Canada

Morality in dialogue systems has raised great attention in research recently. A moral dialogue system aligned with users&#39; values could enhance conversation engagement and user connections. In this paper, we propose a framework, MoralDial to train and evaluate moral dialogue systems. In our framework, we first explore the communication mechanisms of morality and resolve expressed morality into three parts, which indicate the roadmap for building a moral dialogue system. Based on that, we design a simple yet effective method: constructing moral discussions between simulated specific users and the dialogue system. The constructed discussions consist of expressing, explaining, revising, and inferring moral views in dialogue exchanges, which makes conversational models learn morality well in a natural manner. Furthermore, we propose a novel evaluation method under the framework. We evaluate the multiple aspects of morality by judging the relation between dialogue responses and human values in discussions, where the multifaceted nature of morality is particularly considered. Automatic and manual experiments demonstrate that our framework is promising to train and evaluate moral dialogue systems.

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ACL 2023

MoralDial: A Framework to Train and Evaluate Moral Dialogue Systems via Moral Discussions

moral evaluation

moral dialogue system

dialogue safety

## 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!<br>
Katrin Erk<br>
The University of Texas at Austin<br>
NAACL-2024 General Chair<br><br>
*You can read the full Welcome message in the [Conference Handbook (downloadable)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H1NvW0VASQjkSCYgw3mr-3l4yYDSxz6B/view?usp=sharing)*<br><br>

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NAACL 2024

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

Morality in dialogue systems has raised great attention in research recently. A moral dialogue system aligned with users' values could enhance conversation engagement and user connections. In this paper, we propose a framework, MoralDial to train and evaluate moral dialogue systems. In our framework, we first explore the communication mechanisms of morality and resolve expressed morality into three parts, which indicate the roadmap for building a moral dialogue system. Based on that, we design a simple yet effective method: constructing moral discussions between simulated specific users and the dialogue system. The constructed discussions consist of expressing, explaining, revising, and inferring moral views in dialogue exchanges, which makes conversational models learn morality well in a natural manner. Furthermore, we propose a novel evaluation method under the framework. We evaluate the multiple aspects of morality by judging the relation between dialogue responses and human values in discussions, where the multifaceted nature of morality is particularly considered. Automatic and manual experiments demonstrate that our framework is promising to train and evaluate moral dialogue systems.

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poster

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
<br>The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023.<br><br>
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience.<br>
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**
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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Existing bias mitigation methods require social-group-specific word pairs (e.g., "man -- "woman) for each social attribute (e.g., gender), restricting the bias mitigation to only one specified social attribute. Further, this constraint renders such methods impractical and costly for mitigating bias in understudied and/or unmarked social groups. We propose that the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) --- a theoretical framework developed in social psychology for understanding the content of stereotyping --- can help debiasing efforts to become social-group-agnostic by capturing the underlying connection between bias and stereotypes. SCM proposes that the content of stereotypes map to two psychological dimensions of warmth and competence. Using only pairs of terms for these two dimensions (e.g., warmth: "genuine -- "fake; competence: "smart -- "stupid), we perform debiasing with established methods on both pre-trained word embeddings and large language models. We demonstrate that our social-group-agnostic, SCM-based debiasing technique performs comparably to group-specific debiasing on multiple bias benchmarks, but has theoretical and practical advantages over existing approaches.

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Social-Group-Agnostic Bias Mitigation via the Stereotype Content Model

To help the visually impaired enjoy movies, automatic movie narrating systems are expected to narrate accurate, coherent, and role-aware plots when there are no speaking lines of actors. Existing works benchmark this challenge as a normal video captioning task via some simplifications, such as removing role names and evaluating narrations with ngram-based metrics, which makes it difficult for automatic systems to meet the needs of real application scenarios. To narrow this gap, we construct a large-scale Chinese movie benchmark, named Movie101. Closer to real scenarios, the Movie Clip Narrating (MCN) task in our benchmark asks models to generate role-aware narration paragraphs for complete movie clips where no actors are speaking. External knowledge, such as role information and movie genres, is also provided for better movie understanding. Besides, we propose a new metric called Movie Narration Score (MNScore) for movie narrating evaluation, which achieves the best correlation with human evaluation. Our benchmark also supports the Temporal Narration Grounding (TNG) task to investigate clip localization given text descriptions. For both two tasks, our proposed methods well leverage external knowledge and outperform carefully designed baselines. The dataset and codes are released at https://github.com/yuezih/Movie101.

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Movie101: A New Movie Understanding Benchmark

Most existing word alignment methods rely on manual alignment datasets or parallel corpora, which limits their usefulness. Here, to mitigate the dependence on manual data, we broaden the source of supervision by relaxing the requirement for correct, fully-aligned, and parallel sentences. Specifically, we make noisy, partially aligned, and non-parallel paragraphs in this paper. We then use such a large-scale weakly-supervised dataset for word alignment pre-training via span prediction. Extensive experiments with various settings empirically demonstrate that our approach, which is named WSPAlign, is an effective and scalable way to pre-train word aligners without manual data. When fine-tuned on standard benchmarks, WSPAlign has set a new state of the art by improving upon the best supervised baseline by 3.3 ~ 6.1 points in F1 and 1.5 ~ 6.1 points in AER. Furthermore, WSPAlign also achieves competitive performance compared with the corresponding baselines in few-shot, zero-shot and cross-lingual tests, which demonstrates that WSPAlign is potentially more practical for low-resource languages than existing methods.

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WSPAlign: Word Alignment Pre-training via Large-Scale Weakly Supervised Span Prediction

Machine translation technology has made great progress in recent years, but it cannot guarantee error-free results. Human translators perform post-editing on machine translations to correct errors in the scene of computer aided translation. In favor of expediting the post-editing process, many works have investigated machine translation in interactive modes, in which machines can automatically refine the rest of translations constrained by human's edits. Translation Suggestion (TS), as an interactive mode to assist human translators, requires machines to generate alternatives for specific incorrect words or phrases selected by human translators. In this paper, we utilize the parameterized objective function of neural machine translation (NMT) and propose a novel constrained decoding algorithm, namely Prefix-Suffix Guided Decoding (PSGD), to deal with the TS problem without additional training. Compared to state-of-the-art lexical-constrained decoding method, PSGD improves translation quality by an average of 10.6 BLEU and reduces time overhead by an average of 63.4% on benchmark datasets. Furthermore, on both the WeTS and the WMT 2022 Translation Suggestion datasets, it is superior over other supervised learning systems trained with TS annotated data.

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Easy Guided Decoding in Providing Suggestions for Interactive Machine Translation

Recent studies show that large-scale pre-trained language models could be efficaciously adapted to particular tasks in a parameter-efficient manner. The trained lightweight set of parameters, such as adapters, can be easily stored and shared as a capability equipped with the corresponding models. Owning many lightweight parameters, we focus on transferring them between tasks to acquire an improvement in performance of new tasks, the key point of which is to obtain the similarity between tasks. In this paper, we explore 5 parameter-efficient weight ensembling methods to achieve such transferability and verify the effectiveness of them. These methods extract the information of datasets and trained lightweight parameters from different perspectives to obtain the similarity between tasks, and weight the existing lightweight parameters according to the comparability to acquire a suitable module for the initialization of new tasks. We apply them to three parameter-efficient tuning methods and test them on a wide set of downstream tasks. Experimental results show that our methods show an improvement of 5\%\textasciitilde8\% over baselines and could largely facilitate task-level knowledge transfer.

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Parameter-efficient Weight Ensembling Facilitates Task-level Knowledge Transfer

Decoding text stimuli from cognitive signals (e.g. fMRI) enhances our understanding of the human language system, paving the way for building versatile Brain-Computer Interface. However, existing studies largely focus on decoding individual word-level fMRI volumes from a restricted vocabulary, which is far too idealized for real-world application. In this paper, we propose fMRI2text, the first open-vocabulary task aiming to bridge fMRI time series and human language. Furthermore, to explore the potential of this new task, we present a baseline solution, UniCoRN: the Unified Cognitive Signal ReconstructioN for Brain Decoding. By reconstructing both individual time points and time series, UniCoRN establishes a robust encoder for cognitive signals (fMRI & EEG). Leveraging a pre-trained language model as decoder, UniCoRN proves its efficacy in decoding coherent text from fMRI series across various split settings. Our model achieves a 34.77% BLEU score on fMRI2text, and a 37.04% BLEU when generalized to EEG-to-text decoding, thereby surpassing the former baseline. Experimental results indicate the feasibility of decoding consecutive fMRI volumes, and the effectiveness of decoding different cognitive signals using a unified structure.

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UniCoRN: Unified Cognitive Signal ReconstructioN bridging cognitive signals and human language

Dialogue representation and understanding aim to convert conversational inputs into embeddings and fulfill discriminative tasks. Compared with free-form text, dialogue has two important characteristics, hierarchical semantic structure and multi-facet attributes. Therefore, directly applying the pretrained language models (PLMs) might result in unsatisfactory performance. Recently, several work focused on the dialogue-adaptive post-training (DialPost) that further trains PLMs to fit dialogues. To model dialogues more comprehensively, we propose a DialPost method, Dialog-Post, with multi-level self-supervised objectives and a hierarchical model. These objectives leverage dialogue-specific attributes and use self-supervised signals to fully facilitate the representation and understanding of dialogues. The novel model is a hierarchical segment-wise self-attention network, which contains inner-segment and inter-segment self-attention sub-layers followed by an aggregation and updating module. To evaluate the effectiveness of our methods, we first apply two public datasets for the verification of representation ability. Then we conduct experiments on a newly-labelled dataset that is annotated with 4 dialogue understanding tasks. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing SOTA models and achieves a 3.3% improvement on average.

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Dialog-Post: Multi-Level Self-Supervised Objectives and Hierarchical Model for Dialogue Post-Training

Instead of simply matching a query to pre-existing passages, generative retrieval generates identifier strings of passages as the retrieval target. At a cost, the identifier must be distinctive enough to represent a passage. Current approaches use either a numeric ID or a text piece (such as a title or substrings) as the identifier. However, these identifiers cannot cover a passage's content well. As such, we are motivated to propose a new type of identifier, synthetic identifiers, that are generated based on the content of a passage and could integrate contextualized information that text pieces lack. Furthermore, we simultaneously consider multiview identifiers, including synthetic identifiers, titles, and substrings. These views of identifiers complement each other and facilitate the holistic ranking of passages from multiple perspectives. We conduct a series of experiments on three public datasets, and the results indicate that our proposed approach performs the best in generative retrieval, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness.

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Multiview Identifiers Enhanced Generative Retrieval

Most medical dialogue systems assume that patients have clear goals (seeking a diagnosis, medicine querying, etc.) before medical consultation. However, in many real situations, due to the lack of medical knowledge, it is usually difficult for patients to determine clear goals with all necessary slots. In this paper, we identify this challenge as how to construct medical consultation dialogue systems to help patients clarify their goals. For further study, we create a novel human-to-human mixed-type medical consultation dialogue corpus, termed MidMed, covering four dialogue types: task-oriented dialogue for diagnosis, recommendation, QA, and chitchat. MidMed covers four departments (otorhinolaryngology, ophthalmology, skin, and digestive system), with 8,309 dialogues. Furthermore, we build benchmarking baselines on MidMed and propose an instruction-guiding medical dialogue generation framework, termed InsMed, to handle mixed-type dialogues. Experimental results show the effectiveness of InsMed.

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MidMed: Towards Mixed-Type Dialogues for Medical Consultation

Data annotation is the process of labeling data that could be used to train machine learning models. Having high-quality annotation is crucial, as it allows the model to learn the relationship between the input data and the desired output. Large-scale language models, such as GPT-3, ChatGPT, and GPT-4, developed by OpenAI, have demonstrated impressive zero- and few-shot performance on a wide range of NLP tasks. It is therefore natural to wonder whether they can be used to effectively annotate data for NLP tasks. In this paper, we mainly evaluate the performance of GPT-3 as a data annotator by comparing it with traditional data annotation methods and analyzing its output on a range of tasks. We also provide the comparison among GPT-3, ChatGPT, and GPT-4 on certain tasks. Through this analysis, we aim to provide insight into the potential of large language models as general-purpose data annotators in NLP.

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