Singapore

This paper addresses structural ambiguity in Dutch relative clauses. By investigating the task of disambiguation by grounding, we study how the presence of a prior sentence can resolve relative clause ambiguities. We apply this method to two parsing architectures in an attempt to demystify the parsing and language model components of two present-day neural parsers. Results show that a neurosymbolic parser, based on proof nets, is more open to data bias correction than an approach based on universal dependencies, although both set-ups suffer from a comparable initial data bias.

EMNLP 2023

Structural Ambiguity and its Disambiguation in Language Model Based Parsers: the Case of Dutch Clause Relativization

llm-based parsing

structural ambiguity

disambiguation

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

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.

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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.

Image-Text-Matching (ITM) is one of the defacto methods of learning generalized representations from a large corpus in Vision and Language (VL). However, due to the weak association between the web-collected image–text pairs, models fail to show fine-grained understanding of the combined semantics of these modalities. To this end, we propose Hard Negative Captions (HNC): an automatically created
dataset containing foiled hard negative captions for ITM training towards achieving fine-grained cross-modal comprehension in VL. Additionally, we provide a challenging manually-created test set for benchmarking models on a fine-grained cross-modal mismatch with varying levels of compositional complexity. Our results show the effectiveness of training on HNC by improving the models' zero-shot capabilities in detecting mismatches on diagnostic tasks and performing robustly under noisy visual input scenarios. Also, we demonstrate that HNC models yield a comparable or better initialization for fine-tuning. Our code and data are publicly available.

HNC: Leveraging Hard Negative Captions towards Models with Fine-Grained Visual-Linguistic Comprehension Capabilities

Semantic parsing aims to map natural language sentences to predefined formal languages,
such as logic forms and programming languages, as the semantic annotation.
From the theoretic views of linguistic and programming language,
structures play an important role in both languages,
which had motivated semantic parsers since the task was proposed in the beginning.
But in the neural era, semantic parsers treating both natural and formal language as sequences,
such as Seq2Seq and LLMs, have got more attentions.
On the other side, lots of neural progress have been made for grammar induction,
which only focuses on natural languages.
Although closely related in the sense of structural modeling,
these techniques hadn't been jointly analyzed on the semantic parsing testbeds.
To gain the better understanding on structures for semantic parsing,
we design a taxonomy of structural modeling methods,
and evaluate some representative techniques on semantic parsing,
including both compositional and i.i.d. generalizations.
In addition to the previous opinion that structures will help in general,
we find that (1) structures must be designed
for the specific dataset and generalization level,
and (2) what really matters is not the structure choice of either source or target side,
but the choice combination of both sides.
Based on the finding, we further propose a metric that can evaluate the structure choice,
which we believe can boost the automation of grammar designs for specific datasets and domains.

On the Effects of Structural Modeling for Neural Semantic Parsing

NLP models have progressed drastically in recent years, according to numerous datasets proposed to evaluate performance. Questions remain, however, about how particular dataset design choices may impact the conclusions we draw about model capabilities. In this work, we investigate this question in the domain of compositional generalization. We examine the performance of six modeling approaches across 4 datasets, split according to 8 compositional splitting strategies, ranking models by 18 compositional generalization splits in total. Our results show that:
i) the datasets, although all designed to evaluate compositional generalization, rank modeling approaches differently;
ii) datasets generated by humans align better with each other than with synthetic datasets, or than the latter among themselves;
iii) generally, whether datasets are sampled from the same source is more predictive of the resulting model ranking than whether they maintain the same interpretation of compositionality; and
iv) specific lexical items in dataset impacts the measurement consistency.
Overall, our results demonstrate that much work remains to be done when it comes to assessing whether popular evaluation datasets measure what they intend to measure, and suggests that elucidating more rigorous standards for establishing the validity of evaluation sets could benefit the field.

The Validity of Evaluation Results: Assessing Concurrence Across Compositionality Benchmarks

This paper presents the formalization of tree-shape uncertainty that enables us to analyze the inherent branching bias of unsupervised parsing models using raw texts alone. Previous work analyzed the branching bias of unsupervised parsing models by comparing the outputs of trained parsers with gold syntactic trees. However, such approaches do not consider the fact that texts can be generated by different grammars with different syntactic trees, possibly failing to clearly separate the inherent bias of the model and the bias in train data learned by the model. To this end, we formulate tree-shape uncertainty and derive sufficient conditions that can be used for creating texts that are expected to contain no biased information on branching. In the experiment, we show that training parsers on such unbiased texts can effectively detect the branching bias of existing unsupervised parsing models. Such bias may depend only on the algorithm, or it may depend on seemingly unrelated dataset statistics such as sequence length and vocabulary size.

Tree-shape Uncertainty for Analyzing the Inherent Branching Bias of Unsupervised Parsing Models

Simultaneous Translation (ST) involves translating with only partial source inputs instead of the entire source inputs, a process that can potentially result in translation quality degradation. Previous approaches to balancing translation quality and latency have demonstrated that it is more efficient and effective to leverage an offline model with a reasonable policy. However, using an offline model also leads to a distribution shift since it is not trained with partial source inputs, and it can be improved by training an additional module that informs us when to translate. In this paper, we propose an Information Quantifier (IQ) that models source and target information to determine whether the offline model has sufficient information for translation, trained with oracle action sequences generated from the offline model. IQ, by quantifying information, helps in formulating a suitable policy for Simultaneous Translation that better generalizes and also allows us to control the trade-off between quality and latency naturally. Experiments on various language pairs show that our proposed model outperforms baselines.

Quantifying Information of Tokens for Simple and Flexible Simultaneous Machine Translation

In this paper we question the almost universal
assumption that in neural networks each token
should be represented by a single vector. In
fact, it is so natural to use one vector per word
that most people do not even consider it as an
assumption of their various models. Via a series 
of experiments on dependency parsing, in
which we let each token in a sentence be 
represented by a sequence of vectors, we show that
the "one single vector per token" assumption
might be too strong for recurrent neural networks. 
Indeed, biaffine parsers seem to work
better when their encoder accesses its input's
tokens' representations in several time steps
rather than all at once. This seems to indicate
that having only one occasion to look at a token 
through its vector is too strong a constraint
for recurrent neural networks and calls for further 
studies on the way tokens are fed to neural
networks.

Challenging the "One Single Vector per Token" Assumption

Humans tend to strongly agree on ratings on a scale for extreme cases (e.g., a CAT is judged as very concrete), but judgements on mid-scale words exhibit more disagreement. Yet, collected rating norms are heavily exploited across disciplines. Our study focuses on concreteness ratings and (i) implements correlations and supervised classification to identify salient multi-modal characteristics of mid-scale words, and (ii) applies a hard clustering to identify patterns of systematic disagreement across raters. Our results suggest to either fine-tune or filter mid-scale target words before utilising them.

Investigating the Nature of Disagreements on Mid-Scale Ratings: A Case Study on the Abstractness-Concreteness Continuum

We develop and probe a model for detecting the boundaries of prosodic chunks in untranscribed conversational English speech. The model is obtained by fine-tuning a Transformer-based speech-to-text (STT) model to integrate the identification of Intonation Unit (IU) boundaries with the STT task. The model shows robust performance, both on held-out data and on out-of-distribution data representing different dialects and transcription protocols. By evaluating the model on degraded speech data, and comparing it with alternatives, we establish that it relies heavily on lexico-syntactic information inferred from audio, and not solely on acoustic information typically understood to cue prosodic structure. We release our model as both a transcription tool and a baseline for further improvements in prosodic segmentation.

PSST! Prosodic Speech Segmentation with Transformers

Language models (LMs) have been argued to overlap substantially with human beings in grammaticality judgment tasks. But when humans systematically make errors in language processing, should we expect LMs to behave like cognitive models of language and mimic human behavior? We answer this question by
investigating LMs' more subtle judgments associated with "language illusions" – sentences that are vague in meaning, implausible, or ungrammatical but receive unexpectedly high acceptability judgments by humans. We looked at three illusions: the comparative illusion (e.g. "More people have been to Russia than I have"), the depth-charge illusion (e.g. "No head injury is too trivial to be ignored"), and the negative
polarity item (NPI) illusion (e.g. "The hunter who no villager believed to be trustworthy will ever shoot a bear"). We found that probabilities represented by LMs were more likely to align with human judgments of being "tricked" by the NPI illusion which examines a structural dependency, compared to the comparative and the depth-charge illusions which require sophisticated semantic understanding. No single LM or metric yielded results that are entirely consistent with human behavior. Ultimately, we show that LMs are limited both in their construal as cognitive models of human language processing and in their capacity to recognize nuanced but critical information in complicated language materials.

Can Language Models Be Tricked by Language Illusions? Easier with Syntax, Harder with Semantics

We conjecture that hidden state vectors corresponding to individual input tokens encode information sufficient to accurately predict several tokens ahead. More concretely, in this paper we ask: Given a hidden (internal) representation of a single token at position t in an input, can we reliably anticipate the tokens that will appear at positions ≥ t + 2? To test this, we measure linear approximation and causal intervention methods in GPT-J-6B to evaluate the degree to which individual hidden states in the network contain signal rich enough to predict future hidden states and, ultimately, token outputs. We find that, at some layers, we can approximate a model's output with more than 48% accuracy with respect to its prediction of subsequent tokens through a single hidden state. Finally we present a "Future Lens" visualization that uses these methods to create a new view of transformer states.

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Next from EMNLP 2023

HNC: Leveraging Hard Negative Captions towards Models with Fine-Grained Visual-Linguistic Comprehension Capabilities

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Next from EMNLP 2023

HNC: Leveraging Hard Negative Captions towards Models with Fine-Grained Visual-Linguistic Comprehension Capabilities

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Disambiguation in Conversational Question Answering in the Era of LLMs and Agents: A Survey

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