Malta

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have been reshaping Natural Language Processing (NLP) task in several domains. Their use in the field of Human Resources (HR) has still room for expansions and could be beneficial for several time consuming tasks. Examples such as time-off submissions, medical claims filing, and access requests are noteworthy, but they are by no means the sole instances. However the aforementioned developments must grapple with the pivotal challenge of constructing a high-quality training dataset. On one hand, most conversation datasets are solving problems for customers not employees. On the other hand, gathering conversations with HR could raise privacy concerns. To solve it, we introduce HR-Multiwoz, a fully-labeled dataset of 550 conversations spanning 10 HR domains. Our work has the following contributions:
(1) It is the first labeled open-sourced conversation dataset in the HR domain for NLP research. (2) It provides a detailed recipe for the data generation procedure along with data analysis and human evaluations. The data generation pipeline is transferrable and can be easily adapted for labeled conversation data generation in other domains. (3) The proposed data-collection pipeline is mostly based on LLMs with minimal human involvement for annotation, which is time and cost-efficient.

EACL 2024

HR-MultiWOZ: A Task Oriented Dialogue (TOD) Dataset for HR LLM Agent

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

workshop paper

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
#### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Wn38q0yev6U3RTgnf4Tn5T9GuAuZ-xW/view?usp=sharing) *downloadable*

To access the EACL 2024 event page you need to register [**here**](https://acl.swoogo.com/EACL2024). 

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Human processing of nonlocal syntactic dependencies requires engagement of limited working memory for encoding, maintenance, and retrieval. This process creates an evolutionary pressure for language to be structured in a way that keeps the subparts of a dependency closer to each other, an efficiency principle termed dependency locality. The current study proposes that such a dependency locality pressure can be modulated by the surprisal of the antecedent, defined as the first part of a dependency, due to strategic allocation of working memory. In particular, antecedents with novel and unpredictable information are prioritized for memory encoding, receiving more robust representation against memory interference and decay, and thus are more capable of handling longer dependency length. We examine this claim by examining dependency corpora of six languages (Danish, English, Italian, Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish), with word surprisal generated from GPT-3 language model. In support of our hypothesis, we find evidence for a positive correlation between dependency length and the antecedent surprisal in most of the languages in our analyses.

Syntactic dependency length shaped by strategic memory allocation

Over 7,000 of the world's 7,168 living languages are still low-resourced. This paper aims to narrow the language documentation gap by creating multiparallel dictionaries, clustered by SIL's semantic domains. This task is new for machine learning and has previously been done manually by native speakers. We propose GUIDE, a language-agnostic tool that uses a GNN to create and populate semantic domain dictionaries, using seed dictionaries and Bible translations as a parallel text corpus. Our work sets a new benchmark, achieving an exemplary average precision of 60% in eight languages without training data and predicting an average of 2,400 dictionary entries. We share the code, model, multilingual test set, and new dictionaries with the research community.

GUIDE: Creating Semantic Domain Dictionaries for Low-Resource Languages

Traditional dialectology or dialect geography is the study of geographical variation of language. Originated in Europe and pioneered in Germany and France, this field has predominantly been focusing on sounds, more specifically, on segments. Similarly, quantitative approaches to language variation concerned with the phonetic level are in most cases focusing on segments as well. However, more than half of the world’s languages include lexical tones (Yip, 2002). Despite this, tones are still underexplored in quantitative language comparison, partly due to the low accessibility of the suitable data. This paper aims to introduce a newly digitised dataset which comes from the Yue- and Pinghua-speaking areas in Southern China, with over 100 dialects. This dataset consists of two parts: tones and segments. In this paper, we illustrate how we can computationaly model tones in order to explore linguistic variation. We have applied a tone distance metric on our data, and we have found that 1) dialects also form a continuum on the tonal level and 2) other than tonemic (inventory) and tonetic differences, dialects can also differ in the lexical distribution of tones. The availability of this dataset will hopefully enable further exploration of the role of tones in quantitative typology and NLP research.

A New Dataset for Tonal and Segmental Dialectometry from the Yue- and Pinghua-Speaking Area

Closely related languages show linguistic similarities that allow speakers of one language to understand speakers of another language without having actively learned it. Mutual intelligibility varies in degree and is typically tested in psycholinguistic experiments. To study mutual intelligibility computationally, we propose a computer-assisted method using the Linear Discriminative Learner, a computational model developed to approximate the cognitive processes by which humans learn languages, which we expand with multilingual semantic vectors and multilingual sound classes. We test the model on German, Dutch, and English, three closely related Germanic languages. We find that our model’s comprehension accuracy depends on 1) the automatic trimming of inflections and 2)the language pair for which comprehension is tested. Our multilingual modelling approach does not only offer new methodological findings for automatic testing of mutual intelligibility across languages but also extends the use of Linear Discriminative Learning to multilingual settings.

A Computational Model for the Assessment of Mutual Intelligibility Among Closely Related Languages

Comparing eye-movement data of the readers of different languages or language varieties enables us to delve into the linkage between language variation and cognitive processing pattern. Within this scope, the Chinese language is particularly attractive in terms of the uniqueness of its written system, and the diversity of written varieties. As the native language of a wide spectrum of Chinese language speakers, Mandarin contrasts with Cantonese essentially on the complexity and semantic transparency of a single character, and also considerably on word length variability and word order flexibility. These manifold variations back a hypothesis that Simplified Mandarin readers exert more cognitive effort on the context that the Traditional Cantonese readers. The computational language models (LM) accurately quantify the predictive processing (e.g. Surprisal) and contextual effect (e.g. Entropy and Entropy Reduction) underlying the real-time language processing, which allows a deeper and reproducible inspection of high-level factors and their manifestation on the variation of language processing over different written scripts. Leveraging both masked and incremental language models, this study focus on the feature importance of different LM features (Surprisal, Entropy, and Entropy Reduction) in the modeling of eye-movement behaviors (durations and saccades in both early and late stages). The results suggest that the variation of eye-movement patterns is more salient on newly introduced LM features while vague on the widely studied properties. Specifically, Entropy effect is larger in Mandarin reading while Surprisal effect is more pronounced in Cantonese reading.

Predicting Mandarin and Cantonese Adult Speakers’ Eye-Movement Patterns in Natural Reading

LAJaR (Language Atlas of Japanese and Ryukyuan) is a linguistic typology database focusing on micro-variation of the Japonic (Japanese and Ryukyuan) languages. This paper aims to report the design and progress of this ongoing database project. Finally, we also show a case study utilizing its database on zero copulas among the Japonic languages.

Language Atlas of Japanese and Ryukyuan (LAJaR): A Linguistic Typology Database for Endangered Japonic Languages

This paper lays the groundwork for initiating research into Source Language Identification; the task of identifying the original language of a machine-translated text. We contribute a dataset of translations from a typologically diverse spectrum of languages into English and use it to set initial baselines for this novel task.

GTNC: A Many-To-One Dataset of Google Translations from NewsCrawl

Emotion classification is a challenging task in NLP due to the inherent idiosyncratic and subjective nature of linguistic expression. The problem of processing multiple languages at once, each with their own variations of emotional expression, makes this task even more challenging for code-mixed data. Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved high performance for many tasks and languages. It remains to be seen, however, whether these models learn and are robust to the differences in emotional expression across languages. Sociolinguistic studies have shown that Hinglish speakers make associations between language choice and emotion. Namely, they prefer Hindi when expressing negative emotions and English when expressing positive emotions. To understand if language models can pick up on these associations, we study the effect of language on emotion prediction across 3 PLMs on a Hinglish emotion classification dataset. Using LIME and token level language ID, we find that models do learn these associations between language choice and emotion. Moreover, having code-mixed data present in the pre-training can augment that learning even when task-specific data is scarce.

Sociolinguistically Informed Interpretability: A Case Study on Hinglish Emotion Classification

In order to draw generalizable conclusions about the performance of multilingual models across languages, it is important to evaluate on a set of languages that captures linguistic diversity. Linguistic typology is increasingly used to justify language selection, inspired by language sampling in linguistics. However, justifications for 'typological diversity' exhibit great variation, as there seems to be no set definition, methodology or consistent link to linguistic typology. In this work, we provide a systematic insight into how previous work in the ACL Anthology uses the term 'typological diversity'. Our two main findings are: 1) what is meant by typologically diverse language selection is not consistent and 2) the actual typological diversity of the language sets in these papers varies greatly. We argue that, when making claims about 'typological diversity', an operationalization of this should be included. A systematic approach that quantifies this claim, also with respect to the number of languages used, would be even better.

A Call for Consistency in Reporting Typological Diversity

Large language models have emerged as a useful technology for job matching, for both candidates and employers. Job matching is often based on a particular geographic location, such as a city or region. However, LMs have known biases, commonly derived from their training data. In this work, we aim to quantify the metropolitan size bias encoded within large language models, evaluating zero-shot salary, employer presence, and commute duration predictions in 384 of the United States’ metropolitan regions. Across all benchmarks, we observe correlations between metropolitan population and the accuracy of predictions, with the smallest 10 metropolitan regions showing upwards of 300% worse benchmark performance than the largest 10.

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Syntactic dependency length shaped by strategic memory allocation

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Syntactic dependency length shaped by strategic memory allocation

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