Singapore

A cost-effective alternative to manual data labeling is weak supervision (WS), where data samples are automatically annotated using a predefined set of labeling functions (LFs), rule-based mechanisms that generate artificial labels for the associated classes. In this work, we investigate noise reduction techniques for WS based on the principle of k-fold cross-validation. We introduce a new algorithm ULF for Unsupervised Labeling Function correction, which denoises WS data by leveraging models trained on all but some LFs to identify and correct biases specific to the held-out LFs. Specifically, ULF refines the allocation of LFs to classes by re-estimating this assignment on highly reliable cross-validated samples. Evaluation on multiple datasets confirms ULF’s effectiveness in enhancing WS learning without the need for manual labeling.

EMNLP 2023

ULF: Unsupervised Labeling Function Correction using Cross-Validation for Weak Supervision

data denoising

noisy learning

weak supervision

classification

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.

Open-domain fact verification is the task of verifying claims in natural language texts against extracted evidence. FEVEROUS is a benchmark that requires extracting and integrating both unstructured and structured evidence to verify a given claim. Previous models suffer from low recall of structured evidence extraction, i.e., table extraction and cell selection. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method to enhance the extraction of structured evidence by leveraging the row and column semantics of tables. Our method comprises two components: (i) a coarse-grained table extraction module that selects tables based on rows and columns relevant to the claim and (ii) a fine-grained cell selection graph that combines both formats of evidence and enables multi-hop and numerical reasoning. We evaluate our method on FEVEROUS and achieve an evidence recall of $60.01\%$ on the test set, which is $6.14\%$ higher than the previous state-of-the-art performance. Our results demonstrate that our method can extract tables and select cells effectively, and provide better evidence sets for verdict prediction. Our code is released at https://github.com/WilliamZR/see-st

Enhancing Structured Evidence Extraction for Fact Verification | VIDEO

Sparse annotation poses persistent challenges to training dense retrieval models; for example, it distorts the training signal when unlabeled relevant documents are used spuriously as negatives in contrastive learning. To alleviate this problem, we introduce evidence-based label smoothing, a novel, computationally efficient method that prevents penalizing the model for assigning high relevance to false negatives. To compute the target relevance distribution over candidate documents within the ranking context of a given query, we assign a non-zero relevance probability to those candidates most similar to the ground truth based on the degree of their similarity to the ground-truth document(s).

To estimate relevance we leverage an improved similarity metric based on reciprocal nearest neighbors, which can also be used independently to rerank candidates in post-processing. Through extensive experiments on two large-scale ad hoc text retrieval datasets, we demonstrate that reciprocal nearest neighbors can improve the ranking effectiveness of dense retrieval models, both when used for label smoothing, as well as for reranking. This indicates that by considering relationships between documents and queries beyond simple geometric distance we can effectively enhance the ranking context.

Enhancing the Ranking Context of Dense Retrieval through Reciprocal Nearest Neighbors | VIDEO

Quality estimation models have been developed to assess the corrections made by grammatical error correction (GEC) models when the reference or gold-standard corrections are not available. An ideal quality estimator can be utilized to combine the outputs of multiple GEC systems by choosing the best subset of edits from the union of all edits proposed by the GEC base systems. However, we found that existing GEC quality estimation models are not good enough in differentiating good corrections from bad ones, resulting in a low F0.5 score when used for system combination. In this paper, we propose GRECO, a new state-of-the-art quality estimation model that gives a better estimate of the quality of a corrected sentence, as indicated by having a higher correlation to the F0.5 score of a corrected sentence. It results in a combined GEC system with a higher F0.5 score. We also propose three methods for utilizing GEC quality estimation models for system combination with varying generality: model-agnostic, model-agnostic with voting bias, and model-dependent method. The combined GEC system outperforms the state of the art on the CoNLL-2014 test set and the BEA-2019 test set, achieving the highest F0.5 scores published to date.

System Combination via Quality Estimation for Grammatical Error Correction

In the age of neural natural language processing, there are plenty of works trying to derive interpretations of neural models. 
Intuitively, when gold rationales exist during training, one can additionally train the model to match its interpretation with the rationales.
However, this intuitive idea has not been fully explored. In this paper, we propose a framework of utilizing interpretation methods and gold rationales to enhance models. Our framework is very general in the sense that it can incorporate various interpretation methods. Previously proposed gradient-based methods can be shown as an instance of our framework. We also propose two novel instances utilizing two other types of interpretation methods, erasure/replace-based and extractor-based methods, for model enhancement. We conduct comprehensive experiments on a variety of tasks. Experimental results show that our framework is effective especially in low-resource settings in enhancing models with various interpretation methods, and our two newly-proposed methods outperform gradient-based methods in most settings. Code is available at https://github.com/Chord-Chen-30/UIMER.

Using Interpretation Methods for Model Enhancement | VIDEO

In code vulnerability detection tasks, a detector trained on a label-rich source domain fails to provide accurate prediction on new or unseen target domains due to the lack of labeled training data on target domains. Previous studies mainly utilize domain adaptation to perform cross-domain vulnerability detection. But they ignore the negative effect of private semantic characteristics of the target domain for domain alignment, which easily causes the problem of negative transfer. In addition, these methods forcibly reduce the distribution discrepancy between domains and do not take into account the interference of irrelevant target instances for distributional domain alignment, which leads to the problem of excessive alignment. To address the above issues, we propose a novel cross-domain code vulnerability detection framework named MNCRI. Specifically, we introduce mutual nearest neighbor contrastive learning to align the source domain and target domain geometrically, which could align the common semantic characteristics of two domains and separate out the private semantic characteristics of each domain. Furthermore, we introduce an instance re-weighting scheme to alleviate the problem of excessive alignment. This scheme dynamically assign different weights to instances, reducing the contribution of irrelevant instances so as to achieve better domain alignment. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate that MNCRI significantly outperforms state-of-the-art cross-domain code vulnerability detection methods by a large margin.

Joint Geometrical and Statistical Domain Adaptation for Cross-domain Code Vulnerability Detection

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various tasks and gained significant attention.
LLMs are also used for local sequence transduction tasks, including grammatical error correction (GEC) and formality style transfer, where most tokens in a source text are kept unchanged.
However, the models that generate all target tokens in such tasks have a tendency to simply copy the input text as is, without making needed changes, because the difference between input and output texts is minimal in the training data.
This is also inefficient because the computational cost grows quadratically with the target sequence length with Transformer.
This paper proposes predicting edit spans for the source text for local sequence transduction tasks.
Representing an edit span with a position of the source text and corrected tokens, we can reduce the length of the target sequence and the computational cost for inference.
We apply instruction tuning for LLMs on the supervision data of edit spans.
Experiments show that the proposed method achieves comparable performance to the baseline in four tasks, paraphrasing, formality style transfer, GEC, and text simplification, despite reducing the length of the target text by as small as 21%.
Furthermore, we report that the task-specific fine-tuning with the proposed method achieved state-of-the-art performance in the four tasks.

Reducing Sequence Length by Predicting Edit Spans with Large Language Models

Although pre-trained language models (PLM) have achieved great success in question answering (QA), their robustness is still insufficient to support their practical applications, especially in the face of distribution shifts.
Recently, test-time adaptation (TTA) has shown great potential for solving this problem, which adapts the model to fit the test samples at test time. 
However, TTA sometimes causes model collapse, making almost all the model outputs incorrect, which has raised concerns about its stability and reliability.
In this paper, we delve into why TTA causes model collapse and find that the imbalanced label distribution inherent in QA is the reason for it.
To address this problem, we propose Anti-Collapse Fast test-time adaptation (Anti-CF), which utilizes the source model‘s output to regularize the update of the adapted model during test time.
We further design an efficient side block to reduce its inference time.
Extensive experiments on various distribution shift scenarios and pre-trained language models (e.g., XLM-RoBERTa, BLOOM) demonstrate that our method can achieve comparable or better results than previous TTA methods at a speed close to vanilla forward propagation, which is 1.8× to 4.4× speedup compared to previous TTA methods.

Beware of Model Collapse! Fast and Stable Test-time Adaptation for Robust Question Answering

Many text mining models are constructed by fine-tuning a large deep pre-trained language model (PLM) in downstream tasks.
However, a significant challenge that arises nowadays is how to maintain performance when we use a lightweight model with limited labeled samples. 
We present DisCo, a semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework for fine-tuning a cohort of small student models generated from a large PLM using knowledge distillation.
Our key insight is to share complementary knowledge among distilled student cohorts to promote their SSL effectiveness. 
DisCo employs a novel co-training technique to optimize a cohort of multiple small student models by promoting knowledge sharing among students under diversified views: model views produced by different distillation strategies and data views produced by various input augmentations. 
We evaluate DisCo on both semi-supervised text classification and extractive summarization tasks.
Experimental results show that DisCo can produce student models that are $7.6\times$ smaller and $4.8 \times$ faster in inference than the baseline PLMs while maintaining comparable performance.
We also show that DisCo-generated student models outperform the similar-sized models elaborately tuned in distinct tasks.

DisCo: Distilled Student Models Co-training for Semi-supervised Text Mining

This paper studies the use of reinforcement learning for conditional text generation, which overcomes the limitation of the prevalent supervised maximum likelihood estimation approach. However, it still suffers from challenges including the large action space and the delayed reward, as the reward can be computed only after an entire sequence is generated. To address these challenges, we propose a method that provides partial rewards for intermediate actions taken on partial sequences. This enables the model to promptly prioritize actions that lead to the generation of more desirable sequences. Our method's key contribution lies in its focus on distinguishing relatively more desirable actions rather than striving to precisely estimate pointwise values for arbitrary partial sequences. Instead, our model learns to discern the relative desirability between pairs of actions, or rank actions in a pairwise manner, only when necessary and feasible. This is materialized in an efficient way by leveraging the prefix tree constructed from the sampled sequences. Experimental results on paraphrase generation and constrained machine translation tasks showcase the effectiveness of our method.

Learning to Rank Generation with Pairwise Partial Rewards

In recent years, large language models (LLMs), such as GPTs, have attained great impact worldwide.
However, how to adapt these LLMs to better suit the vertical domain-specific tasks by utilizing external knowledge remains not completely solved.
Indeed, there have emerged a few works on this line where most of them rely on an alignment heuristic that is built to inject the corresponding knowledge tuple into the associated text sample.

However, despite the promise, we identify a pivotal problem in this work ubiquitously.
Simply put, we find that injecting unaligned (i.e., random) knowledge tuple into the LLMs achieves comparable (and sometimes better) results than the aligned knowledge being injected.
We therefore take a thorough investigation of this frustrating finding on a variety of related prior work and further provide a chain of potential interpretations for the phenomenon.
Based on all that, we offer a simple remediated technique.
Briefly, the core of this technique roots in an ideological emphasis on the pruning and purification of the external knowledge base to be injected into LLMs.
At last, we show that by integrating this technique into most (if not all) knowledge injection frameworks and recent LLMs, it manages to overcome the aforementioned sanity problem and further pushes the boundary of the performance of the domain-adaptive LLMs.

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Next from EMNLP 2023

Enhancing Structured Evidence Extraction for Fact Verification | VIDEO