Canada

In passage retrieval system, the initial passage retrieval results may be unsatisfactory, which can be refined by a reranking scheme. Existing solutions to passage reranking focus on enriching the interaction between query and each passage separately, neglecting the context among the top-ranked passages in the initial retrieval list. To tackle this problem, we propose a Hybrid and Collaborative Passage Reranking (HybRank) method, which leverages the substantial similarity measurements of upstream retrievers for passage collaboration and incorporates the lexical and semantic properties of sparse and dense retrievers for reranking. Besides, built on off-the-shelf retriever features, HybRank is a plug-in reranker capable of enhancing arbitrary passage lists including previously reranked ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate the stable improvements of performance over prevalent retrieval and reranking methods, and verify the effectiveness of the core components of HybRank.

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ACL 2023

Hybrid and Collaborative Passage Reranking

reranking

passage retrieval

information retrieval

## 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."<br>

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*





<br>

EMNLP 2025

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

In passage retrieval system, the initial passage retrieval results may be unsatisfactory, which can be refined by a reranking scheme. Existing solutions to passage reranking focus on enriching the interaction between query and each passage separately, neglecting the context among the top-ranked passages in the initial retrieval list. To tackle this problem, we propose a Hybrid and Collaborative Passage Reranking (HybRank) method, which leverages the substantial similarity measurements of upstream retrievers for passage collaboration and incorporates the lexical and semantic properties of sparse and dense retrievers for reranking. Besides, built on off-the-shelf retriever features, HybRank is a plug-in reranker capable of enhancing arbitrary passage lists including previously reranked ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate the stable improvements of performance over prevalent retrieval and reranking methods, and verify the effectiveness of the core components of HybRank.

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poster

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
<br>The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023.<br><br>
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.<br>
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)**
<br><br><br><br>

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 studies in natural language processing (NLP) have focused on modern languages and achieved state-of-the-art results in many tasks.Meanwhile, little attention has been paid to ancient texts and related tasks.Classical Chinese first came to Japan approximately 2,000 years ago.It was gradually adapted to a Japanese form called Kanbun-Kundoku (Kanbun) in Japanese reading and translating methods, which has significantly impacted Japanese literature.However, compared to the rich resources of ancient texts in mainland China, Kanbun resources remain scarce in Japan.To solve this problem, we construct the first Classical-Chinese-to-Kanbun dataset in the world.Furthermore, we introduce two tasks, character reordering and machine translation, both of which play a significant role in Kanbun comprehension.We also test the current language models on these tasks and discuss the best evaluation method by comparing the results with human scores.We release our code and dataset on GitHub.

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Kanbun-LM: Reading and Translating Classical Chinese in Japanese Methods by Language Models

Temporal knowledge graph completion that predicts missing links for incomplete temporal knowledge graphs (TKG) is gaining increasing attention.Most existing works have achieved good results by incorporating time information into static knowledge graph embedding methods.However, they ignore the contextual nature of the TKG structure, i.e., query-specific subgraph contains both structural and temporal neighboring facts.This paper presents the SToKE, a novel method that employs the pre-trained language model (PLM) to learn joint Structural and Temporal Contextualized Knowledge Embeddings.Specifically, we first construct an event evolution tree (EET) for each query to enable PLMs to handle the TKG, which can be seen as a structured event sequence recording query-relevant structural and temporal contexts. We then propose a novel temporal embedding and structural matrix to learn the time information and structural dependencies of facts in EET.Finally, we formulate TKG completion as a mask prediction problem by masking the missing entity of the query to fine-tune pre-trained language models.Experimental results on three widely used datasets show the superiority of our model.

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Learning Joint Structural and Temporal Contextualized Knowledge Embeddings for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion

Contrastive learning has been widely studied in sentence representation learning. However, earlier works mainly focus on the construction of positive examples, while in-batch samples are often simply treated as negative examples. This approach overlooks the importance of selecting appropriate negative examples, potentially leading to a scarcity of hard negatives and the inclusion of false negatives. To address these issues, we propose ClusterNS (Clustering-aware Negative Sampling), a novel method that incorporates cluster information into contrastive learning for unsupervised sentence representation learning. We apply a modified K-means clustering algorithm to supply hard negatives and recognize in-batch false negatives during training, aiming to solve the two issues in one unified framework. Experiments on semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks demonstrate that our proposed ClusterNS compares favorably with baselines in unsupervised sentence representation learning. Our code has been made publicly available at github.com/djz233/ClusterNS.

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Clustering-Aware Negative Sampling for Unsupervised Sentence Representation

Recently, a series of works have looked into further improving the adapter-based tuning by manually designing better adapter architectures. Understandably, these manually designed solutions are sub-optimal. In this work, we propose the Learned Adapter framework to automatically learn the optimal adapter architectures for better task adaptation of pre-trained models (PTMs). First, we construct a unified search space for adapter architecture designs. In terms of the optimization method on the search space, we propose a simple-yet-effective method, GDNAS for better architecture optimization. Extensive experiments show that our Learned Adapter framework can outperform the previous parameter-efficient tuning (PETuning) baselines while tuning comparable or fewer parameters. Moreover: (a) the learned adapter architectures are explainable and transferable across tasks. (b) We demonstrate that our architecture search space design is valid.

Learned Adapters Are Better Than Manually Designed Adapters

As the number of vulnerabilities increases day by day, security management requires more and more structured data. In addition to textual descriptions of vulnerabilities, security engineers must classify and assess vulnerabilities and clarify their associated techniques. Vulnerability Description Mapping (VDM) refers to mapping vulnerabilities to Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE), Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification, ATT\&CK Techniques, and other classifications. Accurate VDM is necessary to reduce the pressure of security management and improve the speed of security emergency response. ChatGPT is the latest state-of-the-art closed-source conversational large language model (LLM), which performs excellently on many tasks. This paper explores the application of closed-source LLMs to real-world security management scenarios by evaluating ChatGPT's performance on VDM tasks. The results show that although ChatGPT may be close to the level of human experts on some tasks, it still cannot replace the critical role of professional security engineers in vulnerability analysis. In a word, closed-source LLM is not the end of story.

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Not The End of Story: An Evaluation of ChatGPT-Driven Vulnerability Description Mappings

The analysis of consumer sentiment, as expressed through reviews, can provide a wealth of insight regarding the quality of a product. While the study of sentiment analysis has been widely explored in many popular languages, relatively less attention has been given to the Bangla language, mostly due to a lack of relevant data and cross-domain adaptability. To address this limitation, we present BanglaBook, a large-scale dataset of Bangla book reviews consisting of 158,065 samples classified into three broad categories: positive, negative, and neutral. We provide a detailed statistical analysis of the dataset and employ a range of machine learning models to establish baselines including SVM, LSTM, and Bangla-BERT. Our findings demonstrate a substantial performance advantage of pre-trained models over models that rely on manually crafted features, emphasizing the necessity for additional training resources in this domain. Additionally, we conduct an in-depth error analysis by examining sentiment unigrams, which may provide insight into common classification errors in under-resourced languages like Bangla. Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/mohsinulkabir14/BanglaBook.

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BanglaBook: A Large-scale Bangla Dataset for Sentiment Analysis from Book Reviews

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are becoming integral components of real world services relied upon by millions of users. Unfortunately, architects of these systems can find it difficult to ensure reliable performance as irrelevant details like random initialization can unexpectedly change the outputs of a trained system with potentially disastrous consequences. We formulate the model stability problem by studying how the predictions of a model change, even when it is retrained on the same data, as a consequence of stochasticity in the training process. For Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks, we find instability in predictions for a significant fraction of queries. We formulate principled metrics, like per-sample ``label entropy'' across training runs or within a single training run, to quantify this phenomenon. Intriguingly, we find that unstable predictions do not appear at random, but rather appear to be clustered in data-specific ways. We study data-agnostic regularization methods to improve stability and propose new data-centric methods that exploit our local stability estimates. We find that our localized data-specific mitigation strategy dramatically outperforms data-agnostic methods, and comes within 90% of the gold standard, achieved by ensembling, at a fraction of the computational cost.

Measuring and Mitigating Local Instability in Deep Neural Networks

Metaphor detection (MD) suffers from limited training data. In this paper, we started with a linguistic rule called Metaphor Identification Procedure and then proposed a novel multi-task learning framework to transfer knowledge in basic sense discrimination (BSD) to MD. BSD is constructed from word sense disambiguation (WSD), which has copious amounts of data. We leverage adversarial training to align the data distributions of MD and BSD in the same feature space, so task-invariant representations can be learned. To capture fine-grained alignment patterns, we utilize the multi-mode structures of MD and BSD. Our method is totally end-to-end and can mitigate the data scarcity problem in MD. Competitive results are reported on four public datasets. Our code and datasets are available.

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Adversarial Multi-task Learning for End-to-end Metaphor Detection

Language is by its very nature incremental in how it is produced and processed. This property can be exploited by NLP systems to produce fast responses, which has been shown to be beneficial for real-time interactive applications. Recent neural network-based approaches for incremental processing mainly use RNNs or Transformers. RNNs are fast but monotonic (cannot correct earlier output, which can be necessary in incremental processing). Transformers, on the other hand, consume whole sequences, and hence are by nature non-incremental. A restart-incremental interface that repeatedly passes longer input prefixes can be used to obtain partial outputs, while providing the ability to revise. However, this method becomes costly as the sentence grows longer. In this work, we propose the Two-pass model for AdaPtIve Revision (TAPIR) and introduce a method to obtain an incremental supervision signal for learning an adaptive revision policy. Experimental results on sequence labelling show that our model has better incremental performance and faster inference speed compared to restart-incremental Transformers, while showing little degradation on full sequences.

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TAPIR: Learning Adaptive Revision for Incremental Natural Language Understanding with a Two-Pass Model

Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis (ACSA) is one of the main subtasks of sentiment analysis, which aims at predicting polarity over a given aspect category. Recently, generative methods emerge as an efficient way to utilize a pre-trained language model for solving ACSA. However, those methods fail to model relations of target words and opinion words in a sentence including multiple aspects. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a method to incorporate Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), which describes semantic representation of a sentence as a directed graph, into a text generation model. Furthermore, two regularizers are designed to guide cross attention weights allocation over AMR graphs. One is the identical regularizer that constrains attention weights of aligned nodes, the other is the entropy regularizer that helps the decoder generate tokens by heavily considering only a few related nodes in the AMR graph. Experimental results on three datasets show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, proving the effectiveness of our model.

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