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Large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in various language processing tasks, motivating their adoption in simultaneous translation. Current fine-tuning methods to adapt LLMs for simultaneous translation focus on prompting optimization strategies using either data augmentation or prompt structure modifications. However, these methods suffer from several issues, such as unnecessarily expanded training sets, computational inefficiency from dumping the key and value cache, increased prompt sizes, or restriction to a single decision policy. To eliminate these issues, in this work, we propose SimulMask, a new paradigm for fine-tuning LLMs for simultaneous translation. It utilizes a novel attention mask approach that models simultaneous translation during fine-tuning by masking attention for a desired decision policy. Applying the proposed SimulMask on a Falcon LLM for the IWSLT 2017 dataset, we have observed a significant translation quality improvement compared to state-of-the-art prompting optimization strategies on five language pairs while reducing the computational cost.

EMNLP 2024

Simultaneous Masking, Not Prompting Optimization: A Paradigm Shift in Fine-tuning LLMs for Simultaneous Translation

tool-augmented llms

task-oriented

data augmentation

fine-tuning

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
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EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

Generative AI systems powered by Large Language Models have become increasingly popular in recent years. Lately, due to the risk of providing users with unsafe information, the adoption of those systems in safety-critical domains has raised significant concerns. To respond to this situation, input-output filters, commonly called guardrail models, have been proposed to complement other measures, such as model alignment. Unfortunately, the lack of a standard benchmark for guardrail models poses significant evaluation issues and makes it hard to compare results across scientific publications. To fill this gap, we introduce GuardBench, a large-scale benchmark for guardrail models comprising 40 safety evaluation datasets. To facilitate the adoption of GuardBench, we release a Python library providing an automated evaluation pipeline built on top of it. With our benchmark, we also share the first large-scale prompt moderation datasets in German, French, Italian, and Spanish. To assess the current state-of-the-art, we conduct an extensive comparison of recent guardrail models and show that a general-purpose instruction-following model of comparable size achieves competitive results without the need for specific fine-tuning.

GuardBench: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Guardrail Models

Explaining Artificial Intelligence (AI) decisions is a major challenge nowadays in AI, in particular when applied to sensitive scenarios like medicine and law. However, the need to explain the rationale behind decisions is a main issues also for human-based deliberation as it is important to justify why a certain decision has been taken. Resident medical doctors for instance are required not only to provide a (possibly correct) diagnosis, but also to explain how they reached a certain conclusion. Developing new tools to aid residents to train their explanation skills is therefore a central objective of AI in education. In this paper, we follow this direction, and we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first multilingual dataset for Medical Question Answering where correct and incorrect diagnoses for a clinical case are enriched with a natural language explanation written by doctors. These explanations have been manually annotated with argument components (i.e., premise, claim) and argument relations (i.e., attack, support). The Multilingual CasiMedicos-arg dataset consists of 558 clinical cases (English, Spanish, French, Italian) with explanations, where we annotated 5021 claims, 2313 premises, 2431 support relations, and 1106 attack relations. We conclude by showing how competitive baselines perform over this challenging dataset for the argument mining task.

CasiMedicos-Arg: A Medical Question Answering Dataset Annotated with Explanatory Argumentative Structures

Audio-Language Models (ALMs) have recently achieved remarkable success in zero-shot audio recognition tasks, which match features of audio waveforms with class-specific text prompt features, inspired by advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Given the sensitivity of zero-shot performance to the choice of hand-crafted text prompts, many prompt learning techniques have been developed for VLMs. We explore the efficacy of these approaches in ALMs and propose a novel method, Prompt Learning in Audio Language Models (PALM), which optimizes the feature space of the text encoder branch. Unlike existing methods that work in the input space, our approach results in greater training efficiency. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on 11 audio recognition datasets, encompassing a variety of speech-processing tasks, and compare the results with three baselines in a few-shot learning setup. Our method is either on par with or outperforms other approaches while being computationally less demanding. Our code is publicly available at \url{https://asif-hanif.github.io/palm/}.

PALM: Few-Shot Prompt Learning for Audio Language Models

Hallucinated translations pose significant threats and safety concerns when it comes to practical deployment of machine translation systems. Previous research works have identified that detectors exhibit complementary performance --- different detectors excel at detecting different types of hallucinations. In this paper, we propose to address the limitations of individual detectors by combining them and introducing a straightforward method for aggregating multiple detectors. Our results demonstrate the efficacy of our aggregated detector, providing a promising step towards evermore reliable machine translation systems.

Enhanced Hallucination Detection in Neural Machine Translation through Simple Detector Aggregation

In abstractive summarization, the challenge of producing concise and accurate summaries arises from the vast amount of information contained in the source document. Consequently, although Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate fluent text, they often introduce inaccuracies by hallucinating content not found in the original source. While supervised fine-tuning methods that maximize likelihood contribute to this issue, they do not consistently enhance the faithfulness of the summaries. Preference-based optimization methods, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), can further refine the model to align with human preferences. However, these methods still heavily depend on costly human feedback. In this work, we introduce a novel and straightforward approach called Model-based Preference Optimization (MPO) to fine-tune LLMs for improved summarization abilities without any human feedback. By leveraging the model's inherent summarization capabilities, we create a preference dataset that is fully generated by the model using different decoding strategies. Our experiments on standard summarization datasets and various metrics demonstrate that our proposed MPO significantly enhances the quality of generated summaries without relying on human feedback. The code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/cjaep/MPO}.

Model-based Preference Optimization in Abstractive Summarization without Human Feedback

Data-driven storytelling is a powerful method for conveying insights by combining narrative techniques with visualizations and text. These stories integrate visual aids, such as highlighted bars and lines in charts, along with textual annotations explaining insights. However, creating such stories requires a deep understanding of the data and meticulous narrative planning, often necessitating human intervention, which can be time-consuming and mentally taxing. While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various NLP tasks, their ability to generate coherent and comprehensive data stories remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce a novel task for data story generation and a benchmark containing 1,449 stories from diverse sources. To address the challenges of crafting coherent data stories, we propose a multi-agent framework employing two LLM agents designed to replicate the human storytelling process: one for understanding and describing the data (Reflection), generating the outline, and narration, and another for verification at each intermediary step. While our agentic framework generally outperforms non-agentic counterparts in both model-based and human evaluations, the results also reveal unique challenges in data story generation.

DataNarrative: Automated Data-Driven Storytelling with Visualizations and Texts

Multilingual large language models (mLLMs) have significantly advanced machine translation, yet challenges remain for low-resource languages like Amharic. This study evaluates the performance of state-of-the-art mLLMs, specifically NLLB-200 (NLLB3.3, NLLB1.3 Distilled1.3, NLB600) and M2M (M2M1.2B, M2M418), in English-Amharic bidirectional translation using the Lesan AI dataset. We employed both automatic and human evaluation methods to analyze translation errors. Automatic evaluation used BLEU, METEOR, chrF, and TER metrics, while human evaluation assessed translation quality at both word and sentence levels. Sentence-level accuracy was rated by annotators on a scale from 0 to 5, and word-level quality was evaluated using Multidimensional Quality Metrics. Our findings indicate that the NLLB3.3B model consistently outperformed other mLLMs across all evaluation methods. Common error included mistranslation, omission, untranslated segments, and additions, with mistranslation being particularly common. Punctuation and spelling errors were rare in our experiment.

Error Analysis of Multilingual Language Models in Machine Translation for Low-resource Languages: A Case Study of Amharic to English Bi-directional Machine Translation

This study presents a novel corpus of 15,356 Polish web articles, including articles identified as containing disinformation. Our dataset enables a multifaceted understanding of disinformation. We present a distinctive multilayered methodology for annotating disinformation in texts. What sets our corpus apart is its focus on uncovering hidden intent and manipulation in disinformative content. A team of experts annotated each article with multiple labels indicating both disinformation creators' intents and the manipulation techniques employed. Additionally, we set new baselines for binary disinformation detection and two multiclass multilabel classification tasks: manipulation techniques and intention types classification.

MIPD: Exploring Manipulation and Intention In a Novel Corpus of Polish Disinformation

Large language models (LLMs) are trained from vast repositories of text authored by millions of distinct authors, reflecting an enormous diversity of human traits. While these models bear the potential to be used as approximations of human subjects in behavioral studies, prior efforts have been limited in steering model responses to match individual human users. In this work, we introduce Anthology, a method for conditioning LLMs to particular virtual personas by harnessing open-ended life narratives, which we refer to as backstories. We show that our methodology enhances the consistency and reliability of experimental outcomes while ensuring better representation of diverse sub-populations. Across three nationally representative human surveys conducted as part of Pew Research Center's American Trends Panel (ATP), we demonstrate that Anthology achieves up to 18% improvement in matching the response distributions of human respondents and 27% improvement in consistency metrics.

Virtual Personas for Language Models via an Anthology of Backstories

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT & Llama have demonstrated significant achievements in summarization tasks but struggle with factual inaccuracies, a critical issue in clinical NLP applications where errors could lead to serious consequences. To counter the high costs and limited availability of expert-annotated data for factual alignment, this study introduces an innovative pipeline that utilizes >100B parameter GPT variants like GPT-3.5 & GPT-4 to act as synthetic experts to generate high-quality synthetics feedback aimed at enhancing factual consistency in clinical note summarization. Our research primarily focuses on edit feedback generated by these synthetic feedback experts without additional human annotations, mirroring and optimizing the practical scenario in which medical professionals refine AI system outputs. Although such 100B+ parameter GPT variants have proven to demonstrate expertise in various clinical NLP tasks, such as the Medical Licensing Examination, there is scant research on their capacity to act as synthetic feedback experts and deliver expert-level edit feedback for improving the generation quality of weaker (<10B parameter) LLMs like GPT-2 (1.5B) & Llama 2 (7B) in clinical domain. So in this work, we leverage 100B+ GPT variants to act as synthetic feedback experts offering expert-level edit feedback, that is used to reduce hallucinations and align weaker (<10B parameter) LLMs with medical facts using two distinct alignment algorithms (DPO & SALT), endeavoring to narrow the divide between AI-generated content and factual accuracy. This highlights the substantial potential of LLM-based synthetic edits in enhancing the alignment of clinical factuality.

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Next from EMNLP 2024

GuardBench: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Guardrail Models

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