Canada

While modern language models can generate a scripted scene in the format of a play, movie, or video game cutscene the quality of machine generated text remains behind that of human authors. In this work, we focus on one aspect of this quality gap; generating text in the style of an arbitrary and unseen character. We propose the Style Adaptive Semiparametric Scriptwriter (SASS) which leverages an adaptive weighted style memory to generate dialog lines in accordance with a character’s speaking patterns. Using the LIGHT dataset as well as a new corpus of scripts from twenty-three AAA video games, we show that SASS not only outperforms similar models but in some cases can also be used in conjunction with them to yield
further improvement.

ACL 2023

Generating Video Game Scripts with Style

non-parametric language models

style controlled dialog generation

assistant

video games

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

workshop paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
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
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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)**

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.

Conversational recommendation systems (CRS) aim to recommend suitable items to users through natural language conversation. However, most CRS approaches do not effectively utilize the signal provided by these conversations. They rely heavily on explicit external knowledge e.g., knowledge graphs to augment the models’ understanding of the items and attributes, which is quite hard to scale. To alleviate this, we propose an alternative information retrieval (IR)-styled approach to the CRS item recommendation task, where we represent conversations as queries and items as documents to be retrieved. We expand the document representation used for retrieval with conversations from the training set. With a simple BM25-based retriever, we show that our task formulation compares favorably with much more complex baselines using complex external knowledge on a popular CRS benchmark. We demonstrate further improvements using user-centric modeling and data augmentation to counter the cold start problem for CRSs.

Conversational Recommendation as Retrieval: A Simple, Strong Baseline

Dialogue state tracking (DST) is designed to track the dialogue state during the conversations between users and systems, which is the core of task-oriented dialogue systems. Mainstream models predict the values for each slot with fully token-wise slot attention from dialogue history. However, such operations may result in overlooking the neighboring relationship. Moreover, it may lead the model to assign probability mass to irrelevant parts, while these parts contribute little. It becomes severe with the increase in dialogue length. Therefore, we investigate sparse local slot attention for DST in this work. Slot-specific local semantic information is obtained at a sub-sampled temporal resolution capturing local dependencies for each slot. Then these local representations are attended with sparse attention weights to guide the model to pay attention to relevant parts of local information for subsequent state value prediction. The experimental results on MultiWOZ 2.0 and 2.4 datasets show that the proposed approach effectively improves the performance of ontology-based dialogue state tracking, and performs better than token-wise attention for long dialogues.

Dialogue State Tracking with Sparse Local Slot Attention

We propose LLM-Eval, a unified multi-dimensional automatic evaluation method for open-domain conversations with large language models (LLMs). Existing evaluation methods often rely on human annotations, ground-truth responses, or multiple LLM prompts, which can be expensive and time-consuming. To address these issues, we design a single prompt-based evaluation method that leverages a unified evaluation schema to cover multiple dimensions of conversation quality in a single model call. We extensively evaluate the performance of LLM-Eval on various benchmark datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness, efficiency, and adaptability compared to state-of-the-art evaluation methods. Our analysis also highlights the importance of choosing suitable LLMs and decoding strategies for accurate evaluation results. LLM-Eval offers a versatile and robust solution for evaluating open-domain conversation systems, streamlining the evaluation process and providing consistent performance across diverse scenarios.

LLM-Eval: Unified Multi-Dimensional Automatic Evaluation for Open-Domain Conversations with Large Language Models

Optimizing accuracy and performance while eliminating hallucinations of open-domain conversational large language models (LLMs) is an open research challenge. A particularly promising direction is to augment and ground LLMs with information from structured sources. This paper introduces Conversational 
Tables (cTBLS), a three-step architecture to retrieve and generate dialogue responses grounded on retrieved tabular information. cTBLS uses Transformer encoder embeddings for Dense Table Retrieval and obtains up to 125% relative improvement over the retriever in the previous state-of-the-art system on the HyrbiDialogue dataset. cTBLS then uses a shared process between encoder and decoder models to perform a coarse+fine tabular knowledge (e.g., cell) ranking combined with a GPT-3.5 LLM response generator to yield a 2x relative improvement in ROUGE scores. Finally, human evaluators prefer cTBLs +80% of the time (coherency, fluency) and judge informativeness to be 4x better than the previous state-of-the-art.

cTBLS: Augmenting Large Language Models with Conversational Tables

Discovering latent intents from unlabeled utterances is essential for efficient conversational agent creation. We show that recent competitive methods in intent discovery can be outperformed by clustering utterances based on abstractive summaries, i.e., "labels", that retain the core elements while removing non-essential information. We present the IDAS approach, which collects a set of descriptive utterance labels by prompting a Large Language Model, starting from a well-chosen seed set of prototypical utterances, to bootstrap an In-Context Learning procedure to generate labels for non-prototypical utterances. The utterances and their resulting noisy labels are then encoded by a frozen pre-trained encoder, and subsequently clustered to recover the latent intents. For the unsupervised task (without any intent labels) IDAS outperforms the state-of-the-art by up to +7.42% in standard cluster metrics for the Banking, StackOverflow, and Transport datasets. For the semi-supervised task (with labels for a subset of intents) IDAS surpasses 2 recent methods on the CLINC benchmark despite not using labeled data.

IDAS: Intent Discovery with Abstractive Summarization

Conversational recommendation systems (CRS) have gained popularity in e-commerce as they can recommend items during user interactions. However, current open-ended CRS have limited recommendation performance due to their short-sighted training process, which only predicts one utterance at a time without considering its future impact. To address this, we propose a User Simulator (US) that communicates with the CRS using natural language based on given user preferences, enabling long-term reinforcement learning. We also introduce a framework that uses reinforcement learning (RL) with two novel rewards, i.e., recommendation and conversation rewards, to train the CRS. This approach considers the long-term goals and improves both the conversation and recommendation performance of the CRS. Our experiments show that our proposed framework improves the recall of recommendations by almost 100%. Moreover, human evaluation demonstrates the superiority of our framework in enhancing the informativeness of generated utterances.

User Simulator Assisted Open-ended Conversational Recommendation System

Prior work in semantic parsing has shown that conventional seq2seq models fail at compositional generalization tasks. This limitation led to a resurgence of methods that model alignments between sentences and their corresponding meaning representations, either implicitly through latent variables or explicitly by taking advantage of alignment annotations. We take the second direction and propose TPOL, a two-step approach that first translates input sentences monotonically and then reorders them to obtain the correct output. This is achieved with a modular framework comprising a Translator and a Reorderer component. We test our approach on two popular semantic parsing datasets. Our experiments show that by means of the monotonic translations, TPOL can learn reliable lexico- logical patterns from aligned data, significantly improving compositional generalization both over conventional seq2seq models, as well as over other approaches that exploit gold alignments.

Translate First Reorder Later: Leveraging Monotonicity in Semantic Parsing

Despite significant progress in Natural Language Generation for Indian languages (IndicNLP), there is a lack of datasets around complex structured tasks such as semantic parsing. One reason for this imminent gap is the complexity of the logical form, which makes English to multilingual translation difficult. The process involves alignment of logical forms, intents and slots with translated unstructured utterance. To address this, we propose an Interbilingual Seq2seq Semantic parsing dataset IESEMPARSE for 11 distinct Indian languages. We highlight the proposed task’s practicality, and evaluate existing multilingual seq2seq models across several train-test strategies. Our experiment reveals a high correlation across performance of original multilingual semantic parsing datasets (such as mTOP, multilingual
TOP and multiATIS++) and our proposed IESEMPARSE suite.

Evaluating Inter-Bilingual Semantic Parsing for Indian Languages

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems have been applied in a range of domains to support human users to achieve specific goals. Systems are typically constructed for a single domain or language and do not generalise well beyond this. Their extension to other languages in particular is restricted by the lack of available training data for many of the world’s languages. To support work on Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in TOD across multiple languages and domains simultaneously, we constructed MULTI3NLU++, a multilingual, multi-intent, multi-domain dataset. MULTI3NLU++ extends the English-only NLU++ dataset to include manual translations into a range of high, medium and low resource languages (Spanish, Marathi, Turkish and Amharic), in two domains (banking and hotels). MULTI3NLU++ inherits the multi-intent property of NLU++, where an utterance may be labelled with multiple intents, providing a more realistic representation of a user’s goals and aligning with the more complex tasks that commercial systems aim to model. We use MULTI3NLU++ to benchmark state-of-the-art multilingual language models as well as Machine Translation and Question Answering systems for the NLU task of intent detection for TOD systems in the multilingual setting. The results demonstrate the challenging nature of the dataset, particularly in the low-resource language setting.

Multi3NLU++: A Multilingual, Multi-Intent, Multi-Domain Dataset for Natural Language Understanding in Task-Oriented Dialogue

Task-oriented dialog (TOD) agents often ground their responses on external knowledge bases (KBs). These KBs can be dynamic and may be updated frequently. Existing approaches for learning TOD agents assume the KB snapshot contemporary to each individual dialog is available during training. However, in real-world scenarios, only the latest KB snapshot is available during training and as a result, the train dialogs may contain facts conflicting with the latest KB. These dialog-KB inconsistencies in the training data may potentially confuse the TOD agent learning algorithm.
In this work, we define the novel problem of learning a TOD agent with dialog-KB inconsistencies in the training data. We propose a Dialog-KB Arbitration Framework (DKAF) which reduces the dialog-KB inconsistencies by predicting the contemporary KB snapshot for each train dialog. These predicted KB snapshots are then used for training downstream TOD agents. As there are no existing datasets with dialog-KB inconsistencies, we systematically introduce inconsistencies in two publicly available dialog datasets. We show that TOD agents trained with DKAF perform better than existing baselines on both these datasets.

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