Croatia

Open domain conversational agents can answer a broad range of targeted queries. However, the sequential nature of interaction with these systems makes knowledge exploration a lengthy task which burdens the user with asking a chain of well phrased questions. In this paper, we present a retrieval based system and associated dataset for predicting the next questions that the user might have. Such a system can proactively assist users in knowledge exploration leading to a more engaging dialog. The retrieval system is trained on a dataset called the Follow-up Query Bank (FQ-Bank). FQ-Bank contains ~14K multi-turn information-seeking conversations with a valid follow-up question and a set of invalid candidates. The invalid candidates are generated to simulate various syntactic and semantic confounders such as paraphrases, partial entity match, irrelevant entity, and ASR errors. We use confounder specific techniques to simulate these negative examples on the OR-QuAC dataset. Then, we train ranking models on FQ-Bank and present results comparing supervised and unsupervised approaches. The results suggest that we can retrieve the valid follow-ups by ranking them in higher positions compared to confounders, but further knowledge grounding can improve ranking performance.
FQ-Bank is publicly available at https://github.com/amazon-science/fq-bank.

EACL 2023

Learning to Retrieve Engaging Follow-Up Queries

large language models

natural language processing

deep learning

virtual assistants

## 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.

findings / work in progress

### Welcome to the 17th 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 had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. 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.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

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.

Recent studies have suggested that neural language models learn and store a large amount of facts and commonsense knowledge from training data. 
The ability of language models to restore such knowledge is often evaluated via zero-shot cloze-style QA tasks. 
However, such evaluations rely only on prediction accuracy without punishing the systems for their mistakes, e.g., simply guessing or hallucinating likely answers. 
Selective prediction is a more informative evaluation framework that takes the confidence of predictions into account. 
Under the selective prediction setting, a model is evaluated not only by the number of correct predictions, but also by the ability to filter out dubious predictions by estimating the confidence of individual predictions. 
Such confidence-aware evaluation is crucial for determining whether to trust zero-shot predictions of language models. 
In this paper, we apply the selective prediction setting to an existing benchmark, LAMA probe, and conduct extensive experiments with recent neural language models and different confidence functions. 
We empirically show that our Selective-LAMA evaluation is more robust to the effect of simple guesses than the conventional accuracy-based evaluation.
Our evaluation reveals the importance of the choice of confidence functions by showing that simply relying on token probabilities is not always the best choice.
Further analysis shows that various confidence functions exhibit different preferences over predicted tokens for a given context.

Selective-LAMA: Selective Prediction for Confidence-Aware Evaluation of Language Models

In this paper, we present MuFaSSa (Multi-view Faithfulness Scoring via Source Ablation), a metric for evaluating faithfulness of abstractive summaries, and for guiding training of more faithful summarizers. For evaluation, MuFaSSa employs different strategies (e.g., masking entity mentions) to first remove information from the source document to form multiple ablated views. Then, the faithfulness level of each token in a generated summary is measured by the difference between the token generation probabilities when given the original document and the ablated document as inputs to trained summarizers. For training, MuFaSSa uses a novel word truncation objective that drops unfaithful tokens located by MuFaSSa in both the decoder input and output. Alignments with human-annotated faithfulness labels on AggreFact show that MuFaSSa is comparable to or better than existing metrics built on classifiers or QA models pre-trained on other tasks. In experiments on summarization with XSum and CNN/DailyMail, models trained with word truncation using MuFaSSa outperform competitive methods according to both automatic faithfulness metrics and human assessments.

Multi-View Source Ablation for Faithful Summarization

Humor recognition has been extensively studied with different methods in the past years. However, existing studies on humor recognition do not understand the mechanisms that generate humor. In this paper, inspired by the incongruity theory, any joke can be divided into two components (the setup and the punchline). Both components have multiple possible semantics, and there is an incongruous relationship between them. We use density matrices to represent the semantic uncertainty of the setup and the punchline, respectively, and design QE-Uncertainty and QE-Incongruity with the help of quantum entropy as features for humor recognition. The experimental results on the SemEval2021 Task 7 dataset show that the proposed features are more effective than the baselines for recognizing humorous and non-humorous texts.

Mining Effective Features Using Quantum Entropy for Humor Recognition

Pretrained language models (PLMs) are trained on massive corpora, but often need to specialize to specific domains. A parameter-efficient adaptation method suggests training an adapter for each domain on the task of language modeling. This leads to good in-domain scores but can be impractical for domain- or resource-restricted settings. A solution is to use a related-domain adapter for the novel domain at test time. In this paper, we introduce AdapterSoup, an approach that performs weight-space averaging of adapters trained on different domains. Our approach is embarrassingly parallel: first, we train a set of domain-specific adapters; then, for each novel domain, we determine which adapters should be averaged at test time. 
We present extensive experiments showing that AdapterSoup consistently improves performance to new domains without extra training. We also explore weight averaging of adapters trained on the same domain with different hyper-parameters, and show that it preserves the performance of a PLM on new domains while obtaining strong in-domain results. We explore various approaches for choosing which adapters to combine, such as text clustering and semantic similarity. We find that using clustering leads to the most competitive results on novel domains.

AdapterSoup: Weight Averaging to Improve Generalization of Pretrained Language Models

In open-retrieval conversational machine reading (OR-CMR) task, machines are required to do multi-turn question answering given dialogue history and a textual knowledge base. Existing works generally utilize two independent modules to approach this problem's two successive sub-tasks: first with a hard-label decision making and second with a question generation aided by various entailment reasoning methods. Such usual cascaded modeling is vulnerable to error propagation and prevents the two sub-tasks from being consistently optimized. In this work, we instead model OR-CMR as a unified text-to-text task in a fully end-to-end style. Experiments on the ShARC and OR-ShARC dataset show the effectiveness of our proposed end-to-end framework on both sub-tasks by a large margin, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Further ablation studies support that our framework can generalize to different backbone models.

Towards End-to-End Open Conversational Machine Reading

Knowledge selection is the key in knowledge-grounded dialogues (KGD), which aims to select an appropriate knowledge snippet to be used in the utterance based on dialogue history. Previous studies mainly employ the classification approach to classify each candidate snippet as "relevant” or "irrelevant” independently. However, such approaches neglect the interactions between snippets, leading to difficulties in inferring the meaning of snippets. Moreover, they lack modeling of the discourse structure of dialogue-knowledge interactions. We propose a simple yet effective generative approach for knowledge selection, called GenKS. GenKS learns to select snippets by generating their identifiers with a sequence-to-sequence model. GenKS therefore captures intra-knowledge interaction inherently through attention mechanisms. Meanwhile, we devise a hyperlink mechanism to model the dialogue-knowledge interactions explicitly. We conduct experiments on three benchmark datasets, and verify GenKS achieves the best results on both knowledge selection and response generation.

Generative Knowledge Selection for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogues

Neural models for abstractive summarization tend to generate output that is fluent and well-formed but lacks semantic faithfulness, or factuality, with respect to the input documents. In this paper, we analyze the tradeoff between abstractiveness and factuality of generated summaries across multiple datasets and models, using extensive human evaluations of factuality. In our analysis, we visualize the rates of change in factuality as we gradually increase abstractiveness using a decoding constraint, and we observe that, while increased abstractiveness generally leads to a drop in factuality, the rate of factuality decay depends on factors such as the data that the system was trained on. We introduce two datasets with human factuality judgements; one containing 10.2k generated summaries with systematically varied degrees of abstractiveness; the other containing 4.2k summaries from five different summarization models. We propose new factuality metrics that adjust for the degree of abstractiveness, and we use them to compare the abstractiveness-adjusted factuality of previous summarization works, providing baselines for future work.

Evaluating the Tradeoff Between Abstractiveness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization

With language models becoming increasingly ubiquitous, it has become essential to address their inequitable treatment of diverse demographic groups and factors. Most research on evaluating and mitigating fairness harms has been concentrated on English, while multilingual models and non-English languages have received comparatively little attention. In this paper, we survey different aspects of fairness in languages beyond English and multilingual contexts. This paper presents a survey of fairness in multilingual and non-English contexts, highlighting the shortcomings of current research and the difficulties faced by methods designed for English. We contend that the multitude of diverse cultures and languages across the world makes it infeasible to achieve comprehensive coverage in terms of constructing fairness datasets. Thus, the measurement and mitigation of biases must evolve beyond the current dataset-driven practices that are narrowly focused on specific dimensions and types of biases and, therefore, impossible to scale across languages and cultures.

Fairness in Language Models Beyond English: Gaps and Challenges

The ability to recognize emotions in conversations is necessary and important for the online chatbot to do tasks such as empathetic response generation and emotional support. Present researches mainly focus on recognizing emotions through a speaker's utterance, while research on emotion inference predicts emotions of addressees through previous utterances. Because of the lack of the addressee's utterance, emotion inference is more challenging than emotion recognition. In this paper, we propose a global-local modeling method based on recurrent neural networks (RNN) and pre-trained language models (PLM) to do emotion inference, which utilizes the sequence modeling ability of RNNs and abundant knowledge from PLMs. Moreover, we take the whole dialogue history as input of PLM to generate knowledge by in-context learning. Experimental results show that our model with knoledge enhancement achieves state-of-the-art performance on all three datasets.

Global-Local Modeling with Prompt-Based Knowledge Enhancement for Emotion Inference in Conversation

The news subheading summarizes an article's contents in several sentences to support the headline limited to solely conveying the main contents. So, it is necessary to generate compelling news subheadings in consideration of the structural characteristics of the news. In this paper, we propose a subheading generation model using topical headline information. We introduce a discriminative learning method that utilizes the prediction result of masked headline tokens. Experiments show that the proposed model is effective and outperforms the comparative models on three news datasets written in two languages. We also show that our model performs robustly on a small dataset and various masking ratios. Qualitative analysis and human evaluations also show that the overall quality of generated subheadings improved over the comparative models.

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Next from EACL 2023

Selective-LAMA: Selective Prediction for Confidence-Aware Evaluation of Language Models

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FQ-Eval: Building Evaluation Dataset for User-centered Follow-up Question Generation

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