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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&#39;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.

EMNLP 2023

Weakly Supervised Semantic Parsing with Execution-based Spurious Program Filtering

execution-based filtering

spurious programs

weakly supervised semantic parsing

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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

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.

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.

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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.

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.

C-STS: Conditional Semantic Textual Similarity

Trustworthy language models should abstain from answering questions when they do not know the answer. 
However, the answer to a question can be unknown for a variety of reasons. 
Prior research has focused on the case in which the question is clear and the answer is unambiguous but possibly unknown.
However, the answer to a question can also be unclear due to uncertainty of the questioner’s intent or context.
We investigate question answering from this perspective, focusing on answering a subset of questions with a high degree of accuracy, from a set of questions in which many are inherently ambiguous.
In this setting, we find that the most reliable approach to calibration involves quantifying repetition within a set of sampled model outputs, rather than the model's likelihood or self-verification as used in prior work. 
We find this to be the case across different types of uncertainty, varying model scales and both with or without instruction tuning.
Our results suggest that sampling-based confidence scores help calibrate answers to relatively unambiguous questions, with more dramatic improvements on ambiguous questions.

Selectively Answering Ambiguous Questions | VIDEO

Despite the remarkable ability of large language models (LMs) to comprehend and generate language, they have a tendency to hallucinate and create factually inaccurate output. Augmenting LMs by retrieving information from external knowledge resources is one promising solution. Most existing retrieval augmented LMs employ a retrieve-and-generate setup that only retrieves information once based on the input. This is limiting, however, in more general scenarios involving generation of long texts, where continually gathering information throughout generation is essential. In this work, we provide a generalized view of active retrieval augmented generation, methods that actively decide when and what to retrieve across the course of the generation. We propose Forward-Looking Active REtrieval augmented generation (FLARE), a generic method which iteratively uses a prediction of the upcoming sentence to anticipate future content, which is then utilized as a query to retrieve relevant documents to regenerate the sentence if it contains low-confidence tokens. We test FLARE along with baselines comprehensively over 4 long-form knowledge-intensive generation tasks/datasets. FLARE achieves superior or competitive performance on all tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.

Active Retrieval Augmented Generation | VIDEO

In this paper, we leverage existing corpora, WordNet, and dependency parsing to build the first Galician dataset for training semantic role labeling systems in an effort to expand available NLP resources. Additionally, we introduce verb indexing, a new pre-processing method, which helps increase the performance when semantically parsing highly-complex sentences. We use transfer-learning to test both the resource and the verb indexing method. Our results show that the effects of verb indexing were amplified in scenarios where the model was both pre-trained and fine-tuned on datasets utilizing the method, but improvements are also noticeable when only used during fine-tuning. The best-performing Galician SRL model achieved an f1 score of 0.74, introducing a baseline for future Galician SRL systems. We also tested our method on Spanish where we achieved an f1 score of 0.83, outperforming the baseline set by the 2009 CoNLL Shared Task by 0.025 showing the merits of our verb indexing method for pre-processing.

BERTie Bott’s Every Flavor Labels: A Tasty Introduction to Semantic Role Labeling for Galician | VIDEO

Mis- and disinformation online have become a major societal problem as major sources of online harms of different kinds. One common form of mis- and disinformation is out-of-context (OOC) information, where different pieces of information are falsely associated, e.g., a real image combined with a false textual caption or a misleading textual description. Although some past studies have attempted to defend against OOC mis- and disinformation through external evidence, they tend to disregard the role of different pieces of evidence with different stances. Motivated by the intuition that the stance of evidence represents a bias towards different detection results, we propose a stance extraction network (SEN) that can extract the stances of different pieces of multi-modal evidence in a unified framework. Moreover, we introduce a support-refutation score calculated based on the co-occurrence relations of named entities into the textual SEN. Extensive experiments on a public large-scale dataset demonstrated that our proposed method outperformed the state-of-the-art baselines, with the best model achieving a performance gain of 3.2% in accuracy.

Support or Refute: Analyzing the Stance of Evidence to Detect Out-of-Context Mis- and Disinformation | VIDEO

Conventional speech-to-text translation (ST) systems are trained on single-speaker utterances, and they may not generalize to real-life scenarios where the audio contains conversations by multiple speakers. In this paper, we tackle single-channel multi-speaker conversational ST with an end-to-end and multi-task training model, named Speaker-Turn Aware Conversational Speech Translation, that combines automatic speech recognition, speech translation and speaker turn detection using special tokens in a serialized labeling format. We run experiments on the Fisher-CALLHOME corpus, which we adapted by merging the two single-speaker channels into one multi-speaker channel, thus representing the more realistic and challenging scenario with multi-speaker turns and cross-talk. Experimental results across single- and multi-speaker conditions and against conventional ST systems, show that our model outperforms the reference systems on the multi-speaker condition, while attaining comparable performance on the single-speaker condition. We release scripts for data processing and model training.

End-to-End Single-Channel Speaker-Turn Aware Conversational Speech Translation | VIDEO

While large language models (LLMs) can answer many questions correctly, they can also hallucinate and give wrong answers. Wikidata, with its over 12 billion facts, can be used to ground LLMs to improve their factuality. 

This paper presents WikiWebQuestions, a high-quality question answering benchmark for Wikidata. Ported over from WebQuestions for Freebase, it consists of real-world data with SPARQL annotation. 

This paper presents a few-shot sequence-to-sequence semantic parser for Wikidata. We modify SPARQL to use the unique domain and property names instead of their IDs. We train the parser to use either the results from an entity linker or mentions in the query. We fine-tune LLaMA by adding the few-shot training data to that used to fine-tune Alpaca. 

Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this methodology, establishing a strong baseline of 76% and 65% answer accuracy in the dev and test sets of WikiWebQuestions, respectively. By pairing our semantic parser with GPT-3, we combine verifiable results with qualified GPT-3 guesses to provide useful answers to 96% of the questions in dev. We also show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art for the QALD-7 Wikidata dataset by 3.6% in F1 score.

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Next from EMNLP 2023

Mitigating Temporal Misalignment by Discarding Outdated Facts | VIDEO

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Enforcing Consistency in Weakly Supervised Semantic Parsing