Mexico

The paper focuses on the marginalization of indigenous language communities in the face of rapid technological advancements. We highlight the cultural richness of these languages and the risk they face of being overlooked in the realm of Natural Language Processing (NLP). We aim to bridge the gap between these communities and researchers, emphasizing the need for inclusive technological advancements that respect indigenous community perspectives. We show the NLP progress of indigenous Latin American languages and the survey that covers the status of indigenous languages in Latin America, their representation in NLP, and the challenges and innovations required for their preservation and development. The paper contributes to the current literature in understanding the need and progress of NLP for indigenous communities of Latin America, specifically low-resource and indigenous communities in general.

NAACL 2024

NLP Progress in Indigenous Latin American Languages

nlp progress in latin american languages

latin american languages

indigenous languages of latin america

low-resource languages

indigenous languages

## 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.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
*You can read the full Welcome message in the [Conference Handbook (downloadable)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H1NvW0VASQjkSCYgw3mr-3l4yYDSxz6B/view?usp=sharing)*

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

technical paper

Named entity recognition is a key component of Information Extraction (IE), particularly in scientific domains such as biomedicine and chemistry, where large language models (LLMs), e.g., ChatGPT, fall short. We investigate the applicability of transfer learning for enhancing a named entity recognition model trained in the biomedical domain (the source domain) to be used in the chemical domain (the target domain). A common practice for training such a model in a few-shot learning setting is to pretrain the model on the labeled source data, and then, to finetune it on a hand-full of labeled target examples. In our experiments, we observed that such a model is prone to mislabeling the source entities, which can often appear in the text, as the target entities. To alleviate this problem, we propose a model to transfer the knowledge from the source domain to the target domain, but, at the same time, to project the source entities and target entities into separate regions of the feature space. This diminishes the risk of mislabeling the source entities as the target entities. Our model consists of two stages: 1) entity grouping in the source domain, which incorporates knowledge from annotated events to establish relations between entities, and 2) entity discrimination in the target domain, which relies on pseudo labeling and contrastive learning to enhance discrimination between the entities in the two domains. We conduct our extensive experiments across three source and three target datasets, demonstrating that our method outperforms the baselines by up to 5\% absolute value. Code, data, and resources are publicly available for research purposes: https://github.com/Lhtie/Bio-Domain-Transfer .

Named Entity Recognition Under Domain Shift via Metric Learning for Life Sciences

Ensuring factual consistency is crucial for natural language generation tasks, particularly in abstractive summarization, where preserving the integrity of information is paramount. Prior works on evaluating factual consistency of summarization often take the entailment-based approaches that first generate perturbed (factual inconsistent) summaries and then train a classifier on the generated data to detect the factually inconsistencies during testing time. However, previous approaches generating perturbed summaries are either of low coherence or lack error-type coverage. To address these issues, we propose AMRFact, a framework that generates perturbed summaries using Abstract Meaning Representations (AMRs). Our approach parses factually consistent summaries into AMR graphs and injects controlled factual inconsistencies to create negative examples, allowing for coherent factually inconsistent summaries to be generated with high error-type coverage. Additionally, we present a data selection module NegFilter based on natural language inference and BARTScore to ensure the quality of the generated negative samples. Experimental results demonstrate our approach significantly outperforms previous systems on the AggreFact-SOTA benchmark, showcasing its efficacy in evaluating factuality of abstractive summarization.

AMRFact: Enhancing Summarization Factuality Evaluation with AMR-Driven Negative Samples Generation

Data poisoning backdoor attacks can cause undesirable behaviors in large language models (LLMs), and defending against them is of increasing importance. Existing defense mechanisms often assume that only one type of trigger is adopted by the attacker, while defending against multiple simultaneous and independent trigger types necessitates general defense frameworks and is relatively unexplored. In this paper, we propose Nested Product of Experts (NPoE) defense framework, which involves a mixture of experts (MoE) as a trigger-only ensemble within the PoE defense framework to simultaneously defend against multiple trigger types. During NPoE training, the main model is trained in an ensemble with a mixture of smaller expert models that learn the features of backdoor triggers. At inference time, only the main model is used. Experimental results on sentiment analysis, hate speech detection, and question classification tasks demonstrate that NPoE effectively defends against a variety of triggers both separately and in trigger mixtures. Due to the versatility of the MoE structure in NPoE, this framework can be further expanded to defend against other attack settings.

Two Heads are Better than One: Nested PoE for Robust Defense Against Multi-Backdoors

Sentence embeddings are crucial in measuring semantic similarity. Most recent studies employed large language models (LLMs) to learn sentence embeddings. Existing LLMs mainly adopted autoregressive architecture without explicit backward dependency modeling. Therefore, we examined the effects of backward dependencies in LLMs for semantic similarity measurements. Concretely, we propose a novel model: backward dependency enhanced large language model (BeLLM). It learns sentence embeddings via transforming specific attention layers from uni- to bi-directional. We extensively experiment across various semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks and downstream applications. BeLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance in varying scenarios. It shows that autoregressive LLMs benefit from backward dependencies for sentence embeddings.

BeLLM: Backward Dependency Enhanced Large Language Model for Sentence Embeddings

Human writers often *bookend* their writing with ending sentences that relate back to the beginning sentences in order to compose a satisfying narrative that "closes the loop." Motivated by this observation, we propose RENarGen, a controllable story-generation paradigm that generates narratives by ensuring the first and last sentences are related and then infilling the middle sentences. Our contributions include an initial exploration of how various methods of bookending from Narratology affect language modeling for stories. Automatic and human evaluations indicate RENarGen produces better stories with more narrative closure than current autoregressive models.

Returning to the Start: Generating Narratives with Related Endpoints

Despite remarkable advancements in few-shot generalization in natural language processing, most models are developed and evaluated primarily in English. To establish a rigorous and equitable evaluation framework for few-shot cross-lingual transfer, we introduce a new benchmark, called BUFFET, which unifies 15 diverse tasks across 54 languages in a sequence-to-sequence format and provides a fixed set of few-shot examples and instructions. Using BUFFET, we perform thorough evaluations of ten state-of-the-art multilingual large language models with different transfer methods, namely in-context learning and fine-tuning. Our findings reveal significant room for improvement in few-shot in-context cross-lingual transfer. Strong multilingual pre-trained or instruction-tuned models such as BLOOM or ChatGPT often lag behind much smaller mT5-base models given the same number of few-shot samples, particularly in low-resource languages. Our analysis suggests avenues for future research in few-shot cross-lingual transfer.

BUFFET: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Few-shot Cross-lingual Transfer

The self-improving ability of large language models (LLMs), enabled by prompting them to analyze and revise their own outputs, has garnered significant interest in recent research. However, this ability has been shown to be absent and difficult to learn for smaller models, thus widening the performance gap between state-of-the-art LLMs and more cost-effective and faster ones. To reduce this gap, we introduce TriPosT, a training algorithm that endows smaller models with such self-improvement ability, and show that our approach can improve LLaMA-7B's performance on math and reasoning tasks by up to 7.13%. In contrast to prior work, we achieve this by using the smaller model to interact with LLMs to collect feedback and improvements on *its own generations*. We then replay this experience to train the small model. Our experiments on four math and reasoning datasets show that the interactive experience of learning from and correcting its *own* mistakes is crucial for small models to improve their performance.

Teaching Language Models to Self-Improve through Interactive Demonstrations

Continuous-output neural machine translation (CoNMT) replaces the discrete next-word prediction problem with an embedding prediction. The semantic structure of the target embedding space (*i.e.*, closeness of related words) is intuitively believed to be crucial. We challenge this assumption and show that completely random output embeddings can outperform laboriously pre-trained ones, especially on larger datasets. Further investigation shows this surprising effect is strongest for rare words, due to the geometry of their embeddings. We shed further light on this finding by designing a mixed strategy that combines random and pre-trained embeddings, and that performs best overall.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Random Target Embeddings for Continuous-Output Neural Machine Translation

Questions posed by information-seeking users often contain implicit false or potentially harmful assumptions. In a high-risk domain such as maternal and infant health, a question-answering system must recognize these pragmatic constraints and go beyond simply answering user questions, examining them in context to respond helpfully. To achieve this, we study assumptions and implications, or pragmatic inferences, made when mothers ask questions about pregnancy and infant care by collecting a dataset of 2,727 inferences from 500 questions across three diverse sources. We study how health experts naturally address these inferences when writing answers, and illustrate that informing existing QA pipelines with pragmatic inferences produces responses that are more complete, mitigating the propagation of harmful beliefs.

Pregnant Questions: The Importance of Pragmatic Awareness in Maternal Health Question Answering

While major languages often enjoy substantial attention and resources, the linguistic diversity across the globe encompasses a multitude of smaller, indigenous, and regional languages that lack the same level of computational support. One such region is the Caribbean. While commonly labeled as "English speaking", the ex-British Caribbean region consists of a myriad of Creole languages thriving alongside English. In this paper, we present Guylingo: a comprehensive corpus designed for advancing NLP research in the domain of Creolese (Guyanese English-lexicon Creole), the most widely spoken language in the culturally rich nation of Guyana. We first outline our framework for gathering and digitizing this diverse corpus, inclusive of colloquial expressions, idioms, and regional variations in a low-resource language. We then demonstrate the challenges of training and evaluating NLP models for machine translation for Creolese. Lastly, we discuss the unique opportunities presented by recent NLP advancements for accelerating the formal adoption of Creole languages as official languages in the Caribbean.

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