Singapore

A key technology for large language models (LLMs) involves instruction tuning that helps align the models&#39; responses with human expectations to realize impressive learning abilities. Two major approaches for instruction tuning characterize supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which are applied to produce the best commercial LLMs. To improve the accessibility of LLMs, various instruction-tuned open-source LLMs have also been introduced recently. However, existing open-source LLMs have only been instruction-tuned for English and a few popular languages, thus hindering their accessibility to many other languages in the world. In addition, SFT has been used as the only approach to instruction-tune open-source LLMs for multiple languages. This has left a significant gap for fine-tuned LLMs based on RLHF in diverse languages and raised important questions on how RLHF can boost the performance of multilingual instruction tuning. To overcome this issue, we present Okapi, the first system with instruction-tuned LLMs based on RLHF for multiple languages. Okapi introduces instruction and response-ranked data in 26 diverse languages to facilitate the experiments and development of future multilingual LLM research. We also present benchmark datasets to enable the evaluation of generative LLMs in multiple languages. Our experiments demonstrate the advantages of RLHF for multilingual instruction over SFT for different base models and datasets. Our framework with created resources, fine-tuned LLMs, interaction scripts are released at https://github.com/nlp-uoregon/Okapi. A demo video to show our framework can also be found at: https://youtu.be/QFV2fkPwvi0.

EMNLP 2023

Okapi: Instruction-tuned Large Language Models in Multiple Languages with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback | VIDEO

multilingual learning

large language models

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

A key technology for large language models (LLMs) involves instruction tuning that helps align the models' responses with human expectations to realize impressive learning abilities. Two major approaches for instruction tuning characterize supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which are applied to produce the best commercial LLMs. To improve the accessibility of LLMs, various instruction-tuned open-source LLMs have also been introduced recently. However, existing open-source LLMs have only been instruction-tuned for English and a few popular languages, thus hindering their accessibility to many other languages in the world. In addition, SFT has been used as the only approach to instruction-tune open-source LLMs for multiple languages. This has left a significant gap for fine-tuned LLMs based on RLHF in diverse languages and raised important questions on how RLHF can boost the performance of multilingual instruction tuning. To overcome this issue, we present Okapi, the first system with instruction-tuned LLMs based on RLHF for multiple languages. Okapi introduces instruction and response-ranked data in 26 diverse languages to facilitate the experiments and development of future multilingual LLM research. We also present benchmark datasets to enable the evaluation of generative LLMs in multiple languages. Our experiments demonstrate the advantages of RLHF for multilingual instruction over SFT for different base models and datasets. Our framework with created resources, fine-tuned LLMs, interaction scripts are released at https://github.com/nlp-uoregon/Okapi. A demo video to show our framework can also be found at: https://youtu.be/QFV2fkPwvi0.

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

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

Schema induction involves creating a graph representation depicting how events unfold in a scenario. We present SAGEViz, an intuitive and modular tool that utilizes human-AI collaboration to create and update complex schema graphs efficiently, where multiple annotators (humans and models) can work simultaneously on a schema graph from any domain. The tool consists of two components: (1) a curation component powered by plug-and-play event language models to create and expand event sequences while human annotators validate and enrich the sequences to build complex hierarchical schemas, and (2) an easy-to-use visualization component to visualize schemas at varying levels of hierarchy. Using supervised and few-shot approaches, our event language models can continually predict relevant events starting from a seed event. We conduct a user study and show that users need less effort in terms of interaction steps with SAGEViz to generate schemas of better quality. We also include a video demonstrating the system.

SAGEViz: SchemA GEneration and Visualization

Fine-grained, span-level human evaluation has emerged as a reliable and robust method for evaluating text generation tasks such as summarization, simplification, machine translation and news generation, and the derived annotations have been useful for training automatic metrics and improving language models. However, existing annotation tools implemented for these evaluation frameworks lack the adaptability to be extended to different domains or languages, or modify annotation settings according to user needs; and, the absence of a unified annotated data format inhibits the research in multi-task learning. In this paper, we introduce Thresh, a unified, customizable and deployable platform for fine-grained evaluation. With a single YAML configuration file, users can build and test an annotation interface for any framework within minutes -- all in one web browser window. To facilitate collaboration and sharing, Thresh provides a community hub that hosts a collection of fine-grained frameworks and corresponding annotations made and collected by the community, covering a wide range of NLP tasks. For deployment, Thresh offers multiple options for any scale of annotation projects from small manual inspections to large crowdsourcing ones. Additionally, we introduce a Python library to streamline the entire process from typology design and deployment to annotation processing. Thresh is publicly accessible at https://thresh.tools.

Thresh: A Unified, Customizable and Deployable Platform for Fine-Grained Text Evaluation | VIDEO

Exploring data is crucial in data analysis, as it helps users understand and interpret the data more effectively. However, performing effective data exploration requires in-depth knowledge of the dataset, the user intent and expertise in data analysis techniques. Not being familiar with either can create obstacles that make the process time-consuming and overwhelming.

To address this issue, we introduce InsightPilot, an LLM (Large Language Model)-based, automated data exploration system designed to simplify the data exploration process. InsightPilot features a set of carefully designed analysis actions that streamline the data exploration process. Given a natural language question, InsightPilot collaborates with the LLM to issue a sequence of analysis actions, explore the data and generate insights. We demonstrate the effectiveness of InsightPilot in a user study and a case study, showing how it can help users gain valuable insights from their datasets.

InsightPilot: An LLM-Empowered Automated Data Exploration System | VIDEO

The development of deep learning software libraries enabled significant progress in the field by allowing users to focus on modeling, while letting the library to take care of the tedious and time-consuming task of optimizing execution for modern hardware accelerators. However, this has benefited only particular types of deep learning models, such as Transformers, whose primitives map easily to the vectorized computation. The models that explicitly account for structured objects, such as trees and segmentations, did not benefit equally because they require custom algorithms that are difficult to implement in a vectorized form.

SynJax directly addresses this problem by providing an efficient vectorized implementation of inference algorithms for structured distributions covering alignment, tagging, segmentation, constituency trees and spanning trees. This is done by exploiting the connection between algorithms for automatic differentiation and probabilistic inference. With SynJax we can build large-scale differentiable models that explicitly model structure in the data. The code is available at https://github.com/google-deepmind/synjax

SynJax: Structured Probability Distributions for JAX

In this paper, we present RESIN-EDITOR, an interactive event graph visualizer and editor designed for analyzing complex events. Our RESIN-EDITOR system allows users to render and freely edit hierarchical event graphs extracted from multimedia and multi-document news clusters with guidance from human-curated event schemas. RESIN-EDITOR's unique features include hierarchical graph visualization, comprehensive source tracing, and interactive user editing, which significantly outperforms existing Information Extraction (IE) visualization tools in both IE result analysis and general model improvements. In our evaluation of RESIN-EDITOR, we demonstrate ways in which our tool is effective in understanding complex events and enhancing system performances. The source code, a video demonstration, and a live website for RESIN-EDITOR have been made publicly available.

RESIN-EDITOR: A Schema-guided Hierarchical Event Graph Visualizer and Editor | VIDEO

Africa is home to over 2,000 languages from over six language families and has the highest linguistic diversity among all continents. This includes 75 languages with at least one million speakers each. Yet, there is little NLP research conducted on African languages. Crucial in enabling such research is the availability of high-quality annotated datasets. In this paper, we introduce AfriSenti, a sentiment analysis benchmark that contains a total of >110,000 tweets in 14 African languages (Amharic, Algerian Arabic, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Moroccan Arabic, Mozambican Portuguese, Nigerian Pidgin, Oromo, Swahili, Tigrinya, Twi, Xitsonga, and Yoruba) from four language families. The tweets were annotated by native speakers and used in the AfriSenti-SemEval shared task (with over 200 participants, see website: https://afrisenti-semeval.github.io). We describe the data collection methodology, annotation process, and the challenges we dealt with when curating each dataset. We further report baseline experiments conducted on the AfriSenti datasets and discuss their usefulness.

AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languages

Linguistic communication is prevalent in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Speech (spoken language) serves as a convenient yet potentially ambiguous form due to noise and accents, exposing a gap compared to text. In this study, we investigate the prominent HCI task, Referring Video Object Segmentation (R-VOS), which aims to segment and track objects using linguistic references. While text input is well-investigated, speech input is under-explored. Our objective is to bridge the gap between speech and text, enabling the adaptation of existing text-input R-VOS models to accommodate noisy speech input effectively. Specifically, we propose a method to align the semantic spaces between speech and text by incorporating two key modules: 1) Noise-Aware Semantic Adjustment (NSA) for clear semantics extraction from noisy speech; and 2) Semantic Jitter Suppression (SJS) enabling R-VOS models to tolerate noisy queries. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the challenging AVOS benchmarks reveal that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Towards Noise-Tolerant Speech-Referring Video Object Segmentation: Bridging Speech and Text

In NLP, text language models based on words or subwords are known to outperform their character-based counterparts. Yet, in the speech community, the standard input of spoken LMs are 20ms or 40ms-long discrete units (shorter than a phoneme). Taking inspiration from word-based LM, we introduce a Generative Spoken Language Model (GSLM) based on word-size continuous-valued audio tokens that can generate diverse and expressive language output. This is obtained by replacing lookup table for lexical types with a Lexical Embedding function, the cross entropy loss by a contrastive loss, and multinomial sampling by k-NN sampling. The resulting model is the first generative language model based on word-size continuous tokens. Its performance is on par with discrete unit GSLMs regarding generation quality as measured by automatic metrics and subjective human judgements. Moreover, it is five times more memory efficient thanks to its large 200ms units. In addition, the embeddings before and after the Lexical Embedder are phonetically and semantically interpretable.

Generative Spoken Language Model based on continuous word-sized audio tokens

Hallucinations in machine translation are translations that contain information completely unrelated to the input. Omissions are translations that do not include some of the input information. While both cases tend to be catastrophic errors undermining user trust, annotated data with these types of pathologies is extremely scarce and is limited to a few high-resource languages. In this work, we release an annotated dataset for the hallucination and omission phenomena covering 18 translation directions with varying resource levels and scripts. Our annotation covers different levels of partial and full hallucinations as well as omissions both at the sentence and at the word level. 
Additionally, we revisit previous methods for hallucination and omission detection, show that conclusions made based on a single language pair largely do not hold for a large-scale evaluation, and establish new solid baselines.

HalOmi: A Manually Annotated Benchmark for Multilingual Hallucination and Omission Detection in Machine Translation

Webpages have been a rich, scalable resource for vision-language and language only tasks. Yet only pieces of webpages are kept in existing datasets: image-caption pairs, long text articles, or raw HTML, never all in one place. Webpage tasks have resultingly received little attention and structured image-text data left underused. To study multimodal webpage understanding, we introduce the Wikipedia Webpage suite (WikiWeb2M) containing 2M pages with all of the associated image, text, and structure data. We verify its utility on three generative tasks: page description generation, section summarization, and contextual image captioning. We design a novel attention mechanism Prefix Global, which selects the most relevant image and text content as global tokens to attend to the rest of the webpage for context. By using page structure to separate such tokens, it performs better than full attention with lower computational complexity. Extensive experiments show that the new data in WikiWeb2M improves task performance compared to prior work.

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SAGEViz: SchemA GEneration and Visualization

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X-Instruction: Aligning Language Model in Low-resource Languages with Self-curated Cross-lingual Instructions