Malta

Recent progress in sentence embedding, which represents a sentence&#39;s meaning as a point in a vector space, has achieved high performance on several tasks such as the semantic textual similarity (STS) task.
However, a sentence representation cannot adequately express the diverse information that sentences contain: for example, such representations cannot naturally handle asymmetric relationships between sentences.
This paper proposes GaussCSE, a Gaussian-distribution-based contrastive learning framework for sentence embedding that can handle asymmetric inter-sentential relations, as well as a similarity measure for identifying entailment relations.
Our experiments show that GaussCSE achieves performance comparable to that of previous methods on natural language inference (NLI) tasks, and that it can estimate the direction of entailment relations, which is difficult with point representations.

EACL 2024

Sentence Representations via Gaussian Embedding

gaussian embedding

sentence embedding

contrastive learning

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Recent progress in sentence embedding, which represents a sentence's meaning as a point in a vector space, has achieved high performance on several tasks such as the semantic textual similarity (STS) task.
However, a sentence representation cannot adequately express the diverse information that sentences contain: for example, such representations cannot naturally handle asymmetric relationships between sentences.
This paper proposes GaussCSE, a Gaussian-distribution-based contrastive learning framework for sentence embedding that can handle asymmetric inter-sentential relations, as well as a similarity measure for identifying entailment relations.
Our experiments show that GaussCSE achieves performance comparable to that of previous methods on natural language inference (NLI) tasks, and that it can estimate the direction of entailment relations, which is difficult with point representations.

technical paper

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
#### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Wn38q0yev6U3RTgnf4Tn5T9GuAuZ-xW/view?usp=sharing) *downloadable*

To access the EACL 2024 event page you need to register [**here**](https://acl.swoogo.com/EACL2024). 

Please register!

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) learn rich cross-lingual knowledge and perform well on diverse tasks such as translation and multilingual word sense disambiguation (WSD) when finetuned. However, they often struggle at disambiguating word sense in a zero-shot setting. To better understand this contrast, we present a new study investigating how well PLMs capture cross-lingual word sense with Contextual Word-Level Translation (C-WLT), an extension of word-level translation that prompts the model to translate a given word in context. We find that as the model size increases, PLMs encode more cross-lingual word sense knowledge and better use context to improve WLT performance. Building on C-WLT, we introduce a zero-shot prompting approach for WSD, tested on 18 languages from the XL-WSD dataset. Our method outperforms fully supervised baselines on recall for many evaluation languages without additional training or finetuning. This study presents a first step towards understanding how to best leverage the cross-lingual knowledge inside PLMs for robust zero-shot reasoning in any language.

Translate to Disambiguate: Zero-shot Multilingual Word Sense Disambiguation with Pretrained Language Models

Scientific papers and slides are two different representations of the same underlying information, but both require substantial work to prepare. While there had been prior efforts on automating document-to-slides generation, there is still a pressing need of customizing the presentation of content aligning with the persona of target audience or duration of presentation. This paper first introduces the concept of end-user specification-aware document to slides conversion that incorporates end-user specifications into the conversion process. For this, we initially introduce a new dataset reuse the existing SciDuet dataset consisting of pairs of papers and corresponding slides decks from recent years’ *ACL conferences to create four persona-aware configurations. Secondly, we present Persona-Aware-D2S, a novel approach by finetuning LLMs using target audience feedback to create persona-aware slides from scientific documents. Our evaluation on both automated metrics and qualitative human evaluation suggests that by incorporating end-user specifications into the conversion process, our model can create presentations that are not only informative but also tailored to expectations and cognitive abilities of target audience.

Presentations by the Humans and For the Humans: Harnessing LLMs for Generating Persona-Aware Slides from Documents

The realm of Large Language Models (LLMs) is undergoing a continuous and dynamic transformation. These state-of-the-art LLMs showcase an impressive ability to craft narratives based on contextual cues, highlighting their skill in comprehending and producing text resembling human writing. However, there exists a potential risk: the potential inclination of LLMs to create gossips when prompted with specific contexts. These LLMs possess the capacity to generate stories rooted in the context provided by the prompts. Yet, this very capability carries a risk of generating gossips given the context as input. To mitigate this, we introduce a dataset named "French GossipPrompts" designed for identifying prompts that lead to the creation of gossipy content in the French language. This dataset employs binary classification, categorizing whether a given prompt generates gossip or not. The dataset comprises a total of 7253 individual prompts. We have developed classification models and achieved an accuracy of 89.95\%.

French GossipPrompts: Dataset For Prevention of Generating French Gossip Stories By LLMs

Augmenting large language models (LLM) to use external tools enhances their performance across a variety of tasks. 
However, prior works over-rely on task-specific demonstration of tool use that limits their generalizability and computational cost due to making many calls to large-scale LLMs. We introduce GEAR, a computationally efficient query-tool grounding algorithm that is generalizable to various tasks that require tool use while not relying on task-specific demonstrations. GEAR achieves better efficiency by delegating tool grounding and execution to small language models (SLM) and LLM, respectively; while leveraging semantic and pattern-based evaluation at both question and answer levels for generalizable tool grounding. We evaluate GEAR on 14 datasets across 6 downstream tasks, demonstrating its strong generalizability to novel tasks, tools and different SLMs. Despite offering more efficiency, GEAR achieves higher precision in tool grounding compared to prior strategies using LLM prompting, thus improving downstream accuracy at a reduced computational cost. For example, we demonstrate that GEAR-augmented GPT-J and GPT-3 outperform counterpart tool-augmented baselines because of better tool use.

GEAR: Augmenting Language Models with Generalizable and Efficient Tool Resolution

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to recommend relevant items to users by eliciting user preference through natural language conversation. Prior work often utilizes external knowledge graphs for items’ semantic information, a language model for dialogue generation, and a recommendation module for ranking relevant items. This combination of multiple components suffers from a cumber-
some training process, and leads to semantic misalignment issues between dialogue generation and item recommendation. In this paper, we represent items in natural language and formulate CRS as a natural language processing task. Accordingly, we leverage the power of pre-trained language models to encode items, understand user intent via conversation, perform item recommendation through semantic matching, and generate dialogues. As a unified model, our PECRS (Parameter-Efficient CRS), can be optimized in a single stage, without relying on non-textual metadata such as a knowledge graph. Experiments on two benchmark CRS datasets, ReDial and INSPIRED, demonstrate the effectiveness of PECRS on recommendation and conversation. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Ravoxsg/efficient_unified_crs.

Parameter-Efficient Conversational Recommender System as a Language Processing Task

Inductive reasoning is a core component of human intelligence. In the past research of inductive reasoning within computer science, formal language is used as representations of knowledge (facts and rules, more specifically). However, formal language can cause systematic problems for inductive reasoning such as disability of handling raw input such as natural language, sensitiveness to mislabeled data, and incapacity to handle ambiguous input. To this end, we propose a new paradigm (task) for inductive reasoning, which is to induce natural language rules from natural language facts, and create a dataset termed DEER containing 1.2k rule-fact pairs for the task, where rules and facts are written in natural language. New automatic metrics are also proposed and analysed for the evaluation of this task. With DEER, we investigate a modern approach for inductive reasoning where we use natural language as representation for knowledge instead of formal language and use pretrained language models as ''reasoners''. Moreover, we provide the first and comprehensive analysis of how well pretrained language models can induce natural language rules from natural language facts. We also propose a new framework drawing insights from philosophy literature for this task, which we show in the experiment section that surpasses baselines in both automatic and human evaluations. We discuss about our future perspectives for inductive reasoning in Section 7. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/ZonglinY/Inductive_Reasoning.

Language Models as Inductive Reasoners

Event Extraction is a crucial yet arduous task in natural language processing (NLP), as its performance is significantly hindered by laborious data annotation. Given this challenge, recent research has predominantly focused on two approaches: pretraining task-oriented models for event extraction and employing data augmentation techniques. These methods involve integrating external knowledge, semantic structures, or artificially generated samples using large language models (LLMs). However, their performances can be compromised due to two fundamental issues. Firstly, the alignment between the introduced knowledge and event extraction knowledge is crucial. Secondly, the introduction of data noise during the augmentation is unavoidable and can mislead the model's convergence. To address these issues, we propose a Contrastive Event Aggregation Network with LLM-based Augmentation to promote low-resource learning and reduce data noise for event extraction. Different from the existing methods introducing linguistic knowledge into data augmentation, an event aggregation network is established to introduce event knowledge into supervised learning by constructing adaptively-updated semantic representation for trigger and argument. For LLM-based augmentation, we design a new scheme including a multi-pattern rephrasing paradigm and a data-free composing paradigm. Instead of directly using augmentation samples in the supervised task, we introduce span-level contrastive learning to reduce data noise. Experiments on the ACE2005 and ERE-EN demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves new state-of-the-art results on both of the two datasets.

CEAN: Contrastive Event Aggregation Network with LLM-based Augmentation for Event Extraction

Recent work has shown that large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating summaries zero-shot---i.e., without explicit supervision---that, under human assessment, are often comparable or even preferred to manually composed reference summaries. 
However, this prior work has focussed almost exclusively on evaluating news article summarization. How do zero-shot summarizers perform in other (potentially more specialized) domains?
In this work we evaluate zero-shot generated summaries across specialized domains including: biomedical articles, and legal bills (in addition to standard news benchmarks for reference). We focus especially on the factuality of outputs. 
We acquire annotations from domain experts to identify inconsistencies in summaries and systematically categorize these errors. We analyze whether the prevalence of a given domain in the pretraining corpus affects extractiveness and faithfulness of generated summaries of articles in this domain. 
We release all collected annotations to facilitate additional research toward measuring and realizing factually accurate summarization, beyond news articles (The dataset can be downloaded from 
https://anonymous.4open.science/r/zero_shot_faceval_domains-9B83)

Evaluating the Factuality of Zero-shot Summarizers Across Varied Domains

Strategies such as chain-of-thought prompting improve the performance of large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks by decomposing input examples into intermediate steps. However, it remains unclear how to apply such methods to reason over long input documents, in which both the decomposition and the output of each intermediate step are non-trivial to obtain. In this work, we propose PEARL, a prompting framework to improve reasoning over long documents, which consists of three stages: action mining, plan formulation, and plan execution. More specifically, given a question about a long document, PEARL decomposes the question into a sequence of actions (e.g., SUMMARIZE, FIND_EVENT, FIND_RELATION) and then executes them over the document to obtain the answer. Each stage of PEARL is implemented via zero-shot or few-shot prompting of LLMs (in our work, GPT-4) with minimal human input. We evaluate PEARL on a challenging subset of the QuALITY dataset, which contains questions that require complex reasoning over long narrative texts. PEARL outperforms zero-shot and chain-of-thought prompting on this dataset, and ablation experiments show that each stage of PEARL is critical to its performance. Overall, PEARL is a first step towards leveraging LLMs to reason over long documents.

PEARL: Prompting Large Language Models to Plan and Execute Actions Over Long Documents

Techniques, Tactics and Procedures (TTP) mapping is an important and difficult task in the application of cyber threat intelligence (CTI) extraction for threat reports. TTPs are typically expressed in semantic forms within security knowledge bases like MITRE ATT&CK, serving as textual high-level descriptions for sophisticated attack patterns. Conversely, attacks in CTI threat reports are detailed in a combination of natural and technical language forms, presenting a significant challenge even for security experts to establish correlations or mappings with the corresponding TTPs.

Conventional learning approaches often target the TTP mapping problem in the classical multiclass/label classification setting. This setting hinders the learning capabilities of the model, due to the large number of classes (i.e., TTPs), the inevitable skewness of the label distribution and the complex hierarchical structure of the label space. In this work, we approach the problem in a different learning paradigm, such that the assignment of a text to a TTP label is essentially decided by the direct semantic similarity between the two, thus, reducing the complexity of competing solely over the large labeling space. In order that, we propose a neural matching architecture that incorporates a sampling based learn-to-compare mechanism, facilitating the learning process of the matching model despite constrained resources.

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