By Yifu Qiu
15th January 2024
As a current Ph.D. candidate in Natural Language Processing at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics, I am pleased to share my recent engagement with the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2023) held in Singapore.
About the Conference
EMNLP stands as a flagship conference in the realm of Natural Language Processing. The conference provided an insightful platform for researchers in the field to expound upon the latest developments and challenges within the discipline. EMNLP 2023, characterized by its diverse program, featured keynote presentations, diverse tutorials and workshops, and selected oral/poster presentations. Covering an array of domains in NLP – from computational linguistics to the forefront of large language models – the conference underscored the importance of NLP in the pursuit of artificial general intelligence.
Highlight of my EMNLP Participation
A highlight of my EMNLP 2023 participation was the poster presentation of my research entitled “Detecting and Mitigating Hallucinations in Multilingual Summarisation.” This work systematically investigates the well-known issue of hallucinations in neural generative models, particularly within summarization tasks. The phenomenon of hallucination, compromising the faithfulness of automatically generated summaries to their source documents, constitutes a significant challenge, particularly accentuated in low-resource languages. In our work, we systematically evaluate this issue in existing state-of-the-art methods and propose a new way in mitigating the hallucinations. Presenting at EMNLP not only provided a platform to showcase our research but also initiated valuable interactions with experts in the field. During the poster session, engaging in discussions with fellow researchers enriched my understanding, sparked new ideas, and laid the groundwork for potential collaborations.
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) for providing the travelling funding that supported my attendance at the EMNLP 2023. As a result I have had a wonderful and fulfilling experience.