Mexico

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.

NAACL 2024

Natural Language Embedded Programs for Hybrid Language Symbolic Reasoning

programmatic reasoning

neural-symbolic reasoning

large language models

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

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

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.

Is Reference Necessary in the Evaluation of NLG Systems? When and Where?

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown propensity to generate hallucinated outputs, i.e., texts that are factually incorrect or unsupported. Existing methods for alleviating hallucinations typically require costly human annotations to identify and correct hallucinations in LLM outputs. Moreover, most of these methods focus on a specific type of hallucination, e.g., entity or token errors, which limits their effectiveness in addressing various types of hallucinations exhibited in LLM outputs. To our best knowledge, in this paper we propose the first active learning framework to alleviate LLM hallucinations, reducing costly human annotations of hallucination needed. By measuring fine-grained hallucinations from errors in semantic frame, discourse and content verifiability in text summarization, we propose HAllucination Diversity-Aware Sampling (HADAS) to select diverse hallucinations for annotations in active learning for LLM finetuning. Extensive experiments on three datasets and different backbone models demonstrate advantages of our method in effectively and efficiently mitigating LLM hallucinations.

Hallucination Diversity-Aware Active Learning for Text Summarization

Knowledge base question generation (KBQG) aims to generate natural language questions from a set of triplet facts extracted from KB. Existing methods have significantly boosted the performance of KBQG via pre-trained language models (PLMs) thanks to the richly endowed semantic knowledge. With the advance of pre-training techniques, large language models (LLMs) (e.g., GPT-3.5) undoubtedly possess much more semantic knowledge. Therefore, how to effectively organize and exploit the abundant knowledge for KBQG becomes the focus of our study. In this work, we propose SGSH --- a simple and effective framework to Stimulate GPT-3.5 with Skeleton Heuristics to enhance KBQG. The framework incorporates "skeleton heuristics'', which provides more fine-grained guidance associated with each input to stimulate LLMs to generate optimal questions, encompassing essential elements like the question phrase and the auxiliary verb. More specifically, we devise an automatic data construction strategy leveraging ChatGPT to construct a skeleton training dataset, based on which we employ a soft prompting approach to train a BART model dedicated to generating the skeleton associated with each input. Subsequently, skeleton heuristics are encoded into the prompt to incentivize GPT-3.5 to generate desired questions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SGSH derives the new state-of-the-art performance on the KBQG tasks.

SGSH: Stimulate Large Language Models with Skeleton Heuristics for Knowledge Base Question Generation

Value alignment is crucial for the responsible development of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, how to define values in this context remains largely unexplored. Existing work mainly specifies values as risk criteria formulated in the AI community, e.g., fairness and privacy protection, suffering from poor clarity, adaptability and transparency. Leveraging basic values established in humanity and social science that are compatible with values across cultures, this paper introduces a novel value space spanned by multiple basic value dimensions and proposes BaseAlign, a corresponding value alignment paradigm. Applying the representative Schwartz's Theory of Basic Values as an instantiation, we construct FULCRA, a dataset consisting of 20k $($LLM output, value vector$)$ pairs. LLMs' outputs are mapped into the $K$-dim value space beyond simple binary labels, by identifying their underlying priorities for these value dimensions. Extensive analysis and experiments on FULCRA: (1) reveal the essential relation between basic values and LLMs' behaviors, (2) demonstrate that our paradigm with basic values not only covers existing risks but also anticipates the unidentified ones, and (3) manifest BaseAlign's superiority in alignment performance with less data, paving the way for addressing the above three challenges.

Value FULCRA: Mapping Large Language Models to the Multidimensional Spectrum of Basic Human Value

The opaque nature of neural networks, often described as black boxes, poses significant challenges in understanding their learning mechanisms, which limit our ability to fully optimize and trust these models.
Inspired by how humans learn, this paper proposes a novel neural network training strategy that employs multitask learning with progressive difficulty subtasks, which we believe can potentially shed light on the internal learning mechanisms of neural networks.
We implemented this strategy across a range of NLP tasks, data sets, and neural network architectures and observed notable improvements in model performance.
This suggests that neural networks may be able to extract common features and internalize shared representations across similar subtasks that differ in their difficulty.
Analyzing this strategy could lead us to more interpretable and robust neural networks, enhancing both their performance and our understanding of their nature.

Multitasking with Progressive Difficulty Subtasks: Enhancing Performance in Natural Language Processing Tasks

To achieve good retrieval performance, Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) models must provide high-quality representations for queries and passages. For this purpose, we propose M2DPR, a multi-task multi-view representation learning framework which consists of a deep encoder and multiple shallow decoders. In the pre-training phase, the encoder encodes the input text's information into multiple dense vectors which will be passed to the decoders to accomplish different pre-training tasks so that different perspectives of the input text's information can be captured. In the fine-tuning and inference phases, we discard the decoders and use the weighted sum of the above mentioned vectors as the input text's representation. The results of experiments show the effectiveness of our method.

M2DPR: A Multi-task Multi-view Representation Learning Framework for Dense Passage Retrieval

Code clone detection is challenging, as source code can be written in different languages, do-mains, and styles. In this paper, we argue that source code is inherently a graph, not a sequence, and that graph-based methods are more suitable for code clone detection than sequence-based methods. We compare the per-formance of two state-of-the-art models: Code-BERT (Feng et al., 2020), a sequence-based model, and CodeGraph (Yu et al., 2023), a graph-based model, on two benchmark data-sets: BCB (Svajlenko et al., 2014) and PoolC(PoolC, no date). We show that CodeGraphoutperforms CodeBERT on both data-sets, es-pecially on cross-lingual code clones. To thebest of our knowledge, this is the first work todemonstrate the cross-lingual code clone detec-tion showing superiority on graph-based methods over sequence-based methods

Source Code is a Graph, Not a Sequence: A Cross-Lingual Perspective on Code Clone Detection

Shears is an end-to-end model adaptation solution that demonstrates how integrating cost-effective sparsity and a proposed Neural Low-rank adapter Search (NLS) algorithm can further improve the efficiency of Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) approaches. Results demonstrate the benefits of Shears compared to other methods, reaching high sparsity levels while improving or with little drop in the model’s accuracy.

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Next from NAACL 2024

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

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Meta-Reasoning: Semantics-Symbol Deconstruction for Large Language Models