Singapore

Numerical data plays a crucial role in various real-world domains like finance, economics, and science. Thus, understanding and reasoning with numbers are essential in these fields. Recent benchmarks have assessed the numerical reasoning abilities of language models, revealing their limitations in limited and specific numerical aspects. In this paper, we propose a complete hierarchical taxonomy for numerical reasoning skills, encompassing over ten reasoning types across four levels: representation, number sense, manipulation, and complex reasoning. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art models on all reasoning types. To identify challenging reasoning types for different model types, we develop a diverse and extensive set of numerical probes and measure performance shifts. By employing a semi-automated approach, we focus on the tabular Natural Language Inference (TNLI) task as a case study. While no single model excels in all reasoning types, FlanT5 (few-/zero-shot) and GPT3.5 (few-shot) demonstrate strong overall numerical reasoning skills compared to other models in our probes.

EMNLP 2023

Exploring the Numerical Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models: A Comprehensive Analysis on Tabular Data

table nli

numerical reasoning

language models

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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.

When consumers' shopping needs are concentrated, they are more interested in the collection of commodities under the specific marketing theme. 
Therefore, mining marketing themes and their commodities collections can help customers save shopping costs and improve user clicks and purchases for recommendation system. 
However, the current system invites experts to write marketing themes and select the relevant commodities, which suffer from difficulty in mass production, poor timeliness and low online indicators.
Therefore, we propose a automatic marketing theme and commodity construction system, which can not only generate popular marketing themes and select the relevant commodities automatically, but also improve the theme online effectiveness in the recommendation system. 
Specifically, we firstly utilize the pretrained language model to generate the marketing themes. And then, we utilize the theme-commodity consistency module to select the relevant commodities for the above generative theme. What's more, we also build the indicator simulator to evaluate the effectiveness of the above generative theme. When the indicator is lower, the above selective commodities will be input into the theme-rewriter module to generate more efficient marketing themes. Finally, we utilize the human screening to control the system quality. 
Both the offline experiments and online A/B test demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed system compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Automatic Marketing Theme and Commodity Construction System for E-commerce

The growing popularity of conversational AI agents such as Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri rely on accurate spoken language comprehension. The query reformulation (QR) method, which reformulates defective user queries, has been broadly adopted to mitigate the challenges posed by understanding user's intent from imperfect spoken recognition result. However, due to the scarcity of non-English QR labels, providing high-quality QR for non-English users still remains a challenge. This work proposes a novel cross-lingual QR framework, CL-QR, to leverage the abundant reformulation resources in English to improve non-English QR performance. The proposed work also proposes a Module-wise Mutually-supervised Feedback learning (MMF) algorithm to enable the continually self-improving of the CL-QR, which alleviates the lack of cross-lingual QR training data and enhances the delivery of high-quality reformulations learned in English for multilingual queries. Both offline evaluation and online A/B testing demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

CL-QR: Cross-Lingual Enhanced Query Reformulation for Multi-lingual Conversational AI Agents | VIDEO

In this work, we focus on the task of machine translation (MT) from extremely low-resource language (ELRLs) to English. The unavailability of parallel data, lack of representation from large multilingual pre-trained models, and limited monolingual data hinder the development of MT systems for ELRLs. However, many ELRLs often share lexical similarities with high-resource languages (HRLs) due to factors such as dialectical variations, geographical proximity, and language structure. We utilize this property to improve cross-lingual signals from closely related HRL to enable MT for ELRLs. Specifically, we propose a novel unsupervised approach, $\textit{SelectNoise}$, based on $\textit{selective candidate extraction}$ and $\textit{noise injection}$ to generate noisy HRLs training data. The noise injection acts as a regularizer, and the model trained with noisy data learns to handle lexical variations such as spelling, grammar, and vocabulary changes, leading to improved cross-lingual transfer to ELRLs. The selective candidates are extracted using BPE merge operations and edit operations, and noise injection is performed using greedy, top-p, and top-k sampling strategies. We evaluate the proposed model on 12 ELRLs from the FLORES-200 benchmark in a zero-shot setting across two language families. The proposed model outperformed all the strong baselines, demonstrating its efficacy. It has comparable performance with the supervised noise injection model. Our code and model are publicly available.

SelectNoise: Unsupervised Noise Injection to Enable Zero-Shot Machine Translation for Extremely Low-resource Languages

Recent instruction-finetuned large language models (LMs) have achieved notable performances in various tasks, such as question-answering (QA). However, despite their ability to memorize a vast amount of general knowledge across diverse tasks, they might be suboptimal on specific tasks due to their limited capacity to transfer and adapt knowledge to target tasks. Moreover, further finetuning LMs with labeled datasets is often infeasible due to their absence, but it is also questionable if we can transfer smaller LMs having limited knowledge only with unlabeled test data. In this work, we show and investigate the capabilities of smaller self-adaptive LMs, only with unlabeled test data. In particular, we first stochastically generate multiple answers, and then ensemble them while filtering out low-quality samples to mitigate noise from inaccurate labels. Our proposed self-adaption strategy demonstrates significant performance improvements on benchmark QA datasets with higher robustness across diverse prompts, enabling LMs to stay stable. Code is available at: https://github.com/starsuzi/T-SAS.

Test-Time Self-Adaptive Small Language Models for Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, greatly empower dialogue systems with strong language understanding and generation capabilities. However, most of the previous works prompt the LLMs to directly generate a response based on the dialogue context, overlooking the underlying linguistic cues about the user status exhibited in the context. Such in-depth dialogue scenarios are challenging for existing LLMs to figure out the user's hidden needs and respond satisfactorily through a single-step inference. To this end, we propose a novel linguistic cue-based chain-of-thoughts (Cue-CoT), which enhances the LLMs inference with an intermediate reasoning step to find cues exhibited in the dialogue, aiming to provide a more personalized and engaging response. To evaluate the approach, we build a benchmark with in-depth dialogue questions, consisting of 6 datasets in both Chinese and English, targeting 3 major linguistic cues during the conversation: personality, emotion, and psychology. We conducted experiments on the proposed benchmark with 5 LLMs under both zero-shot and one-shot settings. Empirical results demonstrate our proposed Cue-CoT method outperforms standard prompting methods in terms of both helpfulness and acceptability on all datasets.

Cue-CoT: Chain-of-thought Prompting for Responding to In-depth Dialogue Questions with LLMs

We present a simple, but effective method to incorporate syntactic dependency information directly into transformer-based language models (e.g. RoBERTa) for tasks such as Aspect-Based Sentiment Classification (ABSC), where the desired output depends on specific input tokens. In contrast to prior approaches to ABSC that capture syntax by combining language models with graph neural networks over dependency trees, our model, Syntax-Integrated RoBERTa for ABSC (SIR-ABSC) incorporates syntax directly into the language model by using a novel aggregator token. Yet, SIR-ABSC outperforms these more complex models, yielding new state-of-the-art results on ABSC.

SIR-ABSC: Incorporating Syntax into RoBERTa-based Sentiment Analysis Models with a Special Aggregator Token

Knowledge graphs represent human knowledge using triplets composed of entities and relations. While most existing knowledge graph embedding methods only consider the structure of a knowledge graph, a few recently proposed multimodal methods utilize images or text descriptions of entities in a knowledge graph. In this paper, we propose visual-textual knowledge graphs (VTKGs), where not only entities but also triplets can be explained using images, and both entities and relations can accompany text descriptions. By compiling visually expressible commonsense knowledge, we construct new benchmark datasets where triplets themselves are explained by images, and the meanings of entities and relations are described using text. We propose VISTA, a knowledge graph representation learning method for VTKGs, which incorporates the visual and textual representations of entities and relations using entity encoding, relation encoding, and triplet decoding transformers. Experiments show that VISTA outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge graph completion methods in real-world VTKGs.

VISTA: Visual-Textual Knowledge Graph Representation Learning

We present a neuro-symbolic approach to self-learn rules that serve as interpretable knowledge to perform relation linking in knowledge base question answering systems. These rules define natural language text predicates as a weighted mixture of knowledge base paths. The weights learned during training effectively serve the mapping needed to perform relation linking. We use popular masked training strategy to self-learn the rules. A key distinguishing aspect of our work is that the masked training operate over logical forms of the sentence instead of their natural language text form. This offers opportunity to extract extended context information from the structured knowledge source and use that to build robust and human readable rules. We evaluate accuracy and usefulness of such learned rules by utilizing them for prediction of missing kinship relation in CLUTRR dataset and relation linking in a KBQA system using SWQ-WD dataset. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach - its generalizability, interpretability and ability to achieve an average performance gain of 17% on CLUTRR dataset.

Self-Supervised Rule Learning to Link Text Segments to Relational Elements of Structured Knowledge

Recently Large Language Models (LLMs) have been proven to have strong abilities in various domains and tasks. We study the problem of prompt designing in the text-to-SQL task and attempt to improve the LLMs' reasoning ability when generating SQL queries. Besides the trivial few-shot in-context learning setting, we design our chain-of-thought (CoT) prompt with a similar method to schema linking. We provide a method named ACT-SQL to automatically generate auto-CoT exemplars and thus the whole process doesn't need manual labeling. Our approach is cost-saving since we only use the LLMs' API call once when generating one SQL query. Furthermore, we extend our in-context learning method to the multi-turn text-to-SQL task. The experiment results show that the LLMs' performance can benefit from our ACT-SQL approach. Our approach achieves SOTA performance on the Spider dev set among existing in-context learning approaches.

ACT-SQL: In-Context Learning for Text-to-SQL with Automatically-Generated Chain-of-Thought

Open-domain dialogue system usually requires different sources of knowledge to generate more informative and evidential responses. However, existing knowledge-grounded dialogue systems either focus on a single knowledge source or overlook the dependency between multiple sources of knowledge, which may result in generating inconsistent or even paradoxical responses. To incorporate multiple knowledge sources and dependencies between them, we propose SAFARI, a novel framework that leverages the exceptional capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in planning, understanding, and incorporating under both supervised and unsupervised settings. Specifically, SAFARI decouples the knowledge grounding into multiple sources and response generation, which allows easy extension to various knowledge sources including the possibility of not using any sources. To study the problem, we construct a personalized knowledge-grounded dialogue dataset Knowledge Behind Persona (KBP), which is the first to consider the dependency between persona and implicit knowledge. Experimental results on the KBP dataset demonstrate that the SAFARI framework can effectively produce persona-consistent and knowledge-enhanced responses.

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