Singapore

Sentence-level translation, document-level translation, translation memory, and terminology constrained translation play an important role in machine translation. Most of the previous work uses separate models or methods to solve these tasks, which is not conducive to knowledge transfer of different tasks and increases the complexity of system construction. In this work, we explore the potential of pre-trained language model in machine translation tasks and propose a Multi-Task Machine Translation (MT2) model to integrate these translation tasks. We design a novel translation-specific In-Context Learning (ICL) paradigm for model training, in which all of the translation tasks can be modeled as context-learning tasks that integrate contextual information for performance improvement. Specifically, we propose a retrieval and alignment method to obtain a large scale context-enhancement training data, then we train the model in an in-context learning manner. Furthermore, we adopt two context-dependent training strategies to encourage the model to better understand and utilize contextual information for translation.
Extensive experiments on translation memory, terminology constrained translation, document-level translation, and few-shot domain-adaptation tasks demonstrate the superior performance of our model, verifying the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

EMNLP 2023

MT2: Towards a Multi-Task Machine Translation Model with Translation-Specific In-Context Learning

in-context learning

machine translation

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

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.

Multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) offers the convenience of translating between multiple languages with a single model. However, MNMT often suffers from performance degradation in high-resource languages compared to bilingual counterparts. This degradation is commonly attributed to parameter interference, which occurs when parameters are fully shared across all language pairs. In this work, to tackle this issue we propose a gradient-based gradual pruning technique for MNMT. Our approach aims to identify an optimal sub-network for each language pair within the multilingual model by leveraging gradient-based information as pruning criterion and gradually increasing the pruning ratio as schedule. Our approach allows for partial parameter sharing across language pairs to alleviate interference, and each pair preserves its unique parameters to capture language-specific information. Comprehensive experiments on IWSLT and WMT datasets show that our approach yields a notable performance gain on both datasets.

Gradient-based Gradual Pruning for Language-Specific Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

Document-level NER approaches use global information via word-based key-value memory for accurate and consistent predictions. However, such global information on word level can introduce noise when the same word appears in different token sequences and has different labels. This work proposes a two-stage document-level NER model, ScdNER, for more accurate and consistent predictions via adaptive span-level global feature fusion. In the first stage, ScdNER trains a binary classifier to predict if a token sequence is an entity with a probability. Via a span-based key-value memory, the probabilities are further used to obtain the entity's global features with reduced impact of non-entity sequences. The second stage predicts the entity types using a gate mechanism to balance its local and global information, leading to adaptive global feature fusion. Experiments on benchmark datasets from scientific, biomedical, and general domains show the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

ScdNER: Span-Based Consistency-Aware Document-Level Named Entity Recognition

Large Language Models (LLMs) make natural interfaces to factual knowledge, but their usefulness is limited by their tendency to deliver inconsistent answers to semantically equivalent questions. For example, a model might supply the answer "Edinburgh" to "Anne Redpath passed away in X." and "London" to "Anne Redpath's life ended in X.". 
In this work, we identify potential causes of inconsistency and evaluate the effectiveness of two mitigation strategies: up-scaling and augmenting the LM with a passage retrieval database. Our results on the LLaMA and Atlas models show that both strategies reduce inconsistency but that retrieval augmentation is considerably more efficient. We further consider and disentangle the consistency contributions of different components of Atlas. For all LMs evaluated we find that syntactical form and task artifacts impact consistency. Taken together, our results provide a better understanding of the factors affecting the factual consistency of language models.

The Effect of Scaling, Retrieval Augmentation and Form on the Factual Consistency of Language Models | VIDEO

Recently, there has been an increased emphasis on assessing the quality of natural language arguments. Existing approaches primarily focus on evaluating the quality of individual argument posts. However, they often fall short when it comes to effectively distinguishing arguments that possess a narrow quality margin. To address this limitation, this paper delves into two alternative methods for modeling the relative quality of different arguments. These approaches include: 1) Supervised contrastive learning that captures the intricate interactions between arguments. By incorporating this approach, we aim to enhance the assessment of argument quality by effectively distinguishing between arguments with subtle differences in quality. 2) Large language models (LLMs) with in-context examples that harness the power of LLMs and enrich them with in-context examples. Through extensive evaluation and analysis on the publicly available IBM-Rank-30k dataset, we demonstrate the superiority of our contrastive argument quality assessment approach over state-of-the-art baselines. On the other hand, while LLMs with in-context examples showcase a commendable ability to identify high-quality argument posts, they exhibit relatively limited efficacy in discerning between argument posts with a narrow quality gap.

Contextual Interaction for Argument Post Quality Assessment | VIDEO

Online social platforms provide a bustling arena for information-sharing and for multi-party discussions. Various frameworks for dialogic discourse parsing were developed and used for the processing of discussions and for predicting the productivity of a dialogue. However, most of these frameworks are not suitable for the analysis of contentious discussions that are commonplace in many online platforms. A novel multi-label scheme for contentious dialog parsing was recently introduced by Zakharov et al. (2021). While the schema is well developed, the computational approach they provide is both naive and inefficient, as a different model (architecture) using a different representation of the input, is trained for each of the 31 tags in the annotation scheme. Moreover, all their models assume full knowledge of label collocations and context, which is unlikely in any realistic setting. 

In this work, we present a unified model for Non-Convergent Discourse Parsing that does not require any additional input other than the previous dialog utterances. We fine-tuned a RoBERTa backbone, combining embeddings of the utterance, the context and the labels through GRN layers and an asymmetric loss function.
Overall, our model achieves results comparable with SOTA, without using label collocation and without training a unique architecture/model for each label. Our proposed architecture makes the labeling feasible at large scale, promoting the development of tools that deepen our understanding of discourse dynamics.

A Deeper (Autoregressive) Approach to Non-Convergent Discourse Parsing

Temporal data distribution shift is prevalent in the financial text. How can a financial sentiment analysis system be trained in a volatile market environment that can accurately infer sentiment and be robust to temporal data distribution shifts? In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on the financial sentiment analysis system under temporal data distribution shifts using a real-world financial social media dataset that spans three years. We find that the fine-tuned models suffer from general performance degradation in the presence of temporal distribution shifts. Furthermore, motivated by the unique temporal nature of the financial text, we propose a novel method that combines out-of-distribution detection with time series modeling for temporal financial sentiment analysis. Experimental results show that the proposed method enhances the model's capability to adapt to evolving temporal shifts in a volatile financial market.

Predict the Future from the Past? On the Temporal Data Distribution Shift in Financial Sentiment Classifications | VIDEO

Modeling hypernym-hyponym ("is-a") relations is very important for many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as classification, natural language inference and relation extraction. Existing work on is-a relation extraction is mostly in the English language environment. Due to the flexibility of language expression and the lack of high-quality Chinese annotation datasets, it is still a challenge to accurately identify such relations from Chinese unstructured texts. To tackle this problem, we propose a Knowledge Enhanced Prompt Learning (KEPL) method for Chinese hypernym-hyponym relation extraction. Our model uses the Hearst-like patterns as the prior knowledge. By exploiting a Dynamic Adaptor Architecture to select the matching pattern for the text into prompt, our model embeds patterns and text simultaneously. Additionally, we construct a Chinese hypernym-hyponym relation extraction dataset, which contains three typical scenarios, as baike, news and We-media. The experimental results on the dataset demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed model.

KEPL: Knowledge Enhanced Prompt Learning for Chinese Hypernym-Hyponym Extraction

Multilingual biomedical entity linking (MBEL) aims to map language-specific mentions in the biomedical text to standardized concepts in a multilingual knowledge base (KB) such as Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). In this paper, we propose Con2GEN, a prompt-based controllable contrastive generation framework for MBEL, which summarizes multidimensional information of the UMLS concept mentioned in biomedical text into a natural sentence following a predefined template. Instead of tackling the MBEL problem with a discriminative classifier, we formulate it as a sequence-to-sequence generation task, which better exploits the shared dependencies between source mentions and target entities. Moreover, Con2GEN matches against UMLS concepts in as many languages and types as possible, hence facilitating cross-information disambiguation. Extensive experiments show that our model achieves promising performance improvements compared with several state-of-the-art techniques on the XL-BEL and the Mantra GSC datasets spanning 12 typologically diverse languages.

Controllable Contrastive Generation for Multilingual Biomedical Entity Linking

Many annotation tasks in natural language processing are highly subjective in that there can be different valid and justified perspectives on what is a proper label for a given example.
This also applies to the judgment of argument quality, where the assignment of a single ground truth is often questionable.
At the same time, there are generally accepted concepts behind argumentation that form a common ground.
To best represent the interplay of individual and shared perspectives, we consider a continuum of approaches ranging from models that fully aggregate perspectives into a majority label to ``share nothing''-architectures in which each annotator is considered in isolation from all other annotators. 
In between these extremes, inspired by models used in the field of recommender systems, we investigate the extent to which architectures that predict labels for single annotators but include layers that model the relations between different annotators are beneficial.
By means of two tasks of argument quality classification (argument concreteness and validity/novelty of conclusions), we show that recommender architectures increase the averaged annotator-individual F1-scores up to 43% over a majority-label model.
Our findings indicate that approaches to subjectivity can benefit from relating individual perspectives.

Architectural Sweet Spots for Modeling Human Label Variation by the Example of Argument Quality: It’s Best to Relate Perspectives!

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased impressive performance. However, due to their inability to capture relationships among samples, these frozen LLMs inevitably keep repeating similar mistakes. In this work, we propose our Tuning-free Rule Accumulation (TRAN) framework, which guides LLMs in improving their performance by learning from previous mistakes. Considering data arrives sequentially, LLMs gradually accumulate rules from incorrect cases, forming a rule collection. These rules are then utilized by the LLMs to avoid making similar mistakes when processing subsequent inputs. Moreover, the rules remain independent of the primary prompts, seamlessly complementing prompt design strategies. Experimentally, we show that TRAN improves over recent baselines by a large margin.

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Next from EMNLP 2023

Gradient-based Gradual Pruning for Language-Specific Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

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