Thailand

Scientific data visualization plays a crucial role in research by enabling the direct display of complex information and assisting researchers in identifying implicit patterns. Despite its importance, the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for scientific data visualization remains rather unexplored. In this study, we introduce MatPlotAgent, an efficient model-agnostic LLM agent framework designed to automate scientific data visualization tasks. Leveraging the capabilities of both code LLMs and multi-modal LLMs, MatPlotAgent consists of three core modules: query understanding, code generation with iterative debugging, and a visual feedback mechanism for error correction. To address the lack of benchmarks in this field, we present MatPlotBench, a high-quality benchmark consisting of 100 human-verified test cases. Additionally, we introduce a scoring approach that utilizes GPT-4V for automatic evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that MatPlotAgent can improve the performance of various LLMs, including both commercial and open-source models. Furthermore, the proposed evaluation method shows a strong correlation with human-annotated scores.

ACL 2024

MatPlotAgent: Method and Evaluation for LLM-Based Agentic Scientific Data Visualization

scientific data visualization

large language model

agent

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

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.

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.aclweb.org/registration). **

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Please register!

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.

Text ranking is a critical task in information retrieval. Recent advances in pre-trained language models (PLMs), especially large language models (LLMs), present new opportunities for applying them to text ranking. While supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with ranking data has been widely explored to better align PLMs with text ranking goals, previous studies have focused primarily on encoder-only and encoder-decoder PLMs. Research on leveraging decoder-only LLMs for text ranking remains scarce. An exception to this is RankLLaMA, which uses direct SFT to explore LLaMA’s potential for text ranking. In this work, we propose a two-stage progressive paradigm to better adapt LLMs to text ranking. First, we conduct continual pre-training (CPT) of LLMs on a large weakly-supervised corpus. Second, we perform SFT, and propose an improved optimization strategy building upon RankLLaMA. Our experimental results on multiple benchmarks show that our approach outperforms previous methods in both in-domain and out-domain scenarios.

A Two-Stage Adaptation of Large Language Models for Text Ranking

Model interpretability in toxicity detection greatly profits from token-level annotations. However, currently, such annotations are only available in English. We introduce a dataset annotated for offensive language detection sourced from a news forum, notable for its incorporation of the Austrian German dialect, comprising 4,562 user comments. In addition to binary offensiveness classification, we identify spans within each comment constituting vulgar language or representing targets of offensive statements. We evaluate fine-tuned Transformer models as well as large language models in a zero- and few-shot fashion. The results indicate that while fine-tuned models excel in detecting linguistic peculiarities such as vulgar dialect, large language models demonstrate superior performance in detecting offensiveness in AustroTox.

AustroTox: A Dataset for Target-Based Austrian German Offensive Language Detection

The ancestor of Chinese character – the ancient characters from about 1300 BC to 200 BC are not fixed in their writing glyphs. At the same or different points in time, one character can possess multiple glyphs that are different in shapes or radicals. Nearly half of ancient glyphs have not been deciphered yet. This paper proposes an innovative task of ancient Chinese glyph identification, which aims at inferring the Chinese character label for the unknown ancient Chinese glyphs which are not in the training set based on the image and radical information. Specifically, we construct a Chinese glyph knowledge graph (CGKG) associating glyphs in different historical periods according to the radical semantics, and propose a multimodal Chinese glyph identification framework (MCGI) fusing the visual, textual, and the graph data. The experiment is designed on a real Chinese glyph dataset spanning over 1000 years, it demonstrates the effectiveness of our method, and reports the potentials of each modality on this task. It provides a preliminary reference for the automatic ancient Chinese character deciphering at the glyph level.

Ancient Chinese Glyph Identification Powered by Radical Semantics

This study introduces the Semantic Textual Similarity Pseudo-Label Semi-Supervised Clustering (STSPL-SSC) framework. The STSPL-SSC framework is designed to tackle the prevalent issue of scarce labeled data by combining a Semantic Textual Similarity Pseudo-Label Generation process with a Robust Contrastive Learning module. The process begins with employing k-means clustering on embeddings for initial pseudo-Label allocation. Then we use a Semantic Text Similarity-enhanced module to supervise the secondary clustering of pseudo-labels using labeled data to better align with the real clustering centers. Subsequently, an Adaptive Optimal Transport (AOT) approach fine-tunes the pseudo-labels. Finally, a Robust Contrastive Learning module is employed to foster the learning of classification and instance-level distinctions, aiding clusters to better separate. Experiments conducted on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that with just one label per class, clustering performance can be significantly improved, outperforming state-of-the-art models with an increase of 1-6% in both accuracy and normalized mutual information, approaching the results of fully-labeled classification.

STSPL-SSC: Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Short Text Clustering with Semantic text similarity Optimized Pseudo-Labels

As humans, we consistently interact with our peers and receive feedback in the form of natural language. This language feedback allows us to maintain appropriate behavior, and rectify potential errors. The question arises naturally: can we use language feedback to align large language models (LLMs)? In contrast to previous research that aligns LLMs with scalar rewards, we present the first systematic exploration of alignment through the lens of language feedback (i.e., judgment). We start with an in-depth investigation of potential methods that can be adapted for aligning LLMs with judgments, revealing that these methods cannot fully capitalize on judgments. To facilitate more effective utilization of judgments, we propose a novel framework, Contrastive Unlikelihood Training (CUT), that allows for fine-grained inappropriate content detection and correction based on judgments. Our results show that, with merely 1317 off-the-shelf judgment data, CUT can beat the 175B DaVinci003 and surpass the best baseline by 50.84 points on AlpacaEval using LLaMA2-13b. CUT can also align LLMs in an iterative fashion using up-to-date model-specific judgments, improving performance from 81.09 to 91.68 points on AlpacaEval using LLaMA2-chat-13b. Further analysis suggests that judgments hold greater potential in LLM alignment than rewards.

Reasons to Reject? Aligning Language Models with Judgments

Recognizing fallacies is crucial for ensuring the quality and validity of arguments across various domains. However, computational fallacy recognition faces challenges due to the diverse genres, domains, and types of fallacies found in datasets. This leads to a highly multi-class, and even multi-label, setup with substantial class imbalance. In this study, we aim to enhance existing models for fallacy recognition by incorporating additional context and by leveraging large language models to generate synthetic data, thus increasing the representation of the infrequent classes. We experiment with GPT3.5 to generate synthetic examples and we examine the impact of prompt settings for this. Moreover, we explore zero-shot and few-shot scenarios to evaluate the effectiveness of using the generated examples for training smaller models within a unified fallacy recognition framework. Furthermore, we analyze the overlap between the synthetic data and existing fallacy datasets. Finally, we investigate the usefulness of providing supplementary context for detecting fallacy types that need such context, e.g., diversion fallacies. Our evaluation results demonstrate consistent improvements across fallacy types, datasets, and generators. The code and the synthetic datasets are all publicly available.

Large Language Models are Few-Shot Training Example Generators: A Case Study in Fallacy Recognition

Paraphrasing of offensive content is a better alternative to content removal and helps improve civility in a communication environment. Supervised paraphrasers; however, rely heavily on large quantities of labelled data to help preserve meaning and intent. They also often retain a large portion of the offensiveness of the original content, which raises questions on their overall usability. In this paper we aim to assist practitioners in developing usable paraphrasers by exploring In-Context Learning (ICL) with large language models (LLMs), i.e., using a limited number of input-label demonstration pairs to guide the model in generating desired outputs for specific queries. Our study focuses on key factors such as - number and order of demonstrations, exclusion of prompt instruction, and reduction in measured toxicity. We perform principled evaluation on three datasets, including our proposed Context-Aware Polite Paraphrase (CAPP) dataset, comprising of dialogue-style rude utterances, polite paraphrases, and additional dialogue context. We evaluate our approach using four closed source and one open source LLM. Our results reveal that ICL is comparable to supervised methods in generation quality, while being qualitatively better by 25% on human evaluation and attaining lower toxicity by 76%. Also, ICL-based paraphrasers only show a slight reduction in performance even with just 10% training data.

Demonstrations Are All You Need: Advancing Offensive Content Paraphrasing using In-Context Learning

Information Retrieval (IR) systems are designed to deliver relevant content, but traditional systems may not optimize rankings for fairness, neutrality, or the balance of ideas. Consequently, IR can often introduce indexical biases, or biases in the positional order of documents. Although indexical bias can demonstrably affect people's opinion, voting patterns, and other behaviors, these issues remain understudied as the field lacks reliable metrics and procedures for automatically measuring indexical bias. Towards this end, we introduce the PAIR framework, which supports automatic bias audits for ranked documents or entire IR systems. After introducing DUO, the first general-purpose automatic bias metric, we run an extensive evaluation of 8 IR systems on a new corpus of 32k synthetic and 4.7k natural documents, with 4k queries spanning 1.4k controversial issue topics. A human behavioral study validates our approach, showing that our bias metric can help predict when and how indexical bias will shift a reader's opinion.

Measuring and Addressing Indexical Bias in Information Retrieval

Large language model agents have demonstrated remarkable advancements across various complex tasks. Recent works focus on optimizing the agent team or employing self-reflection to iteratively solve complex tasks. Since these agents are all based on the same LLM, only conducting self-evaluation or removing underperforming agents does not substantively enhance the capability of the agents. We argue that a comprehensive evaluation and accumulating experience from evaluation feedback is an effective approach to improving system performance. In this paper, we propose Reusable Experience Accumulation with $\mathbf{360^\circ}$ Assessment ($360^\circ$REA), a hierarchical multi-agent framework inspired by corporate organizational practices. The framework employs a novel $360^\circ$ performance assessment method for multi-perspective performance evaluation with fine-grained assessment. To enhance the capability of agents in addressing complex tasks, we introduce dual-level experience pool for agents to accumulate experience through fine-grained assessment. Extensive experiments on complex task datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of $360^\circ$REA.

$360^\circ$REA: Towards A Reusable Experience Accumulation with $360^\circ$ Assessment for Multi-Agent System

This paper investigates the use of large language models (LLMs) for extracting sample lists of polymer nanocomposites (PNCs) from full-length materials science research papers. The challenge lies in the complex nature of PNC samples, which have numerous attributes scattered throughout the text. 
The complexity of annotating detailed information on PNCs limits the availability of data, making conventional document-level relation extraction techniques impractical due to the challenge in creating comprehensive named entity span annotations.
To address this, we introduce a new benchmark and an evaluation technique for this task and explore different prompting strategies in a zero-shot manner. We also incorporate self-consistency to improve the performance. Our findings show that even advanced LLMs struggle to extract all of the samples from an article. Finally, we analyze the errors encountered in this process, categorizing them into three main challenges, and discuss potential strategies for future research to overcome them.

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A Two-Stage Adaptation of Large Language Models for Text Ranking

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