Singapore

Compressing large language models (LLMs), often consisting of billions of parameters, provides faster inference, smaller memory footprints, and enables local deployment. 
The standard compression techniques are pruning and quantization, with the former eliminating redundant connections in model layers and the latter representing model parameters with as little as 4 bits. The key tradeoff is between the degree of compression and the impact on the quality of the compressed model. Existing research on LLM compression primarily focuses on performance in terms of general metrics like perplexity or downstream task accuracy. More fine-grained metrics, such as those measuring parametric knowledge, remain significantly underexplored. To help bridge this gap, we present a comprehensive analysis across multiple model families using the LAMA and LM-Harness benchmarks in order to systematically quantify the effect of commonly employed compression techniques on model performance. A particular focus is on tradeoffs involving parametric knowledge, with the goal of providing practitioners with practical insights to make informed decisions on compression.

EMNLP 2023

The Cost of Compression: Investigating the Impact of Compression on Parametric Knowledge in Language Models

parametric knowledge

compression

quantization

pruning

language models

## 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.
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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 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.

One of the main methods for computational interpretation of a text is mapping it into a vector in some embedding space. Such vectors can then be used for a variety of textual processing tasks. Recently, most embedding spaces are a product of training large language models (LLMs). One major drawback of this type of representation is their incomprehensibility to humans. Understanding the embedding space is crucial for several important needs, including the need to debug the embedding method and compare it to alternatives, and the need to detect biases hidden in the model.
In this paper, we present a novel method of understanding embeddings by transforming a latent embedding space into a comprehensible 
conceptual space. We present an algorithm for deriving a conceptual space with dynamic on-demand granularity. We devise a new evaluation method, using either human rater or LLM-based raters, to show that the conceptualized vectors indeed represent the semantics of the original latent ones. We show the use of our method for various tasks, including comparing the semantics of alternative models and tracing the layers of the LLM. The code is available online https://github.com/adiSimhi/Interpreting-Embedding-Spaces-by-Conceptualization.

Interpreting Embedding Spaces by Conceptualization

Human speakers can generate descriptions of perceptual concepts, abstracted from the instance-level. Moreover, such descriptions can be used by other speakers to learn provisional representations of those concepts. Learning and using abstract perceptual concepts is under-investigated in the language-and-vision field. The problem is also highly relevant to the field of representation learning in multi-modal NLP. In this paper, we introduce a framework for testing category-level perceptual grounding in multi-modal language models. In particular, we train separate neural networks to **generate** and **interpret** descriptions of visual categories. We measure the *communicative success* of the two models with the zero-shot classification performance of the interpretation model, which we argue is an indicator of perceptual grounding. Using this framework, we compare the performance of *prototype*- and *exemplar*-based representations. Finally, we show that communicative success exposes performance issues in the generation model, not captured by traditional intrinsic NLG evaluation metrics, and argue that these issues stem from a failure to properly ground language in vision at the category level.

Describe Me an Auklet: Generating Grounded Perceptual Category Descriptions | VIDEO

English and Chinese, known as resource-rich languages, have witnessed the strong development of transformer-based language models for natural language processing tasks. Although Vietnam has approximately 100M people speaking Vietnamese, several pre-trained models, e.g., PhoBERT, ViBERT, and vELECTRA, performed well on general Vietnamese NLP tasks, including POS tagging and named entity recognition. These pre-trained language models are still limited to Vietnamese social media tasks. In this paper, we present the first monolingual pre-trained language model for Vietnamese social media texts, ViSoBERT, which is pre-trained on a large-scale corpus of high-quality and diverse Vietnamese social media texts using XLM-R architecture. Moreover, we explored our pre-trained model on five important natural language downstream tasks on Vietnamese social media texts: emotion recognition, hate speech detection, sentiment analysis, spam reviews detection, and hate speech spans detection. Our experiments demonstrate that ViSoBERT, with far fewer parameters, surpasses the previous state-of-the-art models on multiple Vietnamese social media tasks. Our ViSoBERT model is available only for research purposes. Disclaimer: This paper contains actual comments on social networks that might be construed as abusive, offensive, or obscene.

ViSoBERT: A Pre-Trained Language Model for Vietnamese Social Media Text Processing

Target-Oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification (TMSC) aims to perform sentiment polarity on a target jointly considering its corresponding multiple modalities including text, image, and others. Current researches mainly work on either of two types of targets in a decentralized manner. One type is entity, such as a person name, a location name, etc. and the other is aspect, such as 'food', 'service', etc. We believe that this target type based division in task modelling is not necessary because the sentiment polarity of the specific target is not governed by its type but its context. For this reason, we propose a unified model for target-oriented multimodal sentiment classification, so called UnifiedTMSC. It is prompt-based language modelling and performs well on four datasets spanning the above two target types. Specifically, we design descriptive prompt paraphrasing to reformulate TMSC task via (1) task paraphrasing, which obtains paraphrased prompts based on the task description through a paraphrasing rule, and (2) image prefix tuning, which optimizes a small continuous image vector throughout the multimodal representation space of text and images. Conducted on two entity-level multimodal datasets: Twitter-2015 and Twitter-2017, and two aspect-level multimodal datasets: Multi-ZOL and MASAD, the experimental results show the effectiveness of our UnifiedTMSC.

Descriptive Prompt Paraphrasing for Target-Oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification

Scientific literature review generation aims to extract and organize important information from an abundant collection of reference papers and produces corresponding reviews while lacking a clear and logical hierarchy.
We observe that a high-quality catalogue-guided generation process can effectively alleviate this problem.
Therefore, we present an atomic and challenging task named Hierarchical Catalogue Generation for Literature Review as the first step for review generation, which aims to produce a hierarchical catalogue of a review paper given various references. We construct a novel English Hierarchical Catalogues of Literature Reviews Dataset with 7.6k literature review catalogues and 389k reference papers. To accurately assess the model performance, we design two evaluation metrics for informativeness and similarity to ground truth from semantics and structure. Our extensive analyses verify the high quality of our dataset and the effectiveness of our evaluation metrics. We further benchmark diverse experiments on state-of-the-art summarization models like BART and large language models like ChatGPT to evaluate their capabilities. We further discuss potential directions for this task to motivate future research.

Hierarchical Catalogue Generation for Literature Review: A Benchmark

Claim verification plays a crucial role in combating misinformation. While existing works on claim verification have shown promising results, a crucial piece of the puzzle that remains unsolved is to understand how to verify claims without relying on human-annotated data, which is expensive to create at a large scale. Additionally, it is important for models to provide comprehensive explanations that can justify their decisions and assist human fact-checkers. This paper presents First-Order-Logic-Guided Knowledge-Grounded (FOLK) Reasoning that can verify complex claims and generate explanations without the need for annotated evidence using Large Language Models (LLMs). FOLK leverages the in-context learning ability of LLMs to translate the claim into a First-Order-Logic (FOL) clause consisting of predicates, each corresponding to a sub-claim that needs to be verified. Then, FOLK performs FOL-Guided reasoning over a set of knowledge-grounded question-and-answer pairs to make veracity predictions and generate explanations to justify its decision-making process. This process makes our model highly explanatory, providing clear explanations of its reasoning process in human-readable form. Our experiment results indicate that FOLK outperforms strong baselines on three datasets encompassing various claim verification challenges. Our code and data are available.

Explainable Claim Verification via Knowledge-Grounded Reasoning with Large Language Models

The field of vision-and-language (VL) understanding has made unprecedented progress with end-to-end large pre-trained VL models (VLMs). However, they still fall short in zero-shot reasoning tasks that require multi-step inferencing. To achieve this goal, previous works resort to a divide-and-conquer pipeline. In this paper, we argue that previous efforts have several inherent shortcomings: 1) They rely on domain-specific sub-question decomposing models. 2) They force models to predict the final answer even if the sub-questions or sub-answers provide insufficient information. We address these limitations via IdealGPT, a framework that iteratively decomposes VL reasoning using large language models (LLMs). Specifically, IdealGPT utilizes an LLM to generate sub-questions, a VLM to provide corresponding sub-answers, and another LLM to reason to achieve the final answer. These three modules perform the divide-and-conquer procedure iteratively until the model is confident about the final answer to the main question. We evaluate IdealGPT on multiple challenging VL reasoning tasks under a zero-shot setting. In particular, our IdealGPT outperforms the best existing GPT-4-like models by an absolute 10% on VCR and 15% on SNLI-VE. Code is available at https://github.com/Hxyou/IdealGPT.

IdealGPT: Iteratively Decomposing Vision and Language Reasoning via Large Language Models

Prompt tuning has been proven to be successful on various tasks by incorporating a small number of trainable parameters while freezing large pre-trained language models (PLMs). 
However, it is still unsettled how to generate more proper prompts for any individual examples and how to extend prompt tuning to multi-task learning scenarios by leveraging cross-task features. 
To address these challenges, we propose a token-wise prompt tuning (TPT), in which a bank of finer-grained soft prompt tokens is built for multi-task learning by memory network. 
The tokens are retrieved from the bank against an input example and assembled to an instance-dependent prompt. Extensive experimental results on $14$ datasets demonstrated that the models enhanced by our TPT performed far better than full parameter fine-tuned models and achieved state-of-the-art by tuning only $0.035\%$ parameters.

Parameter Efficient Multi-task Fine-tuning by Learning to Transfer Token-wise Prompts

The dominant paradigm of textual question answering systems is based on end-to-end neural networks, which excels at answering natural language questions but falls short on complex ones. This stands in contrast to the broad adaptation of semantic parsing approaches over structured data sources (e.g., relational database, knowledge graphs), that convert natural language questions to logical forms and execute them with query engines. Towards combining the strengths of neural and symbolic methods, we propose a framework of question parsing and execution on textual QA. It comprises two central pillars: (1) We parse the question of varying complexity into an intermediate representation, named H-expression, which is composed of simple questions as the primitives and symbolic operations representing the relationships among them; (2) To execute the resulting H-expressions, we design a hybrid executor, which integrates the deterministic rules to translate the symbolic operations with a drop-in neural reader network to answer each decomposed simple question. Hence, the proposed framework can be viewed as a top-down question parsing followed by a bottom-up answer backtracking. The resulting H-expressions closely guide the execution process, offering higher precision besides better interpretability while still preserving the advantages of the neural readers for resolving its primitive elements. Our extensive experiments on MuSiQue, 2WikiQA, HotpotQA, and NQ show that the proposed parsing and hybrid execution framework outperforms existing approaches in supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot settings, while also effectively exposing its underlying reasoning process.

HPE: Answering Complex Questions over Text by Hybrid Question Parsing and Execution

Reply suggestion systems represent a staple component of many instant messaging and email systems. However, the requirement to produce sets of replies, rather than individual replies, makes the task poorly suited for out-of-the-box retrieval architectures, which only consider individual message-reply similarity. As a result, these system often rely on additional post-processing modules to diversify the outputs. However, these approaches are ultimately bottlenecked by the performance of the initial retriever, which in practice struggles to present a sufficiently diverse range of options to the downstream diversification module, leading to the suggestions being less relevant to the user. In this paper, we consider a novel approach that radically simplifies this pipeline through an autoregressive text-to-text retrieval model, that learns the smart reply task end-to-end from a dataset of (message, reply set) pairs obtained via bootstrapping. Empirical results show this method consistently outperforms a range of state-of-the-art baselines across three datasets, corresponding to a 5.1\%-17.9\% improvement in relevance, and a 0.5\%-63.1\% improvement in diversity compared to the best baseline approach. We make our code publicly available.

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