Mexico

Sentiment analysis (SA) has been a long-standing research area in natural language processing. With the recent advent of large language models (LLMs), there is great potential for their employment on SA problems. However, the extent to which current LLMs can be leveraged for different sentiment analysis tasks remains unclear. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive investigation into the capabilities of LLMs in performing various sentiment analysis tasks, from conventional sentiment classification to aspect-based sentiment analysis and multifaceted analysis of subjective texts. We evaluate performance across 13 tasks on 26 datasets and compare the results against small language models (SLMs) trained on domain-specific datasets. Our study reveals that while LLMs demonstrate satisfactory performance in simpler tasks, they lag behind in more complex tasks requiring a deeper understanding of specific sentiment phenomena or structured sentiment information. However, LLMs significantly outperform SLMs in few-shot learning settings, suggesting their potential when annotation resources are limited. We also highlight the limitations of current evaluation practices in assessing LLMs&#39; SA abilities and propose a novel benchmark, \textsc{SentiEval}, for a more comprehensive and realistic evaluation. Data and code are available at \url{https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/LLM-Sentiment}.

NAACL 2024

Sentiment Analysis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Reality Check

sentiment analysis; large language model; evaluation

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s 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.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Sentiment analysis (SA) has been a long-standing research area in natural language processing. With the recent advent of large language models (LLMs), there is great potential for their employment on SA problems. However, the extent to which current LLMs can be leveraged for different sentiment analysis tasks remains unclear. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive investigation into the capabilities of LLMs in performing various sentiment analysis tasks, from conventional sentiment classification to aspect-based sentiment analysis and multifaceted analysis of subjective texts. We evaluate performance across 13 tasks on 26 datasets and compare the results against small language models (SLMs) trained on domain-specific datasets. Our study reveals that while LLMs demonstrate satisfactory performance in simpler tasks, they lag behind in more complex tasks requiring a deeper understanding of specific sentiment phenomena or structured sentiment information. However, LLMs significantly outperform SLMs in few-shot learning settings, suggesting their potential when annotation resources are limited. We also highlight the limitations of current evaluation practices in assessing LLMs' SA abilities and propose a novel benchmark, \textsc{SentiEval}, for a more comprehensive and realistic evaluation. Data and code are available at \url{https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/LLM-Sentiment}.

poster

## 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! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Advancements in dense retrieval models have brought ColBERT to prominence in Information Retrieval (IR) with its advanced interaction techniques. However, ColBERT is reported to frequently underperform in zero-shot scenarios, where traditional techniques such as BM25 still exceed it. Addressing this, we propose to balance representation isotropy and anisotropy for zero-shot model performance, based on our observations that isotropy can enhance cosine similarity computations and anisotropy may aid in generalizing to unseen data. Striking a balance between these isotropic and anisotropic qualities stands as a critical objective to refine model efficacy. Based on this, we present ours, a Hybrid Isotropy Learning (HIL) architecture that integrates isotropic and anisotropic representations. Our experiments with the BEIR benchmark show that our model significantly outperforms the baseline ColBERT model, highlighting the importance of harmonized isotropy in improving zero-shot retrieval performance.

HIL: Hybrid Isotropy Learning for Zero-shot Performance in Dense retrieval

The performance cost of differential privacy has, for some applications, been shown to be higher for minority groups; fairness, conversely, has been shown to disproportionally compromise the privacy of members of such groups. Most work in this area has been restricted to computer vision and risk assessment. In response, we evaluate the impact of differential privacy on fairness across four diverse tasks, focusing on how attempts to mitigate privacy violations and between-group performance differences interact: Does privacy inhibit attempts to ensure fairness? To this end, we train $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-differentially private models with empirical risk minimization and group distributionally robust training objectives. Consistent with previous findings, we find that differential privacy increases between-group performance differences in the baseline setting; more interestingly, differential privacy {\em reduces} between-group performance differences in the robust setting. We explain this by interpreting differential privacy as regularization.

The Impact of Differential Privacy on Group Disparity Mitigation

Recent advancements in GPT-4V have displayed remarkable multi-modal capabilities in processing image inputs and following open-ended instructions. Despite these advancements, there is considerable scope for enhancing open-source multi-modal LLMs, especially in terms of multi-modal understanding accuracy and instruction-following proficiency. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on training GPT4-style models. We introduce Lynx a multi-modal LLM developed through a series of controlled experiments comparing various model variants. This process allowed us to identify and implement an optimal training strategy tailored for multi-modal LLMs. In addition to our model development, we propose a plug-and-play technique designed to augment the instruction-following capabilities of multi-modal LLMs. We have validated the performance of Lynx on multiple benchmarks. Results demonstrate that Lynx not only achieves strong image understanding accuracy but also excels in instruction-following tasks, paving the path for ongoing enhancements in multi-modal LLMs.

What Matters in Training a GPT4-Style Language Model with Multimodal Inputs?

While text summarization is a well-known NLP task, in this paper, we introduce a novel and useful variant of it called functionality extraction from Git README files. Though this task is a text2text generation at an abstract level, it involves its own peculiarities and challenges making existing text2text generation systems not very useful. The motivation behind this task stems from a recent surge in research and development activities around the use of large language models for code-related tasks, such as code refactoring, code summarization, etc. We also release a human-annotated dataset called FuncRead, and develop a battery of models for the task. Our exhaustive experimentation shows that small size fine-tuned models beat any baseline models that can be designed using popular black-box or white-box large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Bard. Our best fine-tuned 7 Billion CodeLlama model exhibit 70% and 20% gain on the F1 score against ChatGPT and Bard respectively.

Read between the lines - Functionality Extraction From READMEs

Multilingual generative models obtain remarkable cross-lingual in-context learning capabilities through pre-training on large-scale corpora. However, they still exhibit a performance bias toward high-resource languages and learn isolated distributions of multilingual sentence representations, which may hinder knowledge transfer across languages. To bridge this gap, we propose a simple yet effective cross-lingual alignment framework exploiting pairs of translation sentences. It aligns the internal sentence representations across different languages via multilingual contrastive learning and aligns outputs by following cross-lingual instructions in the target language. Experimental results show that even with less than 0.1${\textperthousand}$ of pre-training tokens, our alignment framework significantly boosts the cross-lingual abilities of generative language models and mitigates the performance gap. Further analyses reveal that it results in a better internal multilingual representation distribution of multilingual models.

Improving In-context Learning of Multilingual Generative Language Models with Cross-lingual Alignment

Logical reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence and a key component of tasks like problem-solving and decision-making. Recent advancements have enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to potentially exhibit reasoning capabilities, but complex logical reasoning remains a challenge. The state-of-the-art, solver-augmented language models, use LLMs to parse natural language logical questions into symbolic representations first and then adopt external logical solvers to take in the symbolic representations and output the answers. Despite their impressive performance, any parsing errors will inevitably result in the failure of the execution of external logical solvers and no answer to the logical questions. In this paper, we introduce LoGiPT, a novel language model that directly internalizes and emulates the reasoning processes of logical solvers and avoids parsing errors by learning strict adherence to solver syntax and grammar. LoGiPT is fine-tuned on a newly constructed instruction-tuning dataset derived from revealing and refining the invisible reasoning process of deductive solvers. Experimental results on two public deductive reasoning benchmarks show that LoGiPT outperforms state-of-the-art solver-augmented LMs and few-shot prompting methods on competitive LLMs like GPT-4. This project is available in https://github.com/Cyril-JZ/LoGiPT.

Language Models can be Deductive Solvers

How can we perform computations over natural language representations to solve tasks that require symbolic and numeric reasoning? We propose natural language embedded programs (NLEP) as a unifying framework for addressing math/symbolic reasoning, natural language understanding, and instruction following tasks. Our approach prompts a language model to generate full Python programs that define functions over data structures which contain natural language representations of structured knowledge. A Python interpreter then executes the generated code and prints the output. Despite using a task-general prompt, we find that this approach can improve upon strong baselines across a range of different tasks including math and symbolic reasoning, text classification, question answering, and instruction following. We found that the generated programs are interpretable since they outline the exact reasoning process followed by the program interpreter.

Natural Language Embedded Programs for Hybrid Language Symbolic Reasoning

Machine Translation (MT) remains one of the last NLP tasks where large language models (LLMs) have not yet replaced dedicated supervised systems. This work exploits the complementary strengths of LLMs and supervised MT by guiding LLMs to automatically post-edit MT with external feedback on its quality, derived from Multidimensional Quality Metric (MQM) annotations. Working with LLaMA-2 models, we consider prompting strategies varying the nature of feedback provided and then fine-tune the LLM to improve its ability to exploit the provided guidance. Through experiments on Chinese-English, English-German, and English-Russian MQM data, we demonstrate that prompting LLMs to post-edit MT improves TER, BLEU and COMET scores, although the benefits of fine-grained feedback are not clear. Fine-tuning helps integrate fine-grained feedback more effectively and further improves translation quality based on both automatic and human evaluation.

Guiding Large Language Models to Post-Edit Machine Translation with Error Annotations

The majority of the recently developed models for automated essay scoring (AES) are evaluated solely on the ASAP corpus. However, ASAP is not without its limitations. For instance, it is not clear whether models trained on ASAP can generalize well when evaluated on other corpora. In light of these limitations, we introduce ICLE++, a corpus of persuasive student essays annotated with both holistic scores and trait-specific scores. Not only can ICLE++ be used to test the generalizability of AES models trained on ASAP, but it can also facilitate the evaluation of models developed for newer AES problems such as multi-trait scoring and cross-prompt scoring. We believe that ICLE++, which represents a culmination of our long-term effort in annotating the essays in the ICLE corpus, contributes to the set of much-needed annotated corpora for AES research.

ICLE++: Modeling Fine-Grained Traits for Holistic Essay Scoring

The majority of automatic metrics for evaluating NLG systems are reference-based. However, the challenge of collecting human annotation results in a lack of reliable references in numerous application scenarios. Despite recent advancements in reference-free metrics, it has not been well understood when and where they can be used as an alternative to reference-based metrics. In this study, by employing diverse analytical approaches, we comprehensively assess the performance of both metrics across a wide range of NLG tasks, encompassing eight datasets and eight evaluation models. Based on solid experiments, the results show that reference-free metrics exhibit a higher correlation with human judgment and greater sensitivity to deficiencies in language quality. However, their effectiveness varies across tasks and is influenced by the quality of candidate texts. Therefore, it's important to assess the performance of reference-free metrics before applying them to a new task, especially when inputs are in uncommon form or when the answer space is highly variable. Our study can provide insight into the appropriate application of automatic metrics and the impact of metric choice on evaluation performance.

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HIL: Hybrid Isotropy Learning for Zero-shot Performance in Dense retrieval

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