Singapore

Controllable text generation (CTG) aims to generate text with desired attributes, and decoding-time-based methods have shown promising performance on this task. However, in this paper, we identify the phenomenon of Attribute Collapse for the first time. It causes the fluency of generated text to rapidly decrease when the control strength exceeds a critical value, rendering the text completely unusable. This limitation hinders the effectiveness of decoding methods in achieving high levels of controllability. To address this problem, we propose a novel lightweight decoding framework named Air-Decoding. Its main idea is reconstructing the attribute distributions to balance the weights between attribute words and non-attribute words to generate more fluent text. Specifically, we train prefixes by prefix-tuning to obtain attribute distributions. Then we design a novel attribute distribution reconstruction method to balance the obtained distributions and use the reconstructed distributions to guide language models for generation, effectively avoiding the issue of Attribute Collapse. Experiments on multiple CTG tasks prove that our method achieves a new state-of-the-art control performance.

EMNLP 2023

Air-Decoding: Attribute Distribution Reconstruction for Decoding-Time Controllable Text Generation

decoding-time

controllable

text generation

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
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EMNLP 2024

EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

poster

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
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EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

The abstracts of scientific papers typically contain both premises (e.g., background and observations) and conclusions. Although conclusion sentences are highlighted in structured abstracts, in non-structured abstracts the concluding information is not explicitly marked, which makes the automatic segmentation of conclusions from scientific abstracts a challenging task. In this work, we explore Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) as a means for abstract segmentation. We consider each abstract as a recurrent cycle of sentences and place two segmentation boundaries by greedily optimizing the NMI score between the two segments, assuming that conclusions are strongly semantically linked with preceding premises. On non-structured abstracts, our proposed unsupervised approach GreedyCAS achieves the best performance across all evaluation metrics; on structured abstracts, GreedyCAS outperforms all baseline methods measured by $P_k$. The strong correlation of NMI to our evaluation metrics reveals the effectiveness of NMI for abstract segmentation.

GreedyCAS: Unsupervised Scientific Abstract Segmentation with Normalized Mutual Information

Achieving empathy is a crucial step toward humanized dialogue systems. Current approaches for empathetic dialogue generation mainly perceive an emotional label to generate an empathetic response conditioned on it, which simply treat emotions independently, but ignore the intrinsic emotion correlation in dialogues, resulting in inaccurate emotion perception and unsuitable response generation. In this paper, we propose a novel emotion correlation enhanced empathetic dialogue generation framework, which comprehensively realizes emotion correlation learning, utilization, and supervising. Specifically, a multi-resolution emotion graph is devised to capture context-based emotion interactions from different resolutions, further modeling emotion correlation. Then we propose an emotion correlation enhanced decoder, with a novel correlation-aware aggregation and soft/hard strategy, respectively improving the emotion perception and response generation. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the superiority of our model in both empathetic perception and expression.

E-CORE: Emotion Correlation Enhanced Empathetic Dialogue Generation | VIDEO

In many domains of argumentation, people’s arguments are driven by so-called attitude roots, i.e., underlying beliefs and world views, and their corresponding attitude themes. Given the strength of these latent drivers of arguments, recent work in psychology suggests that instead of directly countering surface-level reasoning (e.g., falsifying the premises), one should follow an argumentation style inspired by the Jiu-Jitsu ``soft'' combat system: first, identify an arguer's attitude roots and themes, and then choose a prototypical rebuttal that is aligned with those drivers instead of trying to invalidate those. In this work, we are the first to explore Jiu-Jitsu argumentation for peer reviews by proposing the novel task of attitude and theme-guided rebuttal generation. To this end, we enrich an existing dataset for discourse structure in peer reviews with attitude roots, attitude themes, and canonical rebuttals. To facilitate this process, we recast established annotation concepts from the domain of peer reviews (e.g., aspects a review sentence is relating to) and train domain-specific models. We then propose strong rebuttal generation strategies, which we benchmark on our novel dataset for the task of end-to-end attitude and theme-guided rebuttal generation and two subtasks.

Exploring Jiu-Jitsu Argumentation for Writing Peer Review Rebuttals

Language modeling is a fundamental task in natural language processing, which has been thoroughly explored with various architectures and hyperparameters. However, few studies focus on the effect of sub-word segmentation on the performance of language models (LMs). In this paper, we compare GPT and BERT models trained with the statistical segmentation algorithm BPE vs. two unsupervised algorithms for morphological segmentation — Morfessor and StateMorph. We train the models for several languages — including ones with very rich morphology — and compare their performance with different segmentation algorithms, vocabulary sizes, and model sizes.
The results show that training with morphological segmentation allows the LMs to:
(1) achieve lower perplexity,
(2) converge more efficiently in terms of training time,
and
(3) achieve equivalent or better evaluation scores on downstream tasks. 
Lastly, we show that (4) LMs of smaller size using morphological segmentation can perform comparably to models of larger size trained with BPE — both in terms of (1) perplexity and (3) scores on downstream tasks. Points (2) and (4) impact on sustainability, since they reduce the model cost; and while 2 reduces cost only in the training phase, 4 does so also in the inference phase.

Effects of sub-word segmentation on performance of transformer language models | VIDEO

Modern machine translation models and language models are able to translate without having been trained on parallel data, greatly expanding the set of languages that they can serve. However, these models still struggle in a variety of predictable ways, a problem that cannot be overcome without at least some trusted bilingual data. This work expands on a cheap and abundant resource to combat this problem: bilingual lexica. We test the efficacy of bilingual lexica in a real-world set-up, on 200-language translation models trained on web-crawled text. We present several findings: (1) using lexical data augmentation, we demonstrate sizable performance gains for unsupervised translation; (2) we compare several families of data augmentation, demonstrating that they yield similar improvements, and can be combined for even greater improvements; (3) we demonstrate the importance of carefully curated lexica over larger, noisier ones, especially with larger models; and (4) we compare the efficacy of multilingual lexicon data versus human-translated parallel data. Based on results from (3), we develop and open-source GATITOS, a high-quality, curated dataset in 168 tail languages, one of the first human-translated resources to cover many of these languages.

GATITOS: Using a New Multilingual Lexicon for Low-resource Machine Translation | VIDEO

Recent studies on counterfactual augmented data have achieved great success in the coarse-grained natural language processing tasks. However, existing methods encounter two major problems when dealing with the fine-grained relation extraction tasks. One is that they struggle to accurately identify causal terms under the invariant entity constraint. The other is that they ignore the commonsense constraint. To solve these problems, we propose a novel framework to generate commonsense counterfactuals for stable relation extraction. Specifically, to identify causal terms accurately, we introduce an intervention-based strategy and leverage a constituency parser for correction. To satisfy the commonsense constraint, we introduce the concept knowledge base WordNet and design a bottom-up relation expansion algorithm on it to uncover commonsense relations between entities. We conduct a series of comprehensive evaluations, including the low-resource, out-of-domain, and adversarial-attack settings. The results demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances the stability of base relation extraction models.

Generating Commonsense Counterfactuals for Stable Relation Extraction | VIDEO

Abstracts derived from biomedical literature possess distinct domain-specific characteristics, including specialised writing styles and biomedical terminologies, which necessitate a deep understanding of the related literature. As a result, existing language models struggle to generate technical summaries that are on par with those produced by biomedical experts, given the absence of domain-specific background knowledge. This paper aims to enhance the performance of language models in biomedical abstractive summarisation by aggregating knowledge from external papers cited within the source article. We propose a novel attention-based citation aggregation model that integrates domain-specific knowledge from citation papers, allowing neural networks to generate summaries by leveraging both the paper content and relevant knowledge from citation papers. Furthermore, we construct and release a large-scale biomedical summarisation dataset that serves as a foundation for our research. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches and achieves substantial improvements in abstractive biomedical text summarisation.

Improving Biomedical Abstractive Summarisation with Knowledge Aggregation from Citation Papers

Generating commonsense explanations requires reasoning about commonsense knowledge beyond what is explicitly mentioned in the context. Existing models use commonsense knowledge graphs such as ConceptNet to extract a subgraph of relevant knowledge pertaining to concepts in the input. However, due to the large coverage and, consequently, vast scale of ConceptNet, the extracted subgraphs may contain loosely related, redundant and irrelevant information, which can introduce noise into the model. We propose to address this by applying a differentiable graph compression algorithm that focuses on the relevant knowledge for the task. The compressed subgraphs yield considerably more diverse outputs when incorporated into models for the tasks of generating commonsense and abductive explanations. Moreover, our model achieves better quality-diversity tradeoff than a large language model with 100 times the number of parameters. Our generic approach can be applied to additional NLP tasks that can benefit from incorporating external knowledge.

Knowledge Graph Compression Enhances Diverse Commonsense Generation

Understanding how styles differ across languages is advantageous for training both humans and computers to generate culturally appropriate text. We introduce an explanation framework to extract stylistic differences from multilingual LMs and compare styles across languages. Our framework (1) generates comprehensive style lexica in any language and (2) consolidates feature importances from LMs into comparable lexical categories. We apply this framework to compare politeness, creating the first holistic multilingual politeness dataset and exploring how politeness varies across four languages. Our approach enables an effective evaluation of how distinct linguistic categories contribute to stylistic variations and provides interpretable insights into how people communicate differently around the world.

Comparing Styles across Languages

This study investigates machine translation between related languages i.e., languages within the same family that share linguistic characteristics such as word order and lexical similarity. Machine translation through few-shot prompting leverages a small set of translation pair examples to generate translations for test sentences. This procedure requires the model to learn how to generate translations while simultaneously ensuring that token ordering is maintained to produce a fluent and accurate translation. We propose that for related languages, the task of machine translation can be simplified by leveraging the monotonic alignment characteristic of such languages. We introduce DecoMT, a novel approach of few-shot prompting that decomposes the translation process into a sequence of word chunk translations. Through automatic and human evaluation conducted on multiple related language pairs across various language families, we demonstrate that our proposed approach of decomposed prompting surpasses multiple established few-shot baseline approaches. 
For example, DecoMT outperforms the strong few-shot prompting BLOOM model with an average improvement of 8 chrF++ scores across the examined languages.

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Next from EMNLP 2023

GreedyCAS: Unsupervised Scientific Abstract Segmentation with Normalized Mutual Information

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TARA: Token-level Attribute Relation Adaptation for Multi-Attribute Controllable Text Generation