mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
HoneyBee: Progressive Instruction Finetuning of Large Language Models for Materials Science
Authors: Yu Song, Santiago Miret, Huan Zhang, Bang Liu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We propose an instruction-based process for trustworthy data curation in materials science (MatSci-Instruct), which we then apply to finetune a LLaMa-based language model targeted for materials science (HoneyBee). MatSci-Instruct helps alleviate the scarcity of relevant, high-quality materials science textual data available in the open literature, and HoneyBee is the first billion-parameter language model specialized to materials science. In MatSci-Instruct we improve the trustworthiness of generated data by prompting multiple commercially available large language models for generation with an Instructor module (e.g. Chat-GPT) and verification from an independent Verifier module (e.g. Claude). Using MatSci-Instruct, we construct a dataset of multiple tasks and measure the quality of our dataset along multiple dimensions, including accuracy against known facts, relevance to materials science, as well as completeness and reasonableness of the data. Moreover, we iteratively generate more targeted instructions and instruction-data in a finetuning-evaluation-feedback loop leading to progressively better performance for our finetuned HoneyBee models. Our evaluation on the MatSci-NLP benchmark shows HoneyBee`s outperformance of existing language models on materials science tasks and iterative improvement in successive stages of instruction-data refinement. We study the quality of HoneyBee`s language modeling through automatic evaluation and analyze case studies to further understand the model`s capabilities and limitations. Our code and relevant datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/BangLab-UdeM-Mila/NLP4MatSci-HoneyBee.
Prompt-Based Editing for Text Style Transfer
Authors: Guoqing Luo, Yu Han, Lili Mou, Mauajama Firdaus
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Prompting approaches have been recently explored in text style transfer, where a textual prompt is used to query a pretrained language model (PLM) to generate style-transferred texts word by word in an autoregressive manner. However, such a generation process is less controllable and early prediction errors may affect future word predictions. In this paper, we propose a prompt-based editing approach to text style transfer. Specifically, we prompt a PLM for style classification and use the classification probability to compute a style score. Then, we perform discrete search with word-level editing to maximize a comprehensive scoring function for the style-transfer task. In this way, we transform a prompt-based generation problem into a classification one, which does not suffer from the error accumulation problem and is more controllable than the autoregressive generation of sentences. In our experiments, we performed both automatic and human evaluation on three style-transfer benchmark datasets, and show that our approach largely outperforms the existing systems that have 20 times more parameters. Additional empirical analyses further demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Representativeness as a Forgotten Lesson for Multilingual and Code-switched Data Collection and Preparation
Authors: A. Seza Doğruöz, Sunayana Sitaram, Zheng Xin Yong
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Multilingualism is widespread around the world and code-switching (CSW) is a common practice among different language pairs/tuples across locations and regions. However, there is still not much progress in building successful CSW systems, despite the recent advances in Massive Multilingual Language Models (MMLMs). We investigate the reasons behind this setback through a critical study about the existing CSW data sets (68) across language pairs in terms of the collection and preparation (e.g. transcription and annotation) stages. This in-depth analysis reveals that \textbfa) most CSW data involves English ignoring other language pairs/tuples \textbfb) there are flaws in terms of representativeness in data collection and preparation stages due to ignoring the location based, socio-demographic and register variation in CSW. In addition, lack of clarity on the data selection and filtering stages shadow the representativeness of CSW data sets. We conclude by providing a short check-list to improve the representativeness for forthcoming studies involving CSW data collection and preparation.
NERvous About My Health: Constructing a Bengali Medical Named Entity Recognition Dataset
Authors: Alvi Khan, Fida Kamal, Nuzhat Nower, Tasnim Ahmed, Sabbir Ahmed, Tareque Chowdhury
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The ability to identify important entities in a text, known as Named Entity Recognition (NER), is useful in a large variety of downstream tasks in the biomedical domain. This is a considerably difficult task when working with Consumer Health Questions (CHQs), which consist of informal language used in day-to-day life by patients. These difficulties are amplified in the case of Bengali, which allows for a huge amount of flexibility in sentence structures and has significant variances in regional dialects. Unfortunately, the complexity of the language is not accurately reflected in the limited amount of available data, which makes it difficult to build a reliable decision-making system. To address the scarcity of data, this paper presents \textquoteleftBangla-HealthNER', a comprehensive dataset designed to identify named entities in health-related texts in the Bengali language. It consists of 31,783 samples sourced from a popular online public health platform, which allows it to capture the diverse range of linguistic styles and dialects used by native speakers from various regions in their day-to-day lives. The insight into this diversity in language will prove useful to any medical decision-making systems that are developed for use in real-world applications. To highlight the difficulty of the dataset, it has been benchmarked on state-of-the-art token classification models, where BanglishBERT achieved the highest performance with an F1-score of $56.13 ± 0.75$%. The dataset and all relevant code used in this work have been made publicly available.
Sparse Black-Box Multimodal Attack for Vision-Language Adversary Generation
Authors: Zhen Yu, Zhou Qin, Zhenhua Chen, Meihui Lian, Haojun Fu, Weigao Wen, Hui Xue, Kun He
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Deep neural networks have been widely applied in real-world scenarios, such as product restrictions on e-commerce and hate speech monitoring on social media, to ensure secure governance of various platforms. However, illegal merchants often deceive the detection models by adding large-scale perturbations to prohibited products, so as to earn illegal profits. Current adversarial attacks using imperceptible perturbations encounter challenges in simulating such adversarial behavior and evaluating the vulnerabilities of detection models to such perturbations. To address this issue, we propose a novel black-box multimodal attack, termed Sparse Multimodal Attack (SparseMA), which leverages sparse perturbations to simulate the adversarial behavior exhibited by illegal merchants in the black-box scenario. Moreover, SparseMA bridges the gap between images and texts by treating the separated image patches and text words uniformly in the discrete space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SparseMA can identify the vulnerability of the model to different modalities, outperforming existing multimodal attacks and unimodal attacks. SparseMA, which is the first proposed method for black-box multimodal attacks to our knowledge, would be used as an effective tool for evaluating the robustness of multimodal models to different modalities.
Towards a Unified Framework for Reference Retrieval and Related Work Generation
Authors: Zhengliang Shi, Shen Gao, Zhen Zhang, Xiuying Chen, Zhumin Chen, Pengjie Ren, Zhaochun Ren
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The task of related work generation aims to generate a comprehensive survey of related research topics automatically, saving time and effort for authors. Existing methods simplify this task by using human-annotated references in a large-scale scientific corpus as information sources, which is time- and cost-intensive. To this end, we propose a Unified Reference Retrieval and Related Work Generation Model (UR3WG), which combines reference retrieval and related work generation processes in a unified framework based on the large language model (LLM). Specifically, UR3WG first leverages the world knowledge of LLM to extend the abstract and generate the query for the subsequent retrieval stage. Then a lexicon-enhanced dense retrieval is proposed to search relevant references, where an importance-aware representation of the lexicon is introduced. We also propose multi-granularity contrastive learning to optimize our retriever. Since this task is not simply summarizing the main points in references, it should analyze the complex relationships and present them logically. We propose an instruction-tuning method to leverage LLM to generate related work. Extensive experiments on two wide-applied datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in both generation and retrieval metrics.
Visual Storytelling with Question-Answer Plans
Authors: Danyang Liu, Mirella Lapata, Frank Keller
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Visual storytelling aims to generate compelling narratives from image sequences. Existing models often focus on enhancing the representation of the image sequence, e.g., with external knowledge sources or advanced graph structures. Despite recent progress, the stories are often repetitive, illogical, and lacking in detail. To mitigate these issues, we present a novel framework which integrates visual representations with pretrained language models and planning. Our model translates the image sequence into a visual prefix, a sequence of continuous embeddings which language models can interpret. It also leverages a sequence of question-answer pairs as a blueprint plan for selecting salient visual concepts and determining how they should be assembled into a narrative. Automatic and human evaluation on the VIST benchmark demonstrates that blueprint-based models generate stories that are more coherent, interesting, and natural compared to competitive baselines and state-of-the-art systems.
Investigating Online Community Engagement through Stancetaking
Authors: Jai Aggarwal, Brian Diep, Julia Watson, Suzanne Stevenson
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Much work has explored lexical and semantic variation in online communities, and drawn connections to community identity and user engagement patterns. Communities also express identity through the sociolinguistic concept of stancetaking. Large-scale computational work on stancetaking has explored community similarities in their preferences for stance markers -- words that serve to indicate aspects of a speaker`s stance -- without considering the stance-relevant properties of the contexts in which stance markers are used. We propose representations of stance contexts for 1798 Reddit communities and show how they capture community identity patterns distinct from textual or marker similarity measures. We also relate our stance context representations to broader inter- and intra-community engagement patterns, including cross-community posting patterns and social network properties of communities. Our findings highlight the strengths of using rich properties of stance as a way of revealing community identity and engagement patterns in online multi-community spaces.
ASSERT: Automated Safety Scenario Red Teaming for Evaluating the Robustness of Large Language Models
Authors: Alex Mei, Sharon Levy, William Wang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: As large language models are integrated into society, robustness toward a suite of prompts is increasingly important to maintain reliability in a high-variance environment.Robustness evaluations must comprehensively encapsulate the various settings in which a user may invoke an intelligent system. This paper proposes ASSERT, Automated Safety Scenario Red Teaming, consisting of three methods -- semantically aligned augmentation, target bootstrapping, and adversarial knowledge injection. For robust safety evaluation, we apply these methods in the critical domain of AI safety to algorithmically generate a test suite of prompts covering diverse robustness settings -- semantic equivalence, related scenarios, and adversarial. We partition our prompts into four safety domains for a fine-grained analysis of how the domain affects model performance. Despite dedicated safeguards in existing state-of-the-art models, we find statistically significant performance differences of up to 11% in absolute classification accuracy among semantically related scenarios and error rates of up to 19% absolute error in zero-shot adversarial settings, raising concerns for users' physical safety.
Learning to Correct Noisy Labels for Fine-Grained Entity Typing via Co-Prediction Prompt Tuning
Authors: Minghao Tang, Yongquan He, Yongxiu Xu, Hongbo Xu, Wenyuan Zhang, Yang Lin
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Fine-grained entity typing (FET) is an essential task in natural language processing that aims to assign semantic types to entities in text. However, FET poses a major challenge known as the noise labeling problem, whereby current methods rely on estimating noise distribution to identify noisy labels but are confused by diverse noise distribution deviation. To address this limitation, we introduce Co-Prediction Prompt Tuning for noise correction in FET, which leverages multiple prediction results to identify and correct noisy labels. Specifically, we integrate prediction results to recall labeled labels and utilize a differentiated margin to identify inaccurate labels. Moreover, we design an optimization objective concerning divergent co-predictions during fine-tuning, ensuring that the model captures sufficient information and maintains robustness in noise identification. Experimental results on three widely-used FET datasets demonstrate that our noise correction approach significantly enhances the quality of various types of training samples, including those annotated using distant supervision, ChatGPT, and crowdsourcing.
Co$^2$PT: Mitigating Bias in Pre-trained Language Models through Counterfactual Contrastive Prompt Tuning
Authors: Xiangjue Dong, Ziwei Zhu, Zhuoer Wang, Maria Teleki, James Caverlee
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Pre-trained Language Models are widely used in many important real-world applications. However, recent studies show that these models can encode social biases from large pre-training corpora and even amplify biases in downstream applications. To address this challenge, we propose Co$^2$PT, an efficient and effective *debias-while-prompt tuning* method for mitigating biases via counterfactual contrastive prompt tuning on downstream tasks. Our experiments conducted on three extrinsic bias benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of Co$^2$PT on bias mitigation during the prompt tuning process and its adaptability to existing upstream debiased language models. These findings indicate the strength of Co$^2$PT and provide promising avenues for further enhancement in bias mitigation on downstream tasks.
A Hierarchical Encoding-Decoding Scheme for Abstractive Multi-document Summarization
Authors: Chenhui Shen, Liying Cheng, Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Yang You, Lidong Bing
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved outstanding achievements in abstractive single-document summarization (SDS). However, such benefits may not fully extend to multi-document summarization (MDS), where the handling of cross-document information is more complex. Previous works either design new MDS architectures or apply PLMs bluntly with concatenated source documents as a reformulated SDS task. While the former does not utilize previous pre-training efforts and may not generalize well across different domains, the latter may not sufficiently attend to the intricate cross-document relationships unique to MDS tasks. Instead, we enforce hierarchy on both the encoder and decoder to better utilize a PLM to facilitate multi-document interactions for the MDS task. Across 10 MDS benchmarks from various domains, our method outperforms or is competitive with the previous best models, including those with additional MDS pre-training or with more parameters. It outperforms its corresponding PLM backbone by up to 3 Rouge-L and is favored by humans.
Universal Domain Adaptation for Robust Handling of Distributional Shifts in NLP
Authors: Hyuhng Kim, Hyunsoo Cho, Sang-Woo Lee, Junyeob Kim, Choonghyun Park, Sang-goo Lee, Kang Yoo, Taeuk Kim
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: When deploying machine learning systems to the wild, it is highly desirable for them to effectively leverage prior knowledge to the unfamiliar domain while also firing alarms to anomalous inputs. In order to address these requirements, Universal Domain Adaptation (UniDA) has emerged as a novel research area in computer vision, focusing on achieving both adaptation ability and robustness (i.e., the ability to detect out-of-distribution samples). While UniDA has led significant progress in computer vision, its application on language input still needs to be explored despite its feasibility. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive benchmark for natural language that offers thorough viewpoints of the model`s generalizability and robustness. Our benchmark encompasses multiple datasets with varying difficulty levels and characteristics, including temporal shifts and diverse domains. On top of our testbed, we validate existing UniDA methods from computer vision and state-of-the-art domain adaptation techniques from NLP literature, yielding valuable findings: We observe that UniDA methods originally designed for image input can be effectively transferred to the natural language domain while also underscoring the effect of adaptation difficulty in determining the model`s performance.
Aligning Language Models to User Opinions
Authors: EunJeong Hwang, Bodhisattwa Majumder, Niket Tandon
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: An important aspect of developing LLMs that interact with humans is to align models' behavior to their users. It is possible to prompt an LLM into behaving as a certain persona, especially a user group or ideological persona the model captured during its pertaining stage. But, how to best align an LLM with a specific user and not a demographic or ideological group remains an open question. Mining public opinion surveys (by PEW research), we find that the opinions of a user and their demographics and ideologies are not mutual predictors. We use this insight to align LLMs by modeling relevant past user opinions in addition to user demographics and ideology, achieving up to 7 points accuracy gains in predicting public opinions from survey questions across a broad set of topics. Our work opens up the research avenues to bring user opinions as an important ingredient in aligning language models.
CCSRD: Content-Centric Speech Representation Disentanglement Learning for End-to-End Speech Translation
Authors: Xiaohu Zhao, Haoran Sun, Yikun Lei, Shaolin Zhu, Deyi Xiong
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Deep neural networks have demonstrated their capacity in extracting features from speech inputs. However, these features may include non-linguistic speech factors such as timbre and speaker identity, which are not directly related to translation. In this paper, we propose a content-centric speech representation disentanglement learning framework for speech translation, CCSRD, which decomposes speech representations into content representations and non-linguistic representations via representation disentanglement learning. CCSRD consists of a content encoder that encodes linguistic content information from the speech input, a non-content encoder that models non-linguistic speech features, and a disentanglement module that learns disentangled representations with a cyclic reconstructor, feature reconstructor and speaker classifier trained in a multi-task learning way. Experiments on the MuST-C benchmark dataset demonstrate that CCSRD achieves an average improvement of +0.9 BLEU in two settings across five translation directions over the baseline, outperforming state-of-the-art end-to-end speech translation models and cascaded models.
Miracle: Towards Personalized Dialogue Generation with Latent-Space Multiple Personal Attribute Control
Authors: Zhenyi Lu, Wei Wei, Xiaoye Qu, Xian-Ling Mao, Dangyang Chen, Jixiong Chen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Personalized dialogue systems aim to endow the chatbot agent with more anthropomorphic traits for human-like interactions. Previous approaches have explored explicitly user profile modeling using text descriptions, implicit derivation of user embeddings, or utilizing handicraft prompts for ChatGPT-like models. However, textual personas are limited in describing multi-faceted attributes (\textite.g., \textitlanguage style, inner character nuances), implicit embedding suffers from personality sparsity, and handicraft prompts lack fine-grained and stable controllability. Hence, these approaches may struggle with complex personalized dialogue generation tasks that require generating controllable responses with multiple personal attributes. To this end, we propose \textbfMiracle, a novel personalized dialogue generation method through \textbfMult\textbfIple Pe\textbfRsonal \textbfAttributes \textbfControl within \textbfLatent-Space \textbfEnergy-based Models. ttributes \textbfControl within \textbfLatent-Space \textbfEnergy-based Models. Specifically, our approach first disentangles complex personality into multi-faceted attributes. Subsequently, we employ a conditional variational auto-encoder to align with the dense personalized responses within a latent joint attribute space. We have also tailored a dedicated energy function and customized the ordinary differential equations sampling method to offer flexible attribute composition and precise attribute control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Miracle outperforms several strong baselines in terms of personality controllability and response generation quality. Our dataset and code are available at r̆lhttps://github.com/LZY-the-boys/MIRACLE
Towards Multilingual Interlinear Morphological Glossing
Authors: Shu Okabe, François Yvon
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Interlinear Morphological Glosses are annotations produced in the context of language documentation. Their goal is to identify morphs occurring in an L1 sentence and to explicit their function and meaning, with the further support of an associated translation in L2. We study here the task of automatic glossing, aiming to provide linguists with adequate tools to facilitate this process. Our formalisation of glossing uses a latent variable Conditional Random Field (CRF), which labels the L1 morphs while simultaneously aligning them to L2 words. In experiments with several under-resourced languages, we show that this approach is both effective and data-efficient and mitigates the problem of annotating unknown morphs. We also discuss various design choices regarding the alignment process and the selection of features. We finally demonstrate that it can benefit from multilingual (pre-)training, achieving results which outperform very strong baselines.
Transformer Working Memory Enables Regular Language Reasoning And Natural Language Length Extrapolation
Authors: Ta-Chung Chi, Ting-Han Fan, Alexander Rudnicky, Peter Ramadge
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Unlike recurrent models, conventional wisdom has it that Transformers cannot perfectly model regular languages. Inspired by the notion of working memory, we propose a new Transformer variant named RegularGPT. With its novel combination of Weight-Sharing, Adaptive-Depth, and Sliding-Dilated-Attention, RegularGPT constructs working memory along the depth dimension, thereby enabling efficient and successful modeling of regular languages such as PARITY. We further test RegularGPT on the task of natural language length extrapolation and surprisingly find that it rediscovers the local windowed attention effect deemed necessary in prior work for length extrapolation.
Enhancing Conversational Search: Large Language Model-Aided Informative Query Rewriting
Authors: Fanghua Ye, Meng Fang, Shenghui Li, Emine Yilmaz
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Query rewriting plays a vital role in enhancing conversational search by transforming context-dependent user queries into standalone forms. Existing approaches primarily leverage human-rewritten queries as labels to train query rewriting models. However, human rewrites may lack sufficient information for optimal retrieval performance. To overcome this limitation, we propose utilizing large language models (LLMs) as query rewriters, enabling the generation of informative query rewrites through well-designed instructions. We define four essential properties for well-formed rewrites and incorporate all of them into the instruction. In addition, we introduce the role of rewrite editors for LLMs when initial query rewrites are available, forming a “rewrite-then-edit” process. Furthermore, we propose distilling the rewriting capabilities of LLMs into smaller models to reduce rewriting latency. Our experimental evaluation on the QReCC dataset demonstrates that informative query rewrites can yield substantially improved retrieval performance compared to human rewrites, especially with sparse retrievers.
Distilling ChatGPT for Explainable Automated Student Answer Assessment
Authors: Jiazheng Li, Lin Gui, Yuxiang Zhou, David West, Cesare Aloisi, Yulan He
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Providing explainable and faithful feedback is crucial for automated student answer assessment. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework that explores using ChatGPT, a cutting-edge large language model, for the concurrent tasks of student answer scoring and rationale generation. We identify the appropriate instructions by prompting ChatGPT with different templates to collect the rationales, where inconsistent rationales are refined to align with marking standards. The refined ChatGPT outputs enable us to fine-tune a smaller language model that simultaneously assesses student answers and provides rationales. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset show that the proposed method improves the overall QWK score by 11% compared to ChatGPT. Furthermore, our thorough analysis and human evaluation demonstrate that the rationales generated by our proposed method are comparable to those of ChatGPT. Our approach provides a viable solution to achieve explainable automated assessment in education
Grammatical Error Correction via Mixed-Grained Weighted Training
Authors: Jiahao Li, Quan Wang, Chiwei Zhu, Zhendong Mao, Yongdong Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The task of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) aims to automatically correct grammatical errors in natural texts. Almost all previous works treat annotated training data equally, but inherent discrepancies in data are neglected. In this paper, the inherent discrepancies are manifested in two aspects, namely, accuracy of data annotation and diversity of potential annotations. To this end, we propose MainGEC, which designs token-level and sentence-level training weights based on inherent discrepancies therein, and then conducts mixed-grained weighted training to improve the training effect for GEC. Empirical evaluation shows that whether in the Seq2Seq or Seq2Edit manner, MainGEC achieves consistent and significant performance improvements on two benchmark datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of the mixed-grained weighted training. Further ablation experiments verify the effectiveness of designed weights for both granularities in MainGEC.
A Unified Framework for Synaesthesia Analysis
Authors: Kun Sheng, Zhongqing Wang, Qingqing Zhao, Xiaotong Jiang, Guodong Zhou
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Synaesthesia refers to the description of perceptions in one sensory modality through concepts from other modalities. It involves not only a linguistic phenomenon, but also a cognitive phenomenon structuring human thought and action, which makes understanding it challenging. As a means of cognition, synaesthesia is rendered by more than sensory modalities, cue and stimulus can also play an important role in expressing and understanding it. In addition, understanding synaesthesia involves many cognitive efforts, such as identifying the semantic relationship between sensory words and modalities. Therefore, we propose a unified framework focusing on annotating all kinds of synaesthetic elements and fully exploring the relationship among them. In particular, we introduce a new annotation scheme, including sensory modalities as well as their cues and stimuli, which facilitate understanding synaesthetic information collectively. We further design a structure generation model to capture the relations among synaesthetic elements and generate them jointly. Through extensive experiments, the importance of proposed dataset can be verified by the statistics and progressive performances. In addition, our proposed model yields state-of-the-art results, demonstrating its effectiveness.
Domain Private Transformers for Multi-Domain Dialog Systems
Authors: Anmol Kabra, Ethan Elenberg
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Large, general purpose language models have demonstrated impressive performance across many different conversational domains. While multi-domain language models achieve low overall perplexity, their outputs are not guaranteed to stay within the domain of a given input prompt. This paper proposes \textitdomain privacy as a novel way to quantify how likely a conditional language model will leak across domains. We also develop policy functions based on token-level domain classification, and propose an efficient fine-tuning method to improve the trained model`s domain privacy. Experiments on membership inference attacks show that our proposed method has comparable resiliency to methods adapted from recent literature on differentially private language models.
Visual Elements Mining as Prompts for Instruction Learning for Target-Oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification
Authors: Bin Yang, Jinlong Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Target-oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification (TMSC) aims to incorporate visual modality with text modality to identify the sentiment polarity towards a specific target within a sentence. To address this task, we propose a Visual Elements Mining as Prompts (VEMP) method, which describes the semantic information of visual elements with Text Symbols Embedded in the Image (TSEI), Target-aware Adjective-Noun Pairs (TANPs) and image scene caption, and then transform them into prompts for instruction learning of the model Tk-Instruct. In our VEMP, the text symbols embedded in the image may contain the textual descriptions of fine-grained visual elements, and are extracted as input TSEI; we extract adjective-noun pairs from the image and align them with the target to obtain TANPs, in which the adjectives provide emotional embellishments for the relevant target; finally, to effectively fuse these visual elements with text modality for sentiment prediction, we integrate them to construct instruction prompts for instruction-tuning Tk-Instruct which possesses powerful learning capabilities under instructions. Extensive experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets. And further analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of each component of our method.
NASH: A Simple Unified Framework of Structured Pruning for Accelerating Encoder-Decoder Language Models
Authors: Jongwoo Ko, Seungjoon Park, Yujin Kim, Sumyeong Ahn, Du-Seong Chang, Euijai Ahn, Se-Young Yun
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Structured pruning methods have proven effective in reducing the model size and accelerating inference speed in various network architectures such as Transformers. Despite the versatility of encoder-decoder models in numerous NLP tasks, the structured pruning methods on such models are relatively less explored compared to encoder-only models. In this study, we investigate the behavior of the structured pruning of the encoder-decoder models in the decoupled pruning perspective of the encoder and decoder component, respectively. Our findings highlight two insights: (1) the number of decoder layers is the dominant factor of inference speed, and (2) low sparsity in the pruned encoder network enhances generation quality. Motivated by these findings, we propose a simple and effective framework, NASH, that narrows the encoder and shortens the decoder networks of encoder-decoder models. Extensive experiments on diverse generation and inference tasks validate the effectiveness of our method in both speedup and output quality.
GBT: Generative Boosting Training Approach for Paraphrase Identification
Authors: Rui Peng, Zhiling Jin, Yu Hong
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Paraphrase Identification (PI), a task of determining whether a pair of sentences express the same meaning, is widely applied in Information Retrieval and Question Answering. Data Augmentation (DA) is proven effective in tackling the PI task. However, the majority of DA methods still suffer from two limitations: inefficiency and poor quality. In this study, we propose the Generative Boosting Training (GBT) approach for PI. GBT designs a boosting learning method for a single model based on the human learning process, utilizing seq2seq model to perform DA on misclassified instances periodically. We conduct experiments on the benchmark corpora QQP and LCQMC, towards both English and Chinese PI tasks. Experimental results show that our method yields significant improvements on a variety of Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) based baselines with good efficiency and effectiveness. It is noteworthy that a single BERT model (with a linear classifier) can outperform the state-of-the-art PI models with the boosting of GBT.
DeCrisisMB: Debiased Semi-Supervised Learning for Crisis Tweet Classification via Memory Bank
Authors: Henry Zou, Yue Zhou, Weizhi Zhang, Cornelia Caragea
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: During crisis events, people often use social media platforms such as Twitter to disseminate information about the situation, warnings, advice, and support. Emergency relief organizations leverage such information to acquire timely crisis circumstances and expedite rescue operations. While existing works utilize such information to build models for crisis event analysis, fully-supervised approaches require annotating vast amounts of data and are impractical due to limited response time. On the other hand, semi-supervised models can be biased, performing moderately well for certain classes while performing extremely poorly for others, resulting in substantially negative effects on disaster monitoring and rescue. In this paper, we first study two recent debiasing methods on semi-supervised crisis tweet classification. Then we propose a simple but effective debiasing method, DeCrisisMB, that utilizes a Memory Bank to store and perform equal sampling for generated pseudo-labels from each class at each training iteration. Extensive experiments are conducted to compare different debiasing methods' performance and generalization ability in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings. The results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method. Our code is available at https://github.com/HenryPengZou/DeCrisisMB.
Probing LLMs for hate speech detection: strengths and vulnerabilities
Authors: Sarthak Roy, Ashish Harshvardhan, Animesh Mukherjee, Punyajoy Saha
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Recently efforts have been made by social media platforms as well as researchers to detect hateful or toxic language using large language models. However, none of these works aim to use explanation, additional context and victim community information in the detection process. We utilise different prompt variation, input information and evaluate large language models in zero shot setting (without adding any in-context examples). We select two large language models (GPT-3.5 and text-davinci) and three datasets - HateXplain, implicit hate and ToxicSpans. We find that on average including the target information in the pipeline improves the model performance substantially ($∼20-30%$) over the baseline across the datasets. There is also a considerable effect of adding the rationales/explanations into the pipeline ($∼10-20%$) over the baseline across the datasets. In addition, we further provide a typology of the error cases where these large language models fail to (i) classify and (ii) explain the reason for the decisions they take. Such vulnerable points automatically constitute \textquoteleftjailbreak' prompts for these models and industry scale safeguard techniques need to be developed to make the models robust against such prompts.
From Simple to Complex: A Progressive Framework for Document-level Informative Argument Extraction
Authors: Quzhe Huang, Yanxi Zhang, Dongyan Zhao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Document-level Event Argument Extraction (EAE) requires the model to extract arguments of multiple events from a single document. Considering the underlying dependencies between these events, recent efforts leverage the idea of “memory”, where the results of already predicted events are cached and can be retrieved to help the prediction of upcoming events. These methods extract events according to their appearance order in the document, however, the event that appears in the first sentence does not mean that it is the easiest to extract. Existing methods might introduce noise to the extraction of upcoming events if they rely on an incorrect prediction of previous events. In order to provide more reliable memory, we propose a simple-to-complex progressive framework for document-level EAE. Specifically, we first calculate the difficulty of each event and then, we conduct the extraction following a simple-to-complex order. In this way, the memory will store the most certain results, and the model could use these reliable sources to help the prediction of more difficult events. Experiments on WikiEvents show that our model outperforms SOTA by 1.4% in F1, indicating the proposed simple-to-complex framework is useful in the EAE task.
MultiCMET: A Novel Chinese Benchmark for Understanding Multimodal Metaphor
Authors: Dongyu Zhang, Jingwei Yu, Senyuan Jin, Liang Yang, Hongfei Lin
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Metaphor is a pervasive aspect of human communication, and its presence in multimodal forms has become more prominent with the progress of mass media. However, there is limited research on multimodal metaphor resources beyond the English language. Furthermore, the existing work in natural language processing does not address the exploration of categorizing the source and target domains in metaphors. This omission is significant considering the extensive research conducted in the fields of cognitive linguistics, which emphasizes that a profound understanding of metaphor relies on recognizing the differences and similarities between domain categories. We, therefore, introduce MultiCMET, a multimodal Chinese metaphor dataset, consisting of 13,820 text-image pairs of advertisements with manual annotations of the occurrence of metaphors, domain categories, and sentiments metaphors convey. We also constructed a domain lexicon that encompasses categorizations of metaphorical source domains and target domains and propose a Cascading Domain Knowledge Integration (CDKI) benchmark to detect metaphors by introducing domain-specific lexical features. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of CDKI. The dataset and code are publicly available.
GlotLID: Language Identification for Low-Resource Languages
Authors: Amir Hossein Kargaran, Ayyoob Imani, François Yvon, Hinrich Schuetze
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Several recent papers have published good solutions for language identification (LID) for about 300 high-resource and medium-resource languages. However, there is no LID available that (i) covers a wide range of low-resource languages, (ii) is rigorously evaluated and reliable and (iii) efficient and easy to use. Here, we publish GlotLID-M, an LID model that satisfies the desiderata of wide coverage, reliability and efficiency. It identifies 1665 languages, a large increase in coverage compared to prior work. In our experiments, GlotLID-M outperforms four baselines (CLD3, FT176, OpenLID and NLLB) when balancing F1 and false positive rate (FPR). We analyze the unique challenges that low-resource LID poses: incorrect corpus metadata, leakage from high-resource languages, difficulty separating closely related languages, handling of macrolanguage vs varieties and in general noisy data. We hope that integrating GlotLID-M into dataset creation pipelines will improve quality and enhance accessibility of NLP technology for low-resource languages and cultures. GlotLID-M model, code, and list of data sources are available: https://github.com/cisnlp/GlotLID.
Finding Support Examples for In-Context Learning
Authors: Xiaonan Li, Xipeng Qiu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: In-context learning is a new learning paradigm where a language model observes a few examples and directly outputs the test input`s prediction. Previous works have shown that it is sensitive to the provided examples and randomly sampled examples probably cause inferior performance. In this paper, we propose finding “support examples” for in-context learning: Given a training dataset, it aims to select one permutation of a few examples, which can well characterize the task for in-context learning and thus lead to superior performance. Although for traditional gradient-based training, there are extensive methods to find a coreset from the entire dataset, they struggle to find important in-context examples, because in-context learning occurs in the language model`s forward process without gradients or parameter updates and thus has a significant gap with traditional training. Additionally, the strong dependence among in-context examples makes it an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem and enumerating all permutations is infeasible. Hence we propose **LENS**, a fi**L**ter-th**EN**-**S**earch method to tackle this challenge in two stages: irst we filter the dataset to obtain individually informative in-context examples. Specifically, we propose a novel metric, InfoScore, to evaluate the example`s in-context informativeness based on the language model`s feedback, and further propose a progressive filtering process to filter out uninformative examples. Then we propose diversity-guided example search which iteratively refines and evaluates the selected example permutations, to find examples that fully depict the task. The experimental results show that LENS significantly outperforms a wide range of baselines and further analyses show that each component contribute critically to the improvements and shed light on the principles of supporting examples and in-context learning.
Uncovering the Root of Hate Speech: A Dataset for Identifying Hate Instigating Speech
Authors: Hyoungjun Park, Ho Shim, Kyuhan Lee
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: While many prior studies have applied computational approaches, such as machine learning, to detect and moderate hate speech, only scant attention has been paid to the task of identifying the underlying cause of hate speech. In this study, we introduce the concept of hate instigating speech, which refers to a specific type of textual posts on online platforms that stimulate or provoke others to engage in hate speech. The identification of hate instigating speech carries substantial practical implications for effective hate speech moderation. Rather than targeting individual instances of hate speech, by focusing on their roots, i.e., hate instigating speech, it becomes possible to significantly reduce the volume of content that requires review for moderation. Additionally, targeting hate instigating speech enables early prevention of the spread and propagation of hate speech, further enhancing the effectiveness of moderation efforts. However, several challenges hinder researchers from addressing the identification of hate instigating speech. First, there is a lack of comprehensive datasets specifically annotated for hate instigation, making it difficult to train and evaluate computational models effectively. Second, the subtle and nuanced nature of hate instigating speech (e.g., seemingly non-offensive texts serve as catalysts for triggering hate speech) makes it difficult to apply off-the-shelf machine learning models to the problem. To address these challenges, in this study, we have developed and released a multilingual dataset specifically designed for the task of identifying hate instigating speech. Specifically, it encompasses both English and Korean, allowing for a comprehensive examination of hate instigating speech across different linguistic contexts. We have applied existing machine learning models to our dataset and the results demonstrate that the extant models alone are insufficient for effectively detecting hate instigating speech. This finding highlights the need for further attention from the academic community to address this specific challenge. We expect our study and dataset to inspire researchers to explore innovative methods that can enhance the accuracy of hate instigating speech detection, ultimately contributing to more effective moderation and prevention of hate speech propagation online.