Mexico

This paper introduces a novel neuro-symbolic architecture for relation classification (RC) that combines rule-based methods with contemporary deep learning techniques. This approach capitalizes on the strengths of both paradigms: the adaptability of rule-based systems and the generalization power of neural networks. Our architecture consists of two components: a declarative rule-based model for transparent classification and a neural component to enhance rule generalizability through semantic text matching. Notably, our semantic matcher is trained in an unsupervised domain-agnostic way, solely with synthetic data. Further, these components are loosely coupled, allowing for rule modifications without retraining the semantic matcher. In our evaluation, we focused on two few-shot relation classification datasets: Few-Shot TACRED and a Few-Shot version of NYT29. We show that our proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art models in three out of four settings, despite not seeing any human-annotated training data. Further, we show that our approach remains modular and pliable, i.e., the corresponding rules can be locally modified to improve the overall model. Human interventions to the rules for the TACRED relation org:parents boost the performance on that relation by as much as 26\% relative improvement, without negatively impacting the other relations, and without retraining the semantic matching component.

NAACL 2024

Best of Both Worlds: A Pliable and Generalizable Neuro-Symbolic Approach for Relation Classification

neuro-symbolic approaches

relation classification

information extraction

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
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EMNLP 2024

EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

poster

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
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Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Cybersecurity information is often technically complex and relayed through unstructured text, making automation of cyber threat intelligence highly challenging. For such text domains that involve high levels of expertise, pretraining on in-domain corpora has been a popular method for language models to obtain domain expertise. However, cybersecurity texts often contain non-linguistic elements (such as URLs and hash values) that could be unsuitable with the established pretraining methodologies. Previous work in other domains have removed or filtered such text as noise, but the effectiveness of these methods have not been investigated, especially in the cybersecurity domain. We experiment with different pretraining methodologies to account for non-linguistic elements (NLEs) and evaluate their effectiveness through downstream tasks and probing tasks. Our proposed strategy, a combination of selective MLM and jointly training NLE token classification, outperforms the commonly taken approach of replacing NLEs. We use our domain-customized methodology to train CyBERTuned, a cybersecurity domain language model that outperforms other cybersecurity PLMs on most tasks.

Ignore Me But Don’t Replace Me: Utilizing Non-Linguistic Elements for Pretraining on the Cybersecurity Domain

Existing dense retrieval systems utilize the same model architecture for encoding both the passages and the queries, even though queries are much shorter and simpler than passages. This leads to high latency of the query encoding, which is performed online and therefore might impact user experience. We show that combining a standard large passage encoder with a small efficient query encoder can provide significant latency drops with only a small decrease in quality. We offer a pretraining and training solution for multiple small query encoder architectures. Using a small transformer architecture we are able to decrease latency by up to $\sim12\times$, while $MRR@10$ on the MS MARCO dev set only decreases from $38.2$ to $36.2$. If this solution does not reach the desired latency requirements, we propose an efficient RNN as the query encoder, which processes the query prefix incrementally and only infers the last word after the query is issued. This shortens latency by $\sim38\times$ with only a minor drop in quality, reaching $35.5$ $MRR@10$ score.

Extremely efficient online query encoding for dense retrieval

Real-world sequential decision making is characterized by sparse rewards and large decision spaces, posing significant difficulty for experiential learning systems like $\textit{tabula rasa}$ reinforcement learning (RL) agents. Large Language Models (LLMs), with a wealth of world knowledge, can help RL agents learn quickly and adapt to distribution shifts. In this work, we introduce Language Guided Exploration (LGE) framework, which uses a pre-trained language model (called GUIDE ) to provide decision-level guidance to an RL agent (called EXPLORER ). We observe that on ScienceWorld (Wang et al., 2022), a challenging text environment, LGE outperforms vanilla RL agents significantly and also outperforms other sophisticated methods like Behaviour Cloning and Text Decision Transformer.

Language Guided Exploration for RL Agents in Text Environments

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models (LMs) is essential for enhancing their capabilities. Existing techniques commonly fine-tune on input-output pairs (e.g., instruction tuning) or with numerical rewards that gauge the output quality (e.g., RLHF). We explore LMs' potential to **le**arn from **t**extual **i**nteractions (**LETI**) that not only check their correctness with *binary labels* but also pinpoint and explain errors in their outputs through *textual feedback*. Our focus is the code generation task, where the model produces code based on natural language instructions. This setting invites a natural and scalable way to acquire textual feedback: the error messages and stack traces from code execution using a Python interpreter. LETI iteratively fine-tunes the model, using the LM objective, on a concatenation of natural language instructions, LM-generated programs, and textual feedback. Prepended to this fine-tuning text, a binary reward token is used to differentiate correct and buggy solutions. LETI requires *no* ground-truth outputs for training and even outperforms a fine-tuned baseline that does. LETI not only improves the performance of LMs on a code generation dataset MBPP, but also generalizes to other datasets. Trained on MBPP, it achieves comparable or better performance than the base LMs on unseen problems in HumanEval. Furthermore, compared to binary feedback, we observe that textual feedback leads to improved generation quality and sample efficiency, achieving the same performance with fewer than half of the gradient steps. LETI is equally applicable in natural language tasks when they can be formulated as code generation, which we empirically verified on event argument extraction.

LETI: Learning to Generate from Textual Interactions

Existing grammatical error correction tools do not provide natural language explanations of the errors that they correct in user-written text. However, such explanations are essential for helping users learn the language by gaining a deeper understanding of its grammatical rules (DeKeyser, 2003; Ellis et al., 2006). To address this gap, we propose the task of grammar error explanation, where a system needs to provide one-sentence explanations for each grammatical error in a pair of erroneous and corrected sentences. The task is not easily solved by prompting LLMs: we find that, using one-shot prompting, GPT-4 only explains 40.6% of the errors and does not even attempt to explain 39.8% of the errors. Since LLMs struggle to identify grammar errors, we develop a two-step pipeline that leverages fine-tuned and prompted large language models to perform structured atomic token edit extraction, followed by prompting GPT-4 to explain each edit. We evaluate our pipeline on German, Chinese, and English grammar error correction data. Our atomic edit extraction achieves an F1 of 0.93 on German, 0.91 on Chinese, and 0.891 on English. Human evaluation of generated explanations reveals that 93.9% of German errors, 96.4% of Chinese errors, and 92.20% of English errors are correctly detected and explained. To encourage further research, we open-source our data and code.

GEE! Grammar Error Explanation with Large Language Models

This paper focuses on the task of Extreme Multi-Label Classification (XMC) whose goal is to predict multiple labels for each instance from an extremely large label space. While existing research has primarily focused on fully supervised XMC, real-world scenarios often lack supervision signals, highlighting the importance of zero-shot settings. Given the large label space, utilizing in-context learning approaches is not trivial. We address this issue by introducing In-Context Extreme Multi-label Learning (ICXML), a two-stage framework that cuts down the search space by generating a set of candidate labels through in-context learning and then reranks them. Extensive experiments suggest that ICXML advances the state of the art on two diverse public benchmarks.

ICXML: An In-Context Learning Framework for Zero-Shot Extreme Multi-Label Classification

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities for text rewriting. However creating a smaller yet potent language model for text rewriting presents two formidable challenges: costly data collection and absence of emergent capabilities.In this paper we present solutions to address the above challenges.We propose an new instruction tuning method to develop a mo-bile text rewriting model that leverages LLM-generated data and heuristic reinforcement learning, eliminating the need for human data collection. Moreover, to bridge the performance gap from the constraint size, we pro-pose a cascading approach based on the confidence levels which are distilled from the large server model’s critiques. To evaluate the text rewriting tasks for mobile scenarios, we introduce MessageRewriteEval, a human-labeled benchmark that focuses on text rewriting of messages through natural language instructions. Through empirical experiments, we demonstrate that our on-device model surpasses the current state-of-the-art LLMs in text rewriting while maintaining a significantly reduced model size using public benchmark EditEval and our new benchmark. We also demonstrate that our proposed cascading approach improves model performance further.

Towards an On-device Agent for Text Rewriting

Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are ubiquitous in almost all levels of education since they are easy to administer, grade, and are a reliable format in assessments and practices. One of the most important aspects of MCQs is the distractors, i.e., incorrect options that are designed to target common errors or misconceptions among real students. To date, the task of crafting high-quality distractors largely remains a labor and time-intensive process for teachers and learning content designers, which has limited scalability. In this work, we study the task of automated distractor generation in the domain of math MCQs and explore a wide variety of large language model (LLM)-based approaches, from in-context learning to fine-tuning. We conduct extensive experiments using a real-world math MCQ dataset and find that although LLMs can generate some mathematically valid distractors, they are less adept at anticipating common errors or misconceptions among real students.

Exploring Automated Distractor Generation for Math Multiple-choice Questions via Large Language Models

Data augmentation techniques apply transformations to existing texts to generate additional data. The transformations may produce low-quality texts, where the meaning of the text is changed and the text may even be mangled beyond human comprehension. Analyzing the synthetically generated texts and their corresponding labels is slow and demanding. To winnow out texts with incorrect labels, we develop INSPECTOR, a human-in-the-loop data inspection technique. INSPECTOR combines the strengths of provenance tracking techniques with assistive labeling. INSPECTOR allows users to group related texts by their $\textit{transformation provenance}$, i.e., the transformations applied to the original text, or $\textit{feature provenance}$, the linguistic features of the original text. For assistive labeling, INSPECTOR computes metrics that approximate data quality, and allows users to compare the corresponding label of each text against the predictions of a large language model. In a user study, INSPECTOR increases the number of texts with correct labels identified by $3\times$ on a sentiment analysis task and by $4\times$ on a hate speech detection task. The participants found grouping the synthetically generated texts by their common transformation to be the most useful technique. Surprisingly, grouping texts by common linguistic features was perceived to be unhelpful. Contrary to prior work, our study finds that no single technique obviates the need for human inspection effort. This validates the design of INSPECTOR which combines both analysis of data provenance and assistive labeling to reduce human inspection effort.

Human-in-the-Loop Synthetic Text Data Inspection with Provenance Tracking

Modern biomedical concept representations are mostly trained on synonymous concept names from a biomedical knowledge base, ignoring the inter-concept interactions and a concept's local neighborhood in a knowledge base graph. In this paper, we introduce Biomedical Entity Representation with a Graph-Augmented Multi-Objective Transformer (BERGAMOT), which adopts the power of pre-trained language models (LMs) and graph neural networks to capture both inter-concept and intra-concept interactions from the multilingual UMLS graph. To obtain fine-grained graph representations, we introduce two additional graph-based objectives: (i) a node-level contrastive objective and (ii) the Deep Graph Infomax (DGI) loss, which maximizes the mutual information between a local subgraph and a high-level graph summary. We apply contrastive loss on textual and graph representations to make them less sensitive to surface forms and enable intermodal knowledge exchange. BERGAMOT achieves state-of-the-art results in zero-shot entity linking without task-specific supervision on 4 of 5 languages of the Mantra corpus and on 8 of 10 languages of the XL-BEL benchmark.

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Next from NAACL 2024

Ignore Me But Don’t Replace Me: Utilizing Non-Linguistic Elements for Pretraining on the Cybersecurity Domain

Similar lecture

Learning to Generate Rules for Realistic Few-Shot Relation Classification: An Encoder-Decoder Approach