Malta

Adversarial attacks against Language models (LMs) are a significant concern. In particular, adversarial samples exploit the model&#39;s sensitivity to small input changes. While these changes appear insignificant on the semantics of the input sample, they result in significant decay in model performance. In this paper, we propose Targeted Paraphrasing via RL (TPRL), an approach to automatically learn a policy to generate challenging samples that improve the model’s performance. TPRL leverages FLAN-T5, a language model, as a generator and employs a self-learned policy using a proximal policy optimization to generate the adversarial examples automatically. TPRL&#39;s reward is based on the confusion induced in the classifier, preserving the original text meaning through a Mutual Implication score. We demonstrate \&amp; evaluate TPRL&#39;s effectiveness in discovering natural adversarial attacks and improving model performance through extensive experiments on four diverse NLP classification tasks via Automatic \&amp; Human evaluation. TPRL outperforms strong baselines, exhibits generalizability across classifiers and datasets, and combines the strengths of language modeling and reinforcement learning to generate diverse and influential adversarial examples.

EACL 2024

Finding a Needle in the Adversarial Haystack: A Targeted Paraphrasing Approach For Uncovering Edge Cases with Minimal Distribution Distortion

sentiment analysis

language models

adversarial attacks

## 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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EMNLP 2022

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.

Adversarial attacks against Language models (LMs) are a significant concern. In particular, adversarial samples exploit the model's sensitivity to small input changes. While these changes appear insignificant on the semantics of the input sample, they result in significant decay in model performance. In this paper, we propose Targeted Paraphrasing via RL (TPRL), an approach to automatically learn a policy to generate challenging samples that improve the model’s performance. TPRL leverages FLAN-T5, a language model, as a generator and employs a self-learned policy using a proximal policy optimization to generate the adversarial examples automatically. TPRL's reward is based on the confusion induced in the classifier, preserving the original text meaning through a Mutual Implication score. We demonstrate \& evaluate TPRL's effectiveness in discovering natural adversarial attacks and improving model performance through extensive experiments on four diverse NLP classification tasks via Automatic \& Human evaluation. TPRL outperforms strong baselines, exhibits generalizability across classifiers and datasets, and combines the strengths of language modeling and reinforcement learning to generate diverse and influential adversarial examples.

technical paper

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. 
#### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Wn38q0yev6U3RTgnf4Tn5T9GuAuZ-xW/view?usp=sharing) *downloadable*

To access the EACL 2024 event page you need to register [**here**](https://acl.swoogo.com/EACL2024). 

Please register!

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.

The prevalence of information manipulation online has created a need for propaganda detection systems. Such systems have typically focused on the surface words, ignoring the linguistic structure. Here we aim to bridge this gap. In particular, we present the first attempt at using discourse analysis for the task. We consider both paragraph-level and token-level classification and we propose a discourse-aware Transformer architecture. Our experiments on English and Russian demonstrate sizeable performance gains compared to a number of baselines. Moreover, our ablation study emphasizes the importance of specific types of discourse features, and our in-depth analysis reveals a strong correlation between propaganda instances and discourse spans.

Unleashing the Power of Discourse-Enhanced Transformers for Propaganda Detection

Image captioning models are typically trained by treating all samples equally, neglecting to account for mismatched or otherwise difficult data points. In contrast, recent work has shown the effectiveness of training models by scheduling the data using curriculum learning strategies. This paper contributes to this direction by actively curating difficult samples in datasets without increasing the total number of samples. We explore the effect of using three data curation methods within the training process: complete removal of an sample, caption replacement, or image replacement via a text-to-image generation model. Experiments on the Flickr30K and COCO datasets with the BLIP and BEiT-3 models demonstrate that these curation methods do indeed yield improved image captioning models, underscoring their efficacy.

The Role of Data Curation in Image Captioning

Large language models excel in text generation and generalization, however they face challenges in text editing tasks, especially in correcting spelling errors and mistyping.
In this paper, we present a methodology for generative spelling correction (SC), tested on English and Russian languages and potentially can be extended to any language with minor changes. Our research mainly focuses on exploring natural spelling errors and mistyping in texts and studying how those errors can be emulated in correct sentences to enrich generative models' pre-train procedure effectively. 
We investigate the effects of emulations in various text domains and examine two spelling corruption techniques: 1) first one mimics human behavior when making a mistake through leveraging statistics of errors from a particular dataset, and 2) second adds the most common spelling errors, keyboard miss clicks, and some heuristics within the texts.
We conducted experiments employing various corruption strategies, models' architectures, and sizes in the pre-training and fine-tuning stages and evaluated the models using single-domain and multi-domain test sets. As a practical outcome of our work, we introduce SAGE (Spell checking via Augmentation and Generative distribution Emulation).

A Methodology for Generative Spelling Correction via Natural Spelling Errors Emulation across Multiple Domains and Languages

Prior work has uncovered a set of common problems in state-of-the-art context-based question answering (QA) systems: a lack of attention to the context when the latter conflicts with a model’s parametric knowledge, little robustness to noise, and a lack of consistency with their answers. However, most prior work focus on one or two of those problems in isolation, which makes it difficult to see trends across them. We aim to close this gap, by first outlining a set of – previously discussed as well as novel – desiderata for QA models. We then survey relevant analysis and methods papers to provide an overview of the state of the field. The second part of our work presents experiments where we evaluate 15 QA systems on 5 datasets according to all desiderata at once. We find many novel trends, including (1) systems that are less susceptible to noise are not necessarily more consistent with their answers when given irrelevant context; (2) most systems that are more susceptible to noise are more likely to correctly answer according to a context that conflicts with their parametric knowledge; and (3) the combination of conflicting knowledge and noise can reduce system performance by up to 96%. As such, our desiderata help increase our understanding of how these models work and reveal potential avenues for improvements.

Desiderata For The Context Use Of Question Answering Systems

Cross-lingual summarization aims to generate a summary in one language
given input in a different language, allowing for the dissemination of
relevant content among different language speaking populations. The
task is challenging mainly due to the paucity of cross-lingual
datasets and the compounded difficulty of summarizing and
translating.
This work presents $\mu$PLAN, an approach to cross-lingual summarization that uses an intermediate planning step as a cross-lingual bridge. 
We formulate the plan as a sequence of entities capturing the
summary's content and the order in which it should be
communicated. Importantly, our plans abstract from surface form: using
a multilingual knowledge base, we align entities to their canonical
designation across languages and generate the summary conditioned on
this cross-lingual bridge and the input. Automatic and human evaluation on the XWikis dataset (across four language pairs) demonstrates 
that our planning objective achieves state-of-the-art performance in
terms of informativeness and faithfulness. Moreover, $\mu$PLAN models
improve the zero-shot transfer to new cross-lingual language pairs
compared to baselines without a planning component.

µPLAN: Summarizing using a Content Plan as Cross-Lingual Bridge

Backchannels, which refer to short and often affirmative or empathetic responses from a listener during a conversation, play a crucial role in effective communication. In this paper, we introduce CABP(Context-Aware Backchannel Prediction), a sequential and attentive context approach aimed at enhancing backchannel prediction performance. Additionally, CABP leverages the pretrained wav2vec model for encoding audio signal. Experimental results show that CABP performs better than context-free models, with performance improvements of 1.3% and 1.8% in Korean and English datasets, respectively. Furthermore, when utilizing the pretrained wav2vec model, CABP consistently demonstrates the best performance, achieving performance improvements of 4.4% and 3.1% in Korean and English datasets.

Improving Backchannel Prediction Leveraging Sequential and Attentive Context Awareness

The five human senses – vision, taste, smell, hearing, and touch – are key concepts that shape human perception of the world. The extraction of sensory references (i.e., expressions that evoke the presence of a sensory experience) in textual corpus is a challenge of high interest, with many applications in various areas. In this paper, we propose SENSE-LM, an information extraction system tailored for the discovery of sensory references in large collections of textual documents. Based on the novel idea of combining the strength of large language models and linguistic resources such as sensorimotor norms, it addresses the task of sensory information extraction at a coarse-grained (sentence binary classification) and fine-grained (sensory term extraction) level.
Our evaluation of SENSE-LM for two sensory functions, Olfaction and Audition, and comparison with state-of-the-art methods emphasize a significant leap forward in automating these complex tasks.

SENSE-LM : A Synergy between a Language Model and Sensorimotor Representations for Auditory and Olfactory Information Extraction

Using large language models (LMs) for query or document expansion can improve generalization in information retrieval. However, it is unknown whether these techniques are universally beneficial or only effective in specific settings, such as for particular retrieval models, dataset domains, or query types. To answer this, we conduct the first comprehensive analysis of LM-based expansion. We find that there exists a strong negative correlation between retriever performance and gains from expansion: expansion improves scores for weaker models, but generally harms stronger models. We show this trend holds across a set of eleven expansion techniques, twelve datasets with diverse distribution shifts, and twenty-four retrieval models. Through qualitative error analysis, we hypothesize that although expansions provide extra information (potentially improving recall), they add additional noise that makes it difficult to discern between the top relevant documents (thus introducing false positives). Our results suggest the following recipe: use expansions for weaker models or when the target dataset significantly differs from training corpus in format; otherwise, avoid expansions to keep the relevance signal clear.

When do Generative Query and Document Expansions Fail? A Comprehensive Study Across Methods, Retrievers, and Datasets

We have deployed an LLM-based spoken dialogue system in a real hospital. The ARI social robot embodies our system, which patients and their companions can have multi-party conversations with together. In order to enable this multi-party ability, multimodality is critical. Our system, therefore, receives speech and video as input, and generates both speech and gestures (arm, head, and eye movements). In this paper, we describe our complex setting and the architecture of our dialogue system. Each component is detailed, and a video of the full system is available with the appropriate components highlighted in real-time. Our system decides when it should take its turn, generates human-like clarification requests when the patient pauses mid-utterance, answers in-domain questions (grounding to the in-prompt knowledge), and responds appropriately to out-of-domain requests (like generating jokes or quizzes). This latter feature is particularly remarkable as real patients often utter unexpected sentences that could not be handled previously.

Multi-party Multimodal Conversations Between Patients, Their Companions, and a Social Robot in a Hospital Memory Clinic

This paper presents TL;DR Progress, a new tool for exploring the literature on neural text summarization. It organizes 514~papers based on a comprehensive annotation scheme for text summarization approaches and enables fine-grained, faceted search. Each paper was manually annotated to capture aspects such as evaluation metrics, quality dimensions, learning paradigms, challenges addressed, datasets, and document domains. In addition, a succinct indicative summary is provided for each paper, consisting of automatically extracted contextual factors, issues, and proposed solutions. The tool is available online at https://www.tldr-progress.de

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