Singapore

Selective rationalizations improve the explainability of neural networks by selecting a subsequence of the input (i.e., rationales) to explain the prediction results. Although existing methods have achieved promising results, they still suffer from adopting the spurious correlations in data (aka., shortcuts) to compose rationales and make predictions. Inspired by the causal theory, in this paper, we develop an interventional rationalization (Inter-RAT) to discover the causal rationales. Specifically, we first analyse the causalities among the input, rationales and results with a structural causal model. Then, we discover spurious correlations between the input and rationales, and between rationales and results, respectively, by identifying the confounder in the causalities. Next, based on the backdoor adjustment, we propose a causal intervention method to remove the spurious correlations between input and rationales. Further, we discuss reasons why spurious correlations between the selected rationales and results exist by analysing the limitations of the sparsity constraint in the rationalization, and employ the causal intervention method to remove these correlations. Extensive experimental results on three real-world datasets clearly validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The source code of Inter-RAT is available at https://github.com/yuelinan/Codes-of-Inter-RAT.

EMNLP 2023

Interventional Rationalization | VIDEO

backdoor adjustment

rationalization

explainability

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. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

Although In-Context Learning has proven effective across a broad array of tasks, its efﬁciency is noticeably inﬂuenced by the selection of demonstrations. Existing methods tend to select different demonstrations for each test instance, which is time-consuming and poses limitations in practical scenarios. Therefore, this study aims to address the challenge of selecting a representative subset of in-context demonstrations that can effectively prompt different test instances in a speciﬁc task. We propose that this representative subset should be of high quality and diversity. Our empirical analyses conﬁrm that demonstrations that meet these criteria can indeed bolster model performance. To satisfy these criteria, this paper further introduces a two-stage Determinantal Point Process (DPP) method designed to incorporate both quality and diversity in the process of demonstration selection, thereby obtaining representative in-context demonstrations. Through comprehensive experimentation, we have conﬁrmed the efﬁcacy of our proposed method, paving the way for more practical and effective In-Context Learning.

Representative Demonstration Selection for In-Context Learning with Two-Stage Determinantal Point Process

Automatic taxonomy completion aims to attach the emerging concept to an appropriate pair of hypernym and hyponym in the existing taxonomy. Existing methods suffer from the overfitting to leaf-only problem caused by imbalanced leaf and non-leaf samples when training the newly initialized classification head. Besides, they only leverage subtasks, namely attaching the concept to its hypernym or hyponym, as auxiliary supervision for representation learning yet neglect the effects of subtask results on the final prediction. To address the aforementioned limitations, we propose TacoPrompt, a Collaborative Multi-Task Prompt Learning Method for Self-Supervised Taxonomy Completion. First, we perform triplet semantic matching using the prompt learning paradigm to effectively learn non-leaf attachment ability from imbalanced training samples. Second, we design the result context to relate the final prediction to the subtask results by a contextual approach, enhancing prompt-based multi-task learning. Third, we leverage a two-stage retrieval and re-ranking approach to improve the inference efficiency. Experimental results on three datasets show that TacoPrompt achieves state-of-the-art taxonomy completion performance. Codes are available at https://github.com/cyclexu/TacoPrompt.

TacoPrompt: A Collaborative Multi-Task Prompt Learning Method for Self-Supervised Taxonomy Completion

Neural machine translation has achieved great success in the past few years with the help of transformer architectures and large-scale bilingual corpora. However, when the source text gradually grows into an entire document, the performance of current methods for document-level machine translation (DocMT) is less satisfactory. Although the context is beneficial to the translation in general, it is difficult for traditional methods to utilize such long-range information. Previous studies on DocMT have concentrated on extra contents such as multiple surrounding sentences and input instances divided by a fixed length. We suppose that they ignore the structure inside the source text, which leads to under-utilization of the context. In this paper, we present a more sound paragraph-to-paragraph translation mode and explore whether discourse structure can improve DocMT. We introduce several methods from different perspectives, among which our RST-Att model with a multi-granularity attention mechanism based on the RST parsing tree works best. The experiments show that our method indeed utilizes discourse information and performs better than previous work.

Exploring Discourse Structure in Document-level Machine Translation

This work introduces a novel task, location-aware visual question generation (LocaVQG), which aims to generate engaging questions from data relevant to a particular geographical location. Specifically, we represent such location-aware information with surrounding images and a GPS coordinate. To tackle this task, we present a dataset generation pipeline that leverages GPT-4 to produce diverse and sophisticated questions. Then, we aim to learn a lightweight model that can address the LocaVQG task and fit on an edge device, such as a mobile phone. To this end, we propose a method which can reliably generate engaging questions from location-aware information. Our proposed method outperforms baselines regarding human evaluation (e.g., engagement, grounding, coherence) and automatic evaluation metrics (e.g., BERTScore, ROUGE-2). Moreover, we conduct extensive ablation studies to justify our proposed techniques for both generating the dataset and solving the task.

Location-Aware Visual Question Generation with Lightweight Models

Open Information Extraction (OIE) aims to extract relational tuples from open-domain sentences. Existing OIE systems split a sentence into tokens and recognize token spans as tuple relations and arguments. We instead propose Sentence as Chunk sequence (SaC) and recognize chunk spans as tuple relations and arguments. We argue that SaC has better properties for OIE than sentence as token sequence, and evaluate four choices of chunks (i.e., CoNLL chunks, OIA simple phrases, noun phrases, and spans from SpanOIE). Also, we propose a simple end-to-end BERT-based model, Chunk-OIE, for sentence chunking and tuple extraction on top of SaC. Chunk-OIE achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple OIE datasets, showing that SaC benefits the OIE task.

Open Information Extraction via Chunks | VIDEO

Nearest neighbor machine translation ($k$NN-MT), which interpolates target token probabilities with estimates derived from additional examples, has achieved significant improvements and attracted extensive interest in recent years. However, existing research does not explicitly consider the source context when retrieving similar examples, potentially leading to suboptimal performance. To address this, we comprehensively revisit the role of source context and propose a simple and effective method for improving neural machine translation via source context enhancement, demonstrating its crucial role in both retrieving superior examples and determining more suitable interpolation coefficients. Furthermore, we reveal that the probability estimation can be further optimized by incorporating a source-aware distance calibration module. Comprehensive experiments show that our proposed approach can be seamlessly integrated with representative $k$NN-MT baselines, resulting in substantial improvements over these strong baselines across a number of settings and domains. Remarkably, these improvements can reach up to 1.6 BLEU points.

Revisiting Source Context in Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation | VIDEO

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming a one-fits-many solution, but they sometimes hallucinate or produce unreliable output. In this paper, we investigate how hypothesis ensembling can improve the quality of the generated text for the specific problem of LLM-based machine translation. We experiment with several techniques for ensembling hypotheses produced by LLMs such as ChatGPT, LLaMA, and Alpaca. We provide a comprehensive study along multiple dimensions, including the method to generate hypotheses (multiple prompts, temperature-based sampling, and beam search) and the strategy to produce the final translation (instruction-based, quality-based reranking, and minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding). Our results show that MBR decoding is a very effective method, that translation quality can be improved using a small number of samples, and that instruction tuning has a strong impact on the relation between the diversity of the hypotheses and the sampling temperature.

An Empirical Study of Translation Hypothesis Ensembling with Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable human-level natural language generation capabilities. However, their potential to generate misinformation, often called the *hallucination* problem, poses a significant risk to their deployment. A common approach to address this issue is to retrieve relevant knowledge and fine-tune the LLM with the knowledge in its input. Unfortunately, this method incurs high training costs and may cause catastrophic forgetting for multi-tasking models. To overcome these limitations, we propose a knowledge-constrained decoding method called KCTS (Knowledge-Constrained Tree Search), which guides a frozen LM to generate text aligned with the reference knowledge at each decoding step using a knowledge classifier score and MCTS (Monte-Carlo Tree Search). To adapt the sequence-level knowledge classifier to token-level guidance, we also propose a novel token-level hallucination detection method called RIPA (Reward Inflection Point Approximation). Our empirical results on knowledge-grounded dialogue and abstractive summarization demonstrate the strength of KCTS as a plug-and-play, model-agnostic decoding method that can effectively reduce hallucinations in natural language generation.

KCTS: Knowledge-Constrained Tree Search Decoding with Token-Level Hallucination Detection

Language Models (LMs) pre-trained with selfsupervision on large text corpora have become the default starting point for developing models for various NLP tasks. Once the pre-training corpus has been assembled, all data samples in the corpus are treated with equal importance during LM pre-training. However, due to varying levels of relevance and quality of data, equal importance to all the data samples may not be the optimal choice. While data reweighting has been explored in the context of task-specific supervised learning and LM fine-tuning, model-driven reweighting for pretraining data has not been explored. We fill this important gap and propose PRESENCE, a method for jointly reweighting samples by leveraging self-influence (SI) scores as an indicator of sample importance and pre-training. PRESENCE promotes novelty and stability for model pre-training. Through extensive analysis spanning multiple model sizes, datasets, and tasks, we present PRESENCE as an important first step in the research direction of sample reweighting for pre-training language models.

Self-Influence Guided Data Reweighting for Language Model Pre-training

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is one of the compound tasks of fine-grained aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), aiming at extracting the triplets of aspect terms, corresponding opinion terms and the associated sentiment orientation. Recent efforts in exploiting span-level semantic interaction shown superior performance on ASTE task. However, most of the existing span-based approaches suffer from enumerating all possible spans, since it can introduce too much noise in sentiment triplet extraction. To ease this burden, we propose a dual-channel span generation method to coherently constrain the search space of span candidates. Specifically, we leverage the syntactic relations among aspect/opinion terms and the associated part-of-speech characteristics in those terms to generate span candidates, which reduces span enumeration by nearly half. Besides, feature representations are learned from syntactic and part-of-speech correlation among terms, which renders span representation fruitful linguistic information. Extensive experiments on two versions of public datasets demonstrate both the effectiveness of our design and the superiority on ASTE/ATE/OTE tasks~\footnote{We release our code at \url{https://github.com/bert-ply/Dual_Span}}.

Downloads

Next from EMNLP 2023

Representative Demonstration Selection for In-Context Learning with Two-Stage Determinantal Point Process