United States

Long-Context Question Answering (LCQA), a challenging task, aims to reason over long-context documents to yield accurate answers to questions. Existing long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) for LCQA often struggle with the &quot;lost in the middle&quot; issue. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates this issue by providing external factual evidence. However, its chunking strategy disrupts the global long-context information, and its low-quality retrieval in long contexts hinders LLMs from identifying effective factual details due to substantial noise. To this end, we propose LongRAG, a general, dual-perspective, and robust LLM-based RAG system paradigm for LCQA to enhance RAG’s understanding of complex long-context knowledge (i.e., global information and factual details). We design LongRAG as a plug-and-play paradigm, facilitating adaptation to various domains and LLMs. Extensive experiments on three multi-hop datasets demonstrate that LongRAG significantly outperforms long-context LLMs (up by 6.94%), advanced RAG (up by 6.16%), and Vanilla RAG (up by 17.25%). Furthermore, we conduct quantitative ablation studies and multi-dimensional analyses, highlighting the effectiveness of the system’s components and fine-tuning strategies.Data and code are available at [https://github.com/QingFei1/LongRAG](https://github.com/QingFei1/LongRAG).

EMNLP 2024

LongRAG: A Dual-perspective Retrieval-Augmented Generation Paradigm for Long-Context Question Answering

llm safety; nlp applications; text watermark

## 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.

Long-Context Question Answering (LCQA), a challenging task, aims to reason over long-context documents to yield accurate answers to questions. Existing long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) for LCQA often struggle with the "lost in the middle" issue. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates this issue by providing external factual evidence. However, its chunking strategy disrupts the global long-context information, and its low-quality retrieval in long contexts hinders LLMs from identifying effective factual details due to substantial noise. To this end, we propose LongRAG, a general, dual-perspective, and robust LLM-based RAG system paradigm for LCQA to enhance RAG’s understanding of complex long-context knowledge (i.e., global information and factual details). We design LongRAG as a plug-and-play paradigm, facilitating adaptation to various domains and LLMs. Extensive experiments on three multi-hop datasets demonstrate that LongRAG significantly outperforms long-context LLMs (up by 6.94%), advanced RAG (up by 6.16%), and Vanilla RAG (up by 17.25%). Furthermore, we conduct quantitative ablation studies and multi-dimensional analyses, highlighting the effectiveness of the system’s components and fine-tuning strategies.Data and code are available at [https://github.com/QingFei1/LongRAG](https://github.com/QingFei1/LongRAG).

poster

## 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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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.

While recent years have seen rapid progress in image-conditioned text generation, image captioning still suffers from the fundamental issue of hallucinations, namely, the generation of spurious details that cannot be inferred from the given image. Existing methods largely use closed-vocabulary object lists to mitigate or evaluate hallucinations in image captioning, ignoring the long-tailed nature of hallucinations that occur in practice. To this end, we propose a framework for addressing hallucinations in image captioning in the open-vocabulary setting. Our framework includes a new benchmark, OpenCHAIR, that leverages generative foundation models to evaluate open-vocabulary object hallucinations for image captioning, surpassing the popular and similarly-sized CHAIR benchmark in both diversity and accuracy. Furthermore, to mitigate open-vocabulary hallucinations without using a closed object list, we propose MOCHa, an approach harnessing advancements in reinforcement learning. Our multi-objective reward function explicitly targets the trade-off between fidelity and adequacy in generations without requiring any strong supervision. MOCHa improves a large variety of image captioning models, as captured by our OpenCHAIR benchmark and other existing metrics. We will release our code and models.

Mitigating Open-Vocabulary Caption Hallucinations

Loss spikes, a phenomenon in which the loss value diverges suddenly, is a fundamental issue in the pre-training of large language models. This paper supposes that the non-uniformity of the norm of the parameters is one of the causes of loss spikes. Here, in training of neural networks, the scale of the gradients is required to be kept constant throughout the layers to avoid the vanishing and exploding gradients problem. However, to meet these requirements in the Transformer model, the norm of the model parameters must be non-uniform, and thus, parameters whose norm is smaller are more sensitive to the parameter update. To address this issue, we propose a novel technique, weight scaling as reparameterization (WeSaR). WeSaR introduces a gate parameter per parameter matrix and adjusts it to the value satisfying the requirements. Because of the gate parameter, WeSaR sets the norm of the original parameters uniformly, which results in stable training. Experimental results with the Transformer decoders consisting of 130 million, 1.3 billion, and 13 billion parameters showed that WeSaR stabilizes and accelerates training and that it outperformed compared methods including popular initialization methods.

Initialization of Large Language Models via Reparameterization to Mitigate Loss Spikes

We present a novel study analyzing the effects of various prompt loss token weights (PLW) for supervised instruction fine-tuning (SIFT). While prompt-masking (PLW = 0) is common for SIFT, some fine-tuning APIs support fractional PLWs and suggest that using a small non-zero PLW can help stabilize learning when fine-tuning on short-completion data. However, there has never been a study confirming this claim, and OpenAI, a major cloud-based SIFT provider, recently removed this parameter from their fine-tuning API. We found that performance of models fine-tuned on short-completion data had a statistically-significant negative quadratic relationship with PLW. Using small values (0.01 − 0.5) of PLW produced better results on multiple-choice and short-generation benchmarks (outperforming models fine-tuned on long-completion data) while large values (≈ 1.0) of PLW produced better results on long-generation benchmarks. We explained this effect and verified its importance through additional experiments. This research serves as a warning to API providers about the importance of providing a PLW parameter for SIFT.

Instruction Fine-Tuning: Does Prompt Loss Matter?

Human listeners effortlessly compensate for phonological changes during speech perception, often unconsciously inferring the intended sounds. For example, listeners infer the underlying /n/ when hearing an utterance such as “clea[m] pan”, where [m] arises from place assimilation to the following labial [p]. This article explores how the neural speech recognition model Wav2Vec2 perceives assimilated sounds, and identifies the linguistic knowledge that is implemented by the model to compensate for assimilation during Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Using psycholinguistic stimuli, we systematically analyze how various linguistic context cues influence compensation patterns in the model’s output. Complementing these behavioral experiments, our probing experiments indicate that the model shifts its interpretation of assimilated sounds from their acoustic form to their underlying form in its final layers. Finally, our causal intervention experiments suggest that the model relies on minimal phonological context cues to accomplish this shift. These findings represent a step towards better understanding the similarities and differences in phonological processing between neural ASR models and humans.

Perception of Phonological Assimilation by Neural Speech Recognition Models

Recent models in cross-lingual semantic role labeling (SRL) barely analyze the applicability of their network selection.
We believe that network selection is important since it affects the transferability of cross-lingual models, i.e., how the model can extract universal features from source languages to label target languages.
Therefore, we comprehensively compare the transferability of different graph neural network (GNN)-based models enriched with universal dependency trees.
GNN-based models include transformer-based, graph convolutional network-based, and graph attention network (GAT)-based models.
We focus our study on a zero-shot setting by training the models in English and evaluating the models in 23 target languages provided by the Universal Proposition Bank.
Based on our experiments, we consistently show that syntax from universal dependency trees is essential for cross-lingual SRL models to achieve better transferability.
Dependency-aware self-attention with relative position representations (SAN-RPRs) transfer best across languages, especially in the long-range dependency distance.
We also show that dependency-aware two-attention relational GATs transfer better than SAN-RPRs in languages where most arguments lie in a 1-2 dependency distance.

Transferability of Syntax-Aware Graph Neural Networks in Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Semantic Role Labeling

LLMs can now perform a variety of complex writing tasks. They also excel in answering questions pertaining to natural language inference and commonsense reasoning. Composing these questions is itself a skilled writing task, so in this paper we consider LLMs as authors of commonsense assessment items. We prompt LLMs to generate items in the style of a prominent benchmark for commonsense reasoning, the Choice of Plausible Alternatives (COPA). We examine the outcome according to analyses facilitated by the LLMs and human annotation. We find that LLMs that succeed in answering the original COPA benchmark are also more successful in authoring their own items.

From Test-Taking to Test-Making: Examining LLM Authoring of Commonsense Assessment Items

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to execute complex instructions is essential for their real-world applications. However, several recent studies indicate that LLMs struggle with challenging instructions. In this paper, we propose Evolutionary Contrastive Distillation (ECD), a novel method for generating high-quality synthetic preference data designed to enhance the complex instruction-following capability of language models. ECD generates data that specifically illustrates the difference between a response that successfully follows a set of complex instructions and a response that is high-quality, but nevertheless makes some subtle mistakes. This is done by prompting LLMs to progressively evolve simple instructions to more complex instructions. When the complexity of an instruction is increased, the original successful response to the original instruction becomes a "hard negative" response for the new instruction, mostly meeting requirements of the new instruction, but barely missing one or two. By pairing a good response with such a hard negative response, and employing contrastive learning algorithms such as DPO, we improve language models' ability to follow complex instructions. Empirically, we observe that our method yields a 7B model that exceeds the complex instruction-following performance of current SOTA 7B models and is competitive even with open-source 70B models.

Evolutionary Contrastive Distillation for Language Model Alignment

Despite recent advancements in AI and NLP, negotiation remains a difficult domain for AI agents. Traditional game theoretic approaches that have worked well for two-player zero-sum games struggle in the context of negotiation due to their inability to learn human-compatible strategies. On the other hand, approaches that only use human data tend to be domain-specific and lack the theoretical guarantees provided by strategies grounded in game theory. Motivated by the notion of fairness as a criterion for optimality in general sum games, we propose a negotiation framework called FDHC which incorporates fairness into both the reward design and search to learn human-compatible negotiation strategies. Our method includes a novel, RL+search technique called LGM-Zero which leverages a pre-trained language model to retrieve human-compatible offers from large action spaces. Our results show that our method is able to achieve more egalitarian negotiation outcomes and improve negotiation quality.

A Fairness-Driven Method for Learning Human-Compatible Negotiation Strategies

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in the legal domain, with GPT-4 even passing the Uniform Bar Exam in the U.S. However their efficacy remains limited for non-standardized tasks and tasks in languages other than English. This underscores the need for careful evaluation of LLMs within each legal system before application.
Here, we introduce KBL, a benchmark for assessing the Korean legal language understanding of LLMs, consisting of (1) 7 legal knowledge tasks (510 examples), (2) 4 legal reasoning tasks (288 examples), and (3) the Korean bar exam (4 domains, 53 tasks, 2,510 examples). First two datasets were developed in close collaboration with lawyers to evaluate LLMs in practical scenarios in a certified manner. Furthermore, considering legal practitioners' frequent use of extensive legal documents for research, we assess LLMs in both a closed book setting, where they rely solely on internal knowledge, and a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) setting, using a corpus of Korean statutes and precedents. The results indicate substantial room and opportunities for improvement.

Developing a Pragmatic Benchmark for Assessing Korean Legal Language Understanding in Large Language Models

Modern NLP tasks increasingly rely on dense retrieval methods to access up-to-date and relevant contextual information. We are motivated by the premise that retrieval benefits from segments that can vary in size such that a content’s semantic independence is better captured. We propose LumberChunker, a method leveraging an LLM to dynamically segment documents, which iteratively prompts the LLM to identify the point within a group of sequential passages where the content begins to shift. To evaluate our method, we introduce GutenQA, a benchmark with 3000 "needle in a haystack" type of question-answer pairs derived from 100 public domain narrative books available on Project Gutenberg. Our experiments show that LumberChunker not only outperforms the most competitive baseline by 7.37% in retrieval performance (DCG@20) but also that, when integrated into a RAG pipeline, LumberChunker proves to be more effective than other chunking methods and competitive baselines, such as the Gemini 1.5M Pro.

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Next from EMNLP 2024

Mitigating Open-Vocabulary Caption Hallucinations

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Ko-LongRAG: A Korean Long-Context RAG Benchmark Built with a Retrieval-Free Approach