United States

Transformer-based language models have shown an excellent ability to effectively cap- ture and utilize contextual information. Al- though various analysis techniques have been used to quantify and trace the contribution of single contextual cues to a target task such as subject-verb agreement or coreference resolu- tion, scenarios in which multiple relevant cues are available in the context remain underex- plored. In this paper, we investigate how lan- guage models handle gender agreement when multiple gender cue words are present, each capable of independently disambiguating a tar- get gender pronoun. We analyze two widely used Transformer-based models: BERT, an encoder-based, and GPT-2, a decoder-based model. Our analysis employs two comple- mentary approaches: context mixing analysis, which tracks information flow within the model, and a variant of activation patching, which mea- sures the impact of cues on the model’s predic- tion. We find that BERT tends to prioritize the first cue in the context to form both the target word representations and the model’s predic- tion, while GPT-2 relies more on the final cue. Our findings reveal striking differences in how encoder-based and decoder-based models pri- oritize and use contextual information for their predictions.

EMNLP 2024

How Language Models Prioritize Contextual Grammatical Cues?

activation patching

context mixing

interpretability

coreference resolution

language models

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

## 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.
### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPROgxjLAC96AJL7Ugy0tEnYm7dkrbHt/view?usp=sharing)

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.emnlp.org/registration/).** The EMNLP 2024 event page on Underline will be open to public one week prior to the event.

Please register!

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.

Despite the widespread adoption of autoregressive language models, explainability evaluation research has predominantly focused on span infilling and masked language models. Evaluating the faithfulness of an explanation method—how accurately it explains the inner workings and decision-making of the model—is challenging because it is difficult to separate the model from its explanation. Most faithfulness evaluation techniques corrupt or remove input tokens deemed important by a particular attribution (feature importance) method and observe the resulting change in the model's output. However, for autoregressive language models, this approach creates out-of-distribution inputs due to their next-token prediction training objective. In this study, we propose a technique that leverages counterfactual generation to evaluate the faithfulness of attribution methods for autoregressive language models. Our technique generates fluent, in-distribution counterfactuals, making the evaluation protocol more reliable.

Counterfactuals As a Means for Evaluating Faithfulness of Attribution Methods in Autoregressive Language Models

Sparse AutoEncoders (SAEs) have gained popularity as a tool for enhancing the interpretability of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, training SAEs can be computationally intensive, especially as model complexity grows. In this study, the potential of transfer learning to accelerate SAEs training is explored by capitalizing on the shared representations found across adjacent layers of LLMs. Our experimental results demonstrate that fine-tuning SAEs using pre-trained models from nearby layers not only maintains but often improves the quality of learned representations, while significantly accelerating convergence. These findings indicate that the strategic reuse of pretrained SAEs is a promising approach, particularly in settings where computational resources are constrained.

Accelerating Sparse Autoencoder Training via Layer-Wise Transfer Learning in Large Language Models

Enriching Conceptual Knowledge in Language Models through Metaphorical Reference Explanation

Polish Coreference Corpus as an LLM Testbed: Evaluating Coreference Resolution within Instruction-Following Language Models by Instruction-Answer Alignment

MSCAW-coref: Multilingual, Singleton and Conjunction-Aware Word-Level Coreference Resolution

Unifying the Scope of Bridging Anaphora Types in English: Bridging Annotations in ARRAU and GUM

While measuring bias and robustness in coreference resolution are important goals, such measurements are only as good as the tools we use to measure them. Winogender Schemas (Rudinger et al., 2018) are an influential dataset proposed to evaluate gender bias in coreference resolution, but a closer look reveals issues with the data that compromise its use for reliable evaluation, including treating different pronominal forms as equivalent, violations of template constraints, and typographical errors. We identify these issues and fix them, contributing a new dataset: WinoPron. Using WinoPron, we evaluate two state-of-the-art supervised coreference resolution systems, SpanBERT, and five sizes of FLAN-T5, and demonstrate that accusative pronouns are harder to resolve for all models. We also propose a new method to evaluate pronominal bias in coreference resolution that goes beyond the binary. With this method, we also show that bias characteristics vary not just across pronoun sets (e.g., he vs. she), but also across surface forms of those sets (e.g., him vs. his).

WinoPron: Revisiting English Winogender Schemas for Consistency, Coverage, and Grammatical Case

Coreference Resolution is the process of detecting a cluster of mentions that point to the same entity. This paper presents the Coreference Resolution system for Hindi based on Bi-GRU-CNN and Biaffine classifier with IndicBERT and MuRIL BERT. The motivation behind this work is the scarcity of resources available for Hindi and to diminish the dependency on the external parser and hand-crafted feature used by the previous Coreference resolution model in the Hindi language. The coreference annotated dataset is used for the Hindi language, containing 3.6K verbalizations and 78K tokens from the news article domain. The experimental results received are promising in the form of Precision, Recall, and F-measure.

DeepHCoref: A Deep Neural Coreference Resolution for Hindi Text

Findings of the Third Shared Task on Multilingual Coreference Resolution

We present CorPipe 24, the winning entry to the CRAC 2024 Shared Task on Multilingual Coreference Resolution. In this third iteration of the shared task, a novel objective is to also predict empty nodes needed for zero coreference mentions (while the empty nodes were given on input in previous years). This way, coreference resolution can be performed on raw text. We evaluate two model variants: a~two-stage approach (where the empty nodes are predicted first using a pretrained encoder model and then processed together with sentence words by another pretrained model) and a single-stage approach (where a single pretrained encoder model generates empty nodes, coreference mentions, and coreference links jointly). In both settings, CorPipe surpasses other participants by a large margin of 3.9 and 2.8 percent points, respectively. The source code and the trained model are available at https://github.com/ufal/crac2024-corpipe.

Downloads

Next from EMNLP 2024

Counterfactuals As a Means for Evaluating Faithfulness of Attribution Methods in Autoregressive Language Models

Similar lecture

Can Vision-Language Models Infer Speaker's Ignorance? The Role of Visual and Linguistic Cues

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from EMNLP 2024

Counterfactuals As a Means for Evaluating Faithfulness of Attribution Methods in Autoregressive Language Models

Similar lecture

Can Vision-Language Models Infer Speaker's Ignorance? The Role of Visual and Linguistic Cues

Downloads