Singapore

Text simplification has emerged as an increasingly useful application of AI for bridging the communication gap in specialized fields such as medicine, where the lexicon is often dominated by technical jargon and complex constructs. Despite notable progress, methods in medical simplification sometimes result in the generated text having lower quality and diversity. In this work, we explore ways to further improve the readability of text simplification in the medical domain. We propose (1) a new unlikelihood loss that encourages generation of simpler terms and (2) a reranked beam search decoding method that optimizes for simplicity, which achieve better performance on readability metrics on three datasets. This study&#39;s findings offer promising avenues for improving text simplification in the medical field.

EMNLP 2023

Medical Text Simplification: Optimizing for Readability with Unlikelihood Training and Reranked Beam Search Decoding

reranked beam search

unlikelihood learning

medical text simplification

readability

Text simplification has emerged as an increasingly useful application of AI for bridging the communication gap in specialized fields such as medicine, where the lexicon is often dominated by technical jargon and complex constructs. Despite notable progress, methods in medical simplification sometimes result in the generated text having lower quality and diversity. In this work, we explore ways to further improve the readability of text simplification in the medical domain. We propose (1) a new unlikelihood loss that encourages generation of simpler terms and (2) a reranked beam search decoding method that optimizes for simplicity, which achieve better performance on readability metrics on three datasets. This study's findings offer promising avenues for improving text simplification in the medical field.

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.

Conversational query production is an emerging fundamental task for the dialogue system, where search queries are generated to explore the vast and continually updating knowledge from a search engine. To accelerate this line of research, previous studies have released several datasets with human-annotated search queries. However, the limited annotations still can not cover conversations of various domains. To solve this challenge, we propose a novel domain adaptation framework. It is inspired by a weakly supervised learning algorithm from previous work that guides a model using reinforcement learning with BM25 scores as feedback. Though effective, it is fragile facing noisy content on webpages from a commercial search engine and variance in conversations because of ignoring deep semantic information of dialogue contexts. Thus, we improve the algorithm by taking the advance of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and exploring several practical techniques such as knowledge distillation for stable training. We conduct experiments in multiple settings across different languages. Guided by the RAG model feedback, our model is more robust and performs significantly better especially in a more challenging setting over strong baselines.

Domain Adaptation for Conversational Query Production with the RAG Model Feedback

Benefiting from massive corpora and advanced hardware, large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities in language understanding and generation. However, their performance degrades in scenarios where multiple tasks are encountered sequentially, also known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we propose orthogonal low-rank adaptation (O-LoRA), a simple and efficient approach for continual learning in language models, effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting while learning new tasks. Specifically, O-LoRA learns tasks in different (low-rank) vector subspaces that are kept orthogonal to each other in order to minimize interference. Our method induces only marginal additional parameter costs and requires no user data storage for replay. Experimental results on continual learning benchmarks show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, compared to previous approaches, our method excels in preserving the generalization ability of LLMs on unseen tasks.

Orthogonal Subspace Learning for Language Model Continual Learning

When re-finding items, users who forget or are uncertain about identifying details often rely on creative strategies for expressing their information needs---complex queries that describe content elements (e.g., book characters or events), information beyond the document text (e.g., descriptions of book covers), or personal context (e.g., when they read a book). Standard retrieval models that rely on lexical or semantic overlap between query and document text are challenged in such retrieval settings, known as tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) retrieval.
We introduce a simple but effective framework for handling such complex queries by decomposing the query with an LLM into individual clues routing those as subqueries to specialized retrievers, and ensembling the results.
Our approach takes advantage of off-the-shelf retrievers (e.g., CLIP for retrieving images of book covers) or incorporate retriever-specific logic (e.g., date constraints). We show that our framework incorporating query decomposition into retrievers can improve gold book recall up to 6\% absolute gain for Recall@5 on a new collection of 14,441 real-world query-book pairs from an online community for resolving TOT inquiries.

Decomposing Complex Queries for Tip-of-the-tongue Retrieval

While many prior studies have applied computational approaches, such as machine learning, to detect and moderate hate speech, only scant attention has been paid to the task of identifying the underlying cause of hate speech. In this study, we introduce the concept of hate instigating speech, which refers to a specific type of textual posts on online platforms that stimulate or provoke others to engage in hate speech. The identification of hate instigating speech carries substantial practical implications for effective hate speech moderation. Rather than targeting individual instances of hate speech, by focusing on their roots, i.e., hate instigating speech, it becomes possible to significantly reduce the volume of content that requires review for moderation. Additionally, targeting hate instigating speech enables early prevention of the spread and propagation of hate speech, further enhancing the effectiveness of moderation efforts. However, several challenges hinder researchers from addressing the identification of hate instigating speech. First, there is a lack of comprehensive datasets specifically annotated for hate instigation, making it difficult to train and evaluate computational models effectively. Second, the subtle and nuanced nature of hate instigating speech (e.g., seemingly non-offensive texts serve as catalysts for triggering hate speech) makes it difficult to apply off-the-shelf machine learning models to the problem. To address these challenges, in this study, we have developed and released a multilingual dataset specifically designed for the task of identifying hate instigating speech. Specifically, it encompasses both English and Korean, allowing for a comprehensive examination of hate instigating speech across different linguistic contexts. We have applied existing machine learning models to our dataset and the results demonstrate that the extant models alone are insufficient for effectively detecting hate instigating speech. This finding highlights the need for further attention from the academic community to address this specific challenge. We expect our study and dataset to inspire researchers to explore innovative methods that can enhance the accuracy of hate instigating speech detection, ultimately contributing to more effective moderation and prevention of hate speech propagation online.

Uncovering the Root of Hate Speech: A Dataset for Identifying Hate Instigating Speech

We introduce a new task called *entity-centric question generation* (ECQG), motivated by real-world applications such as topic-specific learning, assisted reading, and fact-checking. The task aims to generate questions from an entity perspective. To solve ECQG, we propose a coherent PLM-based framework GenCONE with two novel modules: content focusing and question verification. The content focusing module first identifies a focus as "what to ask" to form draft questions, and the question verification module refines the questions afterwards by verifying the answerability. We also construct a large-scale open-domain dataset from SQuAD to support this task. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that GenCONE significantly and consistently outperforms various baselines, and two modules are effective and complementary in generating high-quality questions.

Ask To The Point: Open-Domain Entity-Centric Question Generation

We investigate the predictability of large language model (LLM) capabilities: given records of past experiments using different model families, numbers of parameters, tasks, and numbers of in-context examples, can we accurately predict LLM performance on new experiment configurations? Answering this question has practical implications for LLM users (e.g., deciding which models to try), developers (e.g., prioritizing evaluation on representative tasks), and the research community (e.g., identifying hard-to-predict capabilities that warrant further investigation).

We study the performance prediction problem on experiment records from BIG-bench. On a random train-test split, an MLP-based predictor achieves an $R^2$ score greater than 95%, indicating the presence of learnable patterns within the experiment records. We then formulate the problem of searching for "small-bench," an informative subset of BIG-bench tasks from which the performance on the full set can be maximally recovered. We find a subset as informative as BIG-bench Hard for evaluating new model families, while being $3\times$ smaller. Additionally, we find competitive subsets by clustering task representations learned by our MLP-based predictor and selecting tasks close to cluster centroids, highlighting the importance of task diversity in constructing "small-bench."

How Predictable Are Large Language Model Capabilities? A Case Study on BIG-bench

Large Language models (LLMs) possess the capability to engage In-context Learning (ICL) by leveraging a few demonstrations pertaining to a new downstream task as conditions. However, this particular learning paradigm suffers from high instability stemming from substantial variances induced by factors such as the input distribution of selected examples, their ordering, and prompt formats. In this work, we demonstrate that even when all these factors are held constant, the random selection of examples still results in high variance. Consequently, we aim to explore the informative ability of data examples by quantifying the Information Gain (IG) obtained in prediction after observing a given example candidate. Then we propose to sample those with maximum IG. Additionally, we identify the presence of template bias, which can lead to unfair evaluations of IG during the sampling process. To mitigate this bias, we introduce Calibration Before Sampling strategy. The experimental results illustrate that our proposed method can yield an average relative improvement of 14.3\% across six classification tasks using three LLMs.

Towards Informative Few-Shot Prompt with Maximum Information Gain for In-Context Learning

Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (IDRR) involves identifying the sense label of an implicit connective between adjacent text spans. 
This has traditionally been approached as a classification task. 
However, some downstream tasks require more than just a sense label as well as the specific connective used.
This paper presents Implicit Sense-labeled Connective Recognition (ISCR), which identifies the implicit connectives and their sense labels between adjacent text spans. 
ISCR can be treated as a classification task, but a large number of potential categories, sense labels, and uneven distribution of instances among them make this difficult. 
Instead, this paper handles the task as a text-generation task, using an encoder-decoder model to generate both connectives and their sense labels. 
Here, we explore a classification method and three kinds of text-generation methods.
From our evaluation results on PDTB-3.0, we found that our method outperforms the conventional classification-based method.

Implicit Sense-labeled Connective Recognition as Text Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable results on NLP tasks but at the expense of huge parameter sizes and the consequent computational costs. In this paper, we propose Variator, a parameter-efficient acceleration method that enhances computational efficiency through plug-and-play compression plugins. Compression plugins are designed to reduce the sequence length via compressing multiple hidden vectors into one and trained with original LLMs frozen. Different from traditional model acceleration methods, which compress LLMs to smaller sizes, Variator offers two distinct advantages: (1) In real-world applications, the plug-and-play nature of our compression plugins enables dynamic selection of different compression plugins with varying acceleration ratios based on the current workload. (2) The compression plugin comprises a few compact neural network layers with minimal parameters, significantly saving storage and memory overhead, particularly in scenarios with a growing number of tasks. We validate the effectiveness of Variator on seven datasets. Experimental results show that Variator can save 53\% computational costs using only 0.9\% additional parameters with a performance drop of less than 2\%. Moreover, when the model scales to billions of parameters, Variator matches the strong performance of uncompressed LLMs. Our code and checkpoints will be released to facilitate future work.

Variator: Accelerating Pre-trained Models with Plug-and-Play Compression Modules

The ability to identify and control different kinds of linguistic information encoded in vector representations of words has many use cases, especially for explainability and bias removal. This is usually done via a set of simple classification tasks, termed \textit{probes}, to evaluate the information encoded in the embedding space. However, the involvement of a trainable classifier leads to entanglement between the probe’s results and the classifier’s nature. As a result, contemporary works on probing include tasks that do not involve training of auxiliary models. In this work we introduce the term \textit{indicator tasks} for non-trainable tasks which are used to query embedding spaces for the existence of certain properties, and claim that this kind of tasks may point to a direction opposite to probes, and that this contradiction complicates the decision on whether a property exists in an embedding space. We demonstrate our claims with two test cases, one dealing with gender debiasing and another with the erasure of morphological information from embedding spaces. We show that the application of a suitable indicator provides a more accurate picture of the information captured and removed compared to probes. We thus conclude that indicator tasks should be implemented and taken into consideration when eliciting information from embedded representations.

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Domain Adaptation for Conversational Query Production with the RAG Model Feedback

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Domain Adaptation for Conversational Query Production with the RAG Model Feedback

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