Singapore

The Retrieval Question Answering (ReQA) task employs the retrieval-augmented framework, composed of a retriever and generator. The generators formulate the answer based on the documents retrieved by the retriever. Incorporating Large Language Models (LLMs) as generators is beneficial due to their advanced QA capabilities, but they are typically too large to be fine-tuned with budget constraints while some of them are only accessible via APIs. To tackle this issue and further improve ReQA performance, we propose a trainable Pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter (PRCA), keeping the generator as a black box. Positioned between the retriever and generator in a Pluggable manner, PRCA refines the retrieved information by operating in a token-autoregressive strategy via maximizing rewards of the reinforcement learning phase. Our experiments validate PRCA&#39;s effectiveness in enhancing ReQA performance on three datasets by up to 20% improvement to fit black-box LLMs into existing frameworks, demonstrating its considerable potential in the LLMs era.

EMNLP 2023

PRCA: Fitting Black-Box Large Language Models for Retrieval Question Answering via Pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter

pluggable reward-driven contextual adapter

black-box llms

retrieval augmentation

retrieval question answering

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The Retrieval Question Answering (ReQA) task employs the retrieval-augmented framework, composed of a retriever and generator. The generators formulate the answer based on the documents retrieved by the retriever. Incorporating Large Language Models (LLMs) as generators is beneficial due to their advanced QA capabilities, but they are typically too large to be fine-tuned with budget constraints while some of them are only accessible via APIs. To tackle this issue and further improve ReQA performance, we propose a trainable Pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter (PRCA), keeping the generator as a black box. Positioned between the retriever and generator in a Pluggable manner, PRCA refines the retrieved information by operating in a token-autoregressive strategy via maximizing rewards of the reinforcement learning phase. Our experiments validate PRCA's effectiveness in enhancing ReQA performance on three datasets by up to 20% improvement to fit black-box LLMs into existing frameworks, demonstrating its considerable potential in the LLMs era.

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.

Fighting misinformation is a challenging, yet crucial, task. Despite the growing number of experts being involved in manual fact-checking, this activity is time-consuming and cannot keep up with the ever-increasing amount of Fake News produced daily. Hence, automating this process is necessary to help curb misinformation. Thus far, researchers have mainly focused on claim veracity classification. In this paper, instead, we address the generation of justifications (textual explanation of why a claim is classified as either true or false) and benchmark it with novel datasets and advanced baselines. In particular, we focus on summarization approaches over unstructured knowledge (i.e. news articles) and we experiment with several extractive and abstractive strategies. We employed two datasets with different styles and structures, in order to assess the generalizability of our findings. Results show that in justification production summarization benefits from the claim information, and, in particular, that a claim-driven extractive step improves abstractive summarization performances. Finally, we show that although cross-dataset experiments suffer from performance degradation, a unique model trained on a combination of the two datasets is able to retain style information in an efficient manner.

Benchmarking the Generation of Fact Checking Explanations | VIDEO

This paper introduces a novel task of detecting turning points in the engineering process of large-scale projects, wherein the turning points signify significant transitions occurring between phases. Given the complexities involving diverse critical events and limited comprehension in individual news reports, we approach the problem by treating the sequence of related news streams as a window with multiple instances. To capture the evolution of changes effectively, we adopt a deep Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) framework and employ the multiple instance ranking loss to discern the transition patterns exhibited in the turning point window. Extensive experiments consistently demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach on the constructed dataset compared to baseline methods. We deployed the proposed mode and provided a demonstration video to illustrate its functionality. The code and dataset are available on GitHub.

TP-Detector: Detecting Turning Points in the Engineering Process of Large-scale Projects | VIDEO

AI-empowered music processing is a diverse feld that encompasses dozens of tasks, ranging from generation tasks (e.g., timbre synthesis) to comprehension tasks (e.g., music classifcation). For developers and amateurs, it is very diffcult to grasp all of these task to satisfy their requirements in music processing, especially considering the huge differences in the representations of music data and the model applicability across platforms among various tasks. Consequently, it is necessary to build a system to organize and integrate these tasks, and thus help practitioners to automatically analyze their demand and call suitable tools as solutions to fulfill their requirements. 

Inspired by the recent success of large language models (LLMs) in task automation, we develop a system, named MusicAgent, which integrates numerous music-related tools and an autonomous workﬂow to address user requirements. More specifically, we build 1) toolset that collects tools from diverse sources, including Hugging Face, GitHub, and Web API, etc. 2) an autonomous workﬂow empowered by LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT) to organize these tools and automatically decompose user requests into multiple sub-tasks and invoke corresponding music tools. The primary goal of this system is to free users from the intricacies of AI-music tools, enabling them to concentrate on the creative aspect. By granting users the freedom to effortlessly combine tools, the system offers a seamless and enriching music experience. 

The code is available on GitHub along with a brief instructional video.

MusicAgent: An AI Agent for Music Understanding and Generation with Large Language Models

We present a novel system that automatically extracts and generates informative and descriptive sentences from the biomedical corpus and facilitates the efficient search for relational knowledge. Unlike previous search engines or exploration systems that retrieve unconnected passages, our system organizes descriptive sentences as a relational graph, enabling researchers to explore closely related biomedical entities (e.g., diseases treated by a chemical) or indirectly connected entities (e.g., potential drugs for treating a disease). Our system also uses ChatGPT and a fine-tuned relation synthesis model to generate concise and reliable descriptive sentences from retrieved information, reducing the need for extensive human reading effort. With our system, researchers can easily obtain both high-level knowledge and detailed references and interactively steer to the information of interest. We spotlight the application of our system in COVID-19 research, illustrating its utility in areas such as drug repurposing and literature curation.

Descriptive Knowledge Graph in Biomedical Domain

The unprecedented performance of large language models (LLMs) requires comprehensive and accurate evaluation. We argue that for LLMs evaluation, benchmarks need to be comprehensive and systematic. To this end, we propose the ZhuJiu benchmark, which has the following strengths: (1) Multi-dimensional ability coverage: We comprehensively evaluate LLMs across 7 ability dimensions covering 51 tasks. Especially, we also propose a new benchmark that focus on knowledge ability of LLMs. (2) Multi-faceted evaluation methods collaboration: We use 3 different yet complementary evaluation methods to comprehensively evaluate LLMs, which can ensure the authority and accuracy of the evaluation results. (3) Comprehensive Chinese benchmark: ZhuJiu is the pioneering benchmark that fully assesses LLMs
in Chinese, while also providing equally robust evaluation abilities in English. (4) Avoiding potential data leakage: To avoid data leakage, we construct evaluation data specifically for 37 tasks. We evaluate 10 current mainstream LLMs, and conduct an in-depth discussion and analysis of their results. The ZhuJiu benchmark and open-participation leaderboard are publicly released at http://www.zhujiu-benchmark.
com/ and we also provide a demo video at https://youtu.be/qypkJ89L1Ic.

ZhuJiu: A Multi-dimensional, Multi-faceted Chinese Benchmark for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly pivotal in a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Access to pre-trained models, courtesy of the open-source community, has made it possible to adapt these models to specific applications for enhanced performance. However, the substantial resources required for training these models necessitate efficient solutions. This paper introduces CoLLiE, an efficient library that facilitates collaborative training of large language models using 3D parallelism, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, and optimizers such as Lion, Adan, Sophia, and LOMO. With its modular design and comprehensive functionality, CoLLiE offers a balanced blend of efficiency, ease of use, and customization. CoLLiE has proven superior training efficiency in comparison with prevalent solutions in pre-training and fine-tuning scenarios. Furthermore, we provide an empirical evaluation of the correlation between model size and GPU memory consumption under different optimization methods, as well as an analysis of the throughput. Lastly, we carry out a comprehensive comparison of various optimizers and PEFT methods within the instruction-tuning context. CoLLiE is available at https://github.com/OpenLMLab/collie.

CoLLiE: Collaborative Training of Large Language Models in an Efficient Way

We present Video-LLaMA, a multi-modal framework that empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with the capability of understanding both visual and auditory content in the video. Video-LLaMA bootstraps cross-modal training from the frozen pre-trained visual & audio encoders and the frozen LLMs. Unlike previous works that complement LLMs to process the visual or audio signals only, Video-LLaMA enables video comprehension by tackling two challenges: (1) capturing the temporal changes in visual scenes, (2) integrating audio-visual signals. To counter the first challenge, we propose a Video Q-former to assemble a pre-trained image encoder into our video encoder and introduce a video-to-text generation task to learn video-language correspondence. For the second challenge, we leverage ImageBind, a universal embedding model aligning multiple modalities, as the pre-trained audio encoder and introduce an Audio Q-former on top of ImageBind to learn reasonable auditory query embeddings for the LLM module. To align the output of both visual \& audio encoders with LLM's embedding space, we first train Video-LLaMA on massive video/image-caption pairs and then tune our model with visual-instruction datasets of moderate amount but higher quality. We found Video-LLaMA shows the ability to perceive and comprehend video content and generate meaningful responses grounded in the visual and auditory information presented in the videos.

Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding

Current approaches for text summarization are predominantly automatic, with rather limited space for human intervention and control over the process.
In this paper, we introduce SummHelper,\footnote{System at \url{https://nlp.biu.ac.il/~niv.na/} and screencast demo at \url{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGcknJwGhxk}} a 2-phase summarization assistant designed to foster human-machine collaboration. 
The initial phase involves content selection, where the system recommends potential content, allowing users to accept, modify, or introduce additional selections. 
The subsequent phase, content consolidation, involves SummHelper generating a coherent summary from these selections, which users can then refine using visual mappings between the summary and the source text. 
Small-scale user studies reveal the effectiveness of our application, with participants being especially appreciative of the balance between automated guidance and opportunities for personal input.

SummHelper: Collaborative Human-Computer Summarization

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities to comprehend human intentions, engage in reasoning, and design planning-like behavior. To further unleash the power of LLMs to accomplish complex tasks, there is a growing trend to build agent frameworks that equips LLMs, such as ChatGPT, with tool-use abilities to connect with massive external APIs.

In this work, we introduce ModelScope-Agent, a general and customizable agent framework for real-world applications, based on open-source LLMs as controllers. It provides a user-friendly system library, with a customizable engine design to support model training on multiple open-source LLMs, while also enabling seamless integration with both model APIs and common APIs in a unified way. To equip the LLMs with tool-use abilities, a comprehensive framework has been proposed spanning tool-use data collection, tool retrieval, tool registration, memory control, customized model training, and evaluation for practical real-world applications. Finally, we showcase ModelScopeGPT\footnote{https://modelscope.cn/studios/damo/ModelscopeGPT}, a real-world intelligent assistant of ModelScope Community based on the \modelname framework, which is able to connect open-source LLMs with more than 1000 public AI models and localized community knowledge in ModelScope.
The \modelname online demo\footnote{https://modelscope.cn/studios/lcl193798/Modelscope-Agent}, library\footnote{https://github.com/modelscope/modelscope-agent} are now publicly available.

ModelScope-Agent: Building Your Customizable Agent System with Open-source Large Language Models

Billions of public domain documents remain trapped in hard copy or lack an accurate digitization. Modern natural language processing methods cannot be used to index, retrieve, and summarize their texts; conduct computational textual analyses; or extract information for statistical analyses, and these texts cannot be incorporated into language model training. Given the diversity and sheer quantity of public domain texts, liberating them at scale requires optical character recognition (OCR) that is accurate, extremely cheap to deploy, and sample-efficient to customize to novel collections, languages, and character sets. Existing OCR engines, largely designed for small-scale commercial applications in high resource languages, often fall short of these requirements. EffOCR (EfficientOCR), a novel open-source OCR package, meets both the computational and sample efficiency requirements for liberating texts at scale by abandoning the sequence-to-sequence architecture typically used for OCR, which takes representations from a learned vision model as inputs to a learned language model. Instead, EffOCR models OCR as a character or word-level image retrieval problem. EffOCR is cheap and sample efficient to train, as the model only needs to learn characters' visual appearance and not how they are used in sequence to form language. Models in the EffOCR model zoo can be deployed off-the-shelf with only a few lines of code and include lightweight models designed for mobile phones that are extremely cheap to deploy. Importantly, EffOCR also allows for easy, sample efficient customization with a simple model training interface and minimal labeling requirements due to its sample efficiency. We illustrate the utility of EffOCR by cheaply and accurately digitizing 20 million historical U.S. newspaper scans, evaluating zero-shot performance on randomly selected documents from the U.S. National Archives, and accurately digitizing a Japanese document collection for which all other OCR solutions failed.

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Next from EMNLP 2023

Benchmarking the Generation of Fact Checking Explanations | VIDEO

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