Singapore

The identification of cognates is a fundamental process in historical linguistics, on which any further research is based. Even though there are several cognate databases for Romance languages, they are rather scattered, incomplete, noisy, contain unreliable information, or have uncertain availability.
In this paper we introduce a comprehensive database of Romance cognates and borrowings based on the etymological information provided by the dictionaries. We extract pairs of cognates between any two Romance languages by parsing electronic dictionaries of Romanian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French. Based on this resource, we propose a strong benchmark for the automatic detection of cognates, by applying machine learning and deep learning based methods on any two pairs of Romance languages. We find that automatic identification of cognates is possible with accuracy averaging around 94% for the more difficult task formulations.

EMNLP 2023

RoBoCoP: A Comprehensive ROmance BOrrowing COgnate Package and Benchmark for Multilingual Cognate Identification

cognates database

automatic detection

romance languages

borrowing

cognates

## 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.

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.

Analogy-making between narratives is crucial for human reasoning.
In this paper, we evaluate the ability to identify and generate analogies by constructing a first-of-its-kind large-scale story-level analogy corpus, \textsc{StoryAnalogy}, which contains 24K story pairs from diverse domains with human annotations on two similarities from the extended Structure-Mapping Theory.
We design a set of tests on \textsc{StoryAnalogy}, presenting the first evaluation of story-level analogy identification and generation.
Interestingly, we find that the analogy identification tasks are incredibly difficult not only for sentence embedding models but also for the recent large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and LLaMa.
ChatGPT, for example, only achieved around 30\% accuracy in multiple-choice questions (compared to over 85\% accuracy for humans). 
Furthermore, we observe that the data in \textsc{StoryAnalogy} can improve the quality of analogy generation in LLMs, where a fine-tuned FlanT5-xxl model achieves comparable performance to zero-shot ChatGPT.

StoryAnalogy: Deriving Story-level Analogies from Large Language Models to Unlock Analogical Understanding

We present ACL OCL, a scholarly corpus derived from the ACL Anthology to assist Open scientific research in the Computational Linguistics domain. Integrating and enhancing the previous versions of the ACL Anthology, the ACL OCL contributes metadata, PDF files, citation graphs and additional structured full texts with sections, figures, and links to a large knowledge resource (Semantic Scholar). The ACL OCL spans seven decades, containing 73K papers, alongside 210K figures. 

We spotlight how ACL OCL applies to observe trends in computational linguistics. By detecting paper topics with a supervised neural model, we note that interest in “Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing” is waning and “Natural Language Generation” is resurging. Our dataset is available from HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/datasets/WINGNUS/ACL-OCL).

The ACL OCL Corpus: Advancing Open Science in Computational Linguistics

We present BLESS, a comprehensive performance benchmark of the most recent state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) on the task of text simplification (TS). We examine how well off-the-shelf LLMs can solve this challenging task, assessing a total of 44 models, differing in size, architecture, pre-training methods, and accessibility, on three test sets from different domains (Wikipedia, news, and medical) under a few-shot setting. Our analysis considers a suite of automatic metrics, as well as a large-scale quantitative investigation into the types of common edit operations performed by the different models. Furthermore, we perform a manual qualitative analysis on a subset of model outputs to better gauge the quality of the generated simplifications. Our evaluation indicates that the best LLMs, despite not being trained on TS perform comparably with state-of-the-art TS baselines. Additionally, we find that certain LLMs demonstrate a greater range and diversity of edit operations. Our performance benchmark will be available as a resource for the development of future TS methods and evaluation metrics.

BLESS: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Sentence Simplification

The growing number of multimodal online discussions necessitates automatic summarization to save time and reduce content overload. 
However, existing summarization datasets are not suitable for this purpose, as they either do not cover discussions, multiple modalities, or both. To this end, we present mRedditSum, the first multimodal discussion summarization dataset. It consists of 3,033 discussion threads where a post solicits advice regarding an issue described with an image and text, and respective comments express diverse opinions. We annotate each thread with a human-written summary that captures both the essential information from the text, as well as the details available only in the image. Experiments show that popular summarization models---GPT-3.5, BART, and T5---consistently improve in performance when visual information is incorporated. We also introduce a novel method, cluster-based multi-stage summarization, that outperforms existing baselines and serves as a competitive baseline for future work.

mRedditSum: A Multimodal Abstractive Summarization Dataset of Reddit Threads with Images | VIDEO

While Diffusion Generative Models have achieved great success on image generation tasks, how to efficiently and effectively incorporate them into speech generation especially translation tasks remains a non-trivial problem. Specifically, due to the low information density of speech data, the transformed discrete speech unit sequence is much longer than the corresponding text transcription, posing significant challenges to existing auto-regressive models. Furthermore, it is not optimal to brutally apply discrete diffusion on the speech unit sequence while disregarding the continuous space structure, which will degrade the generation performance significantly. In this paper, we propose a novel diffusion model by applying the diffusion forward process in the continuous speech representation space, while employing the diffusion backward process in the discrete speech unit space. In this way, we preserve the semantic structure of the continuous speech representation space in the diffusion process and integrate the continuous and discrete diffusion models. We conduct extensive experiments on the textless direct speech-to-speech translation task, where the proposed method achieves comparable results to the computationally intensive auto-regressive baselines (500 steps on average) with significantly fewer decoding steps (50 steps).

DiffS2UT: A Semantic Preserving Diffusion Model for Textless Direct Speech-to-Speech Translation

Conversational Recommender System (CRS) aims to explicitly acquire user preferences towards items and attributes through natural language conversations. However, existing CRS methods ask users to provide explicit answers (yes/no) for each attribute they require, regardless of users' knowledge or interest, which may significantly reduce the user experience and semantic consistency. Furthermore, these methods assume that users like all attributes of the target item and dislike those unrelated to it, which can introduce bias in attribute-level feedback and impede the system's ability to accurately identify the target item. To address these issues, we propose a more realistic, user-friendly, and explainable CRS framework called Hierarchical User-Interest Tracking for Conversational Recommender System (HutCRS). HutCRS portrays the conversation as a hierarchical interest tree that consists of two stages. In stage I, the system identifies the aspects that the user prefers while the system asks about attributes related to these positive aspects or recommends items in stage II. In addition, we develop a Hierarchical-Interest Policy Learning (HIPL) module to integrate the decision-making process of which aspects to ask and when to ask about attributes or recommend items. Moreover, we classify the attribute-level feedback results to further enhance the system’s ability to capture special information, such as attribute instances that are accepted by users but not presented in their historical interactive data. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method. The implementation of HutCRS is publicly available at https://github.com/xinle1129/HutCRS.

HutCRS: Hierarchical User-Interest Tracking for Conversational Recommender System | VIDEO

In this paper we consider the task of conversational semantic parsing over general purpose knowledge graphs (KGs) with millions of entities, and thousands of relation-types. We focus on models which are capable of interactively mapping user utterances into executable logical forms (e.g., Sparql) in the context of the conversational history. Our key idea is to represent information about an utterance and its context via a subgraph which is created dynamically, i.e., the number of nodes varies per utterance. Rather than treating the subgraph as a sequence, we exploit its underlying structure and encode it with a graph neural network which further allows us to represent a large number of (unseen) nodes. Experimental results show that dynamic context modeling is superior to static approaches, delivering performance improvements across the board (i.e., for simple and complex questions). Our results further confirm that modeling the structure of context is better at processing discourse information, (i.e., at handling ellipsis and resolving coreference) and longer interactions.

Conversational Semantic Parsing using Dynamic Context Graphs

In a spoken dialogue system, an NLU model is preceded by a speech recognition system that can deteriorate the performance of natural language understanding.
This paper proposes a method for investigating the impact of speech recognition errors on the performance of natural language understanding models.
The proposed method combines the back transcription procedure with a fine-grained technique for categorizing the errors that affect the performance of NLU models.
The method relies on the usage of synthesized speech for NLU evaluation.
We show that the use of synthesized speech in place of audio recording does not change the outcomes of the presented technique in a significant way.

Back Transcription as a Method for Evaluating Robustness of Natural Language Understanding Models to Speech Recognition Errors | VIDEO

With the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3.5 (GPT-3.5) exhibiting remarkable reasoning and comprehension abilities in Natural Language Processing (NLP), most Question Answering (QA) research has primarily centered around general QA tasks based on GPT, neglecting the specific challenges posed by Complex Table QA. In this paper, we propose to incorporate GPT-3.5 to address such challenges, in which complex tables are reconstructed into tuples and specific prompt designs are employed for dialogues. Specifically, we encode each cell's hierarchical structure, position information, and content as a tuple. By enhancing the prompt template with an explanatory description of the meaning of each tuple and the logical reasoning process of the task, we effectively improve the hierarchical structure awareness capability of GPT-3.5 to better parse the complex tables. Extensive experiments and results on Complex Table QA datasets, i.e., the open-domain dataset HiTAB and the aviation domain dataset AIT-QA show that our approach significantly outperforms previous work on both datasets, leading to state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.

Large Language Models are Complex Table Parsers

To address the data scarcity issue in Conversational question answering (ConvQA), a dialog inpainting method, which utilizes documents to generate ConvQA datasets, has been proposed. However, the original dialog inpainting model is trained solely on the dialog reconstruction task, resulting in the generation of questions with low contextual relevance due to insufficient learning of question-answer alignment. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel framework called Dialogizer, which has the capability to automatically generate ConvQA datasets with high contextual relevance from textual sources. The framework incorporates two training tasks: question-answer matching (QAM) and topic-aware dialog generation (TDG). Moreover, re-ranking is conducted during the inference phase based on the contextual relevance of the generated questions. Using our framework, we produce four ConvQA datasets by utilizing documents from multiple domains as the primary source. Through automatic evaluation using diverse metrics, as well as human evaluation, we validate that our proposed framework exhibits the ability to generate datasets of higher quality compared to the baseline dialog inpainting model.

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