Thailand

Despite the significant advancements in keyphrase extraction and keyphrase generation methods, the predominant approach for evaluation mainly relies on exact matching with human references. This scheme fails to recognize systems that generate keyphrases semantically equivalent to the references or diverse keyphrases that carry practical utility. To better assess the capability of keyphrase systems, we propose KPEval, a comprehensive evaluation framework consisting of four critical aspects: reference agreement, faithfulness, diversity, and utility. For each aspect, we design semantic-based metrics to reflect the evaluation objectives. Meta-evaluation studies demonstrate that our evaluation strategy correlates better with human preferences compared to a range of previously proposed metrics. Using KPEval, we re-evaluate 23 keyphrase systems and discover that (1) established model comparison results have blind-spots especially when considering reference-free evaluation; (2) large language models are underestimated by prior evaluation works; and (3) there is no single best model that can excel in all the aspects.

ACL 2024

KPEval: Towards Fine-Grained Semantic-Based Keyphrase Evaluation

text generation evaluation

keyphrase extraction

keyphrase generation

## 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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The University of Texas at Austin 
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NAACL 2024

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

poster

### 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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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.

Code generation aims to understand the problem description and generate corresponding code snippets, where existing works generally decompose such complex tasks into intermediate steps by prompting strategies, such as Chain-of-Thought and its variants. While these studies have achieved some success, their effectiveness is highly dependent on the capabilities of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, particularly in terms of API calls, which significantly limits their practical applicability. Consequently, how to enhance the code generation capabilities of small and medium-scale code LLMs without significantly increasing training costs is an appealing challenge. In this paper, we suggest that code comments are the natural logic pivot between natural language and code language and propose using comments to boost the code generation ability of code LLMs. Concretely, we propose MANGO (comMents As Natural loGic pivOts), including a comment contrastive training strategy and a corresponding logical comment decoding strategy. Experiments are performed on HumanEval and MBPP, utilizing StarCoder and WizardCoder as backbone models, and encompassing model parameter sizes between 3B and 7B. The results indicate that MANGO significantly improves the code pass rate based on the strong baselines. Meanwhile, the robustness of the logical comment decoding strategy is notably higher than the Chain-of-thoughts prompting.

Comments as Natural Logic Pivots: Improve Code Generation via Comment Perspective

Generating accurate SQL queries for user questions (text-to-SQL) has been a long-standing challenge since it requires a deep understanding of both the user's question and the corresponding database schema in order to retrieve the desired content accurately. Existing methods rely on the comprehensive capability of large language models (LLMs) to generate the SQL. However, some necessary knowledge is not explicitly included in the database schema and user question or has been learned by LLMs. Thus, the generated SQL of the knowledge-insufficient questions may be inaccurate, negatively influencing the text-to-SQL models' performance and robustness. To address this challenge, we propose the Knowledge-to-SQL framework, which employs tailored Data Expert LLM (DELLM) to provide helpful knowledge for all text-to-SQL models. Specifically, we introduce the detailed implementation of DELLM regarding table reading and the basic fine-tuning process. We further propose a Preference Learning via Database Feedback (PLDBF) strategy, refining the DELLM to generate more helpful knowledge for LLMs. Extensive experiments verify that DELLM can enhance the state-of-the-art approaches for text-to-SQL tasks. The corresponding code of DELLM is released for further research.

Knowledge-to-SQL: Enhancing SQL Generation with Data Expert LLM

Autonomous agents capable of planning, reasoning, and executing actions on the web offer a promising avenue for automating computer tasks. However, the majority of existing benchmarks primarily focus on text-based agents, neglecting many natural tasks that require visual information to effectively solve. Given that most computer interfaces cater to human perception, visual information often augments textual data in ways that text-only models struggle to harness effectively. To bridge this gap, we introduce VisualWebArena, a benchmark designed to assess the performance of multimodal web agents on *realistic visually grounded tasks*. VisualWebArena comprises of a set of diverse and complex web-based tasks that evaluate various capabilities of autonomous multimodal agents. To perform on this benchmark, agents need to accurately process image-text inputs, interpret natural language instructions, and execute actions on websites to accomplish user-defined objectives. We conduct an extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLM-based autonomous agents, including several multimodal models. Through extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis, we identify several limitations of text-only LLM agents, and reveal gaps in the capabilities of state-of-the-art multimodal language agents. VisualWebArena provides a framework for evaluating multimodal autonomous language agents, and offers insights towards building stronger autonomous agents for the web.

VisualWebArena: Evaluating Multimodal Agents on Realistic Visual Web Tasks

The development of multimodal models has significantly advanced multimodal sentiment analysis and emotion recognition. However, in real-world applications, the presence of various missing modality cases often leads to a degradation in the model's performance. In this work, we propose a novel multimodal Transformer framework using prompt learning to address the issue of missing modalities. Our method introduces three types of prompts: generative prompts, missing-signal prompts, and missing-type prompts. These prompts enable the generation of missing modality features and facilitate the learning of intra- and inter-modality information. Through prompt learning, we achieve a substantial reduction in the number of trainable parameters. Our proposed method outperforms other methods significantly across all evaluation metrics. Extensive experiments and ablation studies are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method, showcasing its ability to effectively handle missing modalities. Codes are available at https://github.com/zrguo/MPLMM.

Multimodal Prompt Learning with Missing Modalities for Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Recognition

State-of-the-art sign language translation (SLT) systems facilitate the learning process through gloss annotations, either in an end2end manner or by involving an intermediate step. Unfortunately, gloss labelled sign language data is usually not available at scale and, when available, gloss annotations widely differ from dataset to dataset. We present a novel approach using sentence embeddings of the target sentences at training time that take the role of glosses. The new kind of supervision does not need any manual annotation but it is learned on raw textual data. As our approach easily facilitates multilinguality, we evaluate it on datasets covering German (PHOENIX-2014T) and American (How2Sign) sign languages and experiment with mono- and multilingual sentence embeddings and translation systems. Our approach significantly outperforms other gloss-free approaches, setting the new state-of-the-art for data sets where glosses are not available and when no additional SLT datasets are used for pretraining, diminishing the gap between gloss-free and gloss-dependent systems.

Sign Language Translation with Sentence Embedding Supervision

Individual neurons participate in the representation of multiple high-level concepts. To what extent can different interpretability methods successfully disentangle these roles? To help address this question, we introduce RAVEL (Resolving Attribute-Value Entanglements in Language Models), a dataset that enables tightly controlled, quantitative comparisons between a variety of existing interpretability methods. We use the resulting conceptual framework to define the new method of Multi-task Distributed Alignment Search (MDAS), which allows us to find distributed representations satisfying multiple causal criteria. With Llama2-7B as the target language model, MDAS achieves state-of-the-art results on RAVEL, demonstrating the importance of going beyond neuron-level analyses to identify features distributed across activations. We release our benchmark at https://github.com/explanare/ravel.

RAVEL: Evaluating Interpretability Methods on Disentangling Language Model Representations

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) are expected to support multi-turn queries of interchanging image and text modalities in production. However, the current MLLMs trained with visual-question-answering (VQA) datasets could suffer from degradation, as VQA datasets lack the diversity and complexity of the original text instruction datasets with which the underlying language model was trained. To address this degradation, we first collect a lightweight, 5k-sample VQA preference dataset where answers were annotated by Gemini for five quality metrics in a granular fashion and investigate standard Supervised Fine-tuning, rejection sampling, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and SteerLM algorithms. Our findings indicate that with DPO, we can surpass the instruction-following capabilities of the language model, achieving a 6.73 score on MT-Bench, compared to Vicuna's 6.57 and LLaVA's 5.99. This enhancement in textual instruction-following capability correlates with boosted visual instruction performance (+4.9\% on MM-Vet, +6\% on LLaVA-Bench), with minimal alignment tax on visual knowledge benchmarks compared to the previous RLHF approach. In conclusion, we propose a distillation-based multi-modal alignment model with fine-grained annotations on a small dataset that restores and boosts MLLM's language capability after visual instruction tuning.

Multi-modal Preference Alignment Remedies Degradation of Visual Instruction Tuning on Language Models

Text style transfer (TST) aims to vary the style polarity of text while preserving the semantic content. Although recent advancements have demonstrated remarkable progress in short TST, it remains a relatively straightforward task with limited practical applications. The more comprehensive long TST task presents two challenges: (1) existing methods encounter difficulties in accurately evaluating content attributes in multiple words, leading to content degradation; (2) the conventional vanilla style classifier loss encounters obstacles in maintaining consistent style across multiple generated sentences.

In this paper, we propose a novel method SC2, where a multilayer Joint Style-Content Weighed (JSCW) module and a Style Consistency loss are designed to address the two issues. The JSCW simultaneously assesses the amounts of style and content attributes within a token, aiming to acquire a lossless content representation and thereby enhancing content preservation. The multiple JSCW layers further progressively refine content representations. We design a style consistency loss to ensure the generated multiple sentences consistently reflect the target style polarity. Moreover, we incorporate a denoising non-autoregressive decoder to accelerate the training. We conduct plentiful experiments and the results show significant improvements of SC2 over competitive baselines. Our code: https://github.com/jiezhao6/SC2.

SC2: Towards Enhancing Content Preservation and Style Consistency in Long Text Style Transfer

Large language models (LLMs) are typically aligned to be harmless to humans. Unfortunately, recent work has shown that such models are susceptible to automated jailbreak attacks that induce them to generate harmful content. More recent LLMs often incorporate an additional layer of defense, a Guard Model, which is a second LLM that is designed to check and moderate the output response of the primary LLM. Our key contribution is to show a novel attack strategy, PRP, that is successful against several open-source (e.g., Llama 2) and closed-source (e.g., GPT 3.5) implementations of Guard Models. PRP leverages a two step prefix-based attack that operates by (a) constructing a universal adversarial prefix for the Guard Model, and (b) propagating this prefix to the response. We find that this procedure is effective across multiple threat models, including ones in which the adversary has no access to the Guard Model at all. Our work suggests that further advances are required on defenses and Guard Models before they can be considered effective. Code at https://github.com/AshishHoodaIITD/prp-llm-guard-rail-attack.

PRP: Propagating Universal Perturbations to Attack Large Language Model Guard-Rails

Existing benchmarks for visual question answering lack in visual grounding and complexity, particularly in evaluating spatial reasoning skills. We introduce FlowVQA, a novel benchmark aimed at assessing the capabilities of visual question-answering multimodal language models in reasoning with flowcharts as visual contexts. FlowVQA comprises 2,272 carefully generated and human-verified flowchart images from three distinct content sources, along with 22,413 diverse question-answer pairs, to test a spectrum of reasoning tasks, including information localization, decision-making, and logical progression. We conduct a thorough baseline evaluation on a suite of both open-source and proprietary multimodal language models using various strategies, followed by an analysis of directional bias. The results underscore the benchmark's potential as a vital tool for advancing the field of multimodal modeling, providing a focused and challenging environment for enhancing model performance in visual and logical reasoning tasks.

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Comments as Natural Logic Pivots: Improve Code Generation via Comment Perspective

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