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Given the fact description text of a legal case, legal judgment prediction (LJP) aims to predict the case&#39;s charge, applicable law article, and term of penalty. A core problem of LJP is distinguishing confusing legal cases where only subtle text differences exist. Previous studies fail to distinguish different classification errors with a standard cross-entropy classification loss and ignore the numbers in the fact description for predicting the term of penalty. To tackle these issues, in this work, first, in order to exploit the numbers in legal cases for predicting the term of penalty of certain charges, we enhance the representation of the fact description with extracted crime amounts which are encoded by a pre-trained numeracy model. Second, we propose a moco-based supervised contrastive learning to learn distinguishable representations and explore the best strategy to construct positive example pairs to benefit all three subtasks of LJP simultaneously. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that the proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art results, particularly for confusing legal cases. Ablation studies also demonstrate the effectiveness of each component.

EMNLP 2023

Exploiting Contrastive Learning and Numerical Evidence for Confusing Legal Judgment Prediction

legal artificial intelligence

legal judgment prediction

contrastive learning

Given the fact description text of a legal case, legal judgment prediction (LJP) aims to predict the case's charge, applicable law article, and term of penalty. A core problem of LJP is distinguishing confusing legal cases where only subtle text differences exist. Previous studies fail to distinguish different classification errors with a standard cross-entropy classification loss and ignore the numbers in the fact description for predicting the term of penalty. To tackle these issues, in this work, first, in order to exploit the numbers in legal cases for predicting the term of penalty of certain charges, we enhance the representation of the fact description with extracted crime amounts which are encoded by a pre-trained numeracy model. Second, we propose a moco-based supervised contrastive learning to learn distinguishable representations and explore the best strategy to construct positive example pairs to benefit all three subtasks of LJP simultaneously. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that the proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art results, particularly for confusing legal cases. Ablation studies also demonstrate the effectiveness of each component.

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 have recently risen in popularity due to their ability to perform many natural language tasks without requiring any fine-tuning. In this work, we focus on two novel ideas: (1) generating definitions from examples and using them for zero-shot classification, and (2) investigating how an LLM makes use of the definitions. We thoroughly analyze the performance of GPT-3 model for fine-grained multi-label conspiracy theory classification of tweets using zero-shot labeling. In doing so, we asses how to improve the labeling by providing minimal but meaningful context in the form of the definitions of the labels. We compare descriptive noun phrases, human-crafted definitions, introduce a new method to help the model generate definitions from examples, and propose a method to evaluate GPT-3's understanding of the definitions. We demonstrate that improving definitions of class labels has a direct consequence on the downstream classification results.

Definitions Matter: Guiding GPT for Multi-label Classification

How do we evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) and determine the aspects and limits of their intelligent behaviour?

It is currently conjectured that shortcomings of LLMs in multi-linguality and reasoning are due to a lack of ability to generalize.
It has been argued that, instead, humans are better at generalization because they have a tendency at extracting rules from complex data. 
We propose a method to evaluate LLMs ability to rule-based generalization.

When exposed to tests of analytic intelligence, for example the visual RAVEN IQ test, human problem-solvers identify the relevant objects in the picture and their relevant attributes and reason based on rules applied to them. Based on the induced rules, they are able to provide a generalisation and a solution to the test.

An analogous language task has recently been proposed (called BLM) for LLM. 
In this paper, we argue that we can use this task to investigate what linguistic reasoning LLM develop, by asking them to solve some simple variants of the BLM task.

We find that current state-of-the-art generative models, such as ChatGPT, can handle the task in the sense that they easily understand the instructions and can provide step-by-step reasoning that shows that it can solve two of the main cognitive hurdles: correspondence finding (object and attribute identification) and item novelty. However, overall they cannot find the correct answer, even with considerable help. In particular, they never identify the structure of the problem, exhibiting, we hypothesize, a lack of goal and subgoal management abilities, an ability that has been argued to measure differential abilities in humans. 

We argue that this finding supports the usefulness of the task as a method to test the limits and specific properties of generalisation ability in Large Language Models, providing an intrinsic evaluation method inspired by tests of human intelligence.

Blackbird language matrices (BLM), a new task for rule-like generalization in neural networks: Can Large Language Models pass the test?

The common practice for assessing automatic evaluation metrics is to measure the correlation between their induced system rankings and those obtained by reliable human evaluation, where a higher correlation indicates a better metric. 
Yet, an intricate setting arises when an NLP task is evaluated by multiple Quality Criteria (QCs), like for text summarization where prominent criteria including relevance, consistency, fluency and coherence.
In this paper, we challenge the soundness of this methodology when multiple QCs are involved, concretely for the summarization case. 
First, we show that the allegedly best metrics for certain QCs actually do not perform well, failing to detect even drastic summary corruptions with respect to the considered QC.
To explain this, we show that some of the high correlations obtained in the multi-QC setup are spurious.
Finally, we propose a procedure that may help detecting this effect.
Overall, our findings highlight the need for further investigating metric evaluation methodologies for the multiple-QC case.

Re-Examining Summarization Evaluation across Multiple Quality Criteria | VIDEO

For knowledge intensive NLP tasks, it has been widely accepted that accessing more information is a contributing factor to improvements in the model's end-to-end performance. However, counter-intuitively, too much context can have a negative impact on the model when evaluated on common question answering (QA) datasets. In this paper, we analyze how passages can have a detrimental effect on retrieve-then-read architectures used in question answering. Our empirical evidence indicates that the current read architecture does not fully leverage the retrieved passages and significantly degrades its performance when using the whole passages compared to utilizing subsets of them. 
Our findings demonstrate that model accuracy can be improved by 10\% on two popular QA datasets by filtering out detrimental passages. Additionally, these outcomes are attained by utilizing existing retrieval methods without further training or data. We further highlight the challenges associated with identifying the detrimental passages. First, even with the correct context, the model can make an incorrect prediction, posing a challenge in determining which passages are most influential. Second, evaluation typically considers lexical matching, which is not robust to variations of correct answers. Despite these limitations, our experimental results underscore the pivotal role of identifying and removing these detrimental passages for the context-efficient retrieve-then-read pipeline.

Detrimental Contexts in Open-Domain Question Answering

With advancements in natural language processing (NLP) models, automatic explanation generation has been proposed to mitigate misinformation on social media platforms in addition to adding warning labels to identified fake news. While many researchers have focused on generating good explanations, how these explanations can really help humans combat fake news is under-explored. In this study, we compare the effectiveness of a warning label and the state-of- the-art counterfactual explanations generated by GPT-4 in debunking misinformation. In a two-wave, online human-subject study, participants (N = 215) were randomly assigned to a control group in which false contents are shown without any intervention, a warning tag group in which the false claims were labeled, or an explanation group in which the false contents were accompanied by GPT-4 generated explanations. Our results show that both interventions significantly decrease participants’ self-reported belief in fake claims in an equivalent manner for the short-term and long-term. We discuss the implications of our findings and directions for future NLP-based misinformation debunking strategies.

Is Explanation the Cure? Misinformation Mitigation in the Short Term and Long Term

When training data are collected from human annotators, the design of the annotation instrument, the instructions given to annotators, the characteristics of the annotators, and their interactions can impact training data. This study demonstrates that design choices made when creating an annotation instrument also impact the models trained on the resulting annotations. 

We introduce the term annotation sensitivity to refer to the impact of annotation data collection methods on the annotations themselves and on downstream model performance and predictions.

We collect annotations of hate speech and offensive language in five experimental conditions of an annotation instrument, randomly assigning annotators to conditions. We then fine-tune BERT models on each of the five resulting datasets and evaluate model performance on a holdout portion of each condition. We find considerable differences between the conditions for 1) the share of hate speech/offensive language annotations, 2) model performance, 3) model predictions, and 4) model learning curves.

Our results emphasize the crucial role played by the annotation instrument which has received little attention in the machine learning literature. We call for additional research into how and why the instrument impacts the annotations to inform the development of best practices in instrument design.

Annotation Sensitivity: Training Data Collection Methods Affect Model Performance

Interlinear Morphological Glosses are annotations produced in the context of language documentation. Their goal is to identify morphs occurring in an L1 sentence and to explicit their function and meaning, with the further support of an associated translation in L2. We study here the task of automatic glossing, aiming to provide linguists with adequate tools to facilitate this process. Our formalisation of glossing uses a latent variable Conditional Random Field (CRF), which labels the L1 morphs while simultaneously aligning them to L2 words. In experiments with several under-resourced languages, we show that this approach is both effective and data-efficient and mitigates the problem of annotating unknown morphs. We also discuss various design choices regarding the alignment process and the selection of features. We finally demonstrate that it can benefit from multilingual (pre-)training, achieving results which outperform very strong baselines.

Towards Multilingual Interlinear Morphological Glossing

Dual use, the intentional, harmful reuse of technology and scientific artefacts, is an ill-defined problem within the context of Natural Language Processing (NLP). As large language models (LLMs) have advanced in their capabilities and become more accessible, the risk of their intentional misuse becomes more prevalent. To prevent such intentional malicious use, it is necessary for NLP researchers and practitioners to understand and mitigate the risks of their research. Hence, we present an NLP-specific definition of dual use informed by researchers and practitioners in the field. Further, we propose a checklist focusing on dual-use in NLP, that can be integrated into existing conference ethics-frameworks. The definition and checklist are created based on a survey of NLP researchers and practitioners.

Thorny Roses: Investigating the Dual Use Dilemma in Natural Language Processing

Safety detection has been an increasingly important topic in recent years and it has become even more necessary to develop reliable safety detection systems with the rapid development of large language models. However, currently available safety detection systems have limitations in terms of their versatility and interpretability. In this paper, we first introduce InstructSafety, a safety detection framework that unifies 7 common sub-tasks for safety detection. These tasks are unified into a similar form through different instructions. We then conduct a comprehensive survey of existing safety detection datasets and process 39 human-annotated datasets for instruction tuning. We also construct adversarial samples to enhance the model's robustness. After fine-tuning Flan-T5 on the collected data, we have developed Safety-Flan-T5, a multidimensional and explainable safety detector. We conduct comprehensive experiments on a variety of datasets and tasks, and demonstrate the strong performance of Safety-Flan-T5 in comparison to supervised baselines and served APIs (Perspective API, ChatGPT and InstructGPT). We will release the processed data, fine-tuned Safety-Flan-T5 and related code for public use.

InstructSafety: A Unified Framework for Building Multidimensional and Explainable Safety Detector through Instruction Tuning

In-Image Machine Translation (IIMT) aims to convert images containing texts from one language to another. Traditional approaches for this task are cascade methods, which utilize optical character recognition (OCR) followed by neural machine translation (NMT) and text rendering. However, the cascade methods suffer from compounding errors of OCR and NMT, leading to a decrease in translation quality. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end model instead of the OCR, NMT and text rendering pipeline. Our neural architecture adopts encoder-decoder paradigm with segmented pixel sequences as inputs and outputs. Through end-to-end training, our model yields improvements across various dimensions, (i) it achieves higher translation quality by avoiding error propagation, (ii) it demonstrates robustness for out domain data, and (iii) it displays insensitivity to incomplete words. To validate the effectiveness of our method and support for future research, we construct our dataset containing 4M pairs of De-En images and train our end-to-end model. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms both cascade method and current end-to-end model.

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Exploiting Contrastive Learning and Numerical Evidence for Confusing Legal Judgment Prediction

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Definitions Matter: Guiding GPT for Multi-label Classification