United States

Domain experts across engineering, healthcare, and education follow strict standards for producing quality content such as technical manuals, medication instructions, and children&#39;s reading materials. However, current works in controllable text generation have yet to explore using these standards as references for control. Towards this end, we introduce Standardize, a retrieval-style in-context learning-based framework to guide large language models to align with expert-defined standards. Focusing on English language standards in the education domain as a use case, we consider the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and Common Core Standards (CCS) for the task of open-ended content generation. Our findings show that models can gain 45% to 100% increase in precise accuracy across open and commercial LLMs evaluated, demonstrating that the use of knowledge artifacts extracted from standards and integrating them in the generation process can effectively guide models to produce better standard-aligned content.

EMNLP 2024

Standardize: Aligning Language Models with Expert-Defined Standards for Content Generation

low-resource ner

cross-domain ner

named entity recognition

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
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***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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EMNLP 2022

Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Domain experts across engineering, healthcare, and education follow strict standards for producing quality content such as technical manuals, medication instructions, and children's reading materials. However, current works in controllable text generation have yet to explore using these standards as references for control. Towards this end, we introduce Standardize, a retrieval-style in-context learning-based framework to guide large language models to align with expert-defined standards. Focusing on English language standards in the education domain as a use case, we consider the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and Common Core Standards (CCS) for the task of open-ended content generation. Our findings show that models can gain 45% to 100% increase in precise accuracy across open and commercial LLMs evaluated, demonstrating that the use of knowledge artifacts extracted from standards and integrating them in the generation process can effectively guide models to produce better standard-aligned content.

technical paper

## 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 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.

As awareness of mental health issues grows, online counseling support services are becoming increasingly prevalent worldwide. Detecting whether users express suicidal ideation in text-based counseling services is crucial for identifying and prioritizing at-risk individuals. However, the lack of domain-specific systems to facilitate fine-grained suicide detection and corresponding risk assessment in online counseling poses a significant challenge for automated crisis intervention aimed at suicide prevention. In this paper, we propose PsyGUARD, an automated system for detecting suicide ideation and assessing risk in psychological counseling. To achieve this, we first develop a detailed taxonomy for detecting suicide ideation based on foundational theories. We then curate a large-scale, high-quality dataset called PsySUICIDE for suicide detection. To evaluate the capabilities of automated systems in fine-grained suicide detection, we establish a range of baselines. Subsequently, to assist automated services in providing safe, helpful, and tailored responses for further assessment, we propose to build a suite of risk assessment frameworks. Our study not only provides an insightful analysis of the effectiveness of automated risk assessment systems based on fine-grained suicide detection but also highlights their potential to improve mental health services on online counseling platforms. Code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/qiuhuachuan/PsyGUARD.

PsyGUARD: An Automated System for Suicide Detection and Risk Assessment in Psychological Counseling

The NLP research community has devoted increased attention to languages beyond English, resulting in considerable improvements for multilingual NLP. However, these improvements only apply to a small subset of the world's languages. An increasing number of papers aspires to enhance generalizable multilingual performance across languages. To this end, linguistic typology is commonly used to motivate language selection, on the basis that a broad typological sample ought to imply generalization across a broad range of languages. These selections are often described as being typologically diverse. In this meta-analysis, we systematically investigate NLP research that includes claims regarding typological diversity. We find there are no set definitions or criteria for such claims. We introduce metrics to approximate the diversity of resulting language samples along several axes and find that the results vary considerably across papers. Crucially, we show that skewed language selection can lead to overestimated multilingual performance. We recommend future work to include an operationalization of typological diversity that empirically justifies the diversity of language samples. To help facilitate this, we release the code for our diversity measures.

What is ”Typological Diversity” in NLP?

Text written by humans makes up the vast majority of the data used to pre-train and fine-tune large language models (LLMs). Many sources of this data---like code, forum posts, personal websites, and books---are easily attributed to one or a few "users". In this paper, we ask if it is possible to infer if any of a _user's_ data was used to train an LLM. Not only would this constitute a breach of privacy, but it would also enable users to detect when their data was used for training. We develop the first effective attacks for _user inference_---at times, with near-perfect success---against LLMs. Our attacks are easy to employ, requiring only black-box access to an LLM and a few samples from the user, which _need not be the ones that were trained on_. We find, both theoretically and empirically, that certain properties make users more susceptible to user inference: being an outlier, having highly correlated examples, and contributing a larger fraction of data. Based on these findings, we identify several methods for mitigating user inference including training with example-level differential privacy, removing within-user duplicate examples, and reducing a user's contribution to the training data. Though these provide partial mitigation, our work highlights the need to develop methods to fully protect LLMs from user inference.

User Inference Attacks on Large Language Models

Most NLP work on narrative detection has focused on prescriptive definitions of stories crafted by researchers, leaving open the questions: how do crowd workers perceive texts to be a story, and why? We investigate this by building StoryPerceptions, a dataset of 2,496 perceptions of storytelling in 502 social media texts from 255 crowd workers, including categorical labels along with free-text storytelling rationales, authorial intent, and more. We construct a fine-grained bottom-up taxonomy of crowd workers' varied and nuanced perceptions of storytelling by open-coding their free-text rationales. Through comparative analyses at the label and code level, we illuminate patterns of disagreement among crowd workers and across other annotation contexts, including prescriptive labeling from researchers and LLM-based predictions. Notably, plot complexity, references to generalized or abstract actions, and holistic aesthetic judgments (such as a sense of cohesion) are especially important in disagreements. Our empirical findings broaden understanding of the types, relative importance, and contentiousness of features relevant to narrative detection, highlighting opportunities for future work on reader-contextualized models of narrative reception.

The Empirical Variability of Narrative Perceptions of Social Media Texts

Investigating "Hadith" texts, crucial for theological studies and Islamic jurisprudence, presents challenges due to the linguistic complexity of Arabic, such as its complex morphology. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach to address the challenges of topic modeling in Hadith studies by utilizing the Contextualized Topic Model (CTM). Our study introduces RoBERT2VecTM, a novel neural-based approach that combines the RoBERTa transformer model with Doc2Vec, specifically targeting the semantic analysis of "Matn" (the actual content). The methodology outperforms many traditional state-of-the-art NLP models by generating more coherent and diverse Arabic topics. The diversity of the generated topics allows for further categorization, deepening the understanding of discussed concepts. Notably, our research highlights the critical impact of lemmatization and stopwords in enhancing topic modeling. This breakthrough marks a significant stride in applying NLP to non-Latin languages and opens new avenues for the nuanced analysis of complex religious texts.

RoBERT2VecTM: A Novel Approach for Topic Extraction in Islamic Studies

Existing debiasing techniques are typically training-based or require access to the model's internals and output distributions, so they are inaccessible to end-users looking to adapt LLM outputs for their particular needs. In this study, we examine whether structured prompting techniques can offer opportunities for fair text generation. We evaluate a comprehensive end-user-focused iterative framework of debiasing that applies System 2 thinking processes for prompts to induce logical, reflective, and critical text generation, with single, multi-step, instruction, and role-based variants. By systematically evaluating many LLMs across many datasets and different prompting strategies, we show that the more complex System 2-based Implicative Prompts significantly improve over other techniques demonstrating lower mean bias in the outputs with competitive performance on the downstream tasks. Our work offers research directions for the design and the potential of end-user-focused evaluative frameworks for LLM use.

Thinking Fair and Slow: On the Efficacy of Structured Prompts for Debiasing Language Models

Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) is an efficient position encoding approach and is widely utilized in numerous large language models (LLMs). Recently, a lot of methods have been put forward to further expand the context window based on RoPE. The core concept of those methods is to predefine or search for a set of factors to rescale the base frequencies of RoPE. Nevertheless, it is quite a challenge for existing methods to predefine an optimal factor due to the exponential search space. In view of this, we introduce PSC (Phase Shift Calibration), a small module for calibrating the frequencies predefined by existing methods. With the employment of PSC, we demonstrate that many existing methods can be further enhanced, like PI, YaRN, and LongRoPE. We conducted extensive experiments across multiple models and tasks. The results demonstrate that (1) when PSC is enabled, the comparative reductions in perplexity increase as the context window size is varied from 16k, to 32k, and up to 64k. (2) Our approach is broadly applicable and exhibits robustness across a variety of models and tasks.

PSC: Extending Context Window of Large Language Models via Phase Shift Calibration

The stock market provides a rich well of information that can be split across modalities, making it an ideal candidate for multimodal evaluation. Multimodal data plays an increasingly important role in the development of machine learning and has shown to positively impact performance. But information can do more than exist across modes--- it can exist across time. How should we attend to temporal data that consists of multiple information types? This work introduces (i) the MEANT model, a Multimodal Encoder for Antecedent information and (ii) a new dataset called TempStock, which consists of price, Tweets, and graphical data with over a million Tweets from all of the companies in the S\&P 500 Index. We find that MEANT improves performance on existing baselines by over 15\%, and that the textual information affects performance far more than the visual information on our time-dependent task from our ablation study. The code and dataset will be made available upon publication.

MEANT: Multimodal Encoder for Antecedent Information

Synthetic data is widely used in speech recognition due to the availability of text-to-speech models, which facilitate adapting models to previously unseen text domains. However, existing methods suffer in performance when they fine-tune an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model on synthetic data as they suffer from the distributional shift commonly referred to as the synthetic-to-real gap. In this paper, we find that task arithmetic is effective at mitigating this gap. 
Our proposed method, $SYN2REAL$ task vector, shows an average improvement of 10.03% improvement in word error rate over baselines on the SLURP dataset. Additionally, we show that an average of $SYN2REAL$ task vectors, when we have real speeches from multiple different domains, can further adapt the original ASR model to perform better on the target text domain.

Task Arithmetic can Mitigate Synthetic-to-Real Gap in Automatic Speech Recognition

Current approaches for detecting text reuse do not focus on recontextualization, i.e., how the new context(s) of a reused text differs from its original context(s). In this paper, we propose a novel framework called TRoTR that relies on the notion of topic relatedness for evaluating the diachronic change of context in which text is reused. TRoTR includes two NLP tasks: TRiC and TRaC. TRiC is designed to evaluate the topic relatedness between a pair of recontextualizations. TRaC is designed to evaluate the overall topic variation within a set of recontextualizations. We also provide a curated TRoTR benchmark of biblical text reuse, human-annotated with topic relatedness. The benchmark exhibits an inter-annotator agreement of .811. We evaluate multiple, established SBERT models on the TRoTR tasks and find that they exhibit greater sensitivity to textual similarity than topic relatedness. Our experiments show that fine-tuning these models can mitigate such a kind of sensitivity.

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PsyGUARD: An Automated System for Suicide Detection and Risk Assessment in Psychological Counseling

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