Singapore

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&#39;s predicted label when it&#39;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.

EMNLP 2023

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

explainable nlp

human evaluation

dialogue

**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.

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.

poster

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.

Tokenization Consistency Matters for Generative Models on Extractive NLP Tasks

Argument mining (AM) is a natural language processing task that aims to generate an argumentative graph given an unstructured argumentative text. An argumentative graph that consists of argumentative components and argumentative relations contains completed information of an argument and exhibits the logic of an argument. As the argument structure of an argumentative text can be regarded as an answer to a "why" question, the whole argument structure is therefore similar to the "chain of thought" concept, i.e., the sequence of ideas that lead to a specific conclusion for a given argument (Wei et al., 2022). For argumentative texts in the same specific genre, the "chain of thought" of such texts is usually similar, i.e., in a student essay, there is usually a major claim supported by several claims, and then a number of premises which are related to the claims are included (Eger et al., 2017). In this paper, we propose a new perspective which transfers the argument mining task into a multi-hop reading comprehension task, allowing the model to learn the argument structure as a "chain of thought". We perform a comprehensive evaluation of our approach on two AM benchmarks and find that we surpass SOTA results. A detailed analysis shows that specifically the "chain of thought" information is helpful for the argument mining task.

Argument mining as a multi-hop generative machine reading comprehension task

Augmenting pretrained language models with retrievers has shown promise in effectively solving common NLP problems, such as language modeling and question answering. In this paper, we evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of popular retriever-augmented language models, namely kNN-LM, REALM, DPR + FiD, Contriever + ATLAS, and Contriever + Flan-T5, in reasoning over retrieved statements across different tasks. 
Our findings indicate that the simple similarity metric employed by retrievers is insufficient for retrieving all the necessary statements for reasoning. Additionally, the language models do not exhibit strong reasoning even when provided with only the required statements. 
Furthermore, when combined with imperfect retrievers, the performance of the language models becomes even worse, e.g., Flan-T5's performance drops by 28.6% when retrieving 5 statements using Contriever. While larger language models improve performance, there is still a substantial room for enhancement. Our further analysis indicates that multihop retrieve-and-read is promising for large language models like GPT-3.5, but does not generalize to other language models like Flan-T5-xxl. The code is available at https://github.com/McGill-NLP/retriever-lm-reasoning.

Can Retriever-Augmented Language Models Reason? The Blame Game Between the Retriever and the Language Model

Language models can be prompted to perform a wide variety of tasks with zero- and few-shot in-context learning.
However, performance varies significantly with the choice of prompt, and we do not yet understand why this happens.
In this paper, we analyze the factors that contribute to this variance and establish a new empirical hypothesis: the performance of a prompt is predicted by the extent to which the model is familiar with the language it contains. Over a wide range of tasks, we show that the lower the perplexity of the prompt, the better it is able to perform the task, when considering reasonable prompts that are related to it. As part of our analysis, we also devise a method to automatically extend a small seed set of manually written prompts by paraphrasing with GPT3 and backtranslation. This larger set allows us to verify that perplexity is a strong predictor of the success of a prompt and we show that the lowest perplexity prompts are consistently effective.

Demystifying Prompts in Language Models via Perplexity Estimation

There is an emerging trend to use large language models (LLMs) to reason about complex goals and orchestrate a set of pluggable tools or APIs to accomplish a goal. This functionality could, among other use cases, be used to build personal assistants for knowledge workers. While there are impressive demos of LLMs being used as autonomous agents or for tool composition, these solutions are not ready mission-critical enterprise settings. For example, they are brittle to input changes, and can produce inconsistent results for the same inputs. These use cases have many open problems in an exciting area of NLP research, such as trust and explainability, consistency and reproducibility, adherence to guardrails and policies, best practices for composable tool design, and the need for new metrics and benchmarks. This vision paper illustrates some examples of LLM-based autonomous agents that reason and compose tools, highlights cases where they fail, surveys some of the recent efforts in this space, and lays out the research challenges to make these solutions viable for enterprises.

Towards large language model-based personal agents in the enterprise: Current trends and open problems

Two of the central factors believed to underpin human sentence processing difficulty are expectations and retrieval from working memory. A recent attempt to create a unified cognitive model integrating these two factors have relied on the parallels between the self-attention mechanism of transformer language models and cue-based retrieval theories of working memory in human sentence processing (Ryu and Lewis 2021). While the authors show that attention patterns in specialized attention heads of GPT-2 are consistent with a key prediction of cue-based retrieval models, similarity-based interference effects, their method requires the identification of syntactically specialized attention heads, and makes an cognitively implausible implicit assumption that hundreds of memory retrieval operations take place in parallel. In the present work, we develop a recurrent neural language model with a single self-attention head, which more closely parallels the memory system assumed by cognitive theories. We show that our model’s single attention head can capture semantic and syntactic interference effects observed in human experiments.

A Language Model with Limited Memory Capacity Captures Interference in Human Sentence Processing

When natural language phrases are combined, their meaning is often more than the sum of their parts.
In the context of NLP tasks such as sentiment analysis, where the meaning of a phrase is its sentiment, that still applies.
Many NLP studies on sentiment analysis, however, focus on the fact that sentiment computations are largely compositional.
We, instead, set out to obtain non-compositionality ratings for phrases with respect to their sentiment.
Our contributions are as follows: a) a methodology for obtaining those non-compositionality ratings, b) a resource of ratings for 259 phrases – NonCompSST – along with an analysis of that resource, and c) an evaluation of computational models for sentiment analysis using this new resource.

Non-Compositionality in Sentiment: New Data and Analyses

While text augmentation methods have been successful in improving performance in the low-resource setting, they suffer from annotation corruption for a token-level task like NER. Moreover, existing methods cannot reliably add context diversity to the dataset, which has been shown to be crucial for low-resource NER. In this work, we propose Contextual and Semantic Structure-based Interpolation (CASSI), a novel augmentation scheme that generates high-quality contextually diverse augmentations while avoiding annotation corruption by structurally combining a pair of semantically similar sentences to generate a new sentence while maintaining semantic correctness and fluency. To accomplish this, we generate candidate augmentations by performing multiple dependency parsing-based exchanges in a pair of semantically similar sentences that are filtered via scoring with a pretrained Masked Language Model and a metric to promote specificity. Experiments show that CASSI consistently outperforms existing methods at multiple low resource levels, in multiple languages, and for noisy and clean text.

CASSI: Contextual and Semantic Structure-based Interpolation Augmentation for Low-Resource NER

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is one of the most fundamental tasks in natural language processing. Span-level prediction (SpanNER) is more naturally suitable for nested NER than sequence labeling (SeqLab). However, according to our experiments, the SpanNER method is more sensitive to the amount of training data, i.e., the F1 score of SpanNER drops much more than that of SeqLab when the amount of training data drops. In order to improve the robustness of SpanNER in low resource scenarios, we propose a simple and effective method SmartSpanNER, which introduces a Named Entity Head (NEH) prediction task to SpanNER and performs multi-task learning together with the task of span classification. Experimental results demonstrate that the robustness of SpanNER could be greatly improved by SmartSpanNER in low resource scenarios constructed on the CoNLL03, Few-NERD, GENIA and ACE05 standard benchmark datasets.

SmartSpanNER: Making SpanNER Robust in Low Resource Scenarios

The task of zero-shot commonsense question answering evaluates models on their capacity to reason about general scenarios beyond
those presented in specific datasets. Existing approaches for tackling this task leverage external knowledge from CommonSense Knowledge Bases (CSKBs) by pre-training the model on synthetic QA pairs constructed from CSKBs. In these approaches, negative examples (distractors) are formulated by randomly sampling from CSKBs using fairly primitive keyword constraints. However, two bottlenecks limit these approaches: the inherent incompleteness of CSKBs limits the semantic coverage of synthetic QA pairs, and the lack of human annotations makes the sampled negative examples potentially uninformative and contradictory. 

To tackle these limitations above, we propose Conceptualization-Augmented Reasoner (CAR), a zero-shot commonsense question-answering framework that fully leverages the power of conceptualization. Specifically, CAR abstracts a commonsense knowledge triple to many higher-level instances, which increases the coverage of the CSKB and expands the ground-truth answer space, reducing the likelihood of selecting false negative distractors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAR more robustly generalizes to answering questions about zero-shot 
commonsense scenarios than existing methods, including large language models, such as GPT3.5 and ChatGPT. Our code, data, and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/CAR.

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