Singapore

Understanding the prevalence and dynamics of justice partisanship and ideology in the US Supreme Court is critical in studying jurisdiction. Most research quantifies partisanship based on voting behavior, and oral arguments in the courtroom --- the last essential procedure before the final case outcome --- have not been well studied for this purpose. To address this gap, we present a framework for analyzing the language of justices in the courtroom for partisan signals, and study how partisanship in speech aligns with voting patterns. 
Our results show that the affiliated party of justices can be predicted reliably from their oral contributions. We further show a strong correlation between language partisanship and voting ideology.

EMNLP 2023

More than Votes? Voting and Language based Partisanship in the US Supreme Court

fariness and bias; legal domain; partisanship

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.

LLMs have demonstrated impressive zero-shot performance on NLP tasks thanks to the knowledge they acquired in their training. In multiple-choice QA tasks, the LM probabilities are used as an imperfect measure of the plausibility of each answer choice. One of the major limitations of the basic score is that it treats all words as equally important. We propose CASE, a Commonsense-Augmented Score with an Expanded Answer Space. CASE addresses this limitation by assigning importance weights for individual words based on their semantic relations to other words in the input. The dynamic weighting approach outperforms basic LM scores, not only because it reduces noise from unimportant words, but also because it informs the model of implicit commonsense knowledge that may be useful for answering the question. We then also follow prior work in expanding the answer space by generating lexically-divergent answers that are conceptually-similar to the choices. When combined with answer space expansion, our method outperforms strong baselines on 5 commonsense benchmarks. We further show these two approaches are complementary and may be especially beneficial when using smaller LMs.

CASE: Commonsense-Augmented Score with an Expanded Answer Space

We tackle Aspect Term Extraction (ATE), a task of automatically extracting aspect terms from sentences. The current Pretrained Language Model (PLM) based extractors have achieved significant improvements. They primarily benefit from context-aware encoding. However, a considerable number of sentences in ATE corpora contain uninformative or low-quality contexts. Such sentences frequently act as "troublemakers" during test. In this study, we explore the context-oriented quality improvement method. Specifically, we propose to automatically rewrite the sentences from the perspectives of virtual experts with different roles, such as a "chef" in the restaurant domain. On this basis, we perform ATE over the paraphrased sentences during test, using the well-trained extractors without any change. In the experiments, we leverage ChatGPT to determine virtual experts in the considered domains, and induce ChatGPT to generate paraphrases conditioned on the roles of virtual experts. We experiment on the benchmark SemEval datasets, including Laptop-domain L14 and Restaurant-domain R14-16. The experimental results show that our approach effectively recalls the inconspicuous aspect terms like "al di la", although it reduces the precision. In addition, it is proven that our approach can be substantially improved by redundancy elimination and multi-role voting. More importantly, our approach can be used to expand the predictions obtained on the original sentences. This yields state-of-the-art performance (i.e., F1-scores of 86.2%, 89.3%, 77.7%, 82.7% on L14 and R14-16) without retraining or fine-tuning the baseline extractors.

Smart “Chef”: Verifying the Effect of Role-based Paraphrasing for Aspect Term Extraction

The ability to bridge Question Generation (QG) and Question Answering (QA) across structured and unstructured modalities has the potential for aiding different NLP applications. One key application is in QA-based methods that have recently been shown to be useful for automatically evaluating Natural Language (NL) texts generated from Knowledge Graphs (KG). While methods have been proposed for QG-QA across these modalities, these efforts have been in English only; in this work, we bring multilinguality (Brazilian Portuguese and Russian) to multimodal (KG and NL) QG-QA. Using synthetic data generation and machine translation to produce QG-QA data that is aligned between graph and text, we are able to train multimodal, multi-task models that can perform multimodal QG and QA in Portuguese and Russian. We show that our approach outperforms a baseline which is derived from previous work on English and adapted to handle these two languages.

Multilingual Generation and Answering of Questions from Texts and Knowledge Graphs

As an important application of Artificial Intelligence, legal intelligence has recently attracted the attention of many researchers. Previous works investigated diverse issues like predicting crimes, predicting outcomes of judicial debates, or extracting information/knowledge from various kinds of legal documents. Although many advances have been made, the research on supporting prediction of court judgments remains relatively scarce, while the lack of large-scale data resources limits the development of this research.In this paper, we present a novel, large-size Court Debate Dataset (CDD), which includes 30,481 court cases, totaling 1,144,425 utterances. CDD contains real-world conversations involving judges, plaintiffs and defendants in court trials. To construct this dataset we have invited experienced judges to design appropriate labels for data records. We then asked law school students to provide annotations based on the defined labels. The dataset can be applied to several downstream tasks, such as text summarization, dialogue generation, text classification, etc. We introduce the details of the different tasks in the rapidly developing field of legal intelligence, the research of which can be fostered thanks to our dataset, and we provide the corresponding benchmark performance.

CDD: A Large Scale Dataset for Legal Intelligence Research | VIDEO

Intent discovery is a crucial task in natural language processing, and it is increasingly relevant for various of industrial applications.
Identifying novel, unseen intents from user inputs remains one of the biggest challenges in this field.
Herein, we propose Zero-Shot-BERT-Adapters, a two-stage method for multilingual intent discovery relying on a Transformer architecture,
fine-tuned with Adapters. We train the model for Natural Language Inference (NLI) and later perform unknown intent classification in a zero-shot setting for multiple languages. In our evaluation, we first analyze the quality of the model after adaptive fine-tuning on known classes. Secondly, we evaluate its performance in casting intent classification as an NLI task. Lastly, we test the zero-shot performance of the model on unseen classes, showing how Zero-Shot-BERT-Adapters can effectively perform intent discovery by generating semantically similar intents, if not equal, to the ground-truth ones. Our experiments show how Zero-Shot-BERT-Adapters outperforms various baselines in two zero-shot settings: known intent classification and unseen intent discovery. The proposed pipeline holds the potential for broad application in customer care. It enables automated dynamic triage using a lightweight model that can be easily deployed and scaled in various business scenarios, unlike large language models. Zero-Shot-BERT-Adapters represents an innovative multi-language approach for intent discovery, enabling the online generation of novel intents.
A Python package implementing the pipeline and the new datasets we compiled are available at the following link: https://github.com/GT4SD/zero-shot-bert-adapters.

Zero-Shot-BERT-Adapters: a Zero-Shot Pipeline for Unknown Intent Detection

This article focuses on large language models (LLMs) fine-tuning in the scarce data regime (also known as "few-shot learning setting"). We propose a method to increase the generalization capabilities of LLMs based on neural network subspaces. 

This optimization method, recently introduced in computer vision, aims to improve model generalization by identifying wider local optima through the joint optimization of an entire simplex of models in parameter space.

Although this property would be highly beneficial in the context of training large language models in the “few-shot learning” setting, its adaptation to massive, pretrained transformers poses some challenges. First, their considerable number of parameters make it difficult to train several model jointly, and second, their deterministic parameter initialisation schemes make them unfit to the subspace method as originaly proposed.
We show in this paper that its application to "Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning" (PEFT) methods, however, is relatively natural, and we propose to apply it to prefix-tuning, by learning entire simplexes of continous prefixes. 

We test our method on a variant of the GLUE benchmark adapted to the few-shot learning setting, and show that both our contributions (learning prefix simplexes, and non-deterministic validation metric inference) jointly lead to a gain in average performances compared to state of the art methods.

Improving generalization in large langue model by learning prefix subspaces

Over recent decades, significant advancements in cross-modal retrieval is mainly driven by breakthroughs in visual and linguistic modeling. However, a recent study shows that multi-modal data representations tend to cluster within a limited convex cone (as representation degeneration problem), which hinders retrieval performance due to the inseparability of these representations. In our study, we first empirically validate the presence of the representation degeneration problem across multiple cross-modal benchmarks and methods. Next, to address it, we introduce a novel method, called InvGC, a post-processing technique inspired by graph convolution and average pooling. Specifically, InvGC defines the graph topology within the datasets and then applies graph convolution in a subtractive manner. This method effectively separates representations by increasing the distances between data points. To improve the efficiency and effectiveness of InvGC, we propose an advanced graph topology, LocalAdj, which only aims to increase the distances between each data point and its nearest neighbors. To understand why InvGC works, we present a detailed theoretical analysis, proving that the lower bound of recall will be improved after deploying InvGC. Extensive empirical results show that InvGC and InvGC w/LocalAdj significantly mitigate the representation degeneration problem, thereby enhancing retrieval performance.

InvGC: Robust Cross-Modal Retrieval by Inverse Graph Convolution

Pretrained multilingual encoder models can directly perform zero-shot multilingual tasks or linguistic probing by reformulating the input examples into cloze-style prompts.
This is accomplished by predicting the probabilities of the label words at the masked token position, without requiring any updates to the model parameters.
However, the performance of this method is limited by the model's bias toward predicting label words which frequently occurred during the pretraining. 
These words typically receive high probabilities. 
To address this issue, we combine the models with calibration techniques which modify the probabilities of label words predicted by the models.
We first validate the effectiveness of a proposed simple calibration method together with other existing techniques on monolingual encoders in both zero- and few-shot scenarios.
We subsequently employ these calibration techniques on multilingual encoders, resulting in substantial performance improvements across a wide range of tasks.

Unleashing the Multilingual Encoder Potential: Boosting Zero-Shot Performance via Probability Calibration

Transformer-based models have achieved dominant performance in numerous NLP tasks. Despite their remarkable successes, pre-trained transformers such as BERT suffer from a computationally expensive self-attention mechanism that interacts with all tokens, including the ones unfavorable to classification performance. To overcome these challenges, we propose integrating two strategies: token pruning and token combining. Token pruning eliminates less important tokens in the attention mechanism’s key and value as they pass through the layers. Additionally, we adopt fuzzy logic to handle uncertainty and alleviate potential mispruning risks arising from an imbalanced distribution of each token’s importance. Token combining, on the other hand, condenses input sequences into smaller sizes in order to further compress the model. By integrating these two approaches, we not only improve the model’s performance but also reduce its computational demands. Experiments with various datasets demonstrate superior performance compared to baseline models, especially with the best improvement over the existing BERT model, achieving +5%p in accuracy and +5.6%p in F1 score. Additionally, memory cost is reduced to 0.61x, and a speedup of 1.64x is achieved.

Focus on the Core: Efficient Attention via Pruned Token Compression for Document Classification

To properly explain sentence pairs that provide contradictory (different) information for different conditions, we introduce the task of conditional natural language inference (Cond-NLI) and focus on automatically extracting contradictory aspects and their conditions from a sentence pair. Cond-NLI can help to provide a full spectrum of information, such as when there are multiple answers to a question each addressing a specific condition, or reviews with different opinions for different conditions. We show that widely-used feature-attribution explanation models are not suitable for finding conditions, especially when sentences are long and are written independently. We propose a simple yet effective model for the original NLI task that can successfully extract conditions while not requiring token-level annotations. Our model enhances the interpretability of the NLI task while maintaining comparable accuracy. To evaluate models for the Cond-NLI, we build and release a token-level annotated dataset BioClaim which contains potentially contradictory claims from the biomedical domain. Our experiments show that our proposed model outperforms the full cross-encoder and other baselines in extracting conditions. It also performs on-par with GPT-3 which has an order of magnitude more parameters and trained on a huge amount of data.

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Next from EMNLP 2023

CASE: Commonsense-Augmented Score with an Expanded Answer Space