Singapore

Model alignment with human preferences is an essential step in making Large Language Models (LLMs) helpful and consistent with human values. It typically consists of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) stages. However, RLHF faces inherent limitations stemming from a complex training setup and its tendency to align the model with implicit values that end users cannot control at run-time. Moreover, reward models in RLHF stage commonly rely on single-dimensional feedback as opposed to explicit, multifaceted signals that indicate attributes such as helpfulness, humor, and toxicity. To address these limitations, we propose SteerLM, a supervised fine-tuning method that empowers end-users to control responses during inference. SteerLM conditions responses to conform to an explicitly defined multi-dimensional set of attributes, thereby empowering a steerable AI capable of generating helpful and high-quality responses while maintaining customizability. Experiments show that SteerLM trained on open source datasets generates responses that are preferred by human and automatic evaluators to many state-of-the-art baselines trained with RLHF while being much easier to train. Try SteerLM at https://huggingface.co/nvidia/SteerLM-llama2-13B

EMNLP 2023

SteerLM: Attribute Conditioned SFT as an (User-Steerable) Alternative to RLHF

steerable ai

supervised fine-tuning

large language model

alignment

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
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Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

poster

**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.

Transformer-based encoder-decoder models that generate outputs in a left-to-right fashion have become standard for sequence-to-sequence tasks. In this paper, we propose a framework for decoding that produces sequences from the "outside-in": at each step, the model chooses to generate a token on the left, on the right, or join the left and right sequences. We argue that this is more principled than prior bidirectional decoders. Our proposal supports a variety of model architectures and includes several training methods, such as a dynamic programming algorithm that marginalizes out the latent ordering variable. Our model sets state-of-the-art (SOTA) on the 2022 and 2023 shared tasks, beating the next best systems by over 4.7 and 2.7 points in average accuracy respectively. The model performs particularly well on long sequences, can implicitly learn the split point of words composed of stem and affix, and performs better relative to the baseline on datasets that have fewer unique lemmas.

A Framework for Bidirectional Decoding: Case Study in Morphological Inflection

Hate speech causes widespread and deep-seated societal issues. Proper enforcement of hate speech laws is key for protecting groups of people against harmful and discriminatory language. However, determining what constitutes hate speech is a complex task that is highly open to subjective interpretations. Existing works do not align their systems with enforceable definitions of hate speech, which can make their outputs inconsistent with the goals of regulators. This research introduces a new perspective and task for enforceable hate speech detection centred around legal definitions, and a dataset annotated on violations of eleven possible definitions by legal experts. Given the challenge of identifying clear, legally enforceable instances of hate speech, we augment the dataset with expert-generated samples and an automatically mined challenge set. We experiment with grounding the model decision in these definitions using zero-shot and few-shot prompting. We then report results on several large language models (LLMs). With this task definition, automatic hate speech detection can be more closely aligned to enforceable laws, and hence assist in more rigorous enforcement of legal protections against harmful speech in public forums.

Legally Enforceable Hate Speech Detection for Public Forums

While most task-oriented dialogues assume conversations between the agent and one user at a time, dialogue systems are increasingly expected to communicate with multiple users simultaneously who make decisions collaboratively. To facilitate development of such systems, we release the Multi-User MultiWOZ dataset: task-oriented dialogues among two users and one agent. To collect this dataset, each user utterance from MultiWOZ 2.2 was replaced with a small chat between two users that is semantically and pragmatically consistent with the original user utterance, thus resulting in the same dialogue state and system response. These dialogues reflect interesting dynamics of collaborative decision-making in task-oriented scenarios, e.g., social chatter and deliberation. Supported by this data, we propose the novel task of multi-user contextual query rewriting: to rewrite a task-oriented chat between two users as a concise task-oriented query that retains only task-relevant information and that is directly consumable by the dialogue system. We demonstrate that in multi-user dialogues, using predicted rewrites substantially improves dialogue state tracking without modifying existing dialogue systems that are trained for single-user dialogues. Further, this method surpasses training a medium-sized model directly on multi-user dialogues and generalizes to unseen domains.

Multi-User MultiWOZ: Task-Oriented Dialogues among Multiple Users

The de facto way of utilizing black-box large language models (LLMs) to perform various downstream tasks is prompting. However, obtaining suitable prompts for specific tasks is still a challenging problem. While existing LLM-based methods demonstrate promising performance in task-oriented dialogue (TOD) task, they often require manual adjustment in prompt selection, or focus solely on dialogue understanding or generation. To address these issues, we propose an adaptive prompt generation framework to fully unleash the potential of LLMs for the comprehensive TOD system. Firstly, we design a trainable slot generator (TSG) that can generate domain and slot information in the belief state, which serves as prior knowledge for subsequent prompt generation. Next, we propose an adaptive prompt generator (APG) that utilizes the prior knowledge to generate prompts for the LLM, deriving the belief state and system response of the dialogue for evaluation. Finally, we evaluate our framework on the MultiWOZ 2.0 dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods. Our code and data will be released.

An Adaptive Prompt Generation Framework for Task-oriented Dialogue System

In the burgeoning field of natural language processing, Neural Topic Models (NTMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as areas of significant research interest. Despite this, NTMs primarily utilize contextual embeddings from LLMs, which are not optimal for clustering or capable for topic generation. Our study addresses this gap by introducing a novel framework named Diffusion-Enhanced Topic Modeling using Encoder-Decoder-based LLMs (DeTiME). DeTiME leverages Encoder-Decoder-based LLMs to produce highly clusterable embeddings that could generate topics that exhibit both superior clusterability and enhanced semantic coherence compared to existing methods. Additionally, by exploiting the power of diffusion, our framework also provides the capability to generate content relevant to the identified topics. This dual functionality allows users to efficiently produce highly clustered topics and related content simultaneously. DeTiME's potential extends to generating clustered embeddings as well. Notably, our proposed framework proves to be efficient to train and exhibits high adaptability, demonstrating its potential for a wide array of applications.

DeTiME: Diffusion-Enhanced Topic Modeling using Encoder-decoder based LLM

Neural 'dense' retrieval models are state of the art for many datasets, however these models often exhibit limited domain transfer ability.
Existing approaches to adaptation are unwieldy, such as requiring explicit supervision, complex model architectures, or massive external models.
We present $\texttt{ABEL}$, a simple but effective unsupervised method to enhance passage retrieval in zero-shot settings. 
Our technique follows a straightforward loop: a dense retriever learns from supervision signals provided by a reranker, and subsequently, the reranker is updated based on feedback from the improved retriever.
By iterating this loop, the two components mutually enhance one another's performance. 
Experimental results demonstrate that our unsupervised $\texttt{ABEL}$ model outperforms both leading supervised and unsupervised retrievers on the BEIR benchmark.
Meanwhile, it exhibits strong adaptation abilities to tasks and domains that were unseen during training.
By either fine-tuning $\texttt{ABEL}$ on labelled data or integrating it with existing supervised dense retrievers, we achieve state-of-the-art results.\footnote{Source code is available at \url{https://github.com/Fantabulous-J/BootSwitch}.}

Boot and Switch: Alternating Distillation for Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval

Despite significant advancements in text-to-image generation models, they still face challenges when it comes to producing highly detailed or complex images based on textual descriptions. In order to explore these limitations, we propose a Structured Semantic Alignment (SSA) method for evaluating text-to-image generation models. SSA focuses on learning structured semantic embeddings across different modalities and aligning them in a joint space. The method employs the following steps to achieve its objective: (i) Generating mutated prompts by substituting words with semantically equivalent or nonequivalent alternatives while preserving the original syntax; (ii) Representing the sentence structure through parsing trees obtained via syntax parsing; (iii) Learning fine-grained structured embeddings that project semantic features from different modalities into a shared embedding space; (iv) Evaluating the semantic consistency between the structured text embeddings and the corresponding visual embeddings. Through experiments conducted on various benchmarks, we have demonstrated that SSA offers improved measurement of semantic consistency of text-to-image generation models. Additionally, it unveils a wide range of generation errors including under-generation, incorrect constituency, incorrect dependency, and semantic confusion. By uncovering these biases and limitations embedded within the models, our proposed method provides valuable insights into their shortcomings when applied to real-world scenarios.

Uncovering Limitations in Text-to-Image Generation: A Contrastive Approach with Structured Semantic Alignment

Training a high performance end-to-end speech (E2E) processing model requires an enormous amount of labeled speech data, especially in the era of data-centric artificial intelligence. However, labeled speech data are usually scarcer and more expensive for collection, compared to textual data.
We propose Latent Synthesis (LaSyn), an efficient textual data utilization framework for E2E speech processing models.
We train a latent synthesizer to convert textual data into an intermediate latent representation of a pre-trained speech model. These pseudo acoustic representations of textual data augment acoustic data for model training.
We evaluate LaSyn on low-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR) and spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks. 
For ASR, LaSyn improves an E2E baseline trained on LibriSpeech train-clean-100, with relative word error rate reductions over 22.3\% on different test sets. 
For SLU, LaSyn improves our E2E baseline by absolute 4.1\% for intent classification accuracy and 3.8\% for slot filling SLU-F1 on SLURP, and absolute 4.49\% and 2.25\% for exact match (EM) and EM-Tree accuracies on STOP respectively.
With fewer parameters, the results of LaSyn are competitive to published state-of-the-art works. 
The results demonstrate the quality of the augmented training data.

Improving End-to-End Speech Processing by Efficient Text Data Utilization with Latent Synthesis

Opinion summarization is expected to digest larger review sets and provide summaries from different perspectives. However, most existing solutions are deficient in epitomizing extensive reviews and offering opinion summaries from various angles due to the lack of designs for information selection. To this end, we propose SubSumm, a supervised summarization framework for large-scale multi-perspective opinion summarization. SubSumm consists of a review sampling strategy set and a two-stage training scheme. The sampling strategies take sentiment orientation and contrastive information value into consideration, with which the review subsets from different perspectives and quality levels can be selected. Subsequently, the summarizer is encouraged to learn from the sub-optimal and optimal subsets successively in order to capitalize on the massive input. Experimental results on AmaSum and Rotten Tomatoes datasets demonstrate that SubSumm is adept at generating pros, cons, and verdict summaries from hundreds of input reviews. Furthermore, our in-depth analysis verifies that the advanced selection of review subsets and the two-stage training scheme are vital to boosting the summarization performance.

Large-Scale and Multi-Perspective Opinion Summarization with Diverse Review Subsets

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown great advances in a variety of tasks, including natural language understanding and generation. However, their use in high-stakes decision-making scenarios is still limited due to the potential for errors. *Selective prediction* is a technique that can be used to improve the reliability of the LLMs by allowing them to abstain from making predictions when they are unsure of the answer. In this work, we propose a novel framework for adaptation with self-evaluation to improve the selective prediction performance of LLMs. Our framework is based on the idea of using parameter-efficient tuning to adapt the LLM to the specific task at hand while improving its ability to perform self-evaluation. We evaluate our method on a variety of question-answering (QA) datasets and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art selective prediction methods. For example, on the CoQA benchmark, our method improves the AUACC from 91.23\% to 92.63\% and improves the AUROC from 74.61\% to 80.25\%.

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A Framework for Bidirectional Decoding: Case Study in Morphological Inflection

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HelpSteer: Multi-attribute Helpfulness Dataset for SteerLM

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