Singapore

Reading comprehension of legal text can be a particularly challenging task due to the length and complexity of legal clauses and a shortage of expert-annotated datasets. To address this challenge, we introduce the Merger Agreement Understanding Dataset (MAUD), an expert-annotated reading comprehension dataset based on the American Bar Association&#39;s 2021 Public Target Deal Points Study, with over 39,000 examples and over 47,000 total annotations. Our fine-tuned Transformer baselines show promising results, with models performing well above random on most questions. However, on a large subset of questions, there is still room for significant improvement. As the only expert-annotated merger agreement dataset, MAUD is valuable as a benchmark for both the legal profession and the NLP community.

EMNLP 2023

MAUD: An Expert-Annotated Legal NLP Dataset for Merger Agreement Understanding

deal points

legal nlp

datasets

reading comprehension

**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.

Reading comprehension of legal text can be a particularly challenging task due to the length and complexity of legal clauses and a shortage of expert-annotated datasets. To address this challenge, we introduce the Merger Agreement Understanding Dataset (MAUD), an expert-annotated reading comprehension dataset based on the American Bar Association's 2021 Public Target Deal Points Study, with over 39,000 examples and over 47,000 total annotations. Our fine-tuned Transformer baselines show promising results, with models performing well above random on most questions. However, on a large subset of questions, there is still room for significant improvement. As the only expert-annotated merger agreement dataset, MAUD is valuable as a benchmark for both the legal profession and the NLP community.

poster

Disagreements are common in online discussions. Disagreement may foster collaboration and improve the quality of a discussion under some conditions. Although there exist methods for recognizing disagreement, a deeper understanding of factors that influence disagreement is lacking in the literature. We investigate a hypothesis that differences in \emph{personal values} are indicative of disagreement in online discussions. We show how state-of-the-art models can be used for estimating values in online discussions and how the estimated values can be aggregated into value profiles. We evaluate the estimated value profiles based on human-annotated agreement labels. We find that the dissimilarity of value profiles correlates with disagreement in specific cases. We also find that including value information in agreement prediction improves performance.

Do Differences in Values Influence Disagreements in Online Discussions?

Spatial reasoning is a fundamental building block of human cognition, used in representing, grounding, and reasoning about physical and abstract concepts. We propose a novel benchmark focused on assessing inferential properties of statements with spatial prepositions. The benchmark includes original datasets in English and Romanian and aims to probe the limits of reasoning about spatial relations in large language models. We use prompt engineering to study the performance of two families of large language models, PaLM and GPT-3, on our benchmark. Our results show considerable variability in the performance of smaller and larger models, as well as across prompts and languages. However, none of the models reaches human performance.

A Benchmark for Reasoning with Spatial Prepositions | VIDEO

Recent work has shown that Aspect-Term Sentiment Analysis (ATSA) can be effectively performed by Gradual Machine Learning (GML). However, the performance of the current unsupervised solution is limited by inaccurate and insufficient knowledge conveyance. In this paper, we propose a supervised GML approach for ATSA, which can effectively exploit labeled training data to improve knowledge conveyance. It leverages binary polarity relations between instances, which can be either similar or opposite, to enable supervised knowledge conveyance. Besides the explicit polarity relations indicated by discourse structures, it also separately supervises a polarity classification DNN and a binary siamese network to extract implicit polarity relations. The proposed approach fulfills knowledge conveyance by modeling detected relations as binary features in a factor graph. Our extensive experiments on real benchmark data show that it achieves the state-of-the-art performance across all the test workloads. Our work demonstrates clearly that, in collaboration with DNN for feature extraction, GML outperforms pure DNN solutions.

Supervised Gradual Machine Learning for Aspect-Term Sentiment Analysis

The events in a narrative are understood as a coherent whole via the underlying states of their participants. Often, these participant states are not explicitly mentioned, instead left to be inferred by the reader. A model that understands narratives should likewise infer these implicit states, and even reason about the impact of changes to these states on the narrative. To facilitate this goal, we introduce a new crowdsourced English-language, Participant States dataset, PASTA. This dataset contains inferable participant states; a counterfactual perturbation to each state; and the changes to the story that would be necessary if the counterfactual were true. We introduce three state-based reasoning tasks that test for the ability to infer when a state is entailed by a story, to revise a story conditioned on a counterfactual state, and to explain the most likely state change given a revised story. Experiments show that today's LLMs can reason about states to some degree, but there is large room for improvement, especially in problems requiring access and ability to reason with diverse types of knowledge (e.g. physical, numerical, factual).

PASTA: A Dataset for Modeling PArticipant STAtes in Narratives

In behavioural testing, system functionalities underrepresented in the standard evaluation setting (with a held-out test set) are validated through controlled input-output pairs. Optimising performance on the behavioural tests during training (behavioural learning) would improve coverage of phenomena not sufficiently represented in the i.i.d. data and could lead to seemingly more robust models. However, there is the risk that the model narrowly captures spurious correlations from the behavioural test suite, leading to overestimation and misrepresentation of model performanceone of the original pitfalls of traditional evaluation. In this work, we introduce BeLUGA, an analysis method for evaluating behavioural learning considering generalisation across dimensions of different granularity levels. We optimise behaviour-specific loss functions and evaluate models on several partitions of the behavioural test suite controlled to leave out specific phenomena. An aggregate score measures generalisation to unseen functionalities (or overfitting). We use BeLUGA to examine three representative NLP tasks (sentiment analysis, paraphrase identification and reading comprehension) and compare the impact of a diverse set of regularisation and domain generalisation methods on generalisation performance.

Cross-functional Analysis of Generalisation in Behavioural Learning | VIDEO

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for automatic summarization but the reasons behind their successes are poorly understood. By conducting a human evaluation on ten LLMs across different pretraining methods, prompts, and model scales, we make two important observations. First, we find instruction tuning, and not model size, is the key to the LLM's zero-shot summarization capability. Second, existing studies have been limited by low-quality references, leading to underestimates of human performance and lower few-shot and finetuning performance. To better evaluate LLMs, we perform human evaluation over high-quality summaries we collect from freelance writers. Despite major stylistic differences such as the amount of paraphrasing, we find that LMM summaries are judged to be on par with human written summaries.

Benchmarking Large Language Models for News Summarization

The recognition of dataset names is a critical task for automatic information extraction in scientific literature, enabling researchers to understand and identify research opportunities. However, existing corpora for dataset mention detection are limited in size and naming diversity. In this paper, we introduce the Dataset Mentions Detection Dataset (DMDD), the largest publicly available corpus for this task. DMDD consists of the DMDD main corpus, comprising 31,219 scientific articles with over 449,000 dataset mentions weakly annotated in the format of in-text spans, and an evaluation set, which comprises of 450 scientific articles manually annotated for evaluation purposes. We use DMDD to establish baseline performance for dataset mention detection and linking. By analyzing the performance of various models on DMDD, we are able to identify open problems in dataset mention detection. We invite the community to use our dataset as a challenge to develop novel dataset mention detection models.

DMDD: A Large-Scale Dataset for Dataset Mentions Detection

While sentence simplification is an active research topic in NLP, its adjacent tasks of sentence complexification and same-level paraphrasing are not. To train models on all three tasks, we present two new unsupervised datasets. We compare these datasets, one labeled by a weak classifier and the other by a rule-based approach, with a single supervised dataset. Using these three datasets for training, we perform extensive experiments on both multitasking and prompting strategies. Compared to other systems trained on unsupervised parallel data, models trained on our weak classifier labeled dataset achieve state-of-the-art performance on the ASSET simplification benchmark.

Learning to Paraphrase Sentences to Different Complexity Levels

Africa has a very low doctor-to-patient ratio. At very busy clinics, doctors could see 30+ patients per day-- a heavy patient burden compared with developed countries-- but productivity tools such as clinical automatic speech recognition (ASR) are lacking for these overworked clinicians. However, clinical ASR is mature, even ubiquitous, in developed nations, and clinician-reported performance of commercial clinical ASR systems is generally satisfactory. Furthermore, the recent performance of general domain ASR is approaching human accuracy. However, several gaps exist. Several publications have highlighted racial bias with speech-to-text algorithms and performance on minority accents lags significantly. To our knowledge, there is no publicly available research or benchmark on accented African clinical ASR, and speech data is non-existent for the majority of African accents. We release AfriSpeech, 200hrs of Pan-African English speech, 67,577 clips from 2,463 unique speakers across 120 indigenous accents from 13 countries for clinical and general domain ASR, a benchmark test set, with publicly available pre-trained models with SOTA performance on the AfriSpeech benchmark.

AfriSpeech-200: Pan-African Accented Speech Dataset for Clinical and General Domain ASR

Self-supervised sentence representation learning is the task of constructing an embedding space for sentences without relying on human annotation efforts. One straightforward approach is to finetune a pretrained language model (PLM) with a representation learning method such as contrastive learning. While this approach achieves impressive performance on larger PLMs, the performance rapidly degrades as the number of parameters decreases. In this paper, we propose a framework called Self-supervised Cross-View Training (SCT) to narrow the performance gap between large and small PLMs. To evaluate the effectiveness of SCT, we compare it to 5 baseline and state-of-the-art competitors on seven Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) benchmarks using 5 PLMs with the number of parameters ranging from 4M to 340M. The experimental results show that STC outperforms the competitors for PLMs with less than 100M parameters in 18 of 21 cases.\n 

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Do Differences in Values Influence Disagreements in Online Discussions?

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The Law and NLP: Bridging Disciplinary Disconnects

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