Malta

Graphs provide a natural, intuitive, and holistic means to capture relationships between different text elements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) such as words, sentences, and documents. 
Recent advancements in the field of Graph Machine Learning (GML) have led to the development of numerous models to process text for various natural language applications, including but not limited to short-text classification, document classification, and others.
At the heart of GML models, specifically those based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), lies the message passing operation which has shown to be an essential component for strong empirical performance in NLP.
However, the number of message passing steps (often known as the radius) is $\textit{fixed for all the nodes}$ in existing GML models for NLP.
Fixing the radius poses a fundamental restriction as nodes exhibit diverse properties and varying amounts of informative local structures in the input graph.
This paper presents GAINER, a novel framework called Graph mAchine learnIng with Node-spEcific Radius, aimed at graph-based NLP. 
We propose non-neural and novel neural approaches built on the core ideas of GAINER.
Through rigorous experimentation, we demonstrate the efficacy of GAINER in various popular NLP tasks.

EACL 2024

GAINER: Graph Machine Learning with Node-specific Radius for Classification of Short Texts and Documents

adaptive smoothing

graph neural networks

text classification

**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

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

poster

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.

The remarkable performance of large language models (LLMs) in zero-shot language understanding has garnered significant attention.
However, employing LLMs for large-scale inference or domain-specific fine-tuning requires immense computational resources due to their substantial model size. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel method, namely GenCo, which leverages the strong generative power of LLMs to assist in training a smaller and more adaptable language model. In our method, an LLM plays an important role in the self-training loop of a smaller model in two important ways. Firstly, we utilize an LLM to generate multiple augmented texts for each input instance to enhance its semantic meaning for better understanding. Secondly, we additionally generate high-quality training instances conditioned on predicted labels, ensuring the generated texts are relevant to the labels. In this way, GenCo not only corrects the errors of predicted labels during self-training but also eliminates the need for extensive unlabeled texts. In our experiments, GenCo outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods when only limited ($<5\%$ of original) in-domain text data is available. Notably, our approach surpasses Alpaca-7B with human instructions, highlighting the significance of self-training.

Generation-driven Contrastive Self-training for Zero-shot Text Classification with Instruction-following LLM

Document-level neural machine translation (DocNMT) aims to generate translations that are both coherent and cohesive, in contrast to its sentence-level counterpart. However, due to its longer input length and limited availability of training data, DocNMT often faces the challenge of data sparsity. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel Importance-Aware Data Augmentation (IADA) algorithm for DocNMT that augments the training data based on token importance information estimated by the norm of hidden states and training gradients. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three widely-used DocNMT benchmarks. Our empirical results show that our proposed IADA outperforms strong DocNMT baselines as well as several data augmentation approaches, with statistical significance on both sentence-level and document-level BLEU.

Importance-Aware Data Augmentation for Document-Level Neural Machine Translation

The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to encode syntactic and semantic structures of language is well examined in NLP. Additionally, analogy identification, in the form of word analogies are extensively studied in the last decade of language modeling literature. In this work we specifically look at how LLMs' abilities to capture sentence analogies (sentences that convey analogous meaning to each other) vary with LLMs' abilities to encode syntactic and semantic structures of sentences. Through our analysis, we find that LLMs' ability to identify sentence analogies is positively correlated with their ability to encode syntactic and semantic structures of sentences. Specifically, we find that the LLMs which capture syntactic structures better, also have higher abilities in identifying sentence analogies.

On the Relationship between Sentence Analogy Identification and Sentence Structure Encoding in Large Language Models

While textual information significantly enhances the performance of pre-trained language models (PLMs) in knowledge graph completion (KGC), the static and noisy nature of existing corpora collected from Wikipedia articles or synsets definitions often limits the potential of PLM-based KGC models. To surmount these challenges, we introduce the \textit{Contextualization Distillation} strategy, a versatile plug-in-and-play approach compatible with both discriminative and generative KGC frameworks. Our method begins by instructing large language models (LLMs) to transform compact, structural triplets into context-rich segments. Subsequently, we introduce two tailored auxiliary tasks\textemdash reconstruction and contextualization\textemdash allowing smaller KGC models to assimilate insights from these enriched triplets. Comprehensive evaluations across diverse datasets and KGC techniques highlight the efficacy and adaptability of our approach, revealing consistent performance enhancements irrespective of underlying pipelines or architectures. Moreover, our analysis makes our method more explainable and provides insight into how to generate high-quality corpora for KGC, as well as the selection of suitable distillation tasks.

Contextualization Distillation from Large Language Model for Knowledge Graph Completion

This paper presents the development process of a Vietnamese spoken language corpus for machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks and provides insights into the challenges and opportunities associated with using real-world data for machine reading comprehension tasks. The existing MRC corpora in Vietnamese mainly focus on formal written documents such as Wikipedia articles, online newspapers, or textbooks. In contrast, the VlogQA consists of 10,076 question-answer pairs based on 1,230 transcript documents sourced from YouTube -- an extensive source of user-uploaded content, covering the topics of food and travel. By capturing the spoken language of native Vietnamese speakers in natural settings, an obscure corner overlooked in Vietnamese research, the corpus provides a valuable resource for future research in reading comprehension tasks for the Vietnamese language. Regarding performance evaluation, our deep-learning models achieved the highest F1 score of 75.34\% on the test set, indicating significant progress in machine reading comprehension for Vietnamese spoken language data. In terms of EM, the highest score we accomplished is 53.97\%, which reflects the challenge in processing spoken-based content and highlights the need for further improvement.

VlogQA: Task, Dataset, and Baseline Models for Vietnamese Spoken-Based Machine Reading Comprehension

Lexical normalization, a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), involves the transformation of words into their canonical forms. This process has been proven to benefit various downstream NLP tasks greatly. In this work, we introduce Vietnamese Lexical Normalization (ViLexNorm), the first-ever corpus developed for the Vietnamese lexical normalization task. The corpus comprises over 10,000 pairs of sentences meticulously annotated by human annotators, sourced from public comments on Vietnam's most popular social media platforms. Various methods were used to evaluate our corpus, and the best-performing system achieved a result of 57.74% using the Error Reduction Rate (ERR) metric (van der Goot, 2019a) with the Leave-As-Is (LAI) baseline. For extrinsic evaluation, employing the model trained on ViLexNorm demonstrates the positive impact of the Vietnamese lexical normalization task on other NLP tasks. Our corpus is publicly available exclusively for research purposes.

ViLexNorm: A Lexical Normalization Corpus for Vietnamese Social Media Text

Visual storytelling aims to automatically generate a coherent story based on a given image sequence. Unlike tasks like image captioning, visual stories should contain factual descriptions, worldviews, and human social commonsense to put disjointed elements together to form a coherent and engaging human-writeable story. However, most models mainly focus on applying factual information and using taxonomic/lexical external knowledge when attempting to create stories. This paper introduces SCO-VIST, a framework representing the image sequence as a graph with objects and relations that includes human action motivation and its social interaction commonsense knowledge. SCO-VIST then takes this graph representing plot points and creates bridges between plot points with semantic and occurrence-based edge weights. This weighted story graph produces the storyline in a sequence of events using Floyd-Warshall's algorithm. Our proposed framework produces stories superior across multiple metrics in terms of visual grounding, coherence, diversity, and humanness, per both automatic and human evaluations.

SCO-VIST: Social Interaction Commonsense Knowledge-based Visual Storytelling

We address the task of machine translation (MT) from extremely low-resource language (ELRL) to English by leveraging cross-lingual transfer from *closely-related* high-resource language (HRL). The development of an MT system for ELRL is challenging because these languages typically lack parallel corpora and monolingual corpora, and their representations are absent from large multilingual language models. Many ELRLs share lexical similarities with some HRLs, which presents a novel modeling opportunity. However, existing subword-based neural MT models do not explicitly harness this lexical similarity, as they only implicitly align HRL and ELRL latent embedding space. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel, CharSpan, approach based on character-span noise augmentation into the training data of HRL. This serves as a regularization technique, making the model more robust to \textit{lexical divergences} between the HRL and ELRL, thus facilitating effective cross-lingual transfer. Our method significantly outperformed strong baselines in zero-shot settings on closely related HRL and ELRL pairs from three diverse language families, emerging as the state-of-the-art model for ELRLs.

CharSpan: Utilizing Lexical Similarity to Enable Zero-Shot Machine Translation for Extremely Low-resource Languages

Large Vision Language Models (VLMs) like GPT-$4$, LLaVA, and InstructBLIP exhibit extraordinary capabilities for both knowledge understanding and reasoning. However, the reasoning capabilities of such models on sophisticated problems that require external knowledge of a specific domain have not been assessed well, due to the unavailability of necessary datasets. In this work, we release a first-of-its-kind dataset called IndiFoodVQA with around $16.7$k data samples, consisting of explicit knowledge-infused questions, answers, and reasons. We also release IndiFoodKG, a related Knowledge Graph (KG) with $79$k triples. The data has been created with minimal human intervention via an automated pipeline based on InstructBlip and GPT-$3.5$. We also present a methodology to extract knowledge from the KG and use it to both answer and reason upon the questions. We employ different models to report baseline zero-shot and fine-tuned results. Fine-tuned VLMs on our data showed an improvement of $\sim25$\% over the corresponding base model, highlighting the fact that current VLMs need domain-specific fine-tuning to excel in specialized settings. Our findings reveal that (1) explicit knowledge infusion during question generation helps in making questions that have more grounded knowledge, and (2) proper knowledge retrieval can often lead to better-answering potential in such cases. The data and code is available at https://github.com/SLSravanthi/IndifoodVQA.

IndiFoodVQA: Advancing Visual Question Answering and Reasoning with a Knowledge-Infused Synthetic Data Generation Pipeline

Certified defense methods have identified their effectiveness against textual adversarial examples, which train models on the worst-case text generated by substituting words in original texts with synonyms. However, due to the discrete word embedding representations, the large search space hinders the robust training efficiency, resulting in significant time consumption. To overcome this challenge, motivated by the observation that synonym embedding has a small distance, we propose to treat the word substitution as a continuous perturbation on the word embedding representation. The proposed method Text-RS applies random smooth techniques to approximate the word substitution operation, offering a computationally efficient solution that outperforms conventional discrete methods and improves the robustness in training. The evaluation results demonstrate its effectiveness in defending against multiple textual adversarial attacks.

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Next from EACL 2024

Generation-driven Contrastive Self-training for Zero-shot Text Classification with Instruction-following LLM

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