Singapore

Shortcut reasoning is an irrational process of inference, which degrades the robustness of an NLP model.
While a number of previous work has tackled the identification of shortcut reasoning, there are still two major limitations: (i) a method for quantifying the severity of the discovered shortcut reasoning is not provided; (ii) certain types of shortcut reasoning may be missed.
To address these issues, we propose a novel method for identifying shortcut reasoning.
The proposed method quantifies the severity of the shortcut reasoning by leveraging out-of-distribution data and does not make any assumptions about the type of tokens triggering the shortcut reasoning.
Our experiments on Natural Language Inference and Sentiment Analysis demonstrate that our framework successfully discovers known and unknown shortcut reasoning in the previous work.

EMNLP 2023

Discovering Highly Influential Shortcut Reasoning: An Automated Template-Free Approach

shortcut reasoning

inference

robustness

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

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.

Misinformation is often conveyed in multiple modalities, e.g. a miscaptioned image. Multimodal misinformation is perceived as more credible by humans, and spreads faster than its text-only counterparts. While an increasing body of research investigates automated 
fact-checking (AFC), previous surveys mostly focus on text. In this survey, we conceptualise a framework for AFC including subtasks unique to multimodal misinformation. Furthermore, we discuss related terms used in different communities and map them to our framework. We focus on four modalities prevalent in real-world fact-checking: text, image, audio, and video. We survey benchmarks and models, and discuss limitations and promising directions for future research

Multimodal Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey

Grounding has been argued to be a crucial component towards the development of more complete and truly semantically competent artificial intelligence systems. Literature has divided into two camps: While some argue that grounding allows for qualitatively different generalizations, others believe it can be compensated by mono-modal data quantity. Limited empirical evidence has emerged for or against either position, which we argue is due to the methodological challenges that come with studying grounding and its effects on NLP systems.

In this paper, we establish a methodological framework for studying what the effects are---if any---of providing models with richer input sources than text-only. The crux of it lies in the construction of comparable samples of populations of models trained on different input modalities, so that we can tease apart the qualitative effects of different input sources from quantifiable model performances. Experiments using this framework reveal qualitative differences in model behavior between cross-modally grounded, cross-lingually grounded, and ungrounded models, which we measure both at a global dataset level as well as for specific word representations, depending on how concrete their semantics is.

Grounded and well-rounded: a methodological approach to the study of cross-modal and cross-lingual grounding

A growing area of research investigates augmenting language models with tools (e.g., search engines, calculators) to overcome their shortcomings (e.g., missing or incorrect knowledge, incorrect logical inferences). Various few-shot tool-usage strategies have been proposed. However, there is no systematic and fair comparison across different strategies, or between these strategies and strong baselines that do not leverage tools. We conduct an extensive empirical analysis, finding that (1) across various datasets, example difficulty levels, and models, strong no-tool baselines are competitive to tool-assisted strategies, implying that effectively using tools with in-context demonstrations is a difficult unsolved problem; (2) for knowledge-retrieval tasks, strategies that *refine* incorrect outputs with tools outperform strategies that retrieve relevant information *ahead of* or *during generation*; (3) tool-assisted strategies are expensive in the number of tokens they require to work---incurring additional costs by orders of magnitude---which does not translate into significant improvement in performance. Overall, our findings suggest that few-shot tool integration is still an open challenge, emphasizing the need for comprehensive evaluations of future strategies to accurately assess their *benefits* and *costs*.

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Tool-Assisted Generation Strategies

Zero-shot commonsense Question-Answering (QA) requires models to reason about general situations beyond specific benchmarks. State-of-the-art approaches fine-tune language models on QA pairs constructed from CommonSense Knowledge Bases (CSKBs) to equip the models with more commonsense knowledge in a QA context. However, current QA synthesis protocols may introduce noise from the CSKBs and generate ungrammatical questions and false negative options, which impede the model’s ability to generalize. To address these issues, we propose QADYNAMICS, a training dynamics-driven framework for QA diagnostics and refinement. Our approach analyzes the training dynamics of each QA pair at both the question level and option level, discarding machine-detectable artifacts by removing uninformative QA pairs and mislabeled or false-negative options. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which outperforms all baselines while using only 33% of the synthetic data, even including LLMs such as ChatGPT. Moreover, expert evaluations confirm that our framework significantly improves the quality of QA synthesis. Our code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/QaDynamics.

QADYNAMICS: Training Dynamics-Driven Synthetic QA Diagnostic for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering

The aim of implicit discourse relation recognition is to comprehend the sense of connection between two arguments. In this work, we present a classification method that is solely based on generative models. Our proposed approach employs a combination of instruction templates and in-context learning to refine the generative model for effectively addressing the implicit discourse relation recognition task. Furthermore, we utilize Chain-of-Thoughts to partition the inference process into a sequence of three successive stages. This strategy enables us to fully utilize the autoregressive generative model's potential for knowledge acquisition and inference, ultimately leading to enhanced performance on this natural language understanding task. The results of our experiments, evaluated on benchmark datasets PDTB 2.0, PDTB 3.0, and the CoNLL16 shared task, demonstrate superior performance compared to previous state-of-the-art models.

Enhancing Reasoning Capabilities by Instruction Learning and Chain-of-Thoughts for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition

Climate change is one of the most significant challenges we face together as a society. Creating awareness and educating policy makers the wide-ranging impact of climate change is an essential step towards a sustainable future. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Bard have shown impressive conversational abilities and excel in a wide variety of NLP tasks. While these models are close-source, recently alternative open-source LLMs such as Stanford Alpaca and Vicuna have shown promising results. However, these open-source models are not specifically tailored for climate related domain specific information and also struggle to generate meaningful responses in other languages such as, Arabic. To this end, we propose a light-weight Arabic Mini-ClimateGPT that is built on an open-source LLM and is specifically fine-tuned on a conversational-style instruction tuning curated Arabic dataset Clima500-Instruct with over 500k instructions about climate change and sustainability. Further, our model also utilizes a vector embedding based retrieval mechanism during inference. We validate our proposed model through quantitative and qualitative evaluations on climate-related queries. Our model surpasses the baseline LLM in 88.3% of cases during ChatGPT-based evaluation. Furthermore, our human expert evaluation reveals an 81.6% preference for our model's responses over multiple popular open-source models. Our open-source demos, models and curated instruction sets are available here : https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/ClimateGPT

Arabic Mini-ClimateGPT : A Climate Change and Sustainability Tailored Arabic LLM

Diffusion models have garnered considerable interest in the field of text generation. Several studies have explored text diffusion models with different structures and applied them to various tasks, including named entity recognition and summarization. However, there exists a notable disparity between the "easy-first" text generation process of current diffusion models and the "keyword-first" natural text generation process of humans, which has received limited attention. To bridge this gap, we propose InfoDiffusion, a non-autoregressive text diffusion model. Our approach introduces a "keyinfo-first" generation strategy and incorporates a noise schedule based on the amount of text information. In addition, InfoDiffusion combines self-conditioning with a newly proposed partially noising model structure. Experimental results show that InfoDiffusion outperforms the baseline model in terms of generation quality and diversity, as well as exhibiting higher sampling efficiency.

InfoDiffusion: Information Entropy Aware Diffusion Process for Non-Autoregressive Text Generation

Current model testing work has mostly focused on creating test cases.
Identifying what to test is a step that is largely ignored and poorly supported.
We propose Weaver, an interactive tool that supports requirements elicitation for guiding model testing.
Weaver uses large language models to generate knowledge bases and recommends concepts from them interactively, allowing testers to elicit requirements for further testing.
Weaver provides rich external knowledge to testers and encourages testers to systematically explore diverse concepts beyond their own biases. 
In a user study, we show that both NLP experts and non-experts identified more, as well as more diverse concepts worth testing when using Weaver.
Collectively, they found more than 200 failing test cases for stance detection with zero-shot ChatGPT.
Our case studies further show that Weaver can help practitioners test models in real-world settings,
where developers define more nuanced application scenarios (e.g., code understanding and transcript summarization) using LLMs.

Beyond Testers’ Biases: Guiding Model Testing with Knowledge Bases using LLMs

Concepts play a pivotal role in various human cognitive functions, including learning, reasoning and communication. However, there is very little work on endowing machines with the ability to form and reason with concepts. In particular, state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) work at the level of tokens, not concepts.

In this work, we analyze how well contemporary LLMs capture human concepts and their structure. We then discuss ways to develop concept-aware LLMs, taking place at different stages of the pipeline.
We sketch a method for pretraining LLMs using concepts, and also explore the simpler approach that uses the output of existing LLMs. Despite its simplicity, our proof-of-concept is shown to better match human intuition, as well as improve the robustness of predictions. These preliminary results underscore the promise of concept-aware LLMs.

Towards Concept-Aware Large Language Models

We present 1-Pager the first system that answers a question and retrieves evidence using a single Transformer-based model and decoding process.
1-Pager incrementally partitions the retrieval corpus using constrained decoding to select a document and answer string, and we show that this is competitive with comparable retrieve-and-read alternatives according to both retrieval and answer accuracy metrics. 1-Pager also outperforms the equivalent `closed-book' question answering model, by grounding predictions in an evidence corpus.
While 1-Pager is not yet on-par with more expensive systems that read many more documents before generating an answer, we argue that it provides an important step toward attributed generation by folding retrieval into the sequence-to-sequence paradigm that is currently dominant in NLP.
We also show that the search paths used to partition the corpus are easy to read and understand, paving a way forward for interpretable neural retrieval.

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