Singapore

EMNLP 2023

Swap and Predict - Predicting the Semantic Changes in Words across Corpora by Context Swapping

temporal semantics

contextualised word embedding

semantic change detection

workshop paper

**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.

Text normalization methods have been commonly applied to historical language or user-generated content, but less often to dialectal transcriptions. In this paper, we introduce dialect-to-standard normalization -- i.e., mapping phonetic transcriptions from different dialects to the orthographic norm of the standard variety -- as a distinct sentence-level character transduction task and provide a large-scale analysis of dialect-to-standard normalization methods. To this end, we compile a multilingual dataset covering four languages: Finnish, Norwegian, Swiss German and Slovene. For the two biggest corpora, we provide three different data splits corresponding to different use cases for automatic normalization. We evaluate the most successful sequence-to-sequence model architectures proposed for text normalization tasks using different tokenization approaches and context sizes. We find that a character-level Transformer trained on sliding windows of three words works best for Finnish, Swiss German and Slovene, whereas the pre-trained byT5 model using full sentences obtains the best results for Norwegian. Finally, we perform an error analysis to evaluate the effect of different data splits on model performance.

Dialect-to-Standard Normalization: A Large-Scale Multilingual Evaluation

The Case for Scalable, Data-Driven Theory: A Paradigm for Scientific Progress in NLP

The Intended Uses of Automated Fact-Checking Artefacts: Why, How and Who

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

With their increasing size, Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly good at language understanding tasks. But even with high performance on specific downstream task, LLMs fail at simple linguistic tests for negation or quantifier understanding. Previous work on testing capability of LLMs on understanding quantifiers suggest that as the size of the models increase, they get better at understanding most-type quantifiers but get increasingly worse at understanding few-type quantifiers, thus presenting a case of an inverse-scaling law. In this paper, we question the claims of inverse scaling of few-type quantifier understanding in LLMs and show that it is a result of inappropriate testing methodology. We also present alternate methods to measure quantifier comprehension in LLMs and show that as the size of the models increase, these behaviours are different from what is shown in previous research. LLMs are consistently able to understand the difference between the meaning of few-type and most-type quantifiers, but when a quantifier is added to phrase, LLMs do not always take into account the meaning of the quantifier. We in fact see an inverse scaling law for most-type quantifiers, which is contrary to human psycho-linguistic experiments and previous work, where the model's understanding of most-type quantifier gets worse as the model size increases. We do this evaluation on models ranging from 125M-175B parameters, which suggests that LLMs do not do as well as expected with quantifiers and statistical co-occurrence of words still takes precedence over word meaning.

Probing Quantifier Comprehension in Large Language Models: Another Example of Inverse Scaling

Psycholinguistic studies suggested that our mental perception of events depends not only on the lexical items used to describe them, but also on the syntactic structure of the event description. More specifically, it has been argued that light verb constructions affect the perception of duration in event construal, such that the same event in this type of constructions is perceived by humans as taking less time (to give a kiss takes a shorter time than to kiss). We present two experiments with BERT using English stimuli from psycholinguistic studies to investigate the effects of the syntactic construction on event duration and event similarity. We show that i) the dimensions of BERT vectors encode a smaller value for duration for both punctive and durative events in count syntax, in line with human results; on the other hand, we also found that ii) BERT semantic similarity fails to capture the conceptual shift that durative events should undergo in count syntax

On Quick Kisses and How to Make Them Count: A Study on Event Construal in Light Verb Constructions with BERT

Differential Privacy (DP) has been tailored to address the unique challenges of text-to-text privatization. However, text-to-text privatization is known for degrading the performance of language models when trained on perturbed text. Employing a series of interpretation techniques on the internal representations extracted from BERT trained on perturbed pre-text, we intend to disentangle at the linguistic level the distortion induced by differential privacy. Experimental results from a representational similarity analysis indicate that the overall similarity of internal representations is substantially reduced. Using probing tasks to unpack this dissimilarity, we find evidence that text-to-text privatization affects the linguistic competence across several formalisms, encoding localized properties of words while falling short at encoding the contextual relationships between spans of words.

Disentangling the Linguistic Competence of Privacy-Preserving BERT

Natural language is an appealing medium for explaining how large language models process and store information, but evaluating the faithfulness of such explanations is challenging. To help address this, we develop two modes of evaluation for natural language explanations that claim individual neurons represent a concept in a text input. In the observational mode, we evaluate claims that a neuron $a$ activates on all and only input strings that refer to a concept picked out by the proposed explanation $E$. In the intervention mode, we construe $E$ as a claim that the neuron $a$ is a causal mediator of the concept denoted by $E$. We apply our framework to the GPT-4-generated explanations of GPT-2 XL neurons of Bills et al. (2023) and show that even the most confident explanations have high error rates and little to no causal efficacy. We close the paper by critically assessing whether natural language is a good choice for explanations and whether neurons are the best level of analysis.

Rigorously Assessing Natural Language Explanations of Neurons | VIDEO

Adaptation of pre-trained transformer-based language models (LMs) to new languages, domains, and tasks has become a widely adopted practice. A prominent approach for achieving this is training small modules, called adapters, on top of the LM layers, while freezing the LM parameters. Adapters have demonstrated impressive capabilities in zero-shot cross-lingual settings, multi-task learning, and integrating knowledge into pre-trained LMs. However, despite this vast success, our understanding of the internal adaptation process of LM predictions remains limited. In this ongoing work, we tackle this question by analyzing LM predictions adapted from one language (original) to another language (target) and concretely, we consider the sequence of hidden representations at the prediction position as an information stream being evolved through additive updates across the layers. Then, we analyze the adapters' updates to the prediction, making the following observations: (a) during inference, the model operates in the original language until reaching the very last layers, where the target language abruptly becomes pronounced, and (b) updates by early adapters are gradual, allowing to skip specific adapters without any decrease in performance, while the last adapters are critical for adaptation success. Last, we hypothesize that adapters operate in a dedicated residual stream subspace that becomes pronounced in the last layers, to be tested in our upcoming research.

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Dialect-to-Standard Normalization: A Large-Scale Multilingual Evaluation

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Dialect-to-Standard Normalization: A Large-Scale Multilingual Evaluation

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