Singapore

Multi-aspect controllable text generation aims to generate fluent sentences that possess multiple desired attributes simultaneously.
Traditional methods either require expensive iteration / searching within the discrete text space during the decoding stage, or train separate controllers for each aspect, resulting in a degradation of text quality due to the discrepancy between different aspects. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel approach for $\textbf{M}$ulti-$\textbf{a}$spect $\textbf{c}$ontrol, namely MacLaSa, that estimates compact $\textbf{La}$tent space for multiple aspects, and performs efficient $\textbf{Sa}$mpling with a fast sampler. To eliminate the domain discrepancies between different aspects, we first utilize a variational autoencoder (VAE) network to map text sequences from various data sources into close latent representations. The estimated latent space enables the formulation of joint energy-based models and the plugging in of arbitrary attribute discriminators to achieve multi-aspect control. Afterwards, we draw latent samples with a fast sampler based on ordinary differential equations and feed sampled examples to the VAE decoder to produce target text sequences. Experimental results demonstrate that MacLaSa outperforms strong baselines on both attribute relevance and textual quality while maintaining a high inference speed.

EMNLP 2023

MacLaSa: Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation via Efficient Sampling from Compact Latent Space

controllable text generation

natural language generation

pretrained language models

**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.

poster

Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER) on social media aims to enhance textual entity prediction by incorporating image-based clues. Existing studies mainly focus on maximizing the utilization of pertinent image information or incorporating external knowledge from explicit knowledge bases. However, these methods either neglect the necessity of providing the model with external knowledge, or encounter issues of high redundancy in the retrieved knowledge. In this paper, we present PGIM --- a two-stage framework that aims to leverage ChatGPT as an implicit knowledge base and enable it to heuristically generate auxiliary knowledge for more efficient entity prediction. Specifically, PGIM contains a Multimodal Similar Example Awareness module that selects suitable examples from a small number of predefined artificial samples. These examples are then integrated into a formatted prompt template tailored to the MNER and guide ChatGPT to generate auxiliary refined knowledge. Finally, the acquired knowledge is integrated with the original text and fed into a downstream model for further processing. Extensive experiments show that PGIM outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two classic MNER datasets and exhibits a stronger robustness and generalization capability.

Prompting ChatGPT in MNER: Enhanced Multimodal Named Entity Recognition with Auxiliary Refined Knowledge

Large language models (LLMs) have shown nearly saturated performance on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. As a result, it is natural for people to believe that LLMs have also mastered abilities such as time understanding and reasoning. However, research on the temporal sensitivity of LLMs has been insufficiently emphasized. To fill this gap, this paper constructs Multiple Sensitive Factors Time QA (MenatQA), which encompasses three temporal factors (scope factor, order factor, counterfactual factor) with total 2,853 samples for evaluating the time comprehension and reasoning abilities of LLMs. This paper tests current mainstream LLMs with different parameter sizes, ranging from billions to hundreds of billions. The results show most LLMs fall behind smaller temporal reasoning models with different degree on these factors. In specific, LLMs show a significant vulnerability to temporal biases and depend heavily on the temporal information provided in questions. Furthermore, this paper undertakes a preliminary investigation into potential improvement strategies by devising specific prompts and leveraging external tools. These approaches serve as valuable baselines or references for future research endeavors.

MenatQA: A New Dataset for Testing the Temporal Comprehension and Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Models

In the field of Large Language Models (LLMs), researchers are increasingly exploring their effectiveness across a wide range of tasks. 
However, a critical area that requires further investigation is the interpretability of these models, particularly the ability to generate rational explanations for their decisions. Most existing explanation datasets are limited to the English language and the general domain, which leads to a scarcity of linguistic diversity and a lack of resources in specialized domains, such as medical. To mitigate this, we propose ExplainCPE, a challenging medical dataset consisting of over 7K problems from Chinese Pharmacist Examination, specifically tailored to assess the model-generated explanations. From the overall results, only GPT-4 passes the pharmacist examination with a 75.7\% accuracy, while other models like ChatGPT fail. Further detailed analysis of LLM-generated explanations reveals the limitations of LLMs in understanding medical text and executing computational reasoning. With the increasing importance of AI safety and trustworthiness, ExplainCPE takes a step towards improving and evaluating the interpretability of LLMs in the medical domain.

ExplainCPE: A Free-text Explanation Benchmark of Chinese Pharmacist Examination

Linguists can access movement in the sign language video corpus through manual annotation or computational methods. The first relies on a predefinition of features, and the second requires technical knowledge. Methods like MediaPipe and OpenPose are now more often used in sign language processing. MediaPipe detects a two-dimensional (2D) body pose in a single image with a limited approximation of the depth coordinate. Such 2D projection of a three-dimensional (3D) body pose limits the potential application of the resulting models outside the capturing camera settings and position. 2D pose data does not provide linguists with direct and human-readable access to the collected movement data. We propose our four main contributions: A novel 3D normalization method for MediaPipe's 2D pose, a novel human-readable way of representing the 3D normalized pose data, an analysis of Japanese Sign Language (JSL) sociolinguistic features using the proposed techniques, where we show how an individual signer can be identified based on unique personal movement patterns suggesting a potential threat to anonymity. Our method outperforms the common 2D normalization on a small, diverse JSL dataset. We demonstrate its benefit for deep learning approaches by significantly outperforming the pose-based state-of-the-art models on the open sign language recognition benchmark.

Making Body Movement in Sign Language Corpus Accessible for Linguists and Machines with Three-Dimensional Normalization of MediaPipe

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely applied in various fields due to their excellent capability for memorizing knowledge and chain of thought (CoT). When these language models are applied in the field of psychological counseling, they often rush to provide universal advice. However, when users seek psychological support, they need to gain empathy, trust, understanding and comfort, rather than just reasonable advice. To this end, we constructed a multi-turn empathetic conversation dataset of more than 2 million samples, in which the input is the multi-turn conversation context, and the target is empathetic responses that cover expressions such as questioning, comfort, recognition, listening, trust, emotional support, etc. Experiments have shown that the empathy ability of LLMs can be significantly enhanced when finetuning by using multi-turn dialogue history and responses that are closer to the expression of a psychological consultant.

SoulChat: Improving LLMs' Empathy, Listening, and Comfort Abilities through Fine-tuning with Multi-turn Empathy Conversations

We propose a new large-scale (nearly a million questions) ultra-long-context (more than 50,000 words average document length) reading comprehension dataset. Using GPT 3.5, we summarized each scene in 1,500 hand-curated fiction books from Project Gutenberg, which resulted in approximately 150 scene-level summaries per book. After that, we created a number of reading comprehension questions based on these summaries, including three types of multiple-choice scene recognition questions, as well as free-form narrative reconstruction questions. With 990,595 total questions, our dataset is an order of magnitude larger than the closest alternatives. Crucially, most questions have a known ``retention demand'', indicating how long-term of a memory is needed to answer them, which should aid long-term memory performance evaluation. We validate our data in four small-scale experiments: one with human labelers, and three with existing language models. We show that our questions 1) adequately represent the source material 2) can be used to diagnose a model's memory capacity 3) are not trivial for modern language models even when the memory demand does not exceed those models' context lengths. Lastly, we provide our code which can be used to further expand the dataset with minimal human labor.

NarrativeXL: a Large-scale Dataset for Long-Term Memory Models

Reflective listening is a fundamental skill that counselors must acquire to achieve proficiency in motivational interviewing (MI). It involves responding in a manner that acknowledges and explores the meaning of what the client has expressed in the conversation. In this work, we introduce the task of counseling response rewriting, which transforms non-reflective statements into reflective responses. We introduce VERVE, a template-based rewriting system with paraphrase-augmented training and adaptive template updating. VERVE first creates a template by identifying and filtering out tokens that are not relevant to reflections and constructs a reflective response using the template. Paraphrase-augmented training allows the model to learn less-strict fillings of masked spans, and adaptive template updating helps discover effective templates for rewriting without significantly removing the original content. Using both automatic and human evaluations, we compare our method against text rewriting baselines and show that our framework is effective in turning non-reflective statements into more reflective responses while achieving a good content preservation-reflection style trade-off.

VERVE: Template-based ReflectiVE Rewriting for MotiVational IntErviewing

The performance of sentence encoders can be significantly improved through the simple practice of fine-tuning using contrastive loss. A natural question arises: what characteristics do models acquire during contrastive learning? This paper theoretically and experimentally shows that contrastive-based sentence encoders implicitly weight words based on information-theoretic quantities; that is, more informative words receive greater weight, while others receive less. The theory states that, in the lower bound of the optimal value of the contrastive learning objective, the norm of word embedding reflects the information gain associated with the distribution of surrounding words. We also conduct comprehensive experiments using various models, multiple datasets, two methods to measure the implicit weighting of models (Integrated Gradients and SHAP), and two information-theoretic quantities (information gain and self-information). The results provide empirical evidence that contrastive fine-tuning emphasizes informative words.

Contrastive Learning-based Sentence Encoders Implicitly Weight Informative Words

Large Language Models (LLMs) have attained the impressive capability to resolve a wide range of NLP tasks by fine-tuning high-quality instruction data. However, collecting human-written data of high quality, especially multi-turn dialogues, is expensive and unattainable for most people. Though previous studies have used powerful LLMs to generate the dialogues automatically, they all suffer from generating untruthful dialogues because of the model hallucination. Therefore, we propose a method called RefGPT to generate enormous truthful and customized dialogues without worrying about factual errors caused by the model hallucination. RefGPT solves the model hallucination in dialogue generation by restricting the LLMs to leverage the given reference instead of reciting their own knowledge to generate dialogues. Additionally, RefGPT adds detailed controls on every utterance to enable high customization capability, which previous studies have ignored. On the basis of RefGPT, we also propose two high-quality dialogue datasets generated by GPT-4, namely **RefGPT-Fact** and **RefGPT-Code**. RefGPT-Fact is a dataset with 100k multi-turn dialogues based on factual knowledge and RefGPT-Code has 76k multi-turn dialogues covering a wide range of coding scenarios. Our code and datasets are released in https://github.com/mutonix/RefGPT.

RefGPT: Dialogue Generation of GPT, by GPT, and for GPT

Text-to-SQL aims to automate the process of generating SQL queries on a database from natural language text. In this work, we propose "SQLPrompt", tailored to improve the few-shot prompting capabilities of Text-to-SQL for Large Language Models (LLMs). Our methods include innovative prompt design, execution-based consistency decoding strategy which selects the SQL with the most consistent execution outcome among other SQL proposals, and a method that aims to improve performance by diversifying the SQL proposals during consistency selection with different prompt designs ("MixPrompt") and foundation models ("MixLLMs"). We show that \emph{SQLPrompt} outperforms previous approaches for in-context learning with zero labeled data by a large margin, closing the gap with finetuning state-of-the-art with thousands of labeled data.

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Prompting ChatGPT in MNER: Enhanced Multimodal Named Entity Recognition with Auxiliary Refined Knowledge

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Prompting ChatGPT in MNER: Enhanced Multimodal Named Entity Recognition with Auxiliary Refined Knowledge

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