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Large language models (LLMs) can perform a wide range of tasks by following natural language instructions, without the necessity of task-specific fine-tuning. Unfortunately, the performance of LLMs is greatly influenced by the quality of these instructions, and manually writing effective instructions for each task is a laborious and subjective process. In this paper, we introduce Auto-Instruct, a novel method to automatically improve the quality of instructions provided to LLMs. Our method leverages the inherent generative ability of LLMs to produce diverse candidate instructions for a given task, and then ranks them using a scoring model trained on a variety of 575 existing NLP tasks. In experiments on 118 out-of-domain tasks, Auto-Instruct surpasses both human-written instructions and existing baselines of LLM-generated instructions. Furthermore, our method exhibits notable generalizability even with other LLMs that are not incorporated into its training process.

EMNLP 2023

Auto-Instruct: Automatic Instruction Generation and Ranking for Black-Box Language Models

instructions

prompting

large language models

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.

Personalized Headline Generation aims to generate unique headlines tailored to users' browsing history. In this task, understanding user preferences from click history and incorporating them into headline generation pose challenges. Existing approaches typically rely on predefined styles as control codes, but personal style lacks explicit definition or enumeration, making it difficult to leverage traditional techniques. To tackle these challenges, we propose General Then Personal (GTP), a novel framework comprising user modeling, headline generation, and customization. We train the framework using tailored designs that emphasize two central ideas: (a) task decoupling and (b) model pre-training. With the decoupling mechanism separating the task into generation and customization, two mechanisms, i.e., information self-boosting and mask user modeling, are further introduced to facilitate the training and text control. Additionally, we introduce a new evaluation metric to address existing limitations. Extensive experiments conducted on the PENS dataset, considering both zero-shot and few-shot scenarios, demonstrate that GTP outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, ablation studies and analysis emphasize the significance of decoupling and pre-training. Finally, the human evaluation validates the effectiveness of our approaches.

General then Personal: Decoupling and Pre-training for Personalized Headline Generation | VIDEO

Key information extraction (KIE) from scanned documents has gained increasing attention because of its applications in various domains. Although promising results have been achieved by some recent KIE approaches, they are usually built based on discriminative models, which lack the ability to handle optical character recognition (OCR) errors and require laborious token-level labeling. In this paper, we propose a novel generative end-to-end model, named GenKIE, to address the KIE task. GenKIE is a sequence-to-sequence multimodal generative model that utilizes multimodal encoders to embed visual, layout and textual features and a decoder to generate the desired output. Well-designed prompts are leveraged to incorporate the label semantics as the weakly supervised signals and entice the generation of the key information. One notable advantage of the generative model is that it enables automatic correction of OCR errors. Besides, token-level granular annotation is not required. Extensive experiments on multiple public real-world datasets show that GenKIE effectively generalizes over different types of documents and achieves state-of-the-art results. Our experiments also validate the model's robustness against OCR errors, making GenKIE highly applicable in real-world scenarios.

GenKIE: Robust Generative Multimodal Document Key Information Extraction

Albeit Natural Language Processing has seen major breakthroughs in the last few years, transferring such advances into real-world business cases can be challenging. One of the reasons resides in the displacement between popular benchmarks and actual data. Lack of supervision, unbalanced classes, noisy data and long documents often affect real problems in vertical domains such as finance, law and health. To support industry-oriented research, we present BUSTER, a BUSiness Transaction Entity Recognition dataset. The dataset consists of 3779 manually annotated documents on financial transactions. We establish several baselines exploiting both general-purpose and domain-specific language models. The best performing model is also used to automatically annotate 6196 documents, which we release as an additional silver corpus to BUSTER.

BUSTER: a "BUSiness Transaction Entity Recognition" dataset

Given the fact description text of a legal case, legal judgment prediction (LJP) aims to predict the case's charge, applicable law article, and term of penalty. A core problem of LJP is distinguishing confusing legal cases where only subtle text differences exist. Previous studies fail to distinguish different classification errors with a standard cross-entropy classification loss and ignore the numbers in the fact description for predicting the term of penalty. To tackle these issues, in this work, first, in order to exploit the numbers in legal cases for predicting the term of penalty of certain charges, we enhance the representation of the fact description with extracted crime amounts which are encoded by a pre-trained numeracy model. Second, we propose a moco-based supervised contrastive learning to learn distinguishable representations and explore the best strategy to construct positive example pairs to benefit all three subtasks of LJP simultaneously. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that the proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art results, particularly for confusing legal cases. Ablation studies also demonstrate the effectiveness of each component.

Exploiting Contrastive Learning and Numerical Evidence for Confusing Legal Judgment Prediction

Large language models have recently risen in popularity due to their ability to perform many natural language tasks without requiring any fine-tuning. In this work, we focus on two novel ideas: (1) generating definitions from examples and using them for zero-shot classification, and (2) investigating how an LLM makes use of the definitions. We thoroughly analyze the performance of GPT-3 model for fine-grained multi-label conspiracy theory classification of tweets using zero-shot labeling. In doing so, we asses how to improve the labeling by providing minimal but meaningful context in the form of the definitions of the labels. We compare descriptive noun phrases, human-crafted definitions, introduce a new method to help the model generate definitions from examples, and propose a method to evaluate GPT-3's understanding of the definitions. We demonstrate that improving definitions of class labels has a direct consequence on the downstream classification results.

Definitions Matter: Guiding GPT for Multi-label Classification

How do we evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) and determine the aspects and limits of their intelligent behaviour?

It is currently conjectured that shortcomings of LLMs in multi-linguality and reasoning are due to a lack of ability to generalize.
It has been argued that, instead, humans are better at generalization because they have a tendency at extracting rules from complex data. 
We propose a method to evaluate LLMs ability to rule-based generalization.

When exposed to tests of analytic intelligence, for example the visual RAVEN IQ test, human problem-solvers identify the relevant objects in the picture and their relevant attributes and reason based on rules applied to them. Based on the induced rules, they are able to provide a generalisation and a solution to the test.

An analogous language task has recently been proposed (called BLM) for LLM. 
In this paper, we argue that we can use this task to investigate what linguistic reasoning LLM develop, by asking them to solve some simple variants of the BLM task.

We find that current state-of-the-art generative models, such as ChatGPT, can handle the task in the sense that they easily understand the instructions and can provide step-by-step reasoning that shows that it can solve two of the main cognitive hurdles: correspondence finding (object and attribute identification) and item novelty. However, overall they cannot find the correct answer, even with considerable help. In particular, they never identify the structure of the problem, exhibiting, we hypothesize, a lack of goal and subgoal management abilities, an ability that has been argued to measure differential abilities in humans. 

We argue that this finding supports the usefulness of the task as a method to test the limits and specific properties of generalisation ability in Large Language Models, providing an intrinsic evaluation method inspired by tests of human intelligence.

Blackbird language matrices (BLM), a new task for rule-like generalization in neural networks: Can Large Language Models pass the test?

The common practice for assessing automatic evaluation metrics is to measure the correlation between their induced system rankings and those obtained by reliable human evaluation, where a higher correlation indicates a better metric. 
Yet, an intricate setting arises when an NLP task is evaluated by multiple Quality Criteria (QCs), like for text summarization where prominent criteria including relevance, consistency, fluency and coherence.
In this paper, we challenge the soundness of this methodology when multiple QCs are involved, concretely for the summarization case. 
First, we show that the allegedly best metrics for certain QCs actually do not perform well, failing to detect even drastic summary corruptions with respect to the considered QC.
To explain this, we show that some of the high correlations obtained in the multi-QC setup are spurious.
Finally, we propose a procedure that may help detecting this effect.
Overall, our findings highlight the need for further investigating metric evaluation methodologies for the multiple-QC case.

Re-Examining Summarization Evaluation across Multiple Quality Criteria | VIDEO

For knowledge intensive NLP tasks, it has been widely accepted that accessing more information is a contributing factor to improvements in the model's end-to-end performance. However, counter-intuitively, too much context can have a negative impact on the model when evaluated on common question answering (QA) datasets. In this paper, we analyze how passages can have a detrimental effect on retrieve-then-read architectures used in question answering. Our empirical evidence indicates that the current read architecture does not fully leverage the retrieved passages and significantly degrades its performance when using the whole passages compared to utilizing subsets of them. 
Our findings demonstrate that model accuracy can be improved by 10\% on two popular QA datasets by filtering out detrimental passages. Additionally, these outcomes are attained by utilizing existing retrieval methods without further training or data. We further highlight the challenges associated with identifying the detrimental passages. First, even with the correct context, the model can make an incorrect prediction, posing a challenge in determining which passages are most influential. Second, evaluation typically considers lexical matching, which is not robust to variations of correct answers. Despite these limitations, our experimental results underscore the pivotal role of identifying and removing these detrimental passages for the context-efficient retrieve-then-read pipeline.

Detrimental Contexts in Open-Domain Question Answering

With advancements in natural language processing (NLP) models, automatic explanation generation has been proposed to mitigate misinformation on social media platforms in addition to adding warning labels to identified fake news. While many researchers have focused on generating good explanations, how these explanations can really help humans combat fake news is under-explored. In this study, we compare the effectiveness of a warning label and the state-of- the-art counterfactual explanations generated by GPT-4 in debunking misinformation. In a two-wave, online human-subject study, participants (N = 215) were randomly assigned to a control group in which false contents are shown without any intervention, a warning tag group in which the false claims were labeled, or an explanation group in which the false contents were accompanied by GPT-4 generated explanations. Our results show that both interventions significantly decrease participants’ self-reported belief in fake claims in an equivalent manner for the short-term and long-term. We discuss the implications of our findings and directions for future NLP-based misinformation debunking strategies.

Is Explanation the Cure? Misinformation Mitigation in the Short Term and Long Term

When training data are collected from human annotators, the design of the annotation instrument, the instructions given to annotators, the characteristics of the annotators, and their interactions can impact training data. This study demonstrates that design choices made when creating an annotation instrument also impact the models trained on the resulting annotations. 

We introduce the term annotation sensitivity to refer to the impact of annotation data collection methods on the annotations themselves and on downstream model performance and predictions.

We collect annotations of hate speech and offensive language in five experimental conditions of an annotation instrument, randomly assigning annotators to conditions. We then fine-tune BERT models on each of the five resulting datasets and evaluate model performance on a holdout portion of each condition. We find considerable differences between the conditions for 1) the share of hate speech/offensive language annotations, 2) model performance, 3) model predictions, and 4) model learning curves.

Our results emphasize the crucial role played by the annotation instrument which has received little attention in the machine learning literature. We call for additional research into how and why the instrument impacts the annotations to inform the development of best practices in instrument design.

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Auto-Instruct: Automatic Instruction Generation and Ranking for Black-Box Language Models

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General then Personal: Decoupling and Pre-training for Personalized Headline Generation | VIDEO