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Human languages are often claimed to fundamentally differ from other communication systems. But what is it exactly that unites them as a separate category? This article proposes to approach this problem – here termed the Zipfian Challenge – as a standard classification task. A corpus with textual material from diverse writing systems and languages, as well as other symbolic and non-symbolic systems, is provided. These are subsequently used to train and test binary classification algorithms, assigning labels &quot;writing&quot; and &quot;non-writing&quot; to character strings of the test sets. The performance is generally high, reaching 98% accuracy for the best algorithms. Human languages emerge to have a statistical fingerprint: large unit inventories, high entropy, and few repetitions of adjacent units. This fingerprint can be used to tease them apart from other symbolic and non-symbolic systems.

EMNLP 2023

The Zipfian Challenge: Learning the statistical fingerprint of natural languages

quantitative linguistics

language diversity

language evolution

information theory

Human languages are often claimed to fundamentally differ from other communication systems. But what is it exactly that unites them as a separate category? This article proposes to approach this problem – here termed the Zipfian Challenge – as a standard classification task. A corpus with textual material from diverse writing systems and languages, as well as other symbolic and non-symbolic systems, is provided. These are subsequently used to train and test binary classification algorithms, assigning labels "writing" and "non-writing" to character strings of the test sets. The performance is generally high, reaching 98% accuracy for the best algorithms. Human languages emerge to have a statistical fingerprint: large unit inventories, high entropy, and few repetitions of adjacent units. This fingerprint can be used to tease them apart from other symbolic and non-symbolic systems.

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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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.

This paper explores utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution (CDEC) annotations and evaluates how they fare against human annotators with different levels of training. Specifically, we formulate CDEC as a multi-category classification problem on pairs of events that are represented as decontextualized sentences, and compare the predictions of GPT-4 with the judgment of fully trained annotators and crowdworkers on the same data set. Our study indicates that GPT-4 with zero-shot learning outperformed crowd-workers by a large margin and exhibits a level of performance comparable to trained annotators. Upon closer analysis, GPT-4 also exhibits tendencies of being overly confident, and force annotation decisions even when such decisions are not warranted due to insufficient information. Our results have implications on how to perform complicated annotations such as CDEC in the age of LLMs, and show that the best way to acquire such annotations might be to combine the strengths of LLMs and trained human annotators in the annotation process, and using untrained or undertrained crowdworkers is no longer a viable option to acquire high-quality data to advance the state of the art for such problems.

Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution: Instruct Humans or Instruct GPT?

Edge probing tests are classification tasks that test for grammatical knowledge encoded in token representations coming from contextual encoders such as large language models (LLMs). Many LLM encoders have shown high performance in EP tests, leading to conjectures about their ability to encode linguistic knowledge. However, a large body of research claims that the tests necessarily do not measure the LLM's capacity to encode knowledge, but rather reflect the classifiers' ability to learn the problem. Much of this criticism stems from the fact that often the classifiers have very similar accuracy when an LLM vs a random encoder is used. Consequently, several modifications to the tests have been suggested, including information theoretic probes. We show that commonly used edge probing test datasets have various biases including memorization. When these biases are removed, the LLM encoders do show a significant difference from the random ones, even with the simple non-information theoretic probes.

Implications of Annotation Artifacts in Edge Probing Test Datasets

In this resource paper we release ChiSCor, a new corpus containing 619 fantasy stories, told freely by 442 Dutch children aged 4-12. ChiSCor was compiled for studying how children render character perspectives, and unravelling language and cognition in development, with computational tools. Unlike existing resources, ChiSCor's stories were produced in natural contexts, in line with recent calls for more ecologically valid datasets. ChiSCor hosts text, audio, and annotations for character complexity and linguistic complexity. Additional metadata (e.g. education of caregivers) is available for one third of the Dutch children. ChiSCor also includes a small set of 62 English stories. This paper details how ChiSCor was compiled and shows its potential for future work with three brief case studies: i) we show that the syntactic complexity of stories is strikingly stable across children's ages; ii) we extend work on Zipfian distributions in free speech and show that ChiSCor obeys Zipf's law closely, reflecting its social context; iii) we show that even though ChiSCor is relatively small, the corpus is rich enough to train informative lemma vectors that allow us to analyse children's language use. We end with a reflection on the value of narrative datasets in computational linguistics.

ChiSCor: A Corpus of Freely-Told Fantasy Stories by Dutch Children for Computational Linguistics and Cognitive Science

Human-annotated textual explanations are becoming increasingly important in Explainable Natural Language Processing. Rationale extraction aims to provide faithful (i.e. reflective of the behavior of the model) and plausible (i.e. convincing to humans) explanations by highlighting the inputs that had the largest impact on the prediction without compromising the performance of the task model. In recent works, the focus of training rationale extractors was primarily on optimizing for plausibility using human highlights, while the task model was trained on jointly optimizing for task predictive accuracy and faithfulness. We propose REFER, a framework that employs a differentiable rationale extractor that allows to back-propagate through the rationale extraction process. We analyze the impact of using human highlights during training by jointly training the task model and the rationale extractor. In our experiments, REFER yields significantly better results in terms of faithfulness, plausibility, and downstream task accuracy on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution data. On both e-SNLI and CoS-E, our best setting produces better results in terms of composite normalized relative gain than the previous baselines by 11% and 3%, respectively.

REFER: An End-to-end Rationale Extraction Framework for Explanation Regularization

Language models are often used as the backbone of modern dialogue systems. These models are pre-trained on large amounts of written fluent language. Repetition is typically penalised when evaluating language model generations. However, it is a key component of dialogue. Humans use local and partner specific repetitions; these are preferred by human users and lead to more successful communication in dialogue. In this study, we evaluate (a) whether language models produce human-like levels of repetition in dialogue, and (b) what are the processing mechanisms related to lexical re-use they use during comprehension. We believe that such joint analysis of model production and comprehension behaviour can inform the development of cognitively inspired dialogue generation systems.

Attribution and Alignment: Effects of Local Context Repetition on Utterance Production and Comprehension in Dialogue

Theory of Mind (ToM), the capacity to comprehend the mental states of distinct individuals, is essential for numerous practical applications. With the development of large language models (LLMs), there is a heated debate about whether they are able to perform ToM tasks. Previous studies have used different tasks and prompts to test the ToM on LLMs and the results are inconsistent: some studies asserted these models are capable of exhibiting ToM, while others suggest the opposite. In this study, We present ToMChallenges, a dataset for comprehensively evaluating the Theory of Mind based on Sally-Anne and Smarties tests with a diverse set of tasks. In addition, we also propose an auto-grader to streamline the answer evaluation process. We tested three models: davinci, turbo, and gpt-4. Our evaluation results and error analyses show that LLMs have inconsistent behaviors across prompts and tasks. Performing the ToM tasks robustly remains a challenge for the LLMs. In addition, our paper wants to raise awareness in evaluating the ToM in LLMs and we want to invite more discussion on how to design the prompts and tasks for ToM tasks that can better access the LLMs' ability.

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Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution: Instruct Humans or Instruct GPT?

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Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution: Instruct Humans or Instruct GPT?

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