Thailand

Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysis (DiaASQ) aims to extract fine-grained sentiment quadruples from dialogues. Previous research has primarily concentrated on enhancing token-level interactions, still lacking in sufficient modeling of the discourse structure information in dialogue. Firstly, it does not incorporate interactions among different utterances in the encoding stage, resulting in a limited token-level context understanding for subsequent modules. Secondly, it ignores the critical fact that discourse information is naturally organized at the utterance level and learning it solely at the token level is incomplete. In this work, we strengthen the token-level encoder by utilizing a discourse structure called &quot;thread&quot; and graph convolutional networks to enhance the token interaction among different utterances. Moreover, we propose an utterance-level encoder to learn the structured speaker and reply information, providing a macro understanding of dialogue discourse. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Multi-granularities Integrator to integrate token-level and utterance-level representations, resulting in a comprehensive and cohesive dialogue contextual understanding. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our codes are publicly available at https://github.com/SIGSDSscau/DMIN.

ACL 2024

DMIN: A Discourse-specific Multi-granularity Integration Network for Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysis

multi-granularities integrating

dialogue discourse modeling

conversational aspect-based sentiment quadruple analysis

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

AAAI 2024

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysis (DiaASQ) aims to extract fine-grained sentiment quadruples from dialogues. Previous research has primarily concentrated on enhancing token-level interactions, still lacking in sufficient modeling of the discourse structure information in dialogue. Firstly, it does not incorporate interactions among different utterances in the encoding stage, resulting in a limited token-level context understanding for subsequent modules. Secondly, it ignores the critical fact that discourse information is naturally organized at the utterance level and learning it solely at the token level is incomplete. In this work, we strengthen the token-level encoder by utilizing a discourse structure called "thread" and graph convolutional networks to enhance the token interaction among different utterances. Moreover, we propose an utterance-level encoder to learn the structured speaker and reply information, providing a macro understanding of dialogue discourse. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Multi-granularities Integrator to integrate token-level and utterance-level representations, resulting in a comprehensive and cohesive dialogue contextual understanding. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our codes are publicly available at https://github.com/SIGSDSscau/DMIN.

poster

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.aclweb.org/registration). **

If you have already registered, please check your inbox for an email from Underline granting you access to ACL 2024 content.

Please register!

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.

Metaphors are commonly found in advertising and internet memes. However, the free form of internet memes often leads to a lack of high-quality textual data. Metaphor detection demands a deep interpretation of both textual and visual elements, requiring extensive common-sense knowledge, which poses a challenge to language models. To address these challenges, we propose a compact framework called C4MMD, which utilizes a \textbf{C}hain-of-Thought(CoT) method \textbf{for} \textbf{M}ulti-modal \textbf{M}etaphor \textbf{D}etection. Specifically, our approach designs a three-step process inspired by CoT that extracts and integrates knowledge from Multi-modal Large Language Models(MLLMs) into smaller ones. We also developed a modality fusion architecture to transform knowledge from large models into metaphor features, supplemented by auxiliary tasks to improve model performance. Experimental results on the MET-MEME dataset demonstrate that our method not only effectively enhances the metaphor detection capabilities of small models but also outperforms existing models. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic study leveraging MLLMs in metaphor detection tasks. 
The code for our method is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/xyz189411yt/C4MMD}.

Exploring Chain-of-Thought for Multi-modal Metaphor Detection

Large language models hold significant potential for integrating various data types, such as text documents and database records, for advanced analytics. However, blending text and numerical data presents substantial challenges. LLMs need to process and cross-reference entities and numbers, handle data inconsistencies and redundancies, and develop planning capabilities such as building a working memory for managing complex data queries. In this paper, we introduce four novel tasks centered around sports data analytics to evaluate the numerical reasoning and information fusion capabilities of LLMs. These tasks involve providing LLMs with detailed, play-by-play sports game descriptions, then challenging them with adversarial scenarios such as new game rules, longer durations, scrambled narratives, and analyzing key statistics in game summaries. We conduct extensive experiments on NBA and NFL games to assess the performance of LLMs on these tasks. Our benchmark, SportsMetrics, introduces a new mechanism for assessing LLMs' numerical reasoning and fusion skills.

SportsMetrics: Blending Text and Numerical Data to Understand Information Fusion in LLMs

The mainstream media has much leeway in what it chooses to cover and how it covers it. These choices have real-world consequences on what people know and their subsequent behaviors. However, the lack of objective measures to evaluate editorial choices makes research in this area particularly difficult. In this paper, we argue that there are newsworthy topics where objective measures exist in the form of supporting data and propose a computational framework to analyze editorial choices in this setup. We focus on the economy because the reporting of economic indicators presents us with a relatively easy way to determine both the selection and framing of various publications. Their values provide a ground truth of how the economy is doing relative to how the publications choose to cover it. To do this, we define frame prediction as a set of interdependent tasks. At the article level, we learn to identify the reported stance towards the general state of the economy. Then, for every numerical quantity reported in the article, we learn to identify whether it corresponds to an economic indicator and whether it is being reported in a positive or negative way. To perform our analysis, we track six American publishers and each article that appeared in the top 10 slots of their landing page between 2015 and 2023.

Framing in the Presence of Supporting Data: A Case Study in U.S. Economic News

Document-level relation extraction aims to categorize the association between any two entities within a document.
We find that previous methods for document-level relation extraction are ineffective in exploiting the full potential of large amounts of training data with varied noise levels. For example, in the ReDocRED benchmark dataset, state-of-the-art methods trained on the large-scale, lower-quality, distantly supervised training data generally do not perform better than those trained solely on the smaller, high-quality, human-annotated training data. To unlock the full potential of large-scale noisy training data for document-level relation extraction, we propose TTM-RE, a novel approach that integrates a trainable memory module, known as the Token Turing Machine, with a noisy-robust loss function that accounts for the positive-unlabeled setting. The trainable memory module enhances knowledge extraction from the large-scale noisy training dataset through an explicit learning of the memory tokens and a soft integration of the learned memory tokens into the input representation, thereby improving the model's effectiveness for the final relation classification. Extensive experiments on ReDocRED, a benchmark dataset for document-level relation extraction, reveal that TTM-RE achieves state-of-the-art performance (with an absolute F1 score improvement of over 3%). Ablation studies further illustrate the superiority of TTM-RE in other domains (the ChemDisGene dataset in the biomedical domain) and under highly unlabeled settings.

TTM-RE: Memory-Augmented Document-Level Relation Extraction

Conversational systems often rely on embedding models for intent classification and intent clustering tasks. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), which enable instructional embeddings allowing one to adjust semantics over the embedding space using prompts, are being viewed as a panacea for these downstream conversational tasks. However, traditional evaluation benchmarks rely solely on task metrics that don't particularly measure gaps related to semantic understanding. Thus, we propose an intent semantic toolkit that gives a more holistic view of intent embedding models by considering three tasks-- (1) intent classification, (2) intent clustering, and (3) a novel triplet task. The triplet task gauges the model's understanding of two semantic concepts paramount in real-world conversational systems-- negation and implicature. We observe that current embedding models fare poorly in semantic understanding of these concepts. To address this, we propose a pre-training approach to improve the embedding model by leveraging augmentation with data generated by an auto-regressive model and a contrastive loss term. Our approach improves the semantic understanding of the intent embedding model on the aforementioned linguistic dimensions while slightly effecting their performance on downstream task metrics.

Can Your Model Tell a Negation from an Implicature? Unravelling Challenges With Intent Encoders

Navigating certain communication situations can be challenging due to individuals' lack of skills and the interference of strong emotions. However, effective learning opportunities are rarely accessible. In this work, we conduct a human-centered study that uses language models to simulate bespoke communication training and provide just-in-time feedback to support the practice and learning of interpersonal effectiveness skills. We apply the interpersonal effectiveness framework from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), DEAR MAN, which focuses on both conversational and emotional skills. We present IMBUE, an interactive training system that provides feedback 28% more similar to experts' feedback, compared to that generated by GPT-4. IMBUE is the first to focus on communication skills and emotion management simultaneously, incorporate experts' domain knowledge in providing feedback, and be grounded in psychology theory. Through a randomized trial of 86 participants, we find that IMBUE’s simulation-only variant significantly improves participants' self-efficacy (up to 17%) and reduces negative emotions (up to 25%). With IMBUE's additional just-in-time feedback, participants demonstrate 17% improvement in skill mastery, along with greater enhancements in self-efficacy (27% more) and reduction of negative emotions (16% more) compared to simulation-only. The improvement in skill mastery is the only measure that is transferred to new and more difficult situations; situation-specific training is necessary for improving self-efficacy and emotion reduction.

IMBUE: Improving Interpersonal Effectiveness through Simulation and Just-in-time Feedback with Human-Language Model Interaction

Current language model-driven agents often lack mechanisms for effective user participation, which is crucial given the vagueness commonly found in user instructions. Although adept at devising strategies and performing tasks, these agents struggle with seeking clarification and grasping precise user intentions. To bridge this gap, we introduce Intention-in-Interaction (IN3), a novel benchmark designed to inspect users' implicit intentions through explicit queries. Next, we propose the incorporation of model experts as the upstream in agent designs to enhance user-agent interaction. Employing IN3, we empirically train Mistral-Interact, a powerful model that proactively assesses task vagueness, inquires about user intentions, and refines them into actionable goals before starting downstream agent task execution. Integrating it into the XAgent framework, we comprehensively evaluate the enhanced agent system regarding user instruction understanding and execution, revealing that our approach notably excels at identifying vague user tasks, recovering and summarizing critical missing information, setting precise and necessary agent execution goals, and minimizing redundant tool usage, thus boosting overall efficiency.

Tell Me More! Towards Implicit User Intention Understanding of Language Model Driven Agents

As the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, evaluating their performance is becoming more important and more challenging. This paper aims to address this issue for Mandarin Chinese in the form of CMMLU, a comprehensive Chinese benchmark that covers various subjects, including natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, and the humanities. We conduct a thorough evaluation of more than 20 contemporary multilingual and Chinese LLMs, assessing their performance across different subjects and settings. The results reveal that most existing LLMs struggle to achieve an accuracy of even 60%, which is the pass mark for Chinese exams. This highlights that there is substantial room for improvement in the capabilities of LLMs. Additionally, we conduct extensive experiments to identify factors impacting the models' performance and propose directions for enhancing LLMs. CMMLU fills the gap in evaluating the knowledge and reasoning capabilities of large language models for Chinese.

CMMLU: Measuring massive multitask language understanding in Chinese

Large Language Models (LLMs) are on track to reverse what seemed like an inexorable shift of AI from explicit to tacit knowledge tasks. Trained as they are on everything ever written on the web, LLMs exhibit “approximate omniscience”–they can provide answers to all sorts of queries, but with nary a guarantee. This could herald a new era for knowledge-based AI systems–with LLMs taking the role of (blowhard?) experts. But first, we have to stop confusing the impressive style/form of the generated knowledge for correct/factual content, and resist the temptation to ascribe reasoning, planning, self-critiquing etc. powers to approximate retrieval by these n-gram models on steroids. We have to focus instead on LLM-Modulo techniques that complement the unfettered idea generation of LLMs with careful vetting by model-based verifiers (the models underlying which themselves can be teased out from LLMs in semi-automated fashion). In this talk, I will reify this vision and attendant caveats in the context of our ongoing work on understanding the role of LLMs in planning tasks.

Can LLMs Reason and Plan?

This panel discusses the challenges and opportunities associated with Large Language Models (LLMs) in Southeast Asia (SEA).

Downloads

Next from ACL 2024

Exploring Chain-of-Thought for Multi-modal Metaphor Detection

Similar lecture

Harnessing Holistic Discourse Features and Triadic Interaction for Sentiment Quadruple Extraction in Dialogues