Singapore

The Backpack is a Transformer alternative shown to improve interpretability in English language modeling by decomposing predictions into a weighted sum of token sense components. However, Backpacks&#39; reliance on token-defined meaning raises questions as to their potential for languages other than English, a language for which subword tokenization provides a reasonable approximation for lexical items. In this work, we train, evaluate, interpret, and control Backpack language models in character-tokenized Chinese, in which words are often composed of many characters. We find that our (134M parameter) Chinese Backpack language model performs comparably to a (104M parameter) Transformer, and learns rich character-level meanings that log-additively compose to form word meanings. In SimLex-style lexical semantic evaluations, simple averages of Backpack character senses outperform input embeddings from a Transformer. We find that complex multi-character meanings are often formed by using the same per-character sense weights consistently across context. Exploring interpretability-through control, we show that we can localize a source of gender bias in our Backpacks to specific character senses and intervene to reduce the bias.

EMNLP 2023

Character-level Chinese Backpack Language Models

chinese language modeling

backpack language model

word representations

interpretability

controllability

The Backpack is a Transformer alternative shown to improve interpretability in English language modeling by decomposing predictions into a weighted sum of token sense components. However, Backpacks' reliance on token-defined meaning raises questions as to their potential for languages other than English, a language for which subword tokenization provides a reasonable approximation for lexical items. In this work, we train, evaluate, interpret, and control Backpack language models in character-tokenized Chinese, in which words are often composed of many characters. We find that our (134M parameter) Chinese Backpack language model performs comparably to a (104M parameter) Transformer, and learns rich character-level meanings that log-additively compose to form word meanings. In SimLex-style lexical semantic evaluations, simple averages of Backpack character senses outperform input embeddings from a Transformer. We find that complex multi-character meanings are often formed by using the same per-character sense weights consistently across context. Exploring interpretability-through control, we show that we can localize a source of gender bias in our Backpacks to specific character senses and intervene to reduce the bias.

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.

Unveiling Multilinguality in Transformer Models: Exploring Language Specificity in Feed-Forward Networks

Why bother with geometry? On the relevance of linear decompositions of Transformer embeddings

Syntactic structures used to play a vital role in natural language processing (NLP), but since the deep learning revolution, NLP has been gradually dominated by neural models that do not consider syntactic structures in their design. One vastly successful class of neural models is transformers. When used as an encoder, a transformer produces contextual representation of words in the input sentence. In this work, we propose a new model of contextual word representation, not from a neural perspective, but from a purely syntactic and probabilistic perspective. Specifically, we design a conditional random field that models discrete latent representations of all words in a sentence as well as dependency arcs between them; and we use mean field variational inference for approximate inference. Strikingly, we find that the computation graph of our model resembles transformers, with correspondences between dependencies and self-attention and between distributions over latent representations and contextual embeddings of words. Experiments show that our model performs competitively to transformers on small to medium sized datasets. We hope that our work could help bridge the gap between traditional syntactic and probabilistic approaches and cutting-edge neural approaches to NLP, and inspire more linguistically-principled neural approaches in the future.

Probabilistic Transformer: A Probabilistic Dependency Model for Contextual Word Representation

Investigating semantic subspaces of Transformer sentence embeddings through linear structural probing

Recent work suggests that large language models (LLMs) achieve higher accuracy on multi-step reasoning tasks when prompted to generate intermediate reasoning steps, or a chain of thought (CoT), before their final answer. However, it is unclear how exactly CoTs improve LLMs' accuracy, and in particular, if LLMs use their CoTs to reason to their final answers. This paper tries to answer this question with respect to arithmetic word problems, by (i) evaluating the correctness of LLMs' CoTs, and (ii) using causal abstraction to assess if the intermediate tokens produced as part of a CoT causally impact LLMs' final answers, in line with the reasoning described by the CoT. We find that for CoT-prompted LLMs, correct answers to arithmetic problems are highly correlated with correct CoTs, and that when LLMs produce correct CoTs, they realize to a fairly large extent the causal models suggested by their CoTs. Higher degrees of realization also seem associated with better overall accuracy on the arithmetic problems. These findings suggest that some CoT-prompted LLMs may do better on multi-step arithmetic reasoning at least partly because}they use their CoTs to reason to their final answers. However, for some LLMs, other internal processes may also be involved.

Causal Abstraction for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Arithmetic Word Problems

Answering multi-hop reasoning questions requires retrieving and synthesizing information from diverse sources. Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to perform such reasoning consistently. Here we propose an approach to pinpoint and rectify multi-hop reasoning failures through targeted memory injections on LLM attention heads. First, we analyze the per-layer activations of GPT-2 models in response to single and multi-hop prompts. We then propose a mechanism that allows users to inject pertinent prompt-specific information, which we refer to as "memories," at critical LLM locations during inference. By thus enabling the LLM to incorporate additional relevant information during inference, we enhance the quality of multi-hop prompt completions. We show empirically that a simple, efficient, and targeted memory injection into a key attention layer can often increase the probability of the desired next token in multi-hop tasks, by up to 424%.

Memory Injections: Correcting Multi-Hop Reasoning Failures during Inference in Transformer-Based Language Models

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art for natural language tasks. Recent work has attempted to decode, by reverse engineering the role of linear layers, the internal mechanisms by which LLMs arrive at their final predictions for text completion tasks. Yet little is known about the specific role of attention heads in producing the final token prediction. We propose Attention Lens, a tool that enables researchers to translate the outputs of attention heads into vocabulary tokens via learned attention-head-specific transformations called lenses. Preliminary findings from our trained lenses indicate that attention heads play highly specialized roles in language models.

Attention Lens: A Tool for Mechanistically Interpreting the Attention Head Information Retrieval Mechanism

Despite recent advances in the field of explainability, much remains unknown about the algorithms that neural networks learn to represent. Recent work has attempted to understand trained models by decomposing them into functional circuits (Csordás et al., 2020; Lepori et al., 2023). To advance this research, we developed NeuroSurgeon, a python library that can be used to discover and manipulate subnetworks within models in the Huggingface Transformers library (Wolf et al., 2019). NeuroSurgeon is freely available at https:
//github.com/mlepori1/NeuroSurgeon.

NeuroSurgeon: A Toolkit for Subnetwork Analysis

Explanations for AI are expected to help human users understand AI-driven predictions. Evaluating plausibility, the helpfulness of the explanations, is therefore essential for developing eXplainable AI (XAI) that can really aid human users. Here we propose a human-centric evaluation platform1 to measure plausibility of explanations in the context of eXplainable Knowledge Graph Completion (XKGC). The target audience of the platform are researchers and practitioners who want to 1) investigate real needs and interests of their target users in XKGC, 2) evaluate the plausibility of XKGC methods.

Human-Understandable Knowledge Graph Completion

Establishing whether language models can use contextual information in a human-plausible way is important to ensure their safe adoption in real-world settings. However, the questions of when and which parts of the context affect model generations are typically tackled separately, and current plausibility evaluations are practically limited to a handful of artificial benchmarks. To address this, we introduce Plausibility Evaluation of Context Reliance (PECoRe), an end-to-end interpretability framework designed to quantify context usage in language models' generations. Our approach leverages model internals to (i) contrastively identify context-sensitive target tokens in generated texts and (ii) link them to contextual cues justifying their prediction. We use PECoRe to quantify the plausibility of context-aware machine translation models, comparing model rationales with human annotations across several discourse-level phenomena. Finally, we apply our method to unannotated generations to identify context-mediated predictions and highlight instances of (im)plausible context usage in model translations.

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Unveiling Multilinguality in Transformer Models: Exploring Language Specificity in Feed-Forward Networks

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Unveiling Multilinguality in Transformer Models: Exploring Language Specificity in Feed-Forward Networks

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