Singapore

Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation ($k$NN-MT) has achieved great success in domain adaptation tasks by integrating pre-trained Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models with domain-specific token-level retrieval. However, the reasons underlying its success have not been thoroughly investigated. 
In this paper, we comprehensively analyze $k$NN-MT through theoretical and empirical studies. Initially, we provide new insights into the working mechanism of $k$NN-MT as an efficient technique to implicitly execute gradient descent on the output projection layer of NMT, indicating that it is a specific case of model fine-tuning. Subsequently, we conduct multi-domain experiments and word-level analysis to examine the differences in performance between $k$NN-MT and entire-model fine-tuning. Our findings suggest that: ($i$) Incorporating $k$NN-MT with adapters yields comparable translation performance to fine-tuning on in-domain test sets, while achieving better performance on out-of-domain test sets; 
($ii$) Fine-tuning significantly outperforms $k$NN-MT on the recall of in-domain low-frequency words, but this gap could be bridged by optimizing the context representations with additional adapter layers.

EMNLP 2023

Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation is Meta-Optimizer on Output Projection Layer

knn-mt

domain adaptation

## 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.

poster

**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.

Text simplification systems rewrite text to make it more readable while preserving its content. However, what makes a text easy to read depends on the intended readers. Recent work has shown that pre-trained language models can simplify text using a wealth of techniques to control output simplicity, ranging from specifying only the desired reading grade level, to directly specifying low-level edit operations. Yet it remains unclear how to set these control parameters in practice. Existing approaches set them at the corpus level, disregarding the complexity of individual inputs and considering only one level of output complexity. In this work, we conduct an empirical study to understand how different control mechanisms impact the adequacy and simplicity of text simplification systems. Based on these insights, we introduce a simple method that predicts the edit operations required for simplifying a text for a specific grade level on an instance-per-instance basis. This approach improves the quality of the simplified outputs over corpus-level search-based heuristics.

Controlling Pre-trained Language Models for Grade-Specific Text Simplification

\textit{k}-nearest-neighbor machine translation has demonstrated remarkable improvements in machine translation quality by creating a datastore of cached examples. However, these improvements have been limited to high-resource language pairs, with large datastores, and remain a challenge for low-resource languages. In this paper, we address this issue by combining representations from multiple languages into a single datastore. Our results consistently demonstrate substantial improvements not only in low-resource translation quality (up to $+3.6$ BLEU), but also for high-resource translation quality (up to $+0.5$ BLEU). Our experiments show that it is possible to create multilingual datastores that are a quarter of the size, achieving a 5.3x speed improvement, by using linguistic similarities for datastore creation.\footnote{We will release our code upon acceptance.}

Multilingual k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation | VIDEO

Sharing knowledge between information extraction tasks has always been a challenge due to the diverse data formats and task variations.
Meanwhile, this divergence leads to information waste and increases difficulties in building complex applications in real scenarios.
Recent studies often formulate IE tasks as a triplet extraction problem.
However, such a paradigm does not support multi-span and n-ary extraction, leading to weak versatility.
To this end, we reorganize IE problems into unified multi-slot tuples and propose a universal framework for various IE tasks, namely Mirror.
Specifically, we recast existing IE tasks as a multi-span cyclic graph extraction problem and devise a non-autoregressive graph decoding algorithm to extract all spans in a single step.
It is worth noting that this graph structure is incredibly versatile, and it supports not only complex IE tasks, but also machine reading comprehension and classification tasks.
We manually construct a corpus containing 57 datasets for model pretraining, and conduct experiments on 30 datasets across 8 downstream tasks.
The experimental results demonstrate that our model has decent compatibility and outperforms or reaches competitive performance with SOTA systems under few-shot and zero-shot settings.
The code, model weights, and pretraining corpus are available at https://github.com/Spico197/Mirror .

Mirror: A Universal Framework for Various Information Extraction Tasks

We explore the possibility of improving probabilistic models in structured prediction. Specifically, we combine the models with constrained decoding approaches in the context of token classification for information extraction. The decoding methods search for constraint-satisfying label-assignments while maximizing the total probability. To do this, we evaluate several existing approaches, as well as propose a novel decoding method called Lazy-$k$. Our findings demonstrate that constrained decoding approaches can significantly improve the models' performances, especially when using smaller models. The Lazy-$k$ approach allows for more flexibility between decoding time and accuracy. The code for using Lazy-$k$ decoding can be found at https://github.com/ArthurDevNL/lazyk.

Lazy-k Decoding: Constrained Decoding for Information Extraction

Machine translation (MT) quality estimation (QE) is a crucial task to estimate the quality of MT outputs when reference translations are unavailable. Many studies focus on generating pseudo data using large parallel corpus and achieve remarkable success in the supervised setting. However, pseudo data solutions are less satisfying in unsupervised scenarios because the pseudo labels are inaccurate or the pseudo translations differ from the real ones. To address these problems, we propose to generate pseudo data using the MT model with constrained beam search (CBSQE). CBSQE preserves the reference parts with high MT probabilities as correct translations, while the rest parts as the wrong ones for MT generation. Therefore, CBSQE can reduce the false negative labels caused by synonyms. Overall, beam search will prefer a more real hypothesis with a higher MT generation likelihood. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CBSQE outperforms strong baselines in both supervised and unsupervised settings. Analyses further show the superiority of CBSQE. The code is available at https://github.com/NJUNLP/njuqe.

Improved Pseudo Data for Machine Translation Quality Estimation with Constrained Beam Search | VIDEO

Transformer-based language models (LMs) are powerful and widely-applicable tools, but their usefulness is constrained by a finite context window and the expensive computational cost of processing long text documents. We propose to adapt pre-trained LMs into AutoCompressors. These language models are capable of compressing long contexts into summary vectors, which are then accessible to the model as soft prompts. Summary vectors are trained with an unsupervised objective, whereby long documents are processed in segments, and summary vectors from all previous segments are used in language modeling. We fine-tune OPT and Llama-2 models on sequences of up to 30,720 tokens and show that AutoCompressors can utilize long contexts to improve perplexity. We evaluate AutoCompressors on in-context learning by compressing task demonstrations and find that summary vectors are good substitutes for plain-text demonstrations, increasing accuracy while reducing inference costs. Finally, we explore the benefits of pre-computing summary vectors for large corpora by applying summary vectors to retrieval-augmented language modeling and a passage re-ranking task.
Overall, AutoCompressors emerge as a simple and inexpensive solution to extend the context window of LMs while speeding up inference over long contexts.

Adapting Language Models to Compress Contexts

We propose task-adaptive tokenization\footnote{Our work will be publicly available upon acceptance.} as a way to adapt the generation pipeline to the specifics of a downstream task and enhance long-form generation in mental health. Inspired by insights from cognitive science, our task-adaptive tokenizer samples variable segmentations from multiple outcomes, with sampling probabilities optimized based on task-specific data. We introduce a strategy for building a specialized vocabulary and introduce a vocabulary merging protocol that allows for the integration of task-specific tokens into the pre-trained model's tokenization step. 
Through extensive experiments on psychological question-answering tasks in both Chinese and English, we find that our task-adaptive tokenization approach brings a significant improvement in generation performance while using up to 60\% fewer tokens. 
Preliminary experiments point to promising results when using our tokenization approach with very large language models.

Task-Adaptive Tokenization: Enhancing Long-Form Text Generation Efficacy in Mental Health and Beyond

Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT) facilitates knowledge sharing but often suffers from poor zero-shot (ZS) translation qualities. While prior work has explored the causes of overall low zero-shot translation qualities, our work introduces a fresh perspective: the presence of significant variations in zero-shot performance. This suggests that MNMT does not uniformly exhibit poor zero-shot capability; instead, certain translation directions yield reasonable results. Through systematic experimentation, spanning 1,560 language directions across 40 languages, we identify three key factors contributing to high variations in ZS NMT performance: 1) target-side translation quality, 2) vocabulary overlap, and 3) linguistic properties. Our findings highlight that the target side translation quality is the most influential factor, with vocabulary overlap consistently impacting zero-shot capabilities. Additionally, linguistic properties, such as language family and writing system, play a role, particularly with smaller models. Furthermore, we suggest that the off-target issue is a symptom of inadequate performance, emphasizing that zero-shot translation challenges extend beyond addressing the off-target problem. To support future research, we release the data and models as a benchmark for the study of ZS NMT.

Towards a Better Understanding of Variations in Zero-Shot Neural Machine Translation Performance

With the rise of powerful closed-sourced LLMs (ChatGPT, GPT-4), there are increasing interests in distilling the capabilies of close-sourced LLMs to smaller open-sourced LLMs. Previous distillation methods usually prompt ChatGPT to generate a set of instructions and answers, for the student model to learn. However, such standard distillation approach neglects the merits and conditions of the student model. Inspired by modern teaching principles, we design a personalised distillation process, in which the student attempts to solve a task first, then the teacher provides an adaptive refinement for the student to improve. Instead of feeding the student with teacher's prior, personalised distillation enables personalised learning for the student model, as it only learns on examples it makes mistakes upon and learns to improve its own solution. On code generation, personalised distillation consistently outperforms standard distillation with only one third of the data. With only 2.5-3K personalised examples that incur a data-collection cost of 4-6\$, we boost CodeGen-mono-16B by 7\% to achieve 36.4\% pass@1 and StarCoder by 12.2\% to achieve 45.8\% pass@1 on HumanEval.\footnote{We will release our models and codes upon acceptance}

Personalized Distillation: Empowering Open-Sourced LLMs with Adaptive Learning for Code Generation | VIDEO

Propaganda is a form of communication intended to influence the opinions and the mindset of the public to promote a particular agenda. With the rise of social media, propaganda has spread rapidly, leading to the need for automatic propaganda detection systems. Most work on propaganda detection has focused on high-resource languages, such as English, and little effort has been made to detect propaganda for low-resource languages. Yet, it is common to find a mix of multiple languages in social media communication, a phenomenon known as code-switching. Code-switching combines different languages within the same text, which poses a challenge for automatic systems. Considering this premise, we propose a novel task of detecting propaganda techniques in code-switched text. To support this task, we create a corpus of 1,030 texts code-switching between English and Roman Urdu, annotated with 20 propaganda techniques at fragment-level. We perform a number of experiments contrasting different experimental setups, and we find that it is important to model the multilinguality directly rather than using translation as well as to use the right fine-tuning strategy. We plan to publicly release our code and dataset.

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Next from EMNLP 2023

Controlling Pre-trained Language Models for Grade-Specific Text Simplification

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