Singapore

Linguists can access movement in the sign language video corpus through manual annotation or computational methods. The first relies on a predefinition of features, and the second requires technical knowledge. Methods like MediaPipe and OpenPose are now more often used in sign language processing. MediaPipe detects a two-dimensional (2D) body pose in a single image with a limited approximation of the depth coordinate. Such 2D projection of a three-dimensional (3D) body pose limits the potential application of the resulting models outside the capturing camera settings and position. 2D pose data does not provide linguists with direct and human-readable access to the collected movement data. We propose our four main contributions: A novel 3D normalization method for MediaPipe&#39;s 2D pose, a novel human-readable way of representing the 3D normalized pose data, an analysis of Japanese Sign Language (JSL) sociolinguistic features using the proposed techniques, where we show how an individual signer can be identified based on unique personal movement patterns suggesting a potential threat to anonymity. Our method outperforms the common 2D normalization on a small, diverse JSL dataset. We demonstrate its benefit for deep learning approaches by significantly outperforming the pose-based state-of-the-art models on the open sign language recognition benchmark.

EMNLP 2023

Making Body Movement in Sign Language Corpus Accessible for Linguists and Machines with Three-Dimensional Normalization of MediaPipe

movement processing

wlasl

pose processing

sign language

Linguists can access movement in the sign language video corpus through manual annotation or computational methods. The first relies on a predefinition of features, and the second requires technical knowledge. Methods like MediaPipe and OpenPose are now more often used in sign language processing. MediaPipe detects a two-dimensional (2D) body pose in a single image with a limited approximation of the depth coordinate. Such 2D projection of a three-dimensional (3D) body pose limits the potential application of the resulting models outside the capturing camera settings and position. 2D pose data does not provide linguists with direct and human-readable access to the collected movement data. We propose our four main contributions: A novel 3D normalization method for MediaPipe's 2D pose, a novel human-readable way of representing the 3D normalized pose data, an analysis of Japanese Sign Language (JSL) sociolinguistic features using the proposed techniques, where we show how an individual signer can be identified based on unique personal movement patterns suggesting a potential threat to anonymity. Our method outperforms the common 2D normalization on a small, diverse JSL dataset. We demonstrate its benefit for deep learning approaches by significantly outperforming the pose-based state-of-the-art models on the open sign language recognition benchmark.

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.

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely applied in various fields due to their excellent capability for memorizing knowledge and chain of thought (CoT). When these language models are applied in the field of psychological counseling, they often rush to provide universal advice. However, when users seek psychological support, they need to gain empathy, trust, understanding and comfort, rather than just reasonable advice. To this end, we constructed a multi-turn empathetic conversation dataset of more than 2 million samples, in which the input is the multi-turn conversation context, and the target is empathetic responses that cover expressions such as questioning, comfort, recognition, listening, trust, emotional support, etc. Experiments have shown that the empathy ability of LLMs can be significantly enhanced when finetuning by using multi-turn dialogue history and responses that are closer to the expression of a psychological consultant.

SoulChat: Improving LLMs' Empathy, Listening, and Comfort Abilities through Fine-tuning with Multi-turn Empathy Conversations

We propose a new large-scale (nearly a million questions) ultra-long-context (more than 50,000 words average document length) reading comprehension dataset. Using GPT 3.5, we summarized each scene in 1,500 hand-curated fiction books from Project Gutenberg, which resulted in approximately 150 scene-level summaries per book. After that, we created a number of reading comprehension questions based on these summaries, including three types of multiple-choice scene recognition questions, as well as free-form narrative reconstruction questions. With 990,595 total questions, our dataset is an order of magnitude larger than the closest alternatives. Crucially, most questions have a known ``retention demand'', indicating how long-term of a memory is needed to answer them, which should aid long-term memory performance evaluation. We validate our data in four small-scale experiments: one with human labelers, and three with existing language models. We show that our questions 1) adequately represent the source material 2) can be used to diagnose a model's memory capacity 3) are not trivial for modern language models even when the memory demand does not exceed those models' context lengths. Lastly, we provide our code which can be used to further expand the dataset with minimal human labor.

NarrativeXL: a Large-scale Dataset for Long-Term Memory Models

Reflective listening is a fundamental skill that counselors must acquire to achieve proficiency in motivational interviewing (MI). It involves responding in a manner that acknowledges and explores the meaning of what the client has expressed in the conversation. In this work, we introduce the task of counseling response rewriting, which transforms non-reflective statements into reflective responses. We introduce VERVE, a template-based rewriting system with paraphrase-augmented training and adaptive template updating. VERVE first creates a template by identifying and filtering out tokens that are not relevant to reflections and constructs a reflective response using the template. Paraphrase-augmented training allows the model to learn less-strict fillings of masked spans, and adaptive template updating helps discover effective templates for rewriting without significantly removing the original content. Using both automatic and human evaluations, we compare our method against text rewriting baselines and show that our framework is effective in turning non-reflective statements into more reflective responses while achieving a good content preservation-reflection style trade-off.

VERVE: Template-based ReflectiVE Rewriting for MotiVational IntErviewing

The performance of sentence encoders can be significantly improved through the simple practice of fine-tuning using contrastive loss. A natural question arises: what characteristics do models acquire during contrastive learning? This paper theoretically and experimentally shows that contrastive-based sentence encoders implicitly weight words based on information-theoretic quantities; that is, more informative words receive greater weight, while others receive less. The theory states that, in the lower bound of the optimal value of the contrastive learning objective, the norm of word embedding reflects the information gain associated with the distribution of surrounding words. We also conduct comprehensive experiments using various models, multiple datasets, two methods to measure the implicit weighting of models (Integrated Gradients and SHAP), and two information-theoretic quantities (information gain and self-information). The results provide empirical evidence that contrastive fine-tuning emphasizes informative words.

Contrastive Learning-based Sentence Encoders Implicitly Weight Informative Words

Large Language Models (LLMs) have attained the impressive capability to resolve a wide range of NLP tasks by fine-tuning high-quality instruction data. However, collecting human-written data of high quality, especially multi-turn dialogues, is expensive and unattainable for most people. Though previous studies have used powerful LLMs to generate the dialogues automatically, they all suffer from generating untruthful dialogues because of the model hallucination. Therefore, we propose a method called RefGPT to generate enormous truthful and customized dialogues without worrying about factual errors caused by the model hallucination. RefGPT solves the model hallucination in dialogue generation by restricting the LLMs to leverage the given reference instead of reciting their own knowledge to generate dialogues. Additionally, RefGPT adds detailed controls on every utterance to enable high customization capability, which previous studies have ignored. On the basis of RefGPT, we also propose two high-quality dialogue datasets generated by GPT-4, namely **RefGPT-Fact** and **RefGPT-Code**. RefGPT-Fact is a dataset with 100k multi-turn dialogues based on factual knowledge and RefGPT-Code has 76k multi-turn dialogues covering a wide range of coding scenarios. Our code and datasets are released in https://github.com/mutonix/RefGPT.

RefGPT: Dialogue Generation of GPT, by GPT, and for GPT

Text-to-SQL aims to automate the process of generating SQL queries on a database from natural language text. In this work, we propose "SQLPrompt", tailored to improve the few-shot prompting capabilities of Text-to-SQL for Large Language Models (LLMs). Our methods include innovative prompt design, execution-based consistency decoding strategy which selects the SQL with the most consistent execution outcome among other SQL proposals, and a method that aims to improve performance by diversifying the SQL proposals during consistency selection with different prompt designs ("MixPrompt") and foundation models ("MixLLMs"). We show that \emph{SQLPrompt} outperforms previous approaches for in-context learning with zero labeled data by a large margin, closing the gap with finetuning state-of-the-art with thousands of labeled data.

SQLPrompt: In-Context Text-to-SQL with Minimal Labeled Data

Few-shot classification has made great strides due to foundation models that, through priming and prompting, are highly effective few-shot learners. However, this approach has high variance both across different sets of few shots (*data selection*) and across different finetuning runs (*run variability*). This is problematic not only because it impedes the fair comparison of different approaches, but especially because it makes few-shot learning too unreliable for many real-world applications. To alleviate these issues, we make two contributions for more stable and effective few-shot learning: First, we propose novel ensembling methods and show that they substantially reduce *run variability*. Second, we introduce a new active learning (AL) criterion for *data selection* and present the first AL-based approach specifically tailored towards prompt-based learning. In our experiments, we show that our combined method, MEAL (**M**ultiprompt finetuning and prediction **E**nsembling with **A**ctive **L**earning), improves overall performance of prompt-based finetuning by 2.3 points on five diverse tasks. We publicly share our code and data splits in https://github.com/akoksal/MEAL.

MEAL: Stable and Active Learning for Few-Shot Prompting

Recent approaches to word sense disambiguation (WSD) utilize encodings of the sense gloss (definition), in addition to the input context, to improve performance. In this work we demonstrate that this approach can be adapted for use in multiword expression (MWE) identification by training models which use gloss and context information to filter MWE candidates produced by a rule-based extraction pipeline. Our approach substantially improves precision, outperforming the state-of-the-art in MWE identification on the DiMSUM dataset by up to 1.9 F1 points and achieving competitive results on the PARSEME 1.1 English dataset. Our models also retain most of their WSD performance, showing that a single model can be used for both tasks. Finally, building on similar approaches using Bi-encoders for WSD, we introduce a novel Poly-encoder architecture which improves MWE identification performance.

MWE as WSD: Solving Multiword Expression Identification with Word Sense Disambiguation

Opinion summarization is the task of creating summaries capturing popular opinions from user reviews. In this paper, we introduce Geodesic Summarizer (GeoSumm), a novel system to perform unsupervised extractive opinion summarization. GeoSumm consists of an encoder-decoder based representation learning model that generates topical representations of texts. These representations capture the underlying semantics of the text as a distribution over learnable latent units. GeoSumm generates these topical representations by performing dictionary learning over pre-trained text representations at multiple layers of the decoder. We then use these topical representations to quantify the importance of review sentences using a novel approximate geodesic distance-based scoring mechanism. We use the importance scores to identify popular opinions in order to compose general and aspect-specific summaries. Our proposed model, GeoSumm, achieves strong performance on three opinion summarization datasets. We perform additional experiments to analyze the functioning of our model and showcase the generalization ability of GeoSumm across different domains.

Unsupervised Opinion Summarization Using Approximate Geodesics

Existing question answering (QA) systems owe much of their success to large, high-quality training data. Such annotation efforts are costly, and the difficulty compounds in the cross-lingual setting.
Therefore, prior cross-lingual QA work has focused on releasing evaluation datasets, and then applying zero-shot methods as baselines. This work proposes a synthetic data generation method for cross-lingual QA which leverages indirect supervision from existing parallel corpora. Our method termed PAXQA (Projecting annotations for cross-lingual (x) QA) decomposes cross-lingual QA into two stages. First, we apply a question generation (QG) model to the English side. Second, we apply annotation projection to translate both the questions and answers. To better translate questions, we propose a novel use of lexically-constrained machine translation, in which constrained entities are extracted from the parallel bitexts. 

We apply PAXQA to generate cross-lingual QA examples in 4 languages (662K examples total), and perform human evaluation on a subset to create validation and test splits. We then show that models fine-tuned on these datasets outperform prior synthetic data generation models over several extractive QA datasets. The largest performance gains are for directions with non-English questions and English contexts.
Ablation studies show that our dataset generation method is relatively robust to noise from automatic word alignments, showing the sufficient quality of our generations. To facilitate follow-up work, we release our code and datasets at https://github.com/manestay/paxqa.

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SoulChat: Improving LLMs' Empathy, Listening, and Comfort Abilities through Fine-tuning with Multi-turn Empathy Conversations

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Next from EMNLP 2023

SoulChat: Improving LLMs' Empathy, Listening, and Comfort Abilities through Fine-tuning with Multi-turn Empathy Conversations

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