Singapore

Multiple defendants in a criminal fact description generally exhibit complex interactions, and cannot be well handled by existing Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) methods which focus on predicting judgment results (e.g., law articles, charges, and terms of penalty) for single-defendant cases. To address this problem, we propose the task of multi-defendant LJP, which aims to automatically predict the judgment results for each defendant of multi-defendant cases. Two challenges arise with the task of multi-defendant LJP: (1) indistinguishable judgment results among various defendants; and (2) the lack of a real-world dataset for training and evaluation. To tackle the first challenge, we formalize the multi-defendant judgment process as hierarchical reasoning chains and introduce a multi-defendant LJP method, named Hierarchical Reasoning Network (HRN), which follows the hierarchical reasoning chains to determine criminal relationships, sentencing circumstances, law articles, charges, and terms of penalty for each defendant. To tackle the second challenge, we collect a real-world multi-defendant LJP dataset, namely MultiLJP, to accelerate the relevant research in the future. Extensive experiments on MultiLJP verify the effectiveness of our proposed HRN.

EMNLP 2023

Multi-Defendant Legal Judgment Prediction via Hierarchical Reasoning

legal text mining

legal reasoning

legal judgment prediction

### 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.

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.aclweb.org/registration). **

If you have already registered, please check your inbox for an email from Underline granting you access to ACL 2024 content.

Please register!

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.

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.

Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) generates translation while reading the whole source sentence. However, existing SiMT models are typically trained using the same reference disregarding the varying amounts of available source information at different latency. Training the model with ground-truth at low latency may introduce forced anticipations, whereas utilizing reference consistent with the source word order at high latency results in performance degradation. Consequently, it is crucial to train the SiMT model with appropriate reference that avoids forced anticipations during training while maintaining high quality. In this paper, we propose a novel method that provides tailored reference for the SiMT models trained at different latency by rephrasing the ground-truth. Specifically, we introduce the tailor, induced by reinforcement learning, to modify ground-truth to the tailored reference. The SiMT model is trained with the tailored reference and jointly optimized with the tailor to enhance performance. Importantly, our method is applicable to a wide range of current SiMT approaches. Experiments on three translation tasks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both fixed and adaptive policies.

Simultaneous Machine Translation with Tailored Reference

As information extraction (IE) systems have grown more adept at processing whole documents, the classic task of *template filling* has seen renewed interest as a benchmark for document-level IE. In this position paper, we call into question the suitability of template filling for this purpose. We argue that the task demands definitive answers to thorny questions of *event individuation* — the problem of distinguishing distinct events — about which even human experts disagree. Through an annotation study and error analysis, we show that this raises concerns about the usefulness of template filling metrics, the quality of datasets for the task, and the ability of models to learn it. Finally, we consider possible solutions.

On Event Individuation for Document-Level Information Extraction

Structured knowledge bases (KBs) are an asset for search engines and other applications but are inevitably incomplete. 
Language models (LMs) have been proposed for unsupervised knowledge base completion (KBC), yet, their ability to do this at scale and with high accuracy remains an open question. 
Prior experimental studies mostly fall short because they only evaluate on popular subjects, or sample already existing facts from KBs. 
In this work, we perform a careful evaluation of GPT's 
potential to complete the largest public KB: Wikidata. 
We find that, despite their 
size and capabilities, 
models like GPT-3, ChatGPT and GPT-4 do
not achieve fully convincing results on this task. 
Nonetheless, it provides solid improvements over earlier approaches with smaller LMs. 
In particular, we show that it is feasible 
to extend Wikidata by 27M facts at 90% precision.

Evaluating the Knowledge Base Completion Potential of GPT

Recent applications of LLMs in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) systems have shown impressive results, but the use of shortcuts, mechanisms triggered by features spuriously correlated to the true label, has emerged as a potential threat to their reliability. We analyze the problem from two angles: LLMs as editors, guided to edit text to mislead LLMs; and LLMs as readers, who answer questions based on the edited text. We introduce a framework that guides an editor to add potential shortcuts-triggers to samples. Using GPT4 as the editor, we find it can successfully edit trigger shortcut in samples that fool LLMs. Analysing LLMs as readers, we observe that even capable LLMs can be deceived using shortcut knowledge. Strikingly, we discover that GPT4 can be deceived by its own edits (15% drop in F1). Our findings highlight inherent vulnerabilities of LLMs to shortcut manipulations. We publish ShortcutQA, a curated dataset generated by our framework for future research.

Guiding LLM to Fool Itself: Automatically Manipulating Machine Reading Comprehension Shortcut Triggers

The task of sequential model editing is to fix erroneous knowledge in Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) efficiently, precisely and continuously. Although existing methods can deal with a small number of modifications, these methods experience a performance decline or require additional annotated data, when the number of edits increases. 

In this paper, we propose a $\textbf{R}$etrieval $\textbf{A}$ugmented $\textbf{S}$equential Model $\textbf{E}$diting framework ($\textbf{RASE}$) that leverages factual information to enhance editing generalization and to guide the identification of edits by retrieving related facts from the fact-patch memory we constructed.
Our main findings are: 
(i) State-of-the-art models can hardly correct massive mistakes stably and efficiently;
(ii) Even if we scale up to thousands of edits, RASE can significantly enhance editing generalization and maintain consistent performance and efficiency;
(iii) RASE can edit large-scale PLMs and increase the performance of different editors.
Moreover, it can integrate with ChatGPT and further improve performance. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/sev777/RASE.

Improving Sequential Model Editing with Fact Retrieval

Large language models have demonstrated the capability to perform on machine translation when the input is prompted with a few examples (in-context learning). 
Translation quality depends on various features of the selected examples, such as their quality and relevance, but previous work has predominantly focused on individual features in isolation. In this paper, we propose a general framework for combining different features influencing example selection. We learn a regression model, CTQ Scorer (Contextual Translation Quality), that selects examples based on multiple features in order to maximize the translation quality. On multiple language pairs and language models, we show that CTQ Scorer helps significantly outperform random selection as well as strong single-factor baselines reported in the literature. We also see an improvement of over 2.5 COMET points on average with respect to a strong BM25 retrieval-based baseline.

CTQScorer: Combining Multiple Features for In-context Example Selection for Machine Translation

Knowing how to end and resume conversations over time is a natural part of communication, allowing for discussions to span weeks, months, or years. The duration of gaps between conversations dictates which topics are relevant and which questions to ask, and dialogue systems which do not explicitly model time may generate responses that are unnatural. In this work we explore the idea of making dialogue models aware of time, and present GapChat, a multi-session dialogue dataset in which the time between each session varies. While the dataset is constructed in real-time, progress on events in speakers' lives is simulated in order to create realistic dialogues occurring across a long timespan. We expose time information to the model and compare different representations of time and event progress. In human evaluation we show that time-aware models perform better in metrics that judge the relevance of the chosen topics and the information gained from the conversation.

Mind the Gap Between Conversations for Improved Long-Term Dialogue Generation

Retrieval-augmented methods are successful in the standard scenario where the retrieval space is sufficient; whereas in the few-shot scenario with limited retrieval space, this paper shows it is non-trivial to put them into practice. First, it is impossible to retrieve semantically similar examples by using an off-the-shelf metric and it is crucial to learn a task-specific retrieval metric; Second, our preliminary experiments demonstrate that it is difficult to optimize a plausible metric by minimizing the standard cross-entropy loss.
The in-depth analyses quantitatively show minimizing cross-entropy loss suffers from the weak supervision signals and the severe gradient vanishing issue during the optimization. To address these issues, we introduce two novel training objectives, namely EM-L and R-L, which provide more task-specific guidance to the retrieval metric by the EM algorithm and a ranking-based loss, respectively. Extensive experiments on $10$ datasets prove the superiority of the proposed retrieval augmented methods on the performance.

Retrieval-Augmented Few-shot Text Classification

While recently developed NLP explainability methods let us open the black box in various ways (Madsen et al., 2022), a missing ingredient in this endeavor is an interactive tool offering a conversational interface. Such a dialogue system can help users explore datasets and models with explanations in a contextualized manner, e.g. via clarification or follow-up questions, and through a natural language interface. We adapt the conversational explanation framework TalkToModel (Slack et al., 2022) to the NLP domain, add new NLP-specific operations such as free-text rationalization, and illustrate its generalizability on three NLP tasks (dialogue act classification, question answering, hate speech detection). To recognize user queries for explanations, we evaluate fine-tuned and few-shot prompting models and implement a novel adapter-based approach. We then conduct two user studies on (1) the perceived correctness and helpfulness of the dialogues, and (2) the simulatability, i.e. how objectively helpful dialogical explanations are for humans in figuring out the model's predicted label when it's not shown. We found rationalization and feature attribution were helpful in explaining the model behavior. Moreover, users could more reliably predict the model outcome based on an explanation dialogue rather than one-off explanations.

InterroLang: Exploring NLP Models and Datasets through Dialogue-based Explanations

Generative models have been widely applied to solve extractive tasks, where parts of the input is extracted to form the desired output, and achieved significant success. For example, in extractive question answering (QA), generative models have constantly yielded state-of-the-art results. In this work, we study the issue of tokenization inconsistency that is commonly neglected in training these models. This issue damages the extractive nature of these tasks after the input and output are tokenized inconsistently by the tokenizer, and thus leads to performance drop as well as hallucination. We propose a simple yet effective fix to this issue and conduct a case study on extractive QA. We show that, with consistent tokenization, the model performs better in both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets, with a notable average of +1.7 F1 gain when a BART model is trained on SQuAD and evaluated on 8 QA datasets. Further, the model converges faster, and becomes less likely to generate out-of-context answers. Our results demonstrate the need for increased scrutiny regarding how tokenization is done in extractive tasks and the benefits of consistent tokenization during training.

Downloads

Next from EMNLP 2023

Simultaneous Machine Translation with Tailored Reference

Similar lecture

CMDL: A Large-Scale Chinese Multi-Defendant Legal Judgment Prediction Dataset

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from EMNLP 2023

Simultaneous Machine Translation with Tailored Reference

Similar lecture

CMDL: A Large-Scale Chinese Multi-Defendant Legal Judgment Prediction Dataset

Downloads