Singapore

Chain-of-thought (CoT) is capable of eliciting models to explicitly generate reasoning paths, thus promoting reasoning accuracy and attracting increasing attention. Specifically, zero-shot CoT achieves remarkable improvements in a wide range of reasoning tasks by simply instructing the LLM with the prompt &quot;Let&#39;s think step by step!&quot;. Despite the success of zero-shot CoT, the existing zero-shot prompting techniques remain limited to a single language, making it challenging to generalize to other languages and hindering global development. In this work, we introduce cross-lingual prompting (CLP), aiming to improve zero-shot CoT reasoning across languages. Specifically, CLP consists of two main components: (1) cross-lingual alignment prompting and (2) task-specific solver prompting. The cross-lingual alignment prompting is responsible for aligning representations across different languages, whereas the task-specific solver prompting is used to generate the final chain of thoughts and results for the reasoning task. In addition, we further introduce cross-lingual self-consistent prompting (CLSP) to ensemble different reasoning paths across languages. Our experimental evaluations on several benchmarks demonstrate that CLP and CLSP significantly outperform the existing prompting methods and achieve state-of-the-art performance. We hope this work will inspire further breakthroughs in cross-lingual CoT.

EMNLP 2023

Cross-lingual Prompting: Improving Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning across Languages

chain-of-thought

cross-lingual

reasoning

## 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.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) is capable of eliciting models to explicitly generate reasoning paths, thus promoting reasoning accuracy and attracting increasing attention. Specifically, zero-shot CoT achieves remarkable improvements in a wide range of reasoning tasks by simply instructing the LLM with the prompt "Let's think step by step!". Despite the success of zero-shot CoT, the existing zero-shot prompting techniques remain limited to a single language, making it challenging to generalize to other languages and hindering global development. In this work, we introduce cross-lingual prompting (CLP), aiming to improve zero-shot CoT reasoning across languages. Specifically, CLP consists of two main components: (1) cross-lingual alignment prompting and (2) task-specific solver prompting. The cross-lingual alignment prompting is responsible for aligning representations across different languages, whereas the task-specific solver prompting is used to generate the final chain of thoughts and results for the reasoning task. In addition, we further introduce cross-lingual self-consistent prompting (CLSP) to ensemble different reasoning paths across languages. Our experimental evaluations on several benchmarks demonstrate that CLP and CLSP significantly outperform the existing prompting methods and achieve state-of-the-art performance. We hope this work will inspire further breakthroughs in cross-lingual CoT.

technical paper

**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.

Reasoning over spans of tokens from different parts of the input is essential for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks such as fact-checking (FC), machine reading comprehension (MRC) or natural language inference (NLI). However, existing highlight-based explanations primarily focus on identifying individual important features or interactions only between adjacent tokens or tuples of tokens. Most notably, there is a lack of annotations capturing the human decision-making process with respect to the necessary interactions for informed decision-making in such tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce SpanEx, a multi-annotator dataset of human span interaction explanations for two NLU tasks: NLI and FC. We then investigate the decision-making processes of multiple fine-tuned large language models in terms of the employed connections between spans in separate parts of the input and compare them to the human reasoning processes. Finally, we present a novel community detection based unsupervised method to extract such interaction explanations. We make the code and the dataset available on [Github](https://github.com/copenlu/spanex). The dataset is also available on [Huggingface datasets](https://huggingface.co/datasets/copenlu/spanex).

Explaining Interactions Between Text Spans

For a language model (LM) to faithfully model human language, it must compress vast, potentially infinite information into relatively few dimensions. We propose analyzing compression in (pre-trained) LMs from two points of view: geometric and information-theoretic. We demonstrate that the two views are highly correlated, such that the intrinsic geometric dimension of linguistic data predicts their coding length under the LM. We then show that, in turn, high compression of a linguistic dataset predicts rapid adaptation to that dataset, confirming that being able to compress linguistic information is an important part of successful LM performance. As a practical byproduct of our analysis, we evaluate a battery of intrinsic dimension estimators for the first time on linguistic data, showing that only some encapsulate the relationship between information-theoretic compression, geometric compression, and ease-of-adaptation.

Bridging Information-Theoretic and Geometric Compression in Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) excel in many tasks in NLP and beyond, but most open models have very limited coverage of smaller languages and LLM work tends to focus on languages where nearly unlimited data is available for pretraining. In this work, we study the challenges of creating LLMs for Finnish, a language spoken by less than 0.1\% of the world population. We compile an extensive dataset of Finnish combining web crawls, news, social media and eBooks. We pursue two approaches to pretrain models: 1) we train seven monolingual models from scratch (186M to 13B parameters) dubbed FinGPT, 2) we continue the pretraining of the multilingual BLOOM model on a mix of its original training data and Finnish, resulting in a 176 billion parameter model we call BLUUMI.
For model evaluation, we introduce FIN-bench, a version of BIG-bench with Finnish tasks. We also assess other model qualities such as toxicity and bias. Our models and tools are openly available at \url{https://turkunlp.org/gpt3-finnish}.

FinGPT: Large Generative Models for a Small Language

ChatGPT has gained a huge popularity since its introduction. Its positive aspects have been reported through many media platforms, and some analyses even showed that ChatGPT achieved a decent grade in professional exams, adding extra support to the claim that AI can now assist and even replace humans in industrial fields. Others, however, doubt its reliability and trustworthiness. This paper investigates the trustworthiness of ChatGPT and GPT-4 regarding logically consistent behaviour, focusing specifically on semantic consistency and the properties of negation, symmetric, and transitive consistency. Our findings suggest that while both models appear to show an enhanced language understanding and reasoning ability, they still frequently fall short of generating logically consistent predictions. We also ascertain via experiments that prompt designing, few-shot learning and employing larger large language models (LLMs) are unlikely to be the ultimate solution to resolve the inconsistency issue of LLMs.

Consistency Analysis of ChatGPT | VIDEO

This paper investigates the transferability of debiasing techniques across different languages within multilingual models. We examine the applicability of these techniques in English, French, German, and Dutch. Using multilingual BERT (mBERT), we demonstrate that cross-lingual transfer of debiasing techniques is not only feasible but also yields promising results. Surprisingly, our findings reveal no performance disadvantages when applying these techniques to non-English languages. Using translations of the CrowS-Pairs dataset, our analysis identifies SentenceDebias as the best technique across different languages, reducing bias in mBERT by an average of 13%. We also find that debiasing techniques with additional pretraining exhibit enhanced cross-lingual effectiveness for the languages included in the analyses, particularly in lower-resource languages. These novel insights contribute to a deeper understanding of bias mitigation in multilingual language models and provide practical guidance for debiasing techniques in different language contexts.

Investigating Bias in Multilingual Language Models: Cross-Lingual Transfer of Debiasing Techniques

The field of Natural Language Generation (NLG) suffers from a severe shortage of labeled data due to the extremely expensive and time-consuming process involved in manual annotation. A natural approach for coping with this problem is active learning (AL), a well-known machine learning technique for improving annotation efficiency by selectively choosing the most informative examples to label. However, while AL has been well-researched in the context of text classification, its application to NLG remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a first systematic study of active learning for NLG, considering a diverse set of tasks and multiple leading selection strategies, and harnessing a strong instruction-tuned model. 
Our results indicate that the performance of existing AL strategies is inconsistent, surpassing the baseline of random example selection in some cases but not in others. We highlight some notable differences between the classification and generation scenarios, and analyze the selection behaviors of existing AL strategies. Our findings motivate exploring novel approaches for applying AL to generation tasks.

Active Learning for Natural Language Generation

Users interact with text, image, code, or other editors on a daily basis. However, machine learning models are rarely trained in the settings that reflect the interactivity between users and their editor. This is understandable as training AI models with real users is not only slow and costly, but what these models learn may be specific to user interface design choices. Unfortunately, this means most of the research on text, code, and image generation has focused on non-interactive settings, whereby the model is expected to get everything right without accounting for any input from a user who may be willing to help.

We introduce a new Interactive Text Generation task that allows training generation models interactively without the costs of involving real users, by using user simulators that provide edits that guide the model towards a given target text. We train our interactive models using Imitation Learning, and our experiments against competitive non-interactive generation models show that models trained interactively are superior to their non-interactive counterparts, even when all models are given the same budget of user inputs or edits.

Interactive Text Generation

Open-domain question answering (QA) systems are often built with retrieval modules. However, retrieving passages from a given source is known to suffer from insufficient knowledge coverage. Alternatively, prompting large language models (LLMs) to generate contextual passages based on their parametric knowledge has been shown to improve QA performance. Yet, LLMs tend to "hallucinate" content that conflicts with the retrieved knowledge. Based on the intuition that answers supported by both sources are more likely to be correct, we propose COMBO, a Compatibility-Oriented knowledge Merging for Better Open-domain QA framework, to effectively leverage the two sources of information. Concretely, we match LLM-generated passages with retrieved counterparts into compatible pairs, based on discriminators trained with silver compatibility labels. Then a Fusion-in-Decoder-based reader model handles passage pairs to arrive at the final answer. Experiments show that COMBO outperforms competitive baselines on three out of four tested open-domain QA benchmarks. Further analysis reveals that our proposed framework demonstrates greater efficacy in scenarios with a higher degree of knowledge conflicts.

Merging Generated and Retrieved Knowledge for Open-Domain QA

Automated theorem proving (ATP) has become an appealing domain for exploring the reasoning ability of the recent successful 
generative language models. However, current ATP benchmarks are mainly focus on symbolic inference, but rarely involve the understanding of complex number combination reasoning. In this work, we propose TRIGO, an ATP benchmark that not only requires a model to reduce a trigonometric expression with step-by-step proof but also evaluates a generative LM's reasoning ability on formulas and capability to manipulate, group, and factor number terms. We gather trigonometric expressions and their reduced forms from web, annotate the simplification process manually, and translate it into the ``Lean'' formal language system. We then automatically generate additional examples from the annotated samples to expand the dataset. Furthermore, we also create three automatically generated training and testing datasets of varying difficulty and distributions. Our extensive experiments show our proposed TRIGO poses a new challenge for advanced generative LM's including GPT-4 which is pre-trained on a considerable amount of open-source formal theorem-proving language data, and provide a new tool to study the generative LM's ability on both formal and mathematical reasoning.

TRIGO: Benchmarking Formal Mathematical Proof Reduction for Generative Language Models

The dramatic increase in the use of social media platforms for information sharing has also fueled a steep growth in online abuse. A simple yet effective way of abusing individuals or communities is by creating memes, which often integrate an image with a short piece of text layered on top of it. Such harmful elements are in rampant use and are a threat to online safety. Hence it is necessary to develop efficient models to detect and flag abusive memes. The problem becomes more challenging in a low-resource setting (e.g., Bengali memes, i.e., images with Bengali text embedded on it) because of the absence of benchmark datasets on which AI models could be trained. In this paper we bridge this gap by building a Bengali meme dataset. To setup an effective benchmark we implement several baseline models for classifying abusive memes using this dataset. We observe that multimodal models that use both textual and visual information outperform unimodal models. Our best-performing model achieves a macro F1 score of 70.51. Finally, we perform a qualitative error analysis of the misclassified memes of the best-performing text-based, image-based and multimodal models.

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Disentangling Language Understanding and Reasoning Structures in Cross-lingual Chain-of-Thought Prompting

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Explaining Interactions Between Text Spans

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Disentangling Language Understanding and Reasoning Structures in Cross-lingual Chain-of-Thought Prompting

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