Singapore

How can we interpret and retrieve medical evidence to support clinical decisions? Clinical trial reports (CTR) amassed over the years contain indispensable information for the development of personalized medicine. However, it is practically infeasible to manually inspect over 400,000+ clinical trial reports in order to find the best evidence for experimental treatments. Natural Language Inference (NLI) offers a potential solution to this problem, by allowing the scalable computation of textual entailment. However, existing NLI models perform poorly on biomedical corpora, and previously published datasets fail to capture the full complexity of inference over CTRs.

In this work, we present a novel resource to advance research on NLI for reasoning on CTRs. The resource includes two main tasks. Firstly, to determine the inference relation between a natural language statement, and a CTR. Secondly, to retrieve supporting facts to justify the predicted relation. We provide NLI4CT, a corpus of 2400 statements and CTRs, annotated for these tasks. Baselines on this corpus expose the limitations of existing NLI approaches, with 6 state-of-the-art NLI models achieving a maximum F1 score of 0.627. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to design a task that covers the interpretation of full CTRs. To encourage further work on this challenging dataset, we make the corpus, competition leaderboard, and website, available on CodaLab, and code to replicate the baseline experiments on GitHub.

EMNLP 2023

NLI4CT: Multi-Evidence Natural Language Inference for Clinical Trial Reports | VIDEO

clinical trials

biomedical

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.

Automatically highlighting words that cause semantic differences between two documents could be useful for a wide range of applications. We formulate recognizing semantic differences (RSD) as a token-level regression task and study three unsupervised approaches that rely on a masked language model. To assess the approaches, we begin with basic English sentences and gradually move to more complex, cross-lingual document pairs. Our results show that an approach based on word alignment and sentence-level contrastive learning has a robust correlation to gold labels. However, all unsupervised approaches still leave a large margin of improvement.

Towards Unsupervised Recognition of Token-level Semantic Differences in Related Documents | VIDEO

How do different generalised quantifiers affect the behaviour of transformer-based language models (TLMs)? The recent popularity of TLMs and the central role generalised quantifiers have traditionally played in linguistics and logic bring this question into particular focus. The current research investigating this subject has not utilised a task defined purely in a logical sense, and thus, has not captured the underlying logical significance of generalised quantifiers. Consequently, they have not answered the aforementioned question faithfully or adequately. Therefore, we investigate how different generalised quantifiers affect TLMs by employing a textual entailment problem defined in a purely logical sense, namely, model-checking with natural language. Our approach permits the automatic construction of datasets with respect to which we can assess the ability of TLMs to learn the meanings of generalised quantifiers. Our investigation reveals that TLMs generally can comprehend the logical semantics of the most common generalised quantifiers, but that distinct quantifiers influence TLMs in varying ways.

Not all quantifiers are equal: Probing Transformer-based language models’ understanding of generalised quantifiers | VIDEO

Korean morphological variations present unique opportunities and challenges in natural language processing (NLP), necessitating an advanced understanding of morpheme-based sentence construction. The complexity of morphological variations allows for diverse sentence forms based on the syntactic-semantic integration of functional morphemes (i.e., affixes) to lexical morphemes (i.e., roots). With this in mind, we propose a method - CHEF, replicating the morphological transformations inherent in sentences based on lexical and functional morpheme combinations through generative data augmentation. CHEF operates using a morpheme blender and a label discriminator, thereby enhancing the diversity of Korean sentence forms by capturing the properties of agglutination while maintaining label consistency. We conduct experiments on Korean multiple classification datasets, improving model performance in full- and few-shot settings. Our proposed method boosts performance beyond the preceding data augmentation methods without incurring external data usage. We demonstrate that our approach achieves comparable results yielded by augmentation techniques that use large language models (LLMs).

CHEF in the Language Kitchen: A Generative Data Augmentation Leveraging Korean Morpheme Ingredients

Deep learning models have reignited the interest in Anomaly Detection research in recent years. Methods for Anomaly Detection in text have shown strong empirical results on ad-hoc anomaly setups that are usually made by downsampling some classes of a labeled dataset. This can lead to reproducibility issues and models that are biased toward detecting particular anomalies while failing to recognize them in more sophisticated scenarios. In the present work, we provide a unified benchmark for detecting various types of anomalies, focusing on problems that can be naturally formulated as Anomaly Detection in text, ranging from syntax to stylistics. In this way, we are hoping to facilitate research in Text Anomaly Detection. We also evaluate and analyze two strong shallow baselines, as well as two of the current state-of-the-art neural approaches, providing insights into the knowledge the neural models are learning when performing the anomaly detection task. We provide the code for evaluation, downloading, and preprocessing the dataset at https://github.com/mateibejan1/ad-nlp/.

AD-NLP: A Benchmark for Anomaly Detection in Natural Language Processing

Dialogue agents have been receiving increasing attention for years, and this trend has been further boosted by the recent progress of large language models (LLMs). Stance detection and dialogue summarization are two core tasks of dialogue agents in application scenarios that involve argumentative dialogues. However, research on these tasks is limited by the insufficiency of public datasets, especially for non-English languages. To address this language resource gap in Chinese, we present ORCHID (Oral Chinese Debate), the first Chinese dataset for benchmarking target-independent stance detection and debate summarization. Our dataset consists of 1,218 real-world debates that were conducted in Chinese on 476 unique topics, containing 2,436 stance-specific summaries and 14,133 fully annotated utterances. Besides providing a versatile testbed for future research, we also conduct an empirical study on the dataset and propose an integrated task. The results show the challenging nature of the dataset and suggest a potential of incorporating stance detection in summarization for argumentative dialogue.

ORCHID: A Chinese Debate Corpus for Target-Independent Stance Detection and Argumentative Dialogue Summarization

In recent years, the field of computer vision has seen significant advancements thanks to the development of large language models (LLMs). These models have enabled more effective and sophisticated interactions between humans and machines, paving the way for novel techniques that blur the lines between human and machine intelligence. In this paper, we introduce a new paradigm for object detection that we call reasoning-based object detection. Unlike conventional object detection methods that rely on specific object names, our approach enables users to interact with the system using natural language instructions, allowing for a higher level of interactivity. Our proposed method, called DetGPT, leverages state-of-the-art multi-modal models and open-vocabulary object detectors to perform reasoning within the context of the user’s instructions and the visual scene. This enables DetGPT to automatically locate the object of interest based on the user’s expressed desires, even if the object is not explicitly mentioned. For instance, if a user expresses a desire for a cold beverage, DetGPT can analyze the image, identify a fridge, and use its knowledge of typical fridge contents to locate the beverage. This flexibility makes our system applicable across a wide range of fields, from robotics and automation to autonomous driving. Overall, our proposed paradigm and DetGPT demonstrate the potential for more sophisticated and intuitive interactions between humans and machines. We hope that our proposed paradigm and approach will provide inspiration to the community and open the door to more interactive and versatile object detection systems.

DetGPT: Detect What You Need via Reasoning | VIDEO

Knowledge Base Embedding (KBE) models have been widely used to encode structured information from knowledge bases, including WordNet. However, the existing literature has predominantly focused on link prediction as the evaluation task, often neglecting exploration of the models' semantic capabilities. In this paper, we investigate the potential disconnect between the performance of KBE models of WordNet on link prediction and their ability to encode semantic information, highlighting the limitations of current evaluation protocols. Our findings reveal that some top-performing KBE models on the WN18RR benchmark exhibit subpar results on two semantic tasks and two downstream tasks. These results demonstrate the inadequacy of link prediction benchmarks for evaluating the semantic capabilities of KBE models, suggesting the need for a more targeted assessment approach.

Are Embedded Potatoes Still Vegetables? On the Limitations of WordNet Embeddings for Lexical Semantics

The goal of compositional generalization benchmarks is to evaluate how well models generalize to new complex linguistic expressions. Existing benchmarks often focus on lexical generalization, the interpretation of novel lexical items in syntactic structures familiar from training; structural generalization tasks, where a model needs to interpret syntactic structures that are themselves unfamiliar from training, are often underrepresented, resulting in overly optimistic perceptions of how well models can generalize. We introduce SLOG, a semantic parsing dataset that extends COGS (Kim and Linzen, 2020) with 17 structural generalization cases. In our experiments, the generalization accuracy of Transformer models, including pretrained ones, only reaches 40.6%, while a structure-aware parser only achieves 70.8%. These results are far from the near-perfect accuracy existing models achieve on COGS, demonstrating the role of SLOG in foregrounding the large discrepancy between models' lexical and structural generalization capacities.

SLOG: A Structural Generalization Benchmark for Semantic Parsing

We explore the use of large language models (LLMs) for zero-shot semantic parsing. Semantic parsing involves mapping natural language utterances to task-specific meaning representations. LLMs are generally trained on publicly available text and code and cannot be expected to directly generalize to domain-specific parsing tasks in a zero-shot setting. In this work, we propose ZEROTOP, a zero-shot task-oriented parsing method that decomposes semantic parsing problem into a set of abstractive and extractive question-answering (QA) problems. For each utterance, we prompt the LLM with questions corresponding to its top-level intent and a set of slots and use the LLM generations to construct the target meaning representation. We observe that current LLMs fail to detect unanswerable questions; and as a result, cannot handle questions corresponding to missing slots. We address this by fine-tuning a language model on public QA datasets using synthetic negative samples. Experimental results show that our QA-based decomposition paired with the fine-tuned LLM can zero-shot parse ≈ 16% of utterances in the MTOP dataset.

ZEROTOP: Zero-Shot Task-Oriented Semantic Parsing using Large Language Models

Statistical significance testing is used in natural language processing (NLP) to determine whether the results of a study or experiment are likely to be due to chance or if they reflect a genuine relationship. A key step in significance testing is the estimation of confidence interval which is a function of sample variance. Sample variance calculation is straightforward when evaluating against ground truth. However, in many cases, a metric model is often used for evaluation. For example, to compare toxicity of two large language models, a toxicity classifier is used for evaluation. Existing works usually do not consider the variance change due to metric model errors, which can lead to wrong conclusions. In this work, we establish the mathematical foundation of significance testing for model-based metrics. With experiments on public benchmark datasets and a production system, we show that considering metric model errors to calculate sample variances for model-based metrics changes the conclusions in certain experiments.

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Towards Unsupervised Recognition of Token-level Semantic Differences in Related Documents | VIDEO