Singapore

In this work, we propose a weak supervision pipeline SWEET: Supervise Weakly for Entity Extraction to fight Trafficking for extracting person names from noisy escort advertisements. Our method combines the simplicity of rule-matching (through antirules, i.e., negated rules) and the generalizability of large language models fine-tuned on benchmark, domain-specific and synthetic datasets, treating them as weak labels.
One of the major challenges in this domain is limited labeled data. SWEET addresses this by obtaining multiple weak labels through labeling functions and effectively aggregating them. SWEET outperforms the previous supervised SOTA method for this task by 9% F1 score on domain data and better generalizes to common benchmark datasets. Furthermore, we also release HTGEN, a synthetically generated dataset of escort advertisements (built using ChatGPT) to facilitate further research within the community.

EMNLP 2023

SWEET - Weakly Supervised Person Name Extraction for Fighting Human Trafficking

llm generation

named entity extraction

combating human trafficking

large language model

### 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.
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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.

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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.

Previous studies have relied on existing question-answering benchmarks to evaluate the knowledge stored in large language models (LLMs). However, this approach has limitations regarding factual knowledge coverage, as it mostly focuses on generic domains which may overlap with the pretraining data. This paper proposes a framework to systematically assess the factual knowledge of LLMs by leveraging knowledge graphs (KGs). Our framework automatically generates a set of questions and expected answers from the facts stored in a given KG, and then evaluates the accuracy of LLMs in answering these questions. We systematically evaluate the state-of-the-art LLMs with KGs in generic and specific domains. The experiment shows that ChatGPT is consistently the top performer across all domains. We also find that LLMs performance depends on the instruction finetuning, domain and question complexity and is prone to adversarial context.

Systematic Assessment of Factual Knowledge in Large Language Models

Chatbots have the risk of generating offensive utterances, which must be avoided.
Post-deployment, one way for a chatbot to continuously improve is to source utterance/label pairs from feedback by live users.
However, among users are trolls, who provide training examples with incorrect labels.
To de-troll training data, previous work removed training examples that have high user-aggregated cross-validation (CV) error.
However, CV is expensive; and in a coordinated attack, CV may be overwhelmed by trolls in number and in consistency among themselves.
In the present work, I address both limitations by proposing a solution inspired by methodology in automated essay scoring (AES):
have multiple users rate each utterance, then perform latent class analysis (LCA) to infer correct labels.
As it does not require GPU computations, LCA is inexpensive.
In experiments, I found that the AES-like solution can infer training labels with high accuracy when trolls are consistent, even when trolls are the majority.

Learning to love diligent trolls: Accounting for rater effects in the dialogue safety task

Existing LLM-based systems for writing long-form stories or story outlines frequently suffer from unnatural pacing, whether glossing over important events or over-elaborating on insignificant details, resulting in a jarring experience for the reader.
We propose a **CONC**rete **O**utline **C**on**T**rol (CONCOCT) system to improve pacing when automatically generating story outlines. We first train a *concreteness evaluator* to judge which of two events is more concrete (low-level-detailed). 
This evaluator can then be used to control pacing in hierarchical outline generation; in this work, we explore a *vaguest-first* expansion procedure that aims for uniform pacing. We further use the evaluator to filter new outline items based on predicted concreteness. Compared to a baseline hierarchical outline generator, humans judge CONCOCT's pacing to be more consistent over 57% of the time across multiple outline lengths; the gains also translate to downstream stories. 
All code, data, and models are open-sourced.

Improving Pacing in Long-Form Story Planning

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential for domain-specific applications, such as the law domain. However, recent disputes over GPT-4's law evaluation raise questions concerning their performance in real-world legal tasks. To systematically investigate their competency in the law, we design practical baseline solutions based on LLMs and test on the task of legal judgment prediction. In our solutions, LLMs can work alone to answer open questions or coordinate with an information retrieval (IR) system to learn from similar cases or solve simplified multi-choice questions.
We show that similar cases and multi-choice options, namely label candidates, included in prompts can help LLMs recall domain knowledge that is critical for expertise legal reasoning.
We additionally present an intriguing paradox wherein an IR system surpasses the performance of LLM+IR due to limited gains acquired by weaker LLMs from powerful IR systems. In such case, the role of LLMs becomes redundant. Our evaluation pipeline can be easily extended into other tasks to facilitate evaluations in other domains.
Code is available at https://github.com/srhthu/LM-CompEval-Legal

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models on Legal Judgment Prediction

Large language models (LLMs) enable zero-shot approaches in open-domain question answering (ODQA), yet with limited advancements as the reader is compared to the retriever. This study aims at the feasibility of a zero-shot reader that addresses the challenges of computational cost and the need for labeled data. We find that LLMs are distracted due to irrelevant documents in the retrieved set and the overconfidence of the generated answers when they are exploited as zero-shot readers. To tackle these problems, we mitigate the impact of such documents via Distraction-aware Answer Selection (DAS) with a negation-based instruction and score adjustment for proper answer selection. Experimental results show that our approach successfully handles distraction across diverse scenarios, enhancing the performance of zero-shot readers. Furthermore, unlike supervised readers struggling with unseen data, zero-shot readers demonstrate outstanding transferability without any training.

Improving Zero-shot Reader by Reducing Distractions from Irrelevant Documents in Open-Domain Question Answering

Legal practice is intrinsically rooted in the fabric of language, yet legal practitioners and scholars have been slow to adopt tools from natural language processing (NLP). At the same time, the legal system is experiencing an access to justice crisis, which could be partially alleviated with NLP. In this position paper, we argue that the slow uptake of NLP in legal practice is exacerbated by a disconnect between the needs of the legal community and the focus of NLP researchers. In a review of recent trends in the legal NLP literature, we find limited overlap between the legal NLP community and legal academia. Our interpretation is that some of the most popular legal NLP tasks fail to address the needs of legal practitioners. We discuss examples of legal NLP tasks that promise to bridge disciplinary disconnects and highlight interesting areas for legal NLP research that remain underexplored.

The Law and NLP: Bridging Disciplinary Disconnects

Detecting hallucinations in natural language processing (NLP) is a critical undertaking that demands a deep understanding of both the semantic and pragmatic aspects of languages. Cognitive approaches that leverage users’ behavioural signals, such as gaze, have demonstrated effectiveness in addressing NLP tasks with similar linguistic complexities. However, their potential in the context of hallucination detection remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel cognitive approach for hallucination detection that leverages gaze signals from humans. We first collect and introduce an eye tracking corpus (IITB-HGC: IITB-Hallucination Gaze corpus) consisting of 500 instances, annotated by five annotators for hallucination detection. Our analysis reveals that humans selectively attend to relevant parts of the text based on distributional similarity, similar to the attention bias phenomenon in psychology. We identify two attention strategies employed by humans: global attention, which focuses on the most informative sentence, and local attention, which focuses on important words within a sentence. Leveraging these insights, we propose a novel cognitive framework for hallucination detection that incorporates these attention biases. Experimental evaluations on the FactCC dataset demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, obtaining a balanced accuracy of 87.1%. Our study highlights the potential of gaze-based approaches in addressing the task of hallucination detection and sheds light on the cognitive processes employed by humans in identifying inconsistencies.

Eyes Show the Way: Modelling Gaze Behaviour for Hallucination Detection

The probing classiﬁers framework has been employed for interpreting deep neural network models for a variety of natural language processing (NLP) applications. Studies, however, have largely focused on sentencelevel NLP tasks. This work is the ﬁrst to apply the probing paradigm to representations learned for document-level information extraction (IE). We designed eight embedding probes to analyze surface, semantic, and event-understanding capabilities relevant to document-level event extraction. We apply them to the representations acquired by learning models from three different LLM-based document-level IE approaches on a standard dataset. We found that trained encoders from these models yield embeddings that can modestly improve argument detections and labeling but only slightly enhance event-level tasks, albeit trade-offs in information helpful for coherence and event-type prediction. We further found that encoder models struggle with document length and cross-sentence discourse.

Probing Representations for Document-level Event Extraction

Document-level neural machine translation (DNMT) has shown promising results by incorporating context information through increased maximum lengths of source and target sentences. However, this approach also introduces a length bias problem, whereby DNMT suffers from significant translation quality degradation when decoding sentences that are much shorter or longer than the maximum sentence length during training, i.e., the length bias problem. To prevent the model from neglecting shorter sentences, we sample the training data to ensure a more uniform distribution across different sentence lengths while progressively increasing the maximum sentence length during training. Additionally, we introduce a length-normalized attention mechanism to aid the model in focusing on target information, mitigating the issue of attention divergence when processing longer sentences. Furthermore, during the decoding stage of DNMT, we propose a sliding decoding strategy that limits the length of target sentences to not exceed the maximum length encountered during training. The experimental results indicate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art results on several open datasets, and further analysis shows that our method can significantly alleviate the length bias problem.

Addressing the Length Bias Challenge in Document-Level Neural Machine Translation

Recent works in open-domain question answering (QA) have explored generating context passages from large language models (LLMs), replacing the traditional retrieval step in the QA pipeline. However, it is not well understood why generated passages can be more effective than retrieved ones. This study revisits the conventional formulation of QA and introduces the concept of $\textit{knowledge corpus error}$. This error arises when the knowledge corpus used for retrieval is only a subset of the entire string space, potentially excluding more helpful passages that exist outside the corpus. LLMs may mitigate this shortcoming by generating passages in a larger space. We come up with an experiment of paraphrasing human-annotated gold context using LLMs to observe knowledge corpus error empirically. Our results across three QA benchmarks reveal an increased performance (10\% - 13\%) when using paraphrased passage, indicating a signal for the existence of knowledge corpus error.

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Systematic Assessment of Factual Knowledge in Large Language Models

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SWEET: Weakly Supervised Person Name Extraction for Fighting Human Trafficking

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Systematic Assessment of Factual Knowledge in Large Language Models

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SWEET: Weakly Supervised Person Name Extraction for Fighting Human Trafficking

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