Singapore

Efficiently retrieving FAQ questions that match users&#39; intent is essential for online customer service. 
Existing methods aim to fully utilize the dynamic conversation context to enhance the semantic association between the user query and FAQ questions.
However, the conversation context contains noise, e.g., users may click questions they don&#39;t like, leading to inaccurate semantics modeling.
To tackle this, we introduce tags of FAQ questions, which can help us eliminate irrelevant information. 
We later integrate them into a reinforcement learning framework and minimize the negative impact of irrelevant information in the dynamic conversation context. 
We experimentally demonstrate our efficiency and effectiveness on conversational FAQ retrieval compared to other baselines.

EMNLP 2023

TRAVEL: Tag-Aware Conversational FAQ Retrieval via Reinforcement Learning

conversational faq retrieval

faq retrieval

human-machine interaction

dialogue system

Efficiently retrieving FAQ questions that match users' intent is essential for online customer service. 
Existing methods aim to fully utilize the dynamic conversation context to enhance the semantic association between the user query and FAQ questions.
However, the conversation context contains noise, e.g., users may click questions they don't like, leading to inaccurate semantics modeling.
To tackle this, we introduce tags of FAQ questions, which can help us eliminate irrelevant information. 
We later integrate them into a reinforcement learning framework and minimize the negative impact of irrelevant information in the dynamic conversation context. 
We experimentally demonstrate our efficiency and effectiveness on conversational FAQ retrieval compared to other baselines.

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.

Information-seeking questions in long-form question answering (LFQA) often prove misleading due to ambiguity or false presupposition in the question. While many existing approaches handle misleading questions, they are tailored to limited questions, which are insufficient in a real-world setting with unpredictable input characteristics. In this work, we propose PreWoMe, a unified approach capable of handling any type of information-seeking question. The key idea of PreWoMe involves extracting presuppositions in the question and exploiting them as working memory to generate feedback and action about the question. Our experiment shows that PreWoMe is effective not only in tackling misleading questions but also in handling normal ones, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of leveraging presuppositions, feedback, and action for real-world QA settings.

PreWoMe: Exploiting Presuppositions as Working Memory for Long Form Question Answering | VIDEO

New Intent Discovery (NID) aims to recognize both new and known intents from unlabeled data with the aid of limited labeled data containing only known intents. Without considering structure relationships between samples, previous methods generate noisy supervisory signals which cannot strike a balance between quantity and quality, hindering the formation of new intent clusters and effective transfer of the pre-training knowledge. To mitigate this limitation, we propose a novel $\textit{Diffusion Weighted Graph Framework}$ (DWGF) to capture both semantic similarities and structure relationships inherent in data, enabling more sufficient and reliable supervisory signals. 
Specifically, for each sample, we diffuse neighborhood relationships along semantic paths guided by the nearest neighbors for multiple hops to characterize its local structure discriminately. Then, we sample its positive keys and weigh them based on semantic similarities and local structures for contrastive learning. During inference, we further propose $\textit{Graph Smoothing Filter}$ (GSF) to explicitly utilize the structure relationships to filter high-frequency noise embodied in semantically ambiguous samples on the cluster boundary. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art models on all evaluation metrics across multiple benchmark datasets. Code and data will be made public.

A Diffusion Weighted Graph Framework for New Intent Discovery

Current approaches in paraphrase generation and detection heavily rely on a single general similarity score, ignoring the intricate linguistic properties of language. This paper introduces two new tasks to address this shortcoming by considering paraphrase types - specific linguistic perturbations at particular text positions. We name these tasks Paraphrase Type Generation and Paraphrase Type Detection. Our results suggest that while current techniques perform well in a binary classification scenario, i.e., paraphrased or not, the inclusion of fine-grained paraphrase types poses a significant challenge. While most approaches are good at generating and detecting general semantic similar content, they fail to understand the intrinsic linguistic variables they manipulate. Models trained in generating and identifying paraphrase types also show improvements in tasks without them. In addition, scaling these models further improves their ability to understand paraphrase types. We believe paraphrase types can unlock a new paradigm for developing paraphrase models and solving tasks in the future.

Paraphrase Types for Generation and Detection

Research interest in task-oriented dialogs has increased as systems such as Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri have become ubiquitous in everyday life. However, the impact of academic research in this area has been limited by the lack of datasets that realistically capture the wide array of user pain points. To enable research on some of the more challenging aspects of parsing realistic conversations, we introduce PRESTO, a public dataset of over 550K contextual multilingual conversations between humans and virtual assistants. PRESTO contains a diverse array of challenges that occur in real-world NLU tasks such as disfluencies, code-switching, and revisions. It is the only large scale human generated conversational parsing dataset that provides structured context such as a user's contacts and lists for each example. Our mT5 model based baselines demonstrate that the conversational phenomenon present in PRESTO are challenging to model, which is further pronounced in a low-resource setup.

PRESTO: A Multilingual Dataset for Parsing Realistic Task-Oriented Dialogs

This paper is on the problem of Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA).
Recent works have emphasized the significance of incorporating both explicit (through external databases) and implicit (through LLMs) knowledge to answer questions requiring external knowledge effectively. A common limitation of such approaches is that they consist of relatively complicated pipelines and often heavily rely on accessing GPT-3 API. Our main contribution in this paper is to propose a much simpler and readily reproducible pipeline which, in a nutshell, is based on efficient in-context
learning by prompting LLaMA (1 and 2) using question-informative captions as contextual information. Contrary to recent approaches, our
method is training-free, does not require access to external databases or APIs, and yet achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the OK-VQA and A-OK-VQA datasets. Finally, we perform several ablation studies to understand important aspects of our method. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/alexandrosXe/ASimple-Baseline-For-Knowledge-Based-VQA

A Simple Baseline for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering

The problem of spurious programs is a longstanding challenge when training a semantic parser from weak supervision. To eliminate such programs that have wrong semantics but correct denotation, existing methods focus on exploiting similarities between examples based on domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we propose a domain-agnostic filtering mechanism based on program execution results. Specifically, for each program obtained through the search process, we first construct a representation that captures the program's semantics as execution results under various inputs. Then, we run a majority vote on these representations to identify and filter out programs with significantly different semantics from the other programs. In particular, our method is orthogonal to the program search process so that it can easily augment any of the existing weakly supervised semantic parsing frameworks. Empirical evaluations on the Natural Language Visual Reasoning and WikiTableQuestions demonstrate that applying our method to the existing semantic parsers induces significantly improved performances.

Weakly Supervised Semantic Parsing with Execution-based Spurious Program Filtering

While large language models are able to retain vast amounts of world knowledge seen during pretraining, such knowledge is prone to going out of date and is nontrivial to update. Furthermore, these models are often used under temporal misalignment, tasked with answering questions about the present, despite having only been trained on data collected in the past. To mitigate the effects of temporal misalignment, we propose fact duration prediction: the task of predicting how long a given fact will remain true. In our experiments, we demonstrate that identifying which facts are prone to rapid change can help models avoid reciting outdated information and determine which predictions require seeking out up-to-date knowledge sources. We also show how modeling fact duration improves calibration for knowledge-intensive tasks, such as open-retrieval question answering, under temporal misalignment, by discarding volatile facts.

Mitigating Temporal Misalignment by Discarding Outdated Facts | VIDEO

The performance of large language models (LLMs) on existing reasoning benchmarks has significantly improved over the past years. In response, we present JEEBench, a considerably more challenging benchmark dataset for evaluating the problem solving abilities of LLMs. We curate 515 challenging pre-engineering mathematics, physics and chemistry problems from the highly competitive IIT JEE-Advanced exam. Long-horizon reasoning on top of deep in-domain knowledge is essential for solving problems in this benchmark. Our evaluation on various open-source and proprietary models reveals that the highest performance, even after using techniques like self-consistency, self-refinement and chain-of-thought prompting, is less than 40%. The typical failure modes of GPT-4, the best model, are errors in algebraic manipulation, difficulty in grounding abstract concepts into mathematical equations accurately and failure in retrieving relevant domain-specific concepts. We also observe that by mere prompting, GPT-4 is unable to assess risk introduced by negative marking for incorrect answers. For this, we develop a post-hoc confidence-thresholding method over self-consistency, which enables effective response selection. We hope that our challenging benchmark will guide future re-search in problem-solving using LLMs.

Have LLMs Advanced Enough? A Challenging Problem Solving Benchmark For Large Language Models | VIDEO

Dialogue systems are frequently updated to accommodate new services, but naively updating them by continually training with data for new services in diminishing performance on previously learnt services. Motivated by the insight that dialogue state tracking (DST), a crucial component of dialogue systems that estimates the user's goal as a conversation proceeds, is a simple natural language understanding task, we propose reformulating it as a bundle of granular example-guided question answering tasks to minimize the task shift between services and thus benefit continual learning. Our approach alleviates service-specific memorization and teaches a model to contextualize the given question and example to extract the necessary information from the conversation. We find that a model with just 60M parameters can achieve a significant boost by learning to learn from in-context examples retrieved by a retriever trained to identify turns with similar dialogue state changes. Combining our method with dialogue-level memory replay, our approach attains state of the art performance on DST continual learning metrics without relying on any complex regularization or parameter expansion methods.

Continual Dialogue State Tracking via Example-Guided Question Answering | VIDEO

Semantic textual similarity (STS) has been a cornerstone task in NLP that measures the degree of similarity between a pair of sentences, with applications in information retrieval, question answering, and embedding methods. However, it is an inherently ambiguous task, with the sentence similarity depending on the specific aspect of interest. We resolve this ambiguity by proposing a novel task called conditional STS (C-STS) which measures similarity conditioned on an aspect elucidated in natural language (hereon, condition). As an example, the similarity between the sentences "The NBA player shoots a three-pointer." and "A man throws a tennis ball into the air to serve." is higher for the condition "The motion of the ball." (both upward) and lower for "The size of the ball." (one large and one small). C-STS's advantages are two-fold: (1) it reduces the subjectivity and ambiguity of STS, and (2) enables fine-grained similarity evaluation using diverse conditions. C-STS contains almost 20,000 instances from diverse domains and we evaluate several state-of-the-art models to demonstrate that even the most performant fine-tuning and in-context learning models (GPT-4, Flan, SimCSE) find it challenging, with Spearman correlation scores of <50. We encourage the community to evaluate their models on C-STS to provide a more holistic view of semantic similarity and natural language understanding.

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Next from EMNLP 2023

PreWoMe: Exploiting Presuppositions as Working Memory for Long Form Question Answering | VIDEO