Singapore

Subword tokenization has become the de-facto standard for tokenization although comparative evaluations of their quality across languages are scarce. Existing evaluation studies focus on the effect of a tokenization algorithm on the performance in downstream tasks, or on engineering criteria such as the compression rate. We present a new evaluation paradigm that focuses on the cognitive plausibility of subword tokenization. We analyze the correlation of the tokenizer output with the reading time and accuracy of human responses on a lexical decision task. We compare three tokenization algorithms across several languages and vocabulary sizes. Our results indicate that the Unigram algorithm yields less cognitively plausible tokenization behavior and a worse coverage of derivational morphemes, in contrast with prior work.

EMNLP 2023

Analyzing Cognitive Plausibility of Subword Tokenization

subword tokenization

lexical decision

cognitive plausibility

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
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EACL 2024

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

poster

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

In document-level event extraction (DEE) tasks, a document typically contains many event records with multiple event roles. Therefore, accurately extracting all event records is a big challenge since the number of event records is not given. Previous works present the entity-based directed acyclic graph (EDAG) generation methods to autoregressively generate event roles, which requires a given generation order. Meanwhile, parallel methods are proposed to generate all event roles simultaneously, but suffer from the inadequate training which manifests zero accuracies on some event roles. In this paper, we propose an Iteratively Parallel Generation method with the Pre-Filling strategy (IPGPF). Event roles in an event record are generated in parallel to avoid order selection, and the event records are iteratively generated to utilize historical results. Experiments on two public datasets show our IPGPF improves $11.7$ F1 than previous parallel models and up to $5.1$ F1 than auto-regressive models under the control variable settings. Moreover, our enhanced IPGPF outperforms other entity-enhanced models and achieves new state-of-the-art performance.

An Iteratively Parallel Generation Method with the Pre-Filling Strategy for Document-level Event Extraction | VIDEO

Large language models (LLMs) exhibited powerful capability in various natural language processing tasks. This work focuses on exploring LLM performance on zero-shot information extraction, with a focus on the ChatGPT and named entity recognition (NER) task. Inspired by the remarkable reasoning capability of LLM on symbolic and arithmetic reasoning, we adapt the prevalent reasoning methods to NER and propose reasoning strategies tailored for NER. First, we explore a decomposed question-answering paradigm by breaking down the NER task into simpler subproblems by labels. Second, we propose syntactic augmentation to stimulate the model's intermediate thinking in two ways: syntactic prompting, which encourages the model to analyze the syntactic structure itself, and tool augmentation, which provides the model with the syntactic information generated by a parsing tool. Besides, we adapt self-consistency to NER by proposing a two-stage majority voting strategy, which first votes for the most consistent mentions, then the most consistent types. The proposed methods achieve remarkable improvements for zero-shot NER across seven benchmarks, including Chinese and English datasets, and on both domain-specific and general-domain scenarios. In addition, we present a comprehensive analysis of the error types with suggestions for optimization directions. We also verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods on the few-shot setting and other LLMs.

Empirical Study of Zero-Shot NER with ChatGPT

We propose a novel unsupervised keyphrase extraction approach, called SAMRank, which uses only a self-attention map in a pre-trained language model (PLM) to determine the importance of phrases. Most recent approaches for unsupervised keyphrase extraction mainly utilize contextualized embeddings to capture semantic relevance between words, sentences, and documents. However, due to the anisotropic nature of contextual embeddings, these approaches may not be optimal for semantic similarity measurements. SAMRank as proposed here computes the importance of phrases solely leveraging a self-attention map in a PLM, in this case BERT and GPT-2, eliminating the need to measure embedding similarities. To assess the level of importance, SAMRank combines both global and proportional attention scores through calculations using a self-attention map. We evaluate the SAMRank on three keyphrase extraction datasets: Inspec, SemEval2010, and SemEval2017. The experimental results show that SAMRank outperforms most embedding-based models on both long and short documents and demonstrating that it is possible to use only a self-attention map for keyphrase extraction without relying on embeddings. Source code is available at https://github.com/kangnlp/SAMRank.

SAMRank: Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction using Self-Attention Map in BERT and GPT-2

Entity linking aims to link ambiguous mentions to their corresponding entities in a knowledge base.
One of the key challenges comes from insufficient labeled data for specific domains. 
Although dense retrievers have achieved excellent performance on several benchmarks, their performance decreases significantly when only a limited amount of in-domain labeled data is available.
In such few-shot setting, we revisit the sparse retrieval method, and propose an ELECTRA-based keyword extractor to denoise the mention context and construct a better query expression.
For training the extractor, we propose a distant supervision method to automatically generate training data based on overlapping tokens between mention contexts and entity descriptions.
Experimental results on the ZESHEL dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models by a significant margin across all test domains, showing the effectiveness of keyword-enhanced sparse retrieval.

Revisiting Sparse Retrieval for Few-shot Entity Linking | VIDEO

Recent work in vision-and-language pretraining has investigated supervised signals from object detection data to learn better, fine-grained multimodal representations. In this work, we take a step further and explore how we can tap into supervision from small-scale visual relation data. In particular, we propose two pretraining approaches to contextualise visual entities in a multimodal setup. With verbalised scene graphs, we transform visual relation triplets into structured captions, and treat them as additional image descriptions. With masked relation prediction, we further encourage relating entities from image regions with visually masked contexts. When applied to strong baselines pretrained on large amounts of Web data, zero-shot evaluations on both coarse-grained and fine-grained tasks show the efficacy of our methods in learning multimodal representations from weakly-supervised relations data.

Weakly-Supervised Learning of Visual Relations in Multimodal Pretraining

Pretrained machine learning models are known to perpetuate and even amplify existing biases in data, which can result in unfair outcomes that ultimately impact user experience. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the mechanisms behind those prejudicial biases to ensure that model performance does not result in discriminatory behaviour toward certain groups or populations. In this work, we define gender bias as our case study. We quantify bias amplification in pretraining and after fine-tuning on three families of vision-and-language models. We investigate the connection, if any, between the two learning stages, and evaluate how bias amplification reflects on model performance. Overall, we find that bias amplification in pretraining and after fine-tuning are independent. We then examine the effect of continued pretraining on gender-neutral data, finding that this reduces group disparities, i.e., promotes fairness, on VQAv2 and retrieval tasks without significantly compromising task performance.

Evaluating Bias and Fairness in Gender-Neutral Pretrained Vision-and-Language Models

Label aggregation such as majority voting is commonly used to resolve annotator disagreement in dataset creation. 
However, this may disregard minority values and opinions.
Recent studies indicate that learning from individual annotations outperforms learning from aggregated labels, though they require a considerable amount of annotation.
Active learning, as an annotation cost-saving strategy, has not been fully explored in the context of learning from disagreement. 
We show that in the active learning setting, a multi-head model performs significantly better than a single-head model in terms of uncertainty estimation.
By designing and evaluating acquisition functions with annotator-specific heads on two datasets, we show that group-level entropy works generally well on both datasets. 
Importantly, it achieves performance in terms of both prediction and uncertainty estimation comparable to full-scale training from disagreement, while saving 70\% of the annotation budget.

ACTOR: Active Learning with Annotator-specific Classification Heads to Embrace Human Label Variation | VIDEO

Medical systematic reviews play a vital role in healthcare decision making and policy. However, their production is time-consuming, limiting the availability of high-quality and up-to-date evidence summaries. Recent advancements in LLMs offer the potential to automatically generate literature reviews on demand, addressing this issue. However, LLMs sometimes generate inaccurate (and potentially misleading) texts by hallucination or omission. In healthcare, this can make LLMs unusable at best and dangerous at worst. We conducted 16 interviews with international systematic review experts to characterize the perceived utility and risks of LLMs in the specific context of medical evidence reviews. Experts indicated that LLMs can assist in the writing process by drafting summaries, generating templates, distilling information, and crosschecking information. They also raised concerns regarding confidently composed but inaccurate LLM outputs and other potential downstream harms, including decreased accountability and proliferation of low-quality reviews. Informed by this qualitative analysis, we identify criteria for rigorous evaluation of biomedical LLMs aligned with domain expert views.

Appraising the Potential Uses and Harms of LLMs for Medical Systematic Reviews

Is aesthetic impact different from beauty? Is visual salience a reflection of its capacity for effective communication? We present Impressions, a novel dataset through which to investigate the semiotics of images, and how specific visual features and design choices can elicit specific emotions, thoughts and beliefs. We posit that the impactfulness of an image extends beyond formal definitions of aesthetics, to its success as a communicative act, where style contributes as much to meaning formation as the subject matter. We also acknowledge that existing Image Captioning datasets are not designed to empower state-of-the-art architectures to model potential human impressions or interpretations of images. To fill this need, we design an annotation task heavily inspired by image analysis techniques in the Visual Arts to collect 1,440 image-caption pairs and 4,320 unique annotations exploring impact, pragmatic image description, impressions and aesthetic design choices. We show that existing multimodal image captioning and conditional generation models struggle to simulate plausible human responses to images. However, this dataset significantly improves their ability to model impressions and aesthetic evaluations of images through fine-tuning and few-shot adaptation.

Impressions: Visual Semiotics and Aesthetic Impact Understanding

Recently, pre-trained vision-language (VL) models have achieved remarkable success in various cross-modal tasks, including referring expression comprehension (REC). These models are pre-trained on the large-scale image-text pairs to learn the alignment between words in textual descriptions and objects in the corresponding images and then fine-tuned on downstream tasks. However, the performance of VL models is hindered when dealing with implicit text, which describes objects through comparisons between two or more objects rather than explicitly mentioning them. This is because the models struggle to align the implicit text with the objects in the images. To address the challenge, we introduce CLEVR-Implicit, a dataset consisting of synthetic images and corresponding two types of implicit text for the REC task. Additionally, to enhance the performance of VL models on implicit text, we propose a method called Transforming Implicit text into Explicit text (TIE), which enables VL models to reason with the implicit text. TIE consists of two modules: (1) the prompt design module builds prompts for implicit text by adding masked tokens, and (2) the cloze procedure module fine-tunes the prompts by utilizing masked language modeling (MLM) to predict the explicit words with the implicit prompts. Experimental results on our dataset demonstrate a significant improvement of 37.94\% in the performance of VL models on implicit text after employing our TIE method.

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Next from EMNLP 2023

An Iteratively Parallel Generation Method with the Pre-Filling Strategy for Document-level Event Extraction | VIDEO

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Where are we Still Split on Tokenization?