United States

Diffusion models have shown impressive performance in many domains. However, the model&#39;s capability to follow natural language instructions (e.g., spatial relationships between objects, generating complex scenes) is still unsatisfactory. In this work, we propose Iterative Prompt Relabeling (IPR), a novel algorithm that aligns images to text through iterative image sampling and prompt relabeling with feedback. IPR first samples a batch of images conditioned on the text, then relabels the text prompts of unmatched text-image pairs with classifier feedback. We conduct thorough experiments on SDv2 and SDXL, testing their capability to follow instructions on spatial relations. With IPR, we improved up to 15.22% (absolute improvement) on the challenging spatial relation VISOR benchmark, demonstrating superior performance compared to previous RL methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/cxy000000/IPR-RLDF.

EMNLP 2024

Learning from Mistakes: Iterative Prompt Relabeling for Text-to-Image Diffusion Model Training

low-resource languages

automatic speech recognition

morphology

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

Diffusion models have shown impressive performance in many domains. However, the model's capability to follow natural language instructions (e.g., spatial relationships between objects, generating complex scenes) is still unsatisfactory. In this work, we propose Iterative Prompt Relabeling (IPR), a novel algorithm that aligns images to text through iterative image sampling and prompt relabeling with feedback. IPR first samples a batch of images conditioned on the text, then relabels the text prompts of unmatched text-image pairs with classifier feedback. We conduct thorough experiments on SDv2 and SDXL, testing their capability to follow instructions on spatial relations. With IPR, we improved up to 15.22% (absolute improvement) on the challenging spatial relation VISOR benchmark, demonstrating superior performance compared to previous RL methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/cxy000000/IPR-RLDF.

poster

## 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.
### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPROgxjLAC96AJL7Ugy0tEnYm7dkrbHt/view?usp=sharing)

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.emnlp.org/registration/).** The EMNLP 2024 event page on Underline will be open to public one week prior to the event.

Please register!

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.

Stemming from traditional knowledge graphs (KGs), hyper-relational KGs (HKGs) provide additional key-value pairs (i.e., qualifiers) for each KG fact that help to better restrict the fact validity. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in studying graph reasoning over HKGs. Meanwhile, as discussed in recent works that focus on temporal KGs (TKGs), world knowledge is ever-evolving, making it important to reason over temporal facts in KGs. Previous mainstream benchmark HKGs do not explicitly specify temporal information for each HKG fact. Therefore, almost all existing HKG reasoning approaches do not devise any module specifically for temporal reasoning. To better study temporal fact reasoning over HKGs, we propose a new type of data structure named hyper-relational TKG (HTKG). Every fact in an HTKG is coupled with a timestamp explicitly indicating its time validity. We develop two new benchmark HTKG datasets, i.e., Wiki-hy and YAGO-hy, and propose an HTKG reasoning model that efficiently models hyper-relational temporal facts. To support future research on this topic, we open-source our datasets and model.

Temporal Fact Reasoning over Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graphs

In subjective NLP tasks, where a single ground truth does not exist, the inclusion of diverse annotators becomes crucial as their unique perspectives significantly influence the annotations. In realistic scenarios, the annotation budget often becomes the main determinant of the number of perspectives (i.e., annotators) included in the data and subsequent modeling. We introduce a novel framework for annotation collection and modeling in subjective tasks that aims to minimize the annotation budget while maximizing the predictive performance for each annotator. Our framework has a two-stage design: first, we rely on a small set of annotators to build a multitask model, and second, we augment the model for a new perspective by strategically annotating a few samples per annotator. To test our framework at scale, we introduce and release a unique dataset, Moral Foundations Subjective Corpus, of 2000 Reddit posts annotated by 24 annotators for moral sentiment. We demonstrate that our framework surpasses the previous SOTA in capturing the annotators' individual perspectives with as little as 25% of the original annotation budget on two datasets. Furthermore, our framework results in more equitable models, reducing the performance disparity among annotators.

Cost-Efficient Subjective Task Annotation and Modeling through Few-Shot Annotator Adaptation

Dialogue systems have been used as conversation partners in English learning, but few have studied whether these systems improve learning outcomes. Student passion and perseverance, or grit, has been associated with language learning success. Recent work establishes that as students perceive their English teachers to be more supportive, their grit improves. Hypothesizing that the same pattern applies to English-teaching chatbots, we create EDEN, a robust open-domain chatbot for spoken conversation practice that provides empathetic feedback. To construct EDEN, we first train a specialized spoken utterance grammar correction model and a high-quality social chit-chat conversation model. We then conduct a preliminary user study with a variety of strategies for empathetic feedback. Our experiment suggests that using adaptive empathetic feedback leads to higher *perceived affective support*. Furthermore, elements of perceived affective support positively correlate with student grit.

EDEN: Empathetic Dialogues for English learning

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in parsing textual data and generating code. However, their performance in tasks involving tabular data, especially those requiring symbolic reasoning, faces challenges due to the structural variance and inconsistency in table cell values often found in web tables. In this paper, we introduce NormTab, a novel framework aimed at enhancing the symbolic reasoning performance of LLMs by normalizing web tables. We study table normalization as a stand-alone, one-time preprocessing step using LLMs to support symbolic reasoning on tabular data. Our experimental evaluation, conducted on challenging web table datasets such as WikiTableQuestion and TabFact, demonstrates that leveraging NormTab significantly improves symbolic reasoning performance, showcasing the importance and effectiveness of web table normalization for enhancing LLM-based symbolic reasoning tasks.

NormTab: Improving Symbolic Reasoning in LLMs Through Tabular Data Normalization

We introduce a neural architecture finetuned for the task of scenario context generation: The relevant location and time of an event or entity mentioned in text. Contextualizing information extraction helps to scope the validity of automated finings when aggregating them as knowledge graphs. Our approach uses a high-quality curated dataset of time and location annotations in a corpus of epidemiology papers to train an encoder-decoder architecture. We also explored the use of data augmentation techniques during training. Our findings suggest that a relatively small fine-tuned encoder-decoder model performs better than out-of-the-box LLMs and semantic role labeling parsers to accurate predict the relevant scenario information of a particular entity or event.

When and Where Did it Happen? An Encoder-Decoder Model to Identify Scenario Context

The ability to accurately identify authorship is crucial for verifying content authenticity and mitigating misinformation. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capacity for reasoning and problem-solving. However, their potential in authorship analysis remains under-explored. Traditional studies have depended on hand-crafted stylistic features, whereas state-of-the-art approaches leverage text embeddings from pre-trained language models. These methods, which typically require fine-tuning on labeled data, often suffer from performance degradation in cross-domain applications and provide limited explainability. This work seeks to address three research questions: (1) Can LLMs perform zero-shot, end-to-end authorship verification effectively? (2) Are LLMs capable of accurately attributing authorship among multiple candidates authors (e.g., 10 and 20)? (3) Can LLMs provide explainability in authorship analysis, particularly through the role of linguistic features? Moreover, we investigate the integration of explicit linguistic features to guide LLMs in their reasoning processes. Our assessment demonstrates LLMs' proficiency in both tasks without the need for domain-specific fine-tuning, providing explanations into their decision making via a detailed analysis of linguistic features. This establishes a new benchmark for future research on LLM-based authorship analysis.

Can Large Language Models Identify Authorship?

This paper presents Emosical, a multimodal open-source dataset of musical films. Emosical comprises video, vocal audio, text, and character identity paired samples with annotated emotion tags. Emosical provides rich emotion annotations for each sample by inferring the background story of the characters. To achieve this, we leverage the musical theatre script, which contains the characters' complete background stories and narrative contexts. The annotation pipeline includes feeding the speaking character, text, global persona, and context of the dialogue and song track into a large language model. To verify the effectiveness of our tagging scheme, we perform an ablation study by bypassing each step of the pipeline. The ablation results show the usefulness of each component in generating accurate emotion tags. A subjective test is conducted to compare the generated tags of each ablation result. We also perform a statistical analysis to find out the global characteristics of the collected emotion tags. Emosical would enable expressive synthesis and tagging of the speech and singing voice in the musical theatre domain in future research. Emosical is publicly available at https://github.com/gillosae/emosical.

Emosical: An Emotion Annotated Musical Theatre Dataset

Since the release of ChatGPT, the field of Natural Language Processing has experienced rapid advancements, particularly in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their multimodal counterparts, Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). Despite their impressive capabilities, LLMs often exhibit significant performance disparities across different languages and cultural contexts, as demonstrated by various text-only benchmarks. However, current research lacks such benchmarks for multimodal visio-linguistic settings. This work fills this gap by introducing M5, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate LMMs on diverse vision-language tasks within a multilingual and multicultural context. M5 includes eight datasets covering five tasks and 41 languages, with a focus on underrepresented languages and culturally diverse images. Furthermore, we introduce two novel datasets, M5-VGR and M5-VLOD, including a new Visio-Linguistic Outlier Detection task, in which all evaluated open-source models fail to significantly surpass the random baseline. Through extensive evaluation and analyses, we highlight substantial task-agnostic performance disparities between high- and low-resource languages. Moreover, we show that larger models do not necessarily outperform smaller ones in a multilingual setting.

M5 -- A Diverse Benchmark to Assess the Performance of Large Multimodal Models Across Multilingual and Multicultural Vision-Language Tasks

Emotions play important epistemological and cognitive roles in our lives, revealing our values and guiding our actions. Previous work has shown that LLMs display biases in emotion attribution along gender lines. However, unlike gender, which says little about our values, religion, as a socio-cultural system, prescribes a set of beliefs and values for its followers. Religions, therefore, cultivate certain emotions. Moreover, these rules are explicitly laid out and interpreted by religious leaders. 
Using emotion attribution, we explore how different religions are represented in LLMs. We find that:
Major religions in the US and European countries are represented with more nuance, displaying a more shaded model of their beliefs.
Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism are strongly stereotyped.
Judaism and Islam are stigmatized -- the models' refusal skyrocket. 
We ascribe these to cultural bias in LLMs and the scarcity of NLP literature on religion. In the rare instances where religion is discussed, it is often in the context of toxic language, perpetuating the perception of these religions as inherently toxic. 
This finding underscores the urgent need to address and rectify these biases. 
Our research emphasizes the crucial role emotions play in shaping our lives and how our values influence them.

Divine LLaMAs: Bias, Stereotypes, Stigmatization, and Emotion Representation of Religion in Large Language Models

Moderating hate speech (HS) in the evolving online landscape is a complex challenge, compounded by the multimodal nature of digital content. This survey examines recent advancements in HS moderation, focusing on the burgeoning role of large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs) in detecting, explaining, debiasing, and countering HS. We begin with a comprehensive analysis of current literature, uncovering how text, images, and audio interact to spread HS. The combination of these modalities adds complexity and subtlety to HS dissemination. We also identified research gaps, particularly in underrepresented languages and cultures, and highlight the need for solutions in low-resource settings. The survey concludes with future research directions, including novel AI methodologies, ethical AI governance, and the development of context-aware systems. This overview aims to inspire further research and foster collaboration towards responsible and human-centric approaches to HS moderation in the digital age.

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Next from EMNLP 2024

Temporal Fact Reasoning over Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graphs

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IPR: Intelligent Prompt Routing with User-Controlled Quality-Cost Trade-offs