Singapore

If a question cannot be answered with the available information, robust systems for question answering (QA) should know not to answer. One way to build QA models that do this is with additional training data comprised of unanswerable questions, created either by employing annotators or through automated methods for unanswerable question generation. To show that the model complexity of existing automated approaches is not justified, we examine a simpler data augmentation method for unanswerable question generation in English: performing antonym and entity swaps on answerable questions. Compared to the prior state-of- the-art, data generated with our training-free and lightweight strategy results in better models (+1.6 F1 points on SQuAD 2.0 data with BERT-large), and has higher human-judged relatedness and readability. We quantify the raw benefits of our approach compared to no augmentation across multiple encoder models, using different amounts of generated data, and also on TydiQA-MinSpan data (+9.3 F1 points with BERT-large). Our results establish swaps as a simple but strong baseline for future work.

EMNLP 2023

A Lightweight Method to Generate Unanswerable Questions in English

extractive question answering

machine reading comprehension

data augmentation

**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.

workshop paper

Nearest Neighbor Search over Vectorized Lexico-Syntactic Patterns for Relation Extraction from Financial Documents | VIDEO

Linguistic structures can implicitly imply diverse types of event relations that have been previously underexplored.
For example, the sentence "John was cooking freshly made noodles for the family gathering" contains no explicit temporal indicators between the events, such as "before". Despite this, it is easy for humans to conclude, based on syntax, that the noodles were made before John started cooking, and that the family gathering starts after John starts cooking. 
We introduce Linguistically enhanced Event temporAl relation Framework (LEAF), a simple and effective approach to acquiring rich temporal knowledge of events from large-scale corpora. This method improves pre-trained language models by automatically extracting temporal relation knowledge from unannotated corpora using diverse temporal knowledge patterns. 
We begin by manually curating a comprehensive list of atomic patterns that imply temporal relations between events. These patterns involve event pairs in which one event is contained within the argument of the other.
Using transitivity, we discover compositional patterns and assign labels to event pairs involving these patterns. 
Finally, we make language models learn the rich knowledge by pre-training with the acquired temporal relation supervision. 
Experiments show that our method outperforms or rivals previous models on two event relation datasets: MATRES and TB-Dense. Our approach is also simpler from past works and excels at identifying complex compositional event relations. 


LEAF: Linguistically Enhanced Event Temporal Relation Framework | VIDEO

Recently, end-to-end trained models for multiple-choice commonsense question an- swering (QA) have delivered promising results. However, such question-answering systems cannot be directly applied in real-world scenarios where answer candidates are not provided. Hence, a new benchmark challenge set for open-ended common- sense reasoning (OpenCSR) has been recently released, which contains natural science questions without any predefined choices. On the OpenCSR challenge set, many questions require implicit multi-hop reasoning and have a large deci- sion space, reflecting the difficult nature of this task. Existing work on OpenCSR sorely focuses on improving the retrieval process, which extracts relevant factual sentences from a textual knowledge base, leaving the important and non-trivial reasoning task outside the scope. In this work, we extend the scope to include a reasoner that constructs a question-dependent open knowledge graph based on retrieved supporting facts and employs a sequential subgraph reasoning process to predict the answer. The subgraph itself can be seen as a concise and compact graphical explanation of the prediction. Experiments on two OpenCSR datasets show that the proposed model achieves great performance on benchmark OpenCSR datasets.

A Graph-Guided Reasoning Approach for Open-ended Commonsense Question Answering | VIDEO

Relation extraction (RE) is one of the tasks behind many relevant natural language processing (NLP) applications. Exploiting the information hidden in millions of scholarly articles by leveraging NLP, specifically RE, systems could benefit studies in specialized domains, e.g. biomedicine and biodiversity. Although deep learning (DL)-based methods have shown state-of-the-art performance in many NLP tasks including RE, DL for domain-specific RE systems has been hindered by the lack of expert labeled datasets which are typically required to train such methods. In this paper, we take advantage of the zero-shot (i.e., not requiring any labeled data) capability of pattern-based methods for RE using a rule-based approach, combined
with templates for natural language inference (NLI) transformer models. We present our hybrid method for RE that exploits the advantages of both methods, i.e., interpretability of rules and transferability of transformers. Evaluated on a corpus of biodiversity literature with annotated relations, our hybrid method demonstrated
an improvement of up to 15 percentage points in recall and best performance over solely rule-based and transformer-based methods with F1-scores ranging from 89.61% to 96.75% for reproductive condition - temporal expression relations, and ranging from 85.39% to 89.90% for habitat - geographic location relations.

A Hybrid of Rule-based and Transformer-based Approaches for Relation Extraction in Biodiversity Literature

In this paper, we describe M-FleNS, a multilingual flexible plug-and-play architecture designed to accommodate neural and symbolic modules, and initially instantiated with rule-based modules. We focus on using M-FleNS for the specific purpose of building new resources for Irish, a language currently under-represented in the NLP landscape. We present the general M-FleNS framework and how we use it to build an Irish Natural Language Generation system for verbalising part of the DBpedia ontology and building a multilayered dataset with rich linguistic annotations. Via automatic and human assessments of the output texts we show that with very limited resources we can create a system that reaches high levels of fluency and semantic accuracy, while having very low energy and memory requirements.

Generating Irish Text with a Flexible Plug-and-Play Architecture

What Makes Chain-of-Thought Prompting Effective? A Counterfactual Study

As the immense opportunities enabled by large language models become more apparent, NLP systems will be increasingly expected to excel in real-world settings. However, in many instances, powerful models alone will not yield translational NLP solutions, especially if the formulated problem is not well aligned with the real-world task. In this work, we study the case of UMLS vocabulary insertion, an important real-world task in which hundreds of thousands of new terms, referred to as atoms, are added to the UMLS, one of the most comprehensive open-source biomedical knowledge bases. Previous work aimed to develop an automated NLP system to make this time-consuming, costly, and error-prone task more efficient. Nevertheless, practical progress in this direction has been difficult to achieve due to a problem formulation and evaluation gap between research output and the real-world task. In order to address this gap, we introduce a new formulation for UMLS vocabulary insertion which mirrors the real-world task, datasets which faithfully represent it and several strong baselines we developed through re-purposing existing solutions. Additionally, we propose an effective rule-enhanced biomedical language model which enables important new model behavior, outperforms all strong baselines and provides measurable qualitative improvements to editors who carry out the UVI task. We hope this case study provides insight into the considerable importance of problem formulation for the success of translational NLP solutions.

Solving the Right Problem is Key for Translational NLP | VIDEO

Temporal knowledge graph (TKG) has been proved to be an effective way for modeling dynamic facts in real world. Many efforts have been devoted into predicting future events i.e. extrapolation, on TKGs. Recently, rule-based knowledge graph completion methods which are considered to be more interpretable than embedding-based methods, have been transferred to temporal knowledge graph extrapolation. However, rule-based models suffer from temporal redundancy when leveraged under dynamic settings, which results in inaccurate rule confidence calculation. In this paper, we define the problem of temporal redundancy and propose TR-Rules which solves the temporal redundancy issues through a simple but effective strategy. Besides, to capture more information lurking in TKGs, apart from cyclic rules, TR-Rules also mines and properly leverages acyclic rules, which has not been explored by existing models. Experimental results on three benchmarks show that TR-Rules achieves state-of-the-art performance. Ablation study shows the impact of temporal redundancy and demonstrates the performance of acyclic rules is much more promising due to its higher sensitivity to the number of sampled walks during learning stage.

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