Singapore

In this work we investigate the capacity of language models to generate explicit, interpretable, and interactive world models of scientific and common-sense reasoning tasks. We operationalize this as a task of generating text games, expressed as hundreds of lines of Python code. To facilitate this task, we introduce ByteSized32, a corpus of 32 reasoning-focused text games totalling 20k lines of Python code. We empirically demonstrate that GPT-4 can use these games as templates for single-shot in-context learning, successfully producing runnable games on unseen topics in 28% of cases. When allowed to self-reflect on program errors, game runnability substantially increases to 58%. While evaluating simulation fidelity is labor intensive, we introduce a suite of automated metrics to assess game fidelity, technical validity, adherence to task specifications, and winnability, showing a high-degree of agreement with expert human ratings. We pose this as a challenge task to spur further development at the juncture of world modeling and code generation.

EMNLP 2023

ByteSized32: A Corpus and Challenge Task for Generating Task-Specific World Models Expressed as Text Games

world modeling

text games

code generation

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

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.

Objectivity is a goal for Wikipedia and many news sites, as well as a guiding principle of many large language models. Indeed, several methods have recently been developed for automatic subjective bias neutralization. These methods, however, typically rely on parallel text for training (i.e. a biased sentence coupled with a non-biased sentence), demonstrate poor transfer to new domains, and can lose important bias-independent context. Toward expanding the reach of bias neutralization, we propose in this paper a new approach called FairBalance. Three of its unique features are: i) a cycle consistent adversarial network enables bias neutralization without the need for parallel text; ii) the model design preserves bias-independent content; and iii) through auxiliary guidance, the model highlights sequences of bias-inducing words, yielding strong results in terms of bias neutralization quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate how FairBalance significantly improves subjective bias neutralization compared to other methods.

Bias Neutralization in Non-Parallel Texts: A Cyclic Approach with Auxiliary Guidance | VIDEO

Large language models achieve high performance on many but not all downstream tasks. The interaction between pretraining data and task data is commonly assumed to determine this variance: a task with data that is more similar to a model's pretraining data is assumed to be easier for that model. We test whether distributional and example-specific similarity measures (embedding-, token- and model-based) correlate with language model performance through a large-scale comparison of the Pile and C4 pretraining datasets with downstream benchmarks. Similarity correlates with performance for multilingual datasets, but in other benchmarks, we surprisingly find that similarity metrics are not correlated with accuracy or even each other. This suggests that the relationship between pretraining data and downstream tasks is more complex than often assumed.

Data Similarity is Not Enough to Explain Language Model Performance | VIDEO

In this paper, we study the generation quality of interpolation-based retrieval-augmented language models (LMs). These methods, best exemplified by the $k$NN-LM, interpolate the LM's predicted distribution of the next word with a distribution formed from the most relevant retrievals for a given prefix. While the $k$NN-LM and related methods yield impressive decreases in perplexity, we discover that they do not exhibit corresponding improvements in open-ended generation quality, as measured by both automatic evaluation metrics (e.g., MAUVE) and human evaluations. Digging deeper, we find that interpolating with a retrieval distribution actually increases perplexity compared to a baseline LM for the majority of tokens in the WikiText-103 test set, even though the overall perplexity is lower due to a smaller number of tokens for which perplexity dramatically decreases after interpolation. However, when decoding a long sequence at inference time, significant improvements on this smaller subset of tokens are washed out by slightly worse predictions on most tokens. Furthermore, we discover that the entropy of the retrieval distribution increases faster than that of the base LM as the generated sequence becomes longer, which indicates that retrieval is less reliable when using model-generated text as queries (i.e., is subject to exposure bias). We hope that our analysis spurs future work on improved decoding algorithms and interpolation strategies for retrieval-augmented language models.

kNN-LM Does Not Improve Open-ended Text Generation

Training a Named Entity Recognition (NER) model often involves fixing a taxonomy of entity types. However, requirements evolve and we might need the NER model to recognize additional entity types. A simple approach is to re-annotate entire dataset with both existing and additional entity types and then train the model on the re-annotated dataset. However, this is an extremely laborious task. To remedy this, we propose a novel approach called Partial Label Model (PLM) that uses only partially annotated datasets. We experiment with 6 diverse datasets and show that PLM consistently performs better than most other approaches (0.5 - 2.5 F1), including in novel settings for taxonomy expansion not considered in prior work. The gap between PLM and all other approaches is especially large in settings where there is limited data available for the additional entity types (as much as 11 F1), thus suggesting a more cost effective approaches to taxonomy expansion.

Taxonomy Expansion for Named Entity Recognition | VIDEO

Scaling language models improves performance but comes with significant computational costs. This paper proposes UL2R, a method that substantially improves existing language models and their scaling curves with a relatively tiny amount of extra compute. The key idea is to continue training a state-of-the-art large language model on a few more steps with UL2's mixture-of-denoiser objective. We show that, with almost negligible extra computational costs and no new sources of data, we are able to substantially improve the scaling properties of large language models on downstream metrics. In this paper, we continue training a baseline language model, PaLM, with ULR2, introducing a new set of models at 8B, 62B, and 540B scale which we call U-PaLM. Impressively, at 540B scale, we show an approximately 2x computational savings rate where U-PaLM achieves the same performance as the final PaLM 540B model at around half its computational budget (i.e., saving ~4.4 million TPUv4 hours). We further show that this improved scaling curve leads to "emergent abilities" on challenging BIG-Bench tasks---for instance, U-PaLM does much better on some tasks or demonstrates better quality at much smaller scale (62B as opposed to 540B). Overall, we show that U-PaLM outperforms PaLM on many few-shot setups, including reasoning tasks with chain-of-thought (e.g., GSM8K), multilingual tasks (MGSM, TydiQA), MMLU and challenging BIG-Bench tasks.

Transcending Scaling Laws with 0.1% Extra Compute

Studying language models (LMs) in terms of well-understood formalisms allows us to precisely characterize their abilities and limitations.
Previous work has investigated the expressive power of recurrent neural network (RNN) LMs in terms of their capacity to recognize unweighted formal languages.
However, LMs do not describe unweighted formal languages---rather, they define probability distributions over strings.
In this work, we study what classes of such probability distributions RNN LMs can represent,
which allows us to make more direct statements about their capabilities.
We show that simple RNNs are equivalent to a subclass of probabilistic finite-state automata, and can thus model a strict subset of probability distributions expressible by finite-state models.
Furthermore, we study the space complexity of representing finite-state LMs with RNNs.
We show that, to represent an arbitrary deterministic finite-state LM with $N$ states over an alphabet $\Sigma$, an RNN requires $\Omega\left(N |\Sigma|\right)$ neurons.
These results present a first step towards characterizing the classes of distributions RNN LMs can represent and thus help us understand their capabilities and limitations.

Recurrent Neural Language Models as Probabilistic Finite-state Automata

Translations help people understand content written in another language. However, even correct literal translations do not fulfill that goal when people lack the necessary background to understand them. Professional translators incorporate explicitations to explain the missing context by considering cultural differences between source and target audiences. Despite its potential to help users, NLP research on explicitation is limited because of the dearth of adequate evaluation methods. This work introduces techniques for automatically generating explicitations, motivated by WikiExpl: a dataset that we collect from Wikipedia and annotate with human translators. The resulting explicitations are useful as they help answer questions more accurately in a multilingual question answering framework.

Bridging Background Knowledge Gaps in Translation with Automatic Explicitation | VIDEO

Kendall's tau is frequently used to meta-evaluate how well machine translation (MT) evaluation metrics score individual translations. Its focus on pairwise score comparisons is intuitive but raises the question of how ties should be handled, a gray area that has motivated different variants in the literature. We demonstrate that, in settings like modern MT meta-evaluation, existing variants have weaknesses arising from their handling of ties, and in some situations can even be gamed. We propose instead to meta-evaluate metrics with a version of pairwise accuracy that gives metrics credit for correctly predicting ties, in combination with a tie calibration procedure that automatically introduces ties into metric scores, enabling fair comparison between metrics that do and do not predict ties. We argue and provide experimental evidence that these modifications lead to fairer ranking-based assessments of metric performance.

Ties Matter: Meta-Evaluating Modern Metrics with Pairwise Accuracy and Tie Calibration | VIDEO

When we transfer a pretrained language model to a new language, there are many axes of variation that change at once. To disentangle the impact of different factors like syntactic similarity and vocabulary similarity, we propose a set of \emph{controlled transfer studies}: we systematically transform the language of the GLUE benchmark, altering one axis of crosslingual variation at a time, and then measure the resulting drops in a pretrained model's downstream performance. We find that models can largely recover from syntactic-style shifts, but cannot recover from vocabulary misalignment and embedding matrix re-initialization, even with continued pretraining on 15 million tokens.
Moreover, good-quality tokenizers in the transfer language do not make vocabulary alignment easier. Our experiments provide insights into the factors of cross-lingual transfer that researchers should most focus on when designing language transfer scenarios.

Oolong: Investigating What Makes Transfer Learning Hard with Controlled Studies

A trustworthy real-world prediction system should produce well-calibrated confidence scores; that is, its confidence in an answer should be indicative of the likelihood that the answer is correct, enabling deferral to an expert in cases of low-confidence predictions. Recent studies have shown that unsupervised pre-training produces large language models (LMs) whose conditional probabilities are remarkably well-calibrated. However, the most widely-used LMs are fine-tuned with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF-LMs), and some studies have suggested that RLHF-LMs produce conditional probabilities that are very poorly calibrated. In light of this perceived weakness, we conduct a broad evaluation of methods for extracting confidence scores from RLHF-LMs. For RLHF-LMs such as ChatGPT, GPT-4, and Claude, we find that verbalized confidences emitted as output tokens are typically better-calibrated than the model's conditional probabilities on the TriviaQA, SciQ, and TruthfulQA benchmarks, often reducing the expected calibration error by a relative 50%.

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Bias Neutralization in Non-Parallel Texts: A Cyclic Approach with Auxiliary Guidance | VIDEO

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ByteSized32Refactored: Towards an Extensible Interactive Text Games Corpus for LLM World Modeling and Evaluation

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Bias Neutralization in Non-Parallel Texts: A Cyclic Approach with Auxiliary Guidance | VIDEO

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ByteSized32Refactored: Towards an Extensible Interactive Text Games Corpus for LLM World Modeling and Evaluation

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