Singapore

Dementia is associated with language disorders which impede communication. Here, we automatically learn linguistic disorder patterns by making use of a moderately-sized pre-trained language model and forcing it to focus on reformulated natural language processing (NLP) tasks and associated linguistic patterns. Our experiments show that NLP tasks that encapsulate contextual information and enhance the gradient signal with linguistic patterns benefit performance. We then use the probability estimates from the best model to construct digital linguistic markers measuring the overall quality in communication and the intensity of a variety of language disorders. We investigate how the digital markers characterize dementia speech from a longitudinal perspective. We find that our proposed communication marker is able to robustly and reliably characterize the language of people with dementia, outperforming existing linguistic approaches; and shows external validity via significant correlation with clinical markers of behaviour. Finally, our proposed linguistic disorder markers provide useful insights into gradual language impairment associated with disease progression.

EMNLP 2023

Reformulating NLP tasks to Capture Longitudinal Manifestation of Language Disorders in People with Dementia.

reformulated nlp tasks; language disorder patterns; monitoring dementia

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

technical paper

Despite the success of spoken language understanding (SLU) in high-resource languages, achieving similar performance in low-resource settings, such as zero-shot scenarios, remains challenging due to limited labeled training data. To improve zero-shot cross-lingual SLU, recent studies have explored code-switched sentences containing tokens from multiple languages. However, vanilla code-switched sentences often lack semantic and grammatical coherence. We ascribe this lack to two issues: (1) randomly replacing code-switched tokens with equal probability and (2) disregarding token-level dependency within each language. To tackle these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel method termed SoGo, for zero-shot cross-lingual SLU. First, we use a saliency-based substitution approach to extract keywords as substitution options. Then, we introduce a novel token-level alignment strategy that considers the similarity between the context and the code-switched tokens, ensuring grammatical coherence in code-switched sentences. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate the superior performance of SoGo across nine languages on MultiATIS++.

Enhancing Code-Switching for Cross-lingual SLU: A Unified View of Semantic and Grammatical Coherence | VIDEO

Coherence is a linguistic term that refers to the relations between small textual units (sentences, propositions), which make the text logically consistent and meaningful to the reader. With the advances of generative foundational models in NLP, there is a pressing need to automatically assess the human-perceived coherence of automatically generated texts.
Up until now, little work has been done on explicitly assessing the coherence of generated texts and analyzing the factors contributing to (in)coherence. 
Previous work on the topic used other tasks, e.g., sentence reordering, as proxies of coherence, rather than approaching coherence detection heads on. In this paper, we introduce {\sc CoheSentia}, a novel benchmark of human-perceived coherence of automatically generated texts. 
Our annotation protocol reflects two perspectives; one is global, assigning a single coherence score, and the other is incremental, scoring sentence by sentence. The incremental method produces an (in)coherence score for each text fragment and also pinpoints reasons for incoherence at that point. Our benchmark contains 500 automatically-generated and human-annotated paragraphs, each annotated in both methods, by multiple raters. Our analysis shows that the inter-annotator agreement in the incremental mode is higher than in the holistic alternative, and our experiments show that standard LMs fine-tuned for coherence detection show varied performance on the different factors contributing to (in)coherence. All in all, these models yield unsatisfactory performance, emphasizing the need for developing more reliable methods for coherence assessment.

COHESENTIA: A Novel Benchmark of Incremental versus Holistic Assessment of Coherence in Generated Texts

Today's language models can be remarkably intelligent yet still produce text that contains trivial commonsense errors. Therefore, we seek a retrospective verification approach that can reflect on the commonsense plausibility of the machine text, and introduce Vera, a general-purpose model that learns to estimate the commonsense plausibility of declarative statements. To support diverse commonsense domains, 
Vera is trained on $\sim$7M commonsense statements that are automatically converted from 19 QA datasets and two commonsense knowledge bases, and using a combination of three training objectives. When applied to solving commonsense problems in the verification format, Vera substantially outperforms existing models that can be repurposed for commonsense verification, even including GPT-3.5/ChatGPT/GPT-4, and it further exhibits generalization capabilities to unseen tasks and provides well-calibrated outputs. We find that Vera excels at filtering machine-generated commonsense knowledge and is useful in detecting erroneous commonsense statements generated by models like ChatGPT in real-world settings.

Vera: A General-Purpose Plausibility Estimation Model for Commonsense Statements

Fine-tuning pretrained language models on helpful intermediate tasks often greatly improves the performance of target tasks. However, how to efficiently find the source tasks that can successfully transfer still remains under-explored. In this work, we propose to learn an affinity scoring function to predict transferability between tasks. Specifically, we conduct prompt tuning and regard soft prompts as task embeddings that summarize task-specific information. Then we randomly sample task pairs to train an affinity scoring function. The goal is to predict the transfer gain (i.e., affinity) between a task pair, by conditioning on their task embeddings. Once the scoring function is trained, given a novel target task, we use it to predict the most transferable source tasks, without a brute-force search for all possible source-target pairs. Experimental results across 50 tasks show that our method efficiently identifies beneficial tasks for transfer learning.

Learning to Predict Task Transferability via Soft Prompt

The technology of text-to-SQL has significantly enhanced the efficiency of accessing and manipulating databases.
However, limited research has been conducted to study its vulnerabilities emerging from malicious user interaction. 
By proposing TrojanSQL, a backdoor-based SQL injection framework for text-to-SQL systems,
we show how state-of-the-art text-to-SQL parsers can be easily misled to produce harmful SQL statements
that can invalidate user queries or compromise sensitive information about the database.
The study explores two specific injection attacks, namely $\textit{boolean-based injection}$ and $\textit{union-based injection}$,
which use different types of triggers to achieve distinct goals in compromising the parser.
Experimental results demonstrate that both medium-sized models based on fine-tuning and
LLM-based parsers using prompting techniques are vulnerable to this type of attack,
with attack success rates as high as 99\% and 89\%, respectively.
We hope that this study will raise more concerns about the potential security risks of building natural language interfaces to databases.

TrojanSQL: SQL Injection against Natural Language Interface to Database

Phonological reconstruction is one of the central problems in historical linguistics where a proto-word of an ancestral language is determined from the observed cognate words of daughter languages. Computational approaches to historical linguistics attempt to automate the task by learning models on available linguistic data. Several ideas and techniques drawn from computational biology have been successfully applied in this area of computational historical linguistics. Following these lines, we adapt MSA Transformer, a protein language model, to the problem of automated phonological reconstruction. MSA Transformer trains on multiple sequence alignments as input and is, thus, apt for application on aligned cognate words. We, hence, name our model as Cognate Transformer. We also apply the model on another associated task, namely, cognate reflex prediction where a reflex word in a daughter language is predicted based on cognate words from other daughter languages. We show that our model outperforms the existing models on both the tasks, especially when it is pre-trained on masked word prediction task.

Cognate Transformer for Automated Phonological Reconstruction and Cognate Reflex Prediction | VIDEO

State-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) still have limited performance in structural knowledge extraction, such as relations between objects. In this work, we present ViStruct, a training framework to learn VLMs for effective visual structural knowledge extraction. Two novel designs are incorporated. First, we propose to leverage the inherent structure of programming language to depict visual structural information. This approach enables explicit and consistent representation of visual structural information of multiple granularities, such as concepts, relations, and events, in a well-organized structured format. Second, we introduce curriculum-based learning for VLMs to progressively comprehend visual structures, from fundamental visual concepts to intricate event structures. Our intuition is that lower-level knowledge may contribute to complex visual structure understanding. Furthermore, we compile and release a collection of datasets tailored for visual structural knowledge extraction. We adopt a weakly-supervised approach to directly generate visual event structures from captions for ViStruct training, capitalizing on abundant image-caption pairs from the web. In experiments, we evaluate ViStruct on visual structure prediction tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving the understanding of visual structures. The code will be made public to facilitate future research.

ViStruct: Visual Structural Knowledge Extraction via Curriculum Guided Code-Vision Representation

We are interested in image manipulation via natural language text -- a task that is useful for multiple AI applications but requires complex reasoning over multi-modal spaces. We extend recently proposed Neuro Symbolic Concept Learning (NSCL), which has been quite effective for the task of Visual Question Answering (VQA), for the task of image manipulation. Our system referred to as NeuroSIM can perform complex multi-hop reasoning over multi-object scenes and only requires weak supervision in the form of annotated data for VQA. NeuroSIM parses an instruction into a symbolic program, based on a Domain Specific Language (DSL) comprising of object attributes and manipulation operations, that guides its execution. We create a new dataset for the task, and extensive experiments demonstrate that NeuroSIM is highly competitive with or beats SOTA baselines that make use of supervised data for manipulation.

Image Manipulation via Multi-Hop Instructions - A New Dataset and Weakly-Supervised Neuro-Symbolic Approach

We present Spacerini, a tool that integrates the Pyserini toolkit for reproducible information retrieval research with Hugging Face to enable the seamless construction and deployment of interactive search engines. Spacerini makes state-of-the-art sparse and dense retrieval models more accessible to non-IR practitioners while minimizing deployment effort. This is useful for NLP researchers who want to better understand and validate their research by performing qualitative analyses of training corpora, for IR researchers who want to demonstrate new retrieval models integrated into the growing Pyserini ecosystem, and for third parties reproducing the work of other researchers. Spacerini is open source and includes utilities for loading, preprocessing, indexing, and deploying search engines locally and remotely. We demonstrate a portfolio of 13 search engines created with Spacerini for different use cases.

Spacerini: Plug-and-play Search Engines with Pyserini and Hugging Face | VIDEO

We introduce Adapters, an open-source library
that unifies parameter-efficient and modular
transfer learning in large language models. By
integrating 10 diverse adapter methods into
a unified interface, Adapters offers ease of
use and flexible configuration. Our library
allows researchers and practitioners to lever-
age adapter modularity through composition
blocks, enabling the design of complex adapter
setups. We demonstrate the library's efficacy
by evaluating its performance against full fine-
tuning on various NLP tasks. Adapters pro-
vides a powerful tool for addressing the chal-
lenges of conventional fine-tuning paradigms
and promoting more efficient and modular
transfer learning. The library is available via
https://adapterhub.ml/adapters.

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Enhancing Code-Switching for Cross-lingual SLU: A Unified View of Semantic and Grammatical Coherence | VIDEO

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Next from EMNLP 2023

Enhancing Code-Switching for Cross-lingual SLU: A Unified View of Semantic and Grammatical Coherence | VIDEO

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A Digital Language Coherence Marker for Monitoring Dementia

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