Canada

With the fast-growing popularity of current large pre-trained language models (LLMs), it is necessary to dedicate efforts to making them more reliable. In this thesis proposal, we aim to improve the reliability of natural language generation systems (NLG) by researching the semantic accuracy of their outputs. We look at this problem from the outside (evaluation) and from the inside (interpretability). We propose a novel method for evaluating semantic accuracy and discuss the importance of working towards a unified and objective benchmark for NLG metrics. We also review interpretability approaches which could help us pinpoint the sources of inaccuracies within the models and explore potential mitigation strategies.

ACL 2023

Semantic Accuracy in Natural Language Generation: A Thesis Proposal

interpretability

natural language generation

evaluation

## 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)<br><br><br>

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

Please register!

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 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.

Misinformation poses a critical societal challenge, and current approaches have yet to produce an effective solution. We propose focusing on generalization, soft classification, and leveraging recent large language models to create more practical tools in contexts where perfect predictions remain unattainable. We begin by demonstrating that GPT-4 and other language models can outperform existing methods in the literature. Next, we explore their generalization, revealing that GPT-4 and RoBERTa-large exhibit critical differences in failure modes, which offer potential for significant performance improvements. Finally, we show that these models can be employed in soft classification frameworks to better quantify uncertainty. We discover that models with inferior hard classification results can achieve superior soft classification performance. Overall, our research lays the groundwork for future tools that can drive real-world progress on misinformation.

Towards Reliable Misinformation Mitigation: Generalization, Uncertainty, and GPT-4

The field of Question Answering (QA) has made remarkable progress in recent years, thanks to the advent of large pre-trained language models, newer realistic benchmark datasets with leaderboards, and novel algorithms for key components such as retrievers and readers. In this paper, we introduce PrimeQA: a one-stop and open-source QA repository with an aim to democratize QA research and facilitate easy replication of state-of-the-art (SOTA) QA methods. PrimeQA supports core QA functionalities like retrieval and reading comprehension as well as auxiliary capabilities such as question generation. It has been designed as an end-to-end toolkit for various use cases: building front-end applications, replicating SOTA methods on public benchmarks, and expanding pre-existing methods. PrimeQA is available at: https://github.com/primeqa.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/qQ87ZDnDYN6cfmCQWHFaok/embed/polls/19187add-566c-4a9f-a3f7-758e44d4899e" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

PrimeQA: The Prime Repository for State-of-the-Art Multilingual Question Answering Research and Development

Generating questions along with associated answers from a text has applications in several domains, such as creating reading comprehension tests for students, or improving document search by providing auxiliary questions and answers based on the query. Training models for question and answer generation (QAG) is not straightforward due to the expected structured output (i.e.\ a list of question and answer pairs), as it requires more than generating a single sentence. This results in a small number of publicly accessible QAG models. In this paper, we introduce AutoQG, an online service for multilingual QAG along with \texttt{lmqg}, an all-in-one python package for model fine-tuning, generation, and evaluation. We also release QAG models in eight languages fine-tuned on a few variants of pre-trained encoder-decoder language models, which can be used online via AutoQG or locally via \texttt{lmqg}. With these resources, practitioners of any level can benefit from a toolkit that includes a web interface for end users, and easy-to-use code for developers who require custom models or fine-grained controls for generation.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/qQ87ZDnDYN6cfmCQWHFaok/embed/polls/b042cd17-c648-4263-94f0-67b227b70567" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

A Practical Toolkit for Multilingual Question and Answer Generation

Systems that support users in the automatic creation of visualizations must address several subtasks - understand the semantics of data, enumerate relevant visualization goals and generate visualization specifications. In this work, we pose visualization generation as a multi-stage generation problem and argue that well-orchestrated pipelines based on large language models (LLMs) and image generation models (IGMs) are suitable to addressing these tasks. We present LIDA, a novel tool for generating grammar-agnostic visualizations and infographics. LIDA comprises of 4 modules - A SUMMARIZER that converts data into a rich but compact natural language summary, a GOAL EXPLORER that enumerates visualization goals given the data, a VISGENERATOR that generates, refines, executes and filters visualization code and an INFOGRAPHER module that yields data-faithful stylized graphics using IGMs. LIDA provides a python api, and a hybrid user interface (direct manipulation and multilingual natural language) for interactive chart, infographics and data story generation. 
Code and demo are available at this url - https://microsoft.github.io/lida/

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/qQ87ZDnDYN6cfmCQWHFaok/embed/polls/17a303e5-35b4-41d7-beae-ba0efec8e80a" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

LIDA: A Tool for Automatic Generation of Grammar-Agnostic Visualizations and Infographics using Large Language Models

NLP models are susceptible to learning spurious biases (i.e., bugs) that work on some datasets but do not properly reflect the underlying task. Explanation-based model debugging aims to resolve spurious biases by showing human users explanations of model behavior, asking users to give feedback on the behavior, then
using the feedback to update the model. While existing model debugging methods have shown promise, their prototype-level implementations provide limited practical utility. Thus, we propose XMD: the first open-source, end-to-end framework for explanation-based model debugging. Given task- or instance-level explanations,
users can flexibly provide various forms of feedback via an intuitive, web-based UI. After receiving user feedback, XMD automatically updates the model in real time, by regularizing the model so that its explanations
align with the user feedback. The new model can then be easily deployed into real-world applications via Hugging Face. Using XMD, we can improve the model's OOD performance on text classification tasks by up to 18%.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/qQ87ZDnDYN6cfmCQWHFaok/embed/polls/b3ebfc9e-64d7-4657-b2c0-7d088055d0b2" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

XMD: An End-to-End Framework for Interactive Explanation-Based Debugging of NLP Models

The OPUS-MT dashboard is a web-based platform that provides a comprehensive overview of open translation models. We focus on a systematic collection of benchmark results with verifiable translation performance and large coverage in terms of languages and domains. We provide results for in-house OPUS-MT and Tatoeba models as well as external models from the Huggingface repository and user-contributed translations. The functionalities of the evaluation tool include summaries of benchmarks for over 2,300 models covering 4,560 language directions and 294 languages, as well as the inspection of predicted translations against their human reference. We focus on centralization, reproducibility and coverage of MT evaluation combined with scalability. The dashboard can be accessed live at https://opus.nlpl.eu/dashboard/.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/qQ87ZDnDYN6cfmCQWHFaok/embed/polls/e345c808-5eeb-4212-a62a-78a4b7aa47ce" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

The OPUS-MT Dashboard – A Toolkit for a Systematic Evaluation of Open Machine Translation Models

Many NLP tasks benefit from using large language models (LLMs) that often have more than 100 billion parameters. With the release of BLOOM-176B and OPT-175B, everyone can download pretrained models of this scale. Still, using these models requires high-end hardware unavailable to many researchers. In some cases, LLMs can be used more affordably via RAM offloading or hosted APIs. However, these techniques have innate limitations: offloading is too slow for interactive inference, while APIs are not flexible enough for research that requires access to weights, attention or logits. In this work, we propose Petals - a system for inference and fine-tuning of large models collaboratively by joining the resources of multiple parties. We demonstrate that this strategy outperforms offloading for very large models, running inference of BLOOM-176B on consumer GPUs with ≈1 step per second, which is enough for many interactive LLM applications. Unlike most inference APIs, Petals also natively exposes hidden states of served models, allowing to train and share custom model extensions based on efficient fine-tuning methods. The system, its source code, and documentation are available at https://petals.ml

Video (2 min): https://youtu.be/F4muLI-0hTE

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/qQ87ZDnDYN6cfmCQWHFaok/embed/polls/699811d2-7bf9-46d2-8a95-068ed217c68c" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Petals: Collaborative Inference and Fine-tuning of Large Models

The continuous development of Question Answering (QA) datasets has drawn the research community's attention toward multi-domain models. A popular approach is to use multi-dataset models, which are models trained on multiple datasets to learn their regularities and prevent overfitting to a single dataset. However, with the proliferation of QA models in online repositories such as GitHub or Hugging Face, an alternative is becoming viable. Recent works have demonstrated that combining expert agents can yield large performance gains over multi-dataset models. To ease research in multi-agent models, we extend UKP-SQuARE, an online platform for QA research, to support three families of multi-agent systems: i) agent selection, ii) early-fusion of agents, and iii) late-fusion of agents. We conduct experiments to evaluate their inference speed and discuss the performance vs. speed trade-off compared to multi-dataset models. UKP-SQuARE is open-source and publicly available.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/qQ87ZDnDYN6cfmCQWHFaok/embed/polls/67cacc96-789b-4201-95bf-332ba5c5fe43" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

UKP-SQuARE v3: A Platform for Multi-Agent QA Research

Natural Language Inference (NLI) and Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) are widely used benchmark tasks for compositional evaluation of pre-trained language models. Despite growing interest in linguistic universals, most NLI/STS studies have focused almost exclusively on English. In particular, there are no available multilingual NLI/STS datasets in Japanese, which is typologically different from English and can shed light on the currently controversial behavior of language models in matters such as sensitivity to word order and case particles. Against this background, we introduce JSICK, a Japanese NLI/STS dataset that was manually translated from the English dataset SICK. We also present a stress-test dataset for compositional inference, created by transforming syntactic structures of sentences in JSICK to investigate whether language models are sensitive to word order and case particles. We conduct baseline experiments on different pre-trained language models and compare the performance of multilingual models when applied to Japanese and other languages. The results of the stress-test experiments suggest that the current pre-trained language models are insensitive to word order and case marking.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/uyG7EHDP5trs2LHubv2Gj8/embed/polls/dc6be9b6-0c6a-4c7d-85a8-a4079d699082" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Compositional Evaluation on Japanese Textual Entailment and Similarity

Active learning can play an important role in low-resource settings (i.e., where annotated data is scarce), by selecting which instances may be more worthy to annotate. Most active learning approaches for Machine Translation assume the existence of a pool of sentences in a source language, and rely on human annotators to provide translations or post-edits, which can still be costly. In this article, we apply active learning to a real-world human-in-the-loop scenario in which we assume that: (1) the source sentences may not be readily available, but instead arrive in a stream; (2) the automatic translations receive feedback in the form of a rating, instead of a correct/edited translation, since the human-in-the-loop might be a user looking for a translation, but not be able to provide one. To tackle the challenge of deciding whether each incoming pair source–translations is worthy to query for human feedback, we resort to a number of stream-based active learning query strategies. Moreover, because we do not know in advance which query strategy will be the most adequate for a certain language pair and set of Machine Translation models, we propose to dynamically combine multiple strategies using prediction with expert advice. Our experiments on different language pairs and feedback settings show that using active learning allows us to converge on the best Machine Translation systems with fewer human interactions. Furthermore, combining multiple strategies using prediction with expert advice outperforms several individual active learning strategies with even fewer interactions, particularly in partial feedback settings.

Downloads

Next from ACL 2023

Towards Reliable Misinformation Mitigation: Generalization, Uncertainty, and GPT-4

Similar lecture

Leveraging Large Language Models for NLG Evaluation: Advances and Challenges

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from ACL 2023

Towards Reliable Misinformation Mitigation: Generalization, Uncertainty, and GPT-4

Similar lecture

Leveraging Large Language Models for NLG Evaluation: Advances and Challenges

Downloads