United Arab Emirates

A deployed question answering (QA) model can easily fail when the test data has a distribution shift compared to the training data. Robustness tuning (RT) methods have been widely studied to enhance model robustness against distribution shifts before model deployment. However, can we improve a model after deployment? To answer this question, we evaluate test-time adaptation (TTA) to improve a model after deployment. We first introduce ColdQA, a unified evaluation benchmark for robust QA against text corruption and changes in language and domain. We then evaluate previous TTA methods on ColdQA and compare them to RT methods. We also propose a novel TTA method called online imitation learning (OIL). Through extensive experiments, we find that TTA is comparable to RT methods, and applying TTA after RT can significantly boost the performance on ColdQA. Our proposed OIL improves TTA to be more robust to variation in hyper-parameters and test distributions over time.

EMNLP 2022

Robust Question Answering against Distribution Shifts with Test-Time Adaption: An Empirical Study

test-time adaptation

distribution shift

question answering

robustness

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

findings / work in progress

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Automatic question generation (AQG) is the task of generating a question from a given passage and an answer. Most existing AQG methods aim at encoding the passage and the answer to generate the question. However, limited work has focused on modeling the correlation between the target answer and the generated question. Moreover, unseen or rare word generation has not been studied in previous works. In this paper, we propose a novel approach which incorporates question generation with its dual problem, question answering, into a unified primal-dual framework. Specifically, the question generation component consists of an encoder that jointly encodes the answer with the passage, and a decoder that produces the question. The question answering component then re-asks the generated question on the passage to ensure that the target answer is obtained. We further introduce a knowledge distillation module to improve the model generalization ability. We conduct an extensive set of experiments on SQuAD and HotpotQA benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach over several state-of-the-art methods.

Learning to Generate Question by Asking Question: A Primal-Dual Approach with Uncommon Word Generation

Prompting has shown impressive success in enabling large pre-trained language models (LMs) to perform diverse NLP tasks, especially with only few downstream data. Automatically finding the optimal prompt for each task, however, is challenging. Most existing work resorts to tuning *soft* prompts (e.g., embeddings) which fall short of interpretability, reusability across LMs, and applicability when gradients are not accessible. *Discrete* prompts, on the other hand, are difficult to optimize, and are often created by "enumeration (e.g., paraphrasing)-then-selection" heuristics that do not explore the prompt space systematically. This paper proposes RLPrompt, an efficient discrete prompt optimization approach with reinforcement learning (RL). RLPrompt formulates a parameter-efficient policy network that generates the optimized discrete prompt after training with reward. To harness the complex and stochastic reward signals from the large LM environment, we incorporate effective reward stabilization that substantially enhances training efficiency. RLPrompt is flexibly applicable to different types of LMs, such as masked (e.g., BERT) and left-to-right models (e.g., GPTs), for both classification and generation tasks. Experiments on few-shot classification and unsupervised text style transfer show superior performance over a wide range of existing fine-tuning or prompting methods. Interestingly, the resulting optimized prompts are often ungrammatical gibberish text; and surprisingly, those gibberish prompts are transferrable between different LMs to retain significant performance, indicating that LM prompting may not follow human language patterns.

RLPrompt: Optimizing Discrete Text Prompts with Reinforcement Learning

Given an input sequence (or prefix), modern language models often assign high probabilities to output sequences that are repetitive, incoherent, or irrelevant to the prefix; as such, model-generated text also contains such artifacts. To address these issues we present RankGen, a 1.2B parameter encoder model for English that scores model generations given a prefix. RankGen can be flexibly incorporated as a scoring function in beam search and used to decode from any pretrained language model. We train RankGen using large-scale contrastive learning to map a prefix close to the ground-truth sequence that follows it and far away from two types of negatives: (1) random sequences from the same document as the prefix, and (2) sequences generated from a large language model conditioned on the prefix. Experiments across four different language models (345M-11B parameters) and two domains show that RankGen significantly outperforms decoding algorithms like nucleus, top-k, and typical sampling on both automatic metrics (85.0 vs 77.3 MAUVE) as well as human evaluations with English writers (74.5% human preference over nucleus sampling). Analysis reveals that RankGen outputs are more relevant to the prefix and improve continuity and coherence compared to baselines. We release our model checkpoints, code, and human preference data with explanations to facilitate future research.

RankGen: Improving Text Generation with Large Ranking Models

Generative models of code, pretrained on large corpora of programs, have shown great success in translating natural language to code (Chen et al., 2021; Austin et al., 2021; Li et al., 2022, inter alia). While these models do not explicitly incorporate program semantics (i.e., execution results) during training, they are able to generate correct solutions for many problems. However, choosing a single correct program from a generated set for each problem remains challenging. In this work, we introduce execution result--based minimum Bayes risk decoding (MBR-EXEC) for program selection and show that it improves the few-shot performance of pretrained code models on natural-language-to-code tasks. We select output programs from a generated candidate set by marginalizing over program implementations that share the same semantics. Because exact equivalence is intractable, we execute each program on a small number of test inputs to approximate semantic equivalence. Across datasets, execution or simulated execution significantly outperforms the methods that do not involve program semantics. We find that MBR-EXEC consistently improves over all execution-unaware selection methods, suggesting it as an effective approach for natural language to code translation.

Natural Language to Code Translation with Execution

Analogy-making gives rise to reasoning, abstraction, flexible categorization and counterfactual inference -- abilities lacking in even the best AI systems today. Much research has suggested that analogies are key to non-brittle systems that can adapt to new domains. Despite their importance, analogies received little attention in the NLP community, with most research focusing on simple word analogies. Work that tackled more complex analogies relied heavily on manually constructed, hard-to-scale input representations.
In this work, we explore a more realistic, challenging setup: our input is a pair of natural language procedural texts, describing a situation or a process (e.g., how the heart works/how a pump works). 
Our goal is to automatically extract entities and their relations from the text and find a mapping between the different domains based on relational similarity (e.g., blood is mapped to water). 

We develop an interpretable, scalable algorithm and demonstrate that it identifies the correct mappings 87% of the time for procedural texts and 94% for stories from cognitive-psychology literature. We show it can extract analogies from a large dataset of procedural texts, achieving 79% precision (analogy prevalence in data: 3%). Lastly, we demonstrate that our algorithm is robust to paraphrasing the input texts

Life is a Circus and We are the Clowns: Automatically Finding Analogies between Situations and Processes

Generating engaging content has drawn much recent attention in the NLP community. Asking questions is a natural way to respond to photos and promote awareness. However, most answers to questions in traditional question-answering (QA) datasets are factoids, which reduce individuals' willingness to answer. Furthermore, traditional visual question generation (VQG) confines the source data for question generation to single images, resulting in a limited ability to comprehend time-series information of the underlying event. In this paper, we propose generating engaging questions from multiple images. We present MVQG, a new dataset, and establish a series of baselines, including both end-to-end and dual-stage architectures. Results show that building stories behind the image sequence enables models to
generate engaging questions, which confirms our assumption that people typically construct a picture of the event in their minds before asking questions. These results open up an exciting challenge for visual-and-language models to implicitly construct a story behind a series of photos to allow for creativity and experience sharing and hence draw attention to downstream applications.

Multi-VQG: Generating Engaging Questions for Multiple Images

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have been widely used in large-scale Vision and Language Pre-training (VLP) models. Though previous VLP works have proved the effectiveness of ViTs, they still suffer from computational efficiency brought by the long visual sequence. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose an efficient vision-and-language pre-training model with Text-Relevant Image Patch Selection, namely TRIPS, which reduces the visual sequence progressively with a text-guided patch-selection layer in the visual backbone for efficient training and inference. The patch-selection layer can dynamically compute text-dependent visual attention to identify the attentive image tokens with text guidance and fuse inattentive ones in an end-to-end manner. Meanwhile, TRIPS does not introduce extra parameters to ViTs. Experimental results on a variety of popular benchmark datasets demonstrate that TRIPS gain a speedup of 40% over previous similar VLP models, yet with competitive or better downstream task performance.

TRIPS: Efficient Vision-and-Language Pre-training with Text-Relevant Image Patch Selection

Socratic questioning is an educational method that allows students to discover answers to complex problems by asking them a series of thoughtful questions. 
Generation of didactically sound questions is challenging, requiring understanding of the reasoning process involved in the problem. We hypothesize that such questioning strategy can not only enhance the human performance, but also assist the math word problem (MWP) solvers.
In this work, we explore the ability of large language models (LMs) in generating sequential questions for guiding math word problem-solving. We propose various guided question generation schemes based on input conditioning and reinforcement learning.
On both automatic and human quality evaluations, we find that LMs constrained with desirable question properties generate superior questions and improve the overall performance of a math word problem solver. We conduct a preliminary user study to examine the potential value of such question generation models in the education domain. Results suggest that the difficulty level of problems plays an important role in determining whether questioning improves or hinders human performance. 
We discuss the future of using such questioning strategies in education.

Automatic Generation of Socratic Subquestions for Teaching Math Word Problems

Semi-parametric models, which augment generation with retrieval, have led to impressive results in language modeling and machine translation, due to their ability to retrieve fine-grained information from a datastore of examples. One of the most prominent approaches, kNN-MT, exhibits strong domain adaptation capabilities by retrieving tokens from domain-specific datastores (Khandelwal et al., 2021). However, kNN-MT requires an expensive retrieval operation for every single generated token, leading to a very low decoding speed (around 8 times slower than a parametric model). In this paper, we introduce a chunk-based kNN-MT model which retrieves chunks of tokens from the datastore, instead of a single token. We propose several strategies for incorporating the retrieved chunks into the generation process, and for selecting the steps at which the model needs to search for neighbors in the datastore. Experiments on machine translation in two settings, static and "on-the-fly” domain adaptation, show that the chunk-based kNN-MT model leads to significant speed-ups (up to 4 times) with only a small drop in translation quality.

Chunk-based Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation

Contrary to the notions of language as an amodal system, natural human communication is multimodal and combines speech, gestures, writing, and pictures. To account for this, recent work has proposed that our vocal, bodily, and graphic modalities persist in parallel in a multimodal language faculty, and both unimodal and multimodal expressions arise out of emergent states of a shared architecture. Such a model carries different expectations for the ways in which modalities may be similar or different from each other, and how they may interact. I will highlight these properties specifically for our graphic modality, which I argue can manifest in full visual languages when displaying both a systematic lexicon and complex grammar. I will use analysis of a corpus of several hundred annotated comics to show distinctive patterns that suggest they are drawn in different visual languages. Yet, I will also show that consistent “universal” linguistic principles persist across this structural diversity. Finally, I will argue that a multimodal language faculty requires us to change our conception of linguistic relativity, and I will show how subtle structures of spoken languages permeate across to visual languages. Altogether, this work argues for a multimodal basis of linguistic structure, and heralds a reconsideration of what constitutes the language system.

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