Singapore

Narrative understanding involves capturing the author&#39;s cognitive processes, providing insights into their knowledge, intentions, beliefs, and desires. Although large language models (LLMs) excel in generating grammatically coherent text, their ability to comprehend the author&#39;s thoughts remains uncertain. This limitation hinders the practical applications of narrative understanding. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of narrative understanding tasks, thoroughly examining their key features, definitions, taxonomy, associated datasets, training objectives, evaluation metrics, and limitations. Furthermore, we explore the potential of expanding the capabilities of modularized LLMs to address novel narrative understanding tasks. By framing narrative understanding as the retrieval of the author&#39;s imaginative cues that outline the narrative structure, our study introduces a fresh perspective on enhancing narrative comprehension.

EMNLP 2023

Are NLP Models Good at Tracing Thoughts: An Overview of Narrative Understanding

narrative understanding

reading comprehension

summarization

question answering

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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EMNLP 2024

EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

Narrative understanding involves capturing the author's cognitive processes, providing insights into their knowledge, intentions, beliefs, and desires. Although large language models (LLMs) excel in generating grammatically coherent text, their ability to comprehend the author's thoughts remains uncertain. This limitation hinders the practical applications of narrative understanding. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of narrative understanding tasks, thoroughly examining their key features, definitions, taxonomy, associated datasets, training objectives, evaluation metrics, and limitations. Furthermore, we explore the potential of expanding the capabilities of modularized LLMs to address novel narrative understanding tasks. By framing narrative understanding as the retrieval of the author's imaginative cues that outline the narrative structure, our study introduces a fresh perspective on enhancing narrative comprehension.

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

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EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

The popularity of transformer-based text embeddings calls for better statistical tools for measuring distributions of such embeddings. One such tool would be a method for ranking texts within a corpus by centrality, i.e. assigning each text a number signifying how representative that text is of the corpus as a whole. However, an intrinsic center-outward ordering of high-dimensional text representations is not trivial. A $\textit{statistical depth}$ is a function for ranking $k$-dimensional objects by measuring centrality with respect to some observed $k$-dimensional distribution. We adopt a statistical depth to measure distributions of transformer-based text embeddings, $\textit{transformer-based text embedding (TTE) depth}$, and introduce the practical use of this depth for both modeling and distributional inference in NLP pipelines. We first define TTE depth and an associated rank sum test for determining whether two corpora differ significantly in embedding space. We then use TTE depth for the task of in-context learning prompt selection, showing that this approach reliably improves performance over statistical baseline approaches across six text classification tasks. Finally, we use TTE depth and the associated rank sum test to characterize the distributions of synthesized and human-generated corpora, showing that five recent synthetic data augmentation processes cause a measurable distributional shift away from associated human-generated text.

Statistical Depth for Ranking and Characterizing Transformer-Based Text Embeddings | VIDEO

Reasoning over spans of tokens from different parts of the input is essential for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks such as fact-checking (FC), machine reading comprehension (MRC) or natural language inference (NLI). However, existing highlight-based explanations primarily focus on identifying individual important features or interactions only between adjacent tokens or tuples of tokens. Most notably, there is a lack of annotations capturing the human decision-making process with respect to the necessary interactions for informed decision-making in such tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce SpanEx, a multi-annotator dataset of human span interaction explanations for two NLU tasks: NLI and FC. We then investigate the decision-making processes of multiple fine-tuned large language models in terms of the employed connections between spans in separate parts of the input and compare them to the human reasoning processes. Finally, we present a novel community detection based unsupervised method to extract such interaction explanations. We make the code and the dataset available on [Github](https://github.com/copenlu/spanex). The dataset is also available on [Huggingface datasets](https://huggingface.co/datasets/copenlu/spanex).

Explaining Interactions Between Text Spans

Instruction Fine-Tuning (IFT) is a powerful paradigm that strengthens the zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), but in doing so induces new evaluation metric requirements. We show LLM-based metrics to be well adapted to these requirements, and leverage them to conduct an investigation of task-specialization strategies, quantifying the trade-offs that emerge in practical industrial settings. Our findings offer practitioners actionable insights for real-world IFT model deployment.

Revisiting Instruction Fine-tuned Model Evaluation to Guide Industrial Applications

Large language models (LLMs) excel in many tasks in NLP and beyond, but most open models have very limited coverage of smaller languages and LLM work tends to focus on languages where nearly unlimited data is available for pretraining. In this work, we study the challenges of creating LLMs for Finnish, a language spoken by less than 0.1\% of the world population. We compile an extensive dataset of Finnish combining web crawls, news, social media and eBooks. We pursue two approaches to pretrain models: 1) we train seven monolingual models from scratch (186M to 13B parameters) dubbed FinGPT, 2) we continue the pretraining of the multilingual BLOOM model on a mix of its original training data and Finnish, resulting in a 176 billion parameter model we call BLUUMI.
For model evaluation, we introduce FIN-bench, a version of BIG-bench with Finnish tasks. We also assess other model qualities such as toxicity and bias. Our models and tools are openly available at \url{https://turkunlp.org/gpt3-finnish}.

FinGPT: Large Generative Models for a Small Language

Chain-of-thought (CoT) is capable of eliciting models to explicitly generate reasoning paths, thus promoting reasoning accuracy and attracting increasing attention. Specifically, zero-shot CoT achieves remarkable improvements in a wide range of reasoning tasks by simply instructing the LLM with the prompt "Let's think step by step!". Despite the success of zero-shot CoT, the existing zero-shot prompting techniques remain limited to a single language, making it challenging to generalize to other languages and hindering global development. In this work, we introduce cross-lingual prompting (CLP), aiming to improve zero-shot CoT reasoning across languages. Specifically, CLP consists of two main components: (1) cross-lingual alignment prompting and (2) task-specific solver prompting. The cross-lingual alignment prompting is responsible for aligning representations across different languages, whereas the task-specific solver prompting is used to generate the final chain of thoughts and results for the reasoning task. In addition, we further introduce cross-lingual self-consistent prompting (CLSP) to ensemble different reasoning paths across languages. Our experimental evaluations on several benchmarks demonstrate that CLP and CLSP significantly outperform the existing prompting methods and achieve state-of-the-art performance. We hope this work will inspire further breakthroughs in cross-lingual CoT.

Cross-lingual Prompting: Improving Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning across Languages

The field of Natural Language Generation (NLG) suffers from a severe shortage of labeled data due to the extremely expensive and time-consuming process involved in manual annotation. A natural approach for coping with this problem is active learning (AL), a well-known machine learning technique for improving annotation efficiency by selectively choosing the most informative examples to label. However, while AL has been well-researched in the context of text classification, its application to NLG remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a first systematic study of active learning for NLG, considering a diverse set of tasks and multiple leading selection strategies, and harnessing a strong instruction-tuned model. 
Our results indicate that the performance of existing AL strategies is inconsistent, surpassing the baseline of random example selection in some cases but not in others. We highlight some notable differences between the classification and generation scenarios, and analyze the selection behaviors of existing AL strategies. Our findings motivate exploring novel approaches for applying AL to generation tasks.

Active Learning for Natural Language Generation

Open-domain question answering (QA) systems are often built with retrieval modules. However, retrieving passages from a given source is known to suffer from insufficient knowledge coverage. Alternatively, prompting large language models (LLMs) to generate contextual passages based on their parametric knowledge has been shown to improve QA performance. Yet, LLMs tend to "hallucinate" content that conflicts with the retrieved knowledge. Based on the intuition that answers supported by both sources are more likely to be correct, we propose COMBO, a Compatibility-Oriented knowledge Merging for Better Open-domain QA framework, to effectively leverage the two sources of information. Concretely, we match LLM-generated passages with retrieved counterparts into compatible pairs, based on discriminators trained with silver compatibility labels. Then a Fusion-in-Decoder-based reader model handles passage pairs to arrive at the final answer. Experiments show that COMBO outperforms competitive baselines on three out of four tested open-domain QA benchmarks. Further analysis reveals that our proposed framework demonstrates greater efficacy in scenarios with a higher degree of knowledge conflicts.

Merging Generated and Retrieved Knowledge for Open-Domain QA

Automated theorem proving (ATP) has become an appealing domain for exploring the reasoning ability of the recent successful 
generative language models. However, current ATP benchmarks are mainly focus on symbolic inference, but rarely involve the understanding of complex number combination reasoning. In this work, we propose TRIGO, an ATP benchmark that not only requires a model to reduce a trigonometric expression with step-by-step proof but also evaluates a generative LM's reasoning ability on formulas and capability to manipulate, group, and factor number terms. We gather trigonometric expressions and their reduced forms from web, annotate the simplification process manually, and translate it into the ``Lean'' formal language system. We then automatically generate additional examples from the annotated samples to expand the dataset. Furthermore, we also create three automatically generated training and testing datasets of varying difficulty and distributions. Our extensive experiments show our proposed TRIGO poses a new challenge for advanced generative LM's including GPT-4 which is pre-trained on a considerable amount of open-source formal theorem-proving language data, and provide a new tool to study the generative LM's ability on both formal and mathematical reasoning.

TRIGO: Benchmarking Formal Mathematical Proof Reduction for Generative Language Models

Hallucination is a well-known phenomenon in text generated by large language models (LLMs). The existence of hallucinatory responses is found in almost all application scenarios e.g., summarization, question-answering (QA) etc. For applications requiring high reliability (e.g., customer-facing assistants), the potential existence of hallucination in LLM-generated text is a critical problem. The amount of hallucination can be reduced by leveraging information retrieval to provide relevant background information to the LLM. However, LLMs can still generate hallucinatory content for various reasons (e.g., prioritizing its parametric knowledge over the context, failure to capture the relevant information from the context, etc.). Detecting hallucinations through automated methods is thus paramount. To facilitate research in this direction, we introduce a sophisticated dataset, DelucionQA, that captures hallucinations made by retrieval-augmented LLMs for a domain-specific QA task. Furthermore, we propose a set of hallucination detection methods to serve as baselines for future works from the research community. Analysis and case study are also provided to share valuable insights on hallucination phenomena in the target scenario.

DelucionQA: Detecting Hallucinations in Domain-specific Question Answering

Large language models (LLM's) have been widely used for several applications such as question answering, text classification and clustering. While the preliminary results across the aforementioned tasks looks promising, recent work has dived deep into LLM's performing poorly for complex Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks in comparison to fine-tuned pre-trained language models (PLM's). To enhance wider adoption of LLM's, our paper investigates the robustness of such LLM NER models and its instruction fine-tuned variants to adversarial attacks. In particular, we propose a novel attack which relies on disentanglement and word attribution techniques where the former aids in learning an embedding capturing both entity and non-entity influences separately, and the latter aids in identifying important words across both components. This is in stark contrast to most techniques which primarily leverage non-entity words for perturbations limiting the space being explored to synthesize effective adversarial examples. Adversarial training results based on our method improves the F1 score over original LLM NER model by 8% and 18% on CoNLL-2003 and Ontonotes 5.0 datasets respectively.

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