Singapore

Large language models (LLMs) are a promising avenue for machine translation (MT). However, current LLM-based MT systems are brittle: their effectiveness highly depends on the choice of few-shot examples and they often require extra post-processing due to overgeneration. Alternatives such as finetuning on translation instructions are computationally expensive and may weaken in-context learning capabilities, due to overspecialization. In this paper, we provide a closer look at this problem. We start by showing that adapter-based finetuning with LoRA matches the performance of traditional finetuning while reducing the number of training parameters by a factor of 50. This method also outperforms few-shot prompting and eliminates the need for post-processing or in-context examples. However, we show that finetuning generally degrades few-shot performance, hindering adaptation capabilities. Finally, to obtain the best of both worlds, we propose a simple approach that incorporates few-shot examples during finetuning. Experiments on 10 language pairs show that our proposed approach recovers the original few-shot capabilities while keeping the added benefits of finetuning.

EMNLP 2023

Steering Large Language Models for Machine Translation with Finetuning and In-Context Learning

in-context learning

efficient finetuning

machine translation

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.

In this work, we study the language model backbone replacement problem for personalized downstream tasks in a non-stationary on-device scenario. In real world, company may periodically update the knowledge and architectures of backbones to keep the competitive in the market, meanwhile, to accommodate the users' own preference, models are personalized to fit users' own distribution locally. Traditional full model tuning or transfer learning for such replacements often incur considerable local device training costs and necessitate extensive backpropagation within deep transformer layers. Addressing this issue, we propose a novel, lightweight tuning method for personalized NLP classification tasks post-backbone replacement. Our approach leverages a personalized matrix calculated from documents corresponding to users' old and new backbones. This matrix facilitates top-layer parameter tuning, drastically reducing backpropagation computation. To further mitigate training costs associated with matrix linear optimization, we employ correlation clustering to curate a few examples from personalized cluster sets for individuals. Our method achieves over 1000 times computation reduction in Flops for backpropagation and brings the user-specific initialization for personal matrix yielding significant performance boost compared with popular transfer learning methods.

FaLA: Fast Linear Adaptation for Replacing Backbone Models on Edge Devices

Emotion-Cause analysis has attracted the attention of researchers in recent years. However, most existing datasets are limited in size and number of emotion categories. They often focus on extracting parts of the document that contain the emotion cause and fail to provide more abstractive, generalizable root cause.
To bridge this gap, we introduce a large-scale dataset of emotion causes, derived from 9.8 million cleaned tweets over 15 years.
We describe our curation process, which includes a comprehensive pipeline for data gathering, cleaning, labeling, and validation, ensuring the dataset's reliability and richness. We extract emotion labels and provide abstractive summarization of the events causing emotions. 
The final dataset comprises over 700,000 tweets with corresponding emotion-cause pairs spanning 48 emotion classes, validated by human evaluators. 
The novelty of our dataset stems from its broad spectrum of emotion classes and the abstractive emotion cause that facilitates the development of an emotion-cause knowledge graph for nuanced reasoning.
Our dataset will enable the design of emotion-aware systems that account for the diverse emotional responses of different people for the same event.

EMO-KNOW: A Large Scale Dataset on Emotion-Cause

In-context learning (ICL) in Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a powerful new learning paradigm. However, its underlying mechanism is still not well understood.
In particular, it is challenging to map it to the "standard" machine learning framework, where one uses a training set $S$ to find a best-fitting function $f(x)$ in some hypothesis class. Here we make progress on this problem by showing that the functions learned by ICL often have a very simple structure: they correspond to the transformer LLM whose only inputs are the query $x$ and a single "task vector" calculated from the training set. Thus, ICL can be seen as compressing $S$ into a single task vector $\boldsymbol{\theta}(S)$ and then using this task vector to modulate the transformer to produce the output.
We support the above claim via comprehensive experiments across a range of models and tasks.

In-Context Learning Creates Task Vectors

Scaling dense PCFGs to thousands of nonterminals via low-rank parameterizations of the rule probability tensor has been shown to be beneficial for unsupervised parsing. However, PCFGs scaled this way still perform poorly as a language model, and even underperform similarly-sized HMMs. This work introduces $\emph{SimplePCFG}$, a simple PCFG formalism with independent left and right productions. Despite imposing a stronger independence assumption than the low-rank approach, we find that this formalism scales more effectively both as a language model and as an unsupervised parser. We further introduce $\emph{FlashInside}$, a hardware IO-aware implementation of the inside algorithm for efficiently scaling simple PCFGs. Through extensive experiments on multiple grammar induction benchmarks, we validate the effectiveness of simple PCFGs over low-rank baselines.

Simple Hardware-Efficient PCFGs with Independent Left and Right Productions

Existing works on Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) explicitly focus on developing more efficient fine-tuning techniques for the task. Instead, our motivation is to come up with a generic approach that can improve the downstream performances of multiple ABSA tasks simultaneously. Towards this, we present CONTRASTE, a novel pre-training strategy using CONTRastive learning to enhance the ASTE performance. While we primarily focus on ASTE, we also demonstrate the advantage of our proposed technique on other ABSA tasks such as ACOS, TASD, and AESC. Given a sentence and its associated (aspect, opinion, sentiment) triplets, first, we design aspect-based prompts with corresponding sentiments masked. We then (pre)train an encoder-decoder model by applying contrastive learning on the decoder-generated aspect-aware sentiment representations of the masked terms. For fine-tuning the model weights thus obtained, we then propose a novel multi-task approach where the base encoder-decoder model is combined with two complementary modules, a tagging-based Opinion Term Detector, and a regression-based Triplet Count Estimator. Exhaustive experiments on four benchmark datasets and a detailed ablation study establish the importance of each of our proposed components as we achieve new state-of-the-art ASTE results.

CONTRASTE: Supervised Contrastive Pre-training With Aspect-based Prompts For Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

Traditionally, large language models have been either trained on general web crawls or domain-specific data. However, recent successes of generative large language models, have shed light on the benefits of cross-domain datasets. To examine the significance of prioritizing data diversity over quality, we present a German dataset comprising texts from five domains, along with another dataset aimed at containing high-quality data. Through training a series of models ranging between 122M and 750M parameters on both datasets, we conduct a comprehensive benchmark on multiple downstream tasks. Our findings demonstrate that the models trained on the cross-domain dataset outperform those trained on quality data alone, leading to improvements up to 4.45% over the previous state-of-the-art.

On the Impact of Cross-Domain Data on German Language Models

Target similarity tuning (TST) is a method of selecting relevant examples in natural language (NL) to code generation through large language models (LLMs) to improve performance. Its goal is to adapt a sentence embedding model to have the similarity between two NL inputs match the similarity between their associated code outputs. In this paper, we propose different methods to apply and improve TST in the real world. First, we replace the sentence transformer with embeddings from a larger model, which reduces sensitivity to the language distribution and thus provides more flexibility in synthetic generation of examples, and we train a tiny model that transforms these embeddings to a space where embedding similarity matches code similarity, which allows the model to remain a black box and only requires a few matrix multiplications at inference time. Second, we how to efficiently select a smaller number of training examples to train the TST model. Third, we introduce a ranking-based evaluation for TST that does not require end-to-end code generation experiments, which can be expensive to perform.

TSTR: Target Similarity Tuning Meets the Real World

Event extraction (EE), as a crucial information extraction (IE) task, aims to identify event triggers and their associated arguments from unstructured text, subsequently classifying them into pre-defined types and roles. In the biomedical domain, EE is widely used to extract complex structures representing biological events from literature. Due to the complicated semantics and specialized domain knowledge, it is challenging to construct biomedical event extraction datasets. Additionally, most existing biomedical EE datasets primarily focus on cell experiments or the overall experimental procedures. Therefore, we introduce AniEE, an event extraction dataset concentrated on the animal experiment stage. We establish a novel animal experiment customized entity and event scheme in collaboration with domain experts. We then create an expert-annotated high-quality dataset containing discontinuous entities and nested events and evaluate our dataset on the recent outstanding NER and EE models.

AniEE: A Dataset of Animal Experimental Literature for Event Extraction

Model pruning methods reduce memory requirements and inference time of large-scale pre-trained language models after deployment. However, the actual pruning procedure is computationally intensive, involving repeated training and pruning until the required sparsity is achieved. This paper combines data pruning with movement pruning for Neural Machine Translation (NMT) to enable efficient fine-pruning. We design a dataset pruning strategy by leveraging cross-entropy scores of individual training instances. We conduct pruning experiments on the task of machine translation from Romanian-to-English and Turkish-to-English, and demonstrate that selecting hard-to-learn examples (top-k) based on training cross-entropy scores outperforms other dataset pruning methods. We empirically demonstrate that data pruning reduces the overall steps required for convergence and the training time of movement pruning. Finally, we perform a series of experiments to tease apart the role of training data during movement pruning and uncover new insights to understand the interplay between data and model pruning in the context of NMT.

Data Pruning for Efficient Model Pruning in Neural Machine Translation

Incremental learning plays a pivotal role in the context of online knowledge discovery, as it encourages large models (LM) to learn and refresh knowledge continuously. Many approaches have been proposed to simultaneously preserve knowledge from previous tasks while learning new concepts in online NLP applications. In this paper, we primarily focus on learning a more generalized embedding space that could be better transferred to various downstream sequence tasks. The key idea is to learn from both task-agnostic and task-specific embedding aspects so that the inherent challenge of catastrophic forgetting that arises in incremental learning scenarios can be addressed with a more generalized solution. We propose a dual contrastive learning (DCL) based framework to foster the transferability of representations across different tasks, it consists of two key components: firstly, we utilize global contrastive learning that intertwines a task-agnostic strategy for promoting a generalized embedding space; secondly, considering the domain shift from unseen distributions can compromise the quality of learned embeddings. We further incorporate a task-specific attention mechanism to enhance the adaptability of task-specific weight for various emerging tasks and ultimately reduce errors in generic representations. Experiments over various text datasets demonstrate that our work achieves superior performance and outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods.

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FaLA: Fast Linear Adaptation for Replacing Backbone Models on Edge Devices

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