Mexico

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) that rely solely on textual data may exhibit limitations in multimodal semantics comprehension. Existing solutions attempt to alleviate this issue by incorporating explicit image retrieval or generation techniques. However, these methods: (1) focus exclusively on the static image modality; (2) inevitably encounter modality gaps and noise; (3) indiscriminately treat all modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal-augmented framework termed MaCSC, which can infuse multimodal semantics into PLMs and facilitate a self-balancing calibration of information allocation. Specifically, MaCSC obtains modal-specific conceptual prototypes from contrastive pre-training models (e.g., CLIP), and aggregates the intra- and inter-modal semantics of the conceptual prototype to enhance PLMs. In addition, we utilize a novel self-balancing contrastive loss to achieve multi-scale self-balancing calibration of multimodal information during fine-tuning PLMs. Experimental results show that MaCSC consistently improves the performance of PLMs across various architectures and scales, and outperforms competitive baselines on multiple NLP tasks.

NAACL 2024

MaCSC: Towards Multimodal-augmented Pre-trained Language Models via Conceptual Prototypes and Self-balancing Calibration

pre-trained language models; conceptual prototypes; self-balancing calibration

### Welcome to the 17th 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 had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. 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.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

EACL 2023

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.

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.
 
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

We discover alignments of views between interest groups (lobbies) and members of the European Parliament (MEPs) by automatically analyzing their texts. Specifically, we do so by collecting novel datasets of lobbies' position papers and MEPs' speeches, and comparing these texts on the basis of semantic similarity and entailment. In the absence of ground-truth, we perform an indirect validation by comparing the discovered alignments with a dataset, which we curate, of retweet links between MEPs and lobbies, and with the publicly disclosed meetings of MEPs. Our best method performs significantly better than several baselines. Moreover, an aggregate analysis of the discovered alignments, between groups of related lobbies and political groups of MEPs, correspond to the expectations from the ideology of the groups (e.g., groups on the political left are more aligned with humanitarian and environmental organisations). We believe that this work is a step towards enhancing the transparency of the intricate decision-making processes within democratic institutions.

Discovering Lobby-Parliamentarian Alignments through NLP

Retrieval-augmented generation framework addresses the limitations of large language models by enabling real-time knowledge updates for more accurate answers. An efficient way in the training phase of retrieval-augmented models is attention distillation, which uses attention scores as supervision signals instead of manually annotated query-document pairs. Despite its growing popularity, the detailed mechanisms behind the success of attention distillation remain unexplored, particularly the specific patterns it leverages to benefit training. In this paper, we address this gap by conducting a comprehensive investigation of attention distillation workflow and identifying key factors influencing the learning performance of retrieval-augmented language models. We further propose several insightful indicators for optimizing models' training methods and avoiding ineffective training.

Unveiling the Magic: Investigating Attention Distillation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Depression is a widespread mental health disorder affecting millions globally. Clinical interviews are the gold standard for assessing depression, but they heavily rely on scarce professional clinicians, highlighting the need for automated detection systems. However, existing methods only capture part of the relevant elements in clinical interviews, unable to incorporate all depressive cues. Moreover, the scarcity of participant data, due to privacy concerns and collection challenges, intrinsically constrains interview modeling. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose a structural element graph (SEGA), which transforms the clinical interview into an expertise-inspired directed acyclic graph for comprehensive modeling. Additionally, we further empower SEGA by devising novel principle-guided data augmentation with large language models (LLMs) to supplement high-quality synthetic data and enable graph contrastive learning. Extensive evaluations on two real-world clinical datasets, in both English and Chinese, show that SEGA significantly outperforms baseline methods and powerful LLMs like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.

Depression Detection in Clinical Interviews with LLM-Empowered Structural Element Graph

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems help users execute well-defined tasks across a variety of domains (e.g., \textit{flight booking} or \textit{food ordering}), with their Natural Language Understanding (NLU) components being dedicated to the analysis of user utterances, predicting users’ intents (\textit{Intent Detection}, ID) and extracting values for informational slots (\textit{Value Extraction}, VE). In most domains, labelled NLU data is scarce, making sample-efficient learning – enabled with effective transfer paradigms – paramount. In this work, we introduce SQATIN, a new framework for dialog NLU based on (i) instruction tuning and (ii) question-answering-based formulation of ID and VE tasks. According to the evaluation on established NLU benchmarks, SQATIN sets the new state of the art in dialogue NLU, substantially surpassing the performance of current models based on standard fine-tuning objectives in both in-domain training and cross-domain transfer, and it also surpasses off-the-shelf large language models for the same task, both in terms of performance and inference efficiency. Furthermore, SQATIN yields particularly large performance gains in cross-domain transfer, owing to the fact that our QA-based instruction tuning leverages similarities between natural language descriptions of classes (i.e., slots and intents) across domains.

SQATIN: Supervised Instruction Tuning Meets Question Answering for Improved Dialogue NLU

As the number of language models has increased, various benchmarks have been suggested to assess the proficiency of the models in natural language understanding. However, there is a lack of such a benchmark in Vietnamese due to the difficulty in accessing natural language processing datasets or the scarcity of task-specific datasets. **ViGLUE**, the proposed dataset collection, is a **Vi**etnamese **G**eneral **L**anguage **U**nderstanding **E**valuation benchmark developed using three methods: translating an existing benchmark, generating new corpora, and collecting available datasets. ViGLUE contains twelve tasks and encompasses over ten areas and subjects, enabling it to evaluate models comprehensively over a broad spectrum of aspects. Baseline models utilizing multilingual language models are also provided for all tasks in the proposed benchmarks. In addition, the study of the available Vietnamese large language models is conducted to explore the language models' ability in the few-shot learning framework, leading to the exploration of the relationship between specific tasks and the number of shots.

ViGLUE: A Vietnamese General Language Understanding Benchmark and Analysis of Vietnamese Language Models

Language models (LMs) as conversational assistants recently became popular tools that help people accomplish a variety of tasks. These typically result from adapting LMs pretrained on general domain text sequences through further instruction-tuning and possibly preference optimisation methods. The evaluation of such LMs would ideally be performed using human judgement, however, this is not scalable. On the other hand, automatic evaluation featuring auxiliary LMs as judges and/or knowledge-based tasks is scalable but struggles with assessing conversational ability and adherence to instructions. To help accelerate the development of LMs as conversational assistants, we propose a novel automatic evaluation task: HumanRankEval (HRE). It consists of a large-scale, diverse and high-quality set of questions, each with several answers authored and scored by humans. To perform evaluation, HRE ranks these answers based on their log-likelihood under the LM's distribution, and subsequently calculates their correlation with the corresponding human rankings. We support HRE's efficacy by investigating how efficiently it separates pretrained and instruction-tuned LMs of various sizes. We show that HRE correlates well with human judgements and is particularly responsive to model changes following instruction-tuning.

HumanRankEval: Automatic Evaluation of LMs as Conversational Assistants

Opinion summarization aims to generate concise summaries that present popular opinions of a large group of reviews. However, these summaries can be too generic and lack supporting details. To address these issues, we propose a new paradigm for summarizing reviews, rationale-based opinion summarization. Rationale-based opinion summaries output the representative opinions as well as one or more corresponding rationales. To extract good rationales, we define four desirable properties: relatedness, specificity, popularity, and diversity and present a Gibbs-sampling-based method to extract rationales. Overall, we propose RATION, an unsupervised extractive system that has two components: an Opinion Extractor (to extract representative opinions) and Rationales Extractor (to extract corresponding rationales). We conduct automatic and human evaluations to show that rationales extracted by RATION have the proposed properties and its summaries are more useful than conventional summaries. The implementation of our work is available at https://github.com/leehaoyuan/RATION.

Rationale-based Opinion Summarization

In-context learning (ICL) performs tasks by prompting a large language model (LLM) using an instruction and a small set of annotated examples called demonstrations. Recent work has shown that precise details of the inputs used in the ICL prompt significantly impact performance, which has incentivized instruction selection algorithms. The effect of instruction-choice however is severely underexplored, with existing analyses restricted to shallow subsets of models and tasks, limiting the generalizability of their insights. We develop InstructEval, an ICL evaluation suite to conduct a thorough assessment of these techniques. The suite includes 13 open-sourced LLMs of varying scales from four model families, and covers nine tasks across three categories. Using the suite, we evaluate the relative performance of seven popular instruction selection methods over five metrics relevant to ICL. Our experiments reveal that using curated manually-written instructions or simple instructions without any task-specific descriptions often elicits superior ICL performance overall than that of automatic instruction-induction methods, pointing to a lack of generalizability among the latter. We release our evaluation suite (at https://github.com/princeton-nlp/InstructEval) for benchmarking instruction selection approaches and enabling more generalizable methods in this space.

InstructEval: Systematic Evaluation of Instruction Selection Methods

ChatGPT has recently emerged as a powerful NLP tool that can carry out a variety of tasks. However, the range of languages ChatGPT can handle remains largely a mystery. To uncover which languages ChatGPT 'knows', we investigate its language identification (LID) abilities. For this purpose, we compile Babel-670, a benchmark comprising $670$ languages representing $23$ language families spoken in five continents. Languages in Babel-670 run the gamut from the very high-resource to the very low-resource. We then study ChatGPT's (both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) ability to (i) identify language names and language codes (ii) under zero- and few-shot conditions (iii) with and without provision of a label set. When compared to smaller finetuned LID tools, we find that ChatGPT lags behind. For example, it has poor performance on African languages. We conclude that current large language models would benefit from further development before they can sufficiently serve diverse communities.

Fumbling in Babel: An Investigation into ChatGPT’s Language Identification Ability

Addressing the challenge of low-resource information extraction remains an ongoing issue due to the inherent information scarcity within limited training examples. Existing data augmentation methods, considered potential solutions, struggle to strike a balance between weak augmentation (e.g., synonym augmentation) and drastic augmentation (e.g., conditional generation without proper guidance). This paper introduces a novel paradigm that employs targeted augmentation and back validation to produce augmented examples with enhanced diversity, polarity, accuracy, and coherence. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed paradigm. Furthermore, identified limitations are discussed, shedding light on areas for future improvement.

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