Thailand

We introduce Latxa, a family of large language models for Basque ranging from 7 to 70 billion parameters. Latxa is based on Llama 2, which we continue pretraining on a new Basque corpus comprising 4.3M documents and 4.2B tokens. Addressing the scarcity of high-quality benchmarks for Basque, we further introduce 4 multiple choice evaluation datasets: EusProficiency, comprising 5,169 questions from official language proficiency exams; EusReading, comprising 352 reading comprehension questions; EusTrivia, comprising 1,715 trivia questions from 5 knowledge areas; and EusExams, comprising 16,046 questions from public examinations. In our extensive evaluation, Latxa outperforms all previous open models we compare to by a large margin. In addition, it is competitive with GPT-4 Turbo in language proficiency and understanding, despite lagging behind in reading comprehension and knowledge-intensive tasks. Both the Latxa family of models, as well as our new pretraining corpora and evaluation datasets, are publicly available under open licenses. Our suite enables reproducible research on methods to build LLMs for low-resource languages.

ACL 2024

Latxa: An Open Language Model and Evaluation Suite for Basque

open large language models

large language model evaluation

low-resource languages

## 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.

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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.

Texts written in different languages reflect different culturally-dependent beliefs of their writers. Thus, we expect multilingual LMs (MLMs), that are jointly trained on a concatenation of text in multiple languages, to encode different cultural values for each language. Yet, as the `multilinguality' of these LMs is driven by cross-lingual sharing, we also have reason to belief that cultural values bleed over from one language into another. This limits the use of MLMs in practice, as apart from being proficient in generating text in multiple languages, creating language technology that can serve a community also requires the output of LMs to be sensitive to their biases (Naous et al. 2023). Yet, little is known about how cultural values emerge and evolve in MLMs (Hershcovich et al. 2022). We are the first to study how languages can exert influence on the cultural values encoded for different test languages, by studying how such values are revised during fine-tuning. Focusing on the fine-tuning stage allows us to study the interplay between value shifts when exposed to new linguistic experience from different data sources and languages. Lastly, we use a training data attribution method to find patterns in the fine-tuning examples, and the languages that they come from, that tend to instigate value shifts.

The Echoes of Multilinguality: Tracing Cultural Value Shifts during Language Model Fine-tuning

A major consideration in multilingual language modeling is how to best represent languages with diverse vocabularies and scripts.
Although contemporary text encoding methods cover most of the world's writing systems, they exhibit bias towards the high-resource languages of the Global West. As a result, texts of underrepresented languages tend to be segmented into long sequences of linguistically meaningless units. To address the disparities, we introduce a new paradigm that encodes the same information with segments of consistent size across diverse languages. Our encoding convention (MYTE) is based on morphemes, as their inventories are more balanced across languages than characters, which are used in previous methods. We show that MYTE produces shorter encodings for all 99 analyzed languages, with the most notable improvements for non-European languages and non-Latin scripts. This, in turn, improves multilingual LM performance and diminishes the perplexity gap throughout diverse languages.

MYTE: Morphology-Driven Byte Encoding for Better and Fairer Multilingual Language Modeling

Argumentation mining (AM) aims to detect the arguments and their inherent relations from argumentative textual compositions. Generally, AM comprises three key challenging subtasks, including argument component type classification (ACTC), argumentative relation identification (ARI), and argumentative relation type classification (ARTC). Prior methods are afflicted by a sequential feature decoding paradigm, wherein they initially address the features of argumentation components (ACs) for the task of ACTC. Then, these features are amalgamated in pairs to tackle the task of ARI. Finally, the AC pairs and ascertained pertinent relations are employed for ARTC. However, the explicit and comprehensive inter-relationship among the three subtasks is neglected. In this paper, we propose a novel method PITA for \underline{P}rompt\underline{I}ng \underline{T}ask inter\underline{A}ction to model the inter-relationships among the three subtasks within a generative framework. Specifically, we employ a dynamic prompt template to indicate all ACs and AC pairs in the three subtasks. Then, from a multi-relational perspective, we construct an undirected heterogeneous graph to capture the various relationships within and between ACs and AC pairs. We apply the Relational Graph Convolutional Network (RGCN) on the graph and inject the task interaction information into the soft prompts with continuous representations. PITA jointly decodes all ACs and AC pairs using the prompt template with task interaction information, which thus explicitly and comprehensively harmonizes the information propagation across the three subtasks. Extensive experiments show PITA achieves state-of-the-art performances on two AM benchmarks.

PITA: Prompting Task Interaction for Argumentation Mining

Concerns regarding Large Language Models (LLMs) to memorize and disclose private information, particularly Personally Identifiable Information (PII), become prominent within the community. Many efforts have been made to mitigate the privacy risks.
However, the mechanism through which LLMs memorize PII remains poorly understood. To bridge this gap, we introduce a pioneering method for pinpointing PII-sensitive neurons (privacy neurons) within LLMs. Our method employs learnable binary weight masks to localize specific neurons that account for the memorization of PII in LLMs through adversarial training. Our investigations discover that PII is memorized by a small subset of neurons across all layers, which shows the property of PII specificity. Furthermore, we propose to validate the potential in PII risk mitigation by deactivating the localized privacy neurons. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our neuron localization algorithm.

Learnable Privacy Neurons Localization in Language Models

The development of large language models (LLM) has shown progress on reasoning, though studies have largely considered either English or simple reasoning tasks. To address this, we introduce a multilingual structured reasoning and explanation dataset, termed xSTREET, that covers four tasks across six languages. xSTREET exposes a gap in base LLM performance between English and non-English reasoning tasks.

We then propose two methods to remedy this gap, building on the insight that LLMs trained on code are better reasoners. First, at training time, we augment a code dataset with multilingual comments using machine translation while keeping program code as-is. Second, at inference time, we bridge the gap between training and inference by employing a prompt structure that incorporates step-by-step code primitives to derive new facts and find a solution. Our methods show improved multilingual performance on xSTREET, most notably on the scientific commonsense reasoning subtask. Furthermore, the models show no regression on non-reasoning tasks, thus demonstrating our techniques maintain general-purpose abilities.

Eliciting Better Multilingual Structured Reasoning from LLMs through Code

Incorporating every annotator's perspective is crucial for unbiased data modeling. Annotator fatigue and changing opinions over time can distort dataset annotations. To combat this, we propose to learn a more accurate representation of diverse opinions by utilizing multitask learning in conjunction with loss-based label correction. We show that using our novel formulation, we can cleanly separate agreeing and disagreeing annotations. Furthermore, this method provides a controllable way to encourage or discourage disagreement. We demonstrate that this modification can improve prediction performance in a single or multi-annotator setting. Lastly, we show that this method remains robust to additional label noise that is applied to subjective data.

Noise Correction on Subjective Datasets

Safety is critical to the usage of large language models (LLMs). Multiple techniques such as data filtering and supervised fine-tuning have been developed to strengthen LLM safety. However, currently known techniques presume that corpora used for safety alignment of LLMs are solely interpreted by semantics. This assumption, however, does not hold in real-world applications, which leads to severe vulnerabilities in LLMs. For example, users of forums often use ASCII art, a form of text-based art, to convey image information. In this paper, we propose a novel ASCII art-based jailbreak attack and introduce a comprehensive benchmark Vision-in-Text Challenge (ViTC) to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs in recognizing prompts that cannot be solely interpreted by semantics. We show that five SOTA LLMs (GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Gemini, Claude, and Llama2) struggle to recognize prompts provided in the form of ASCII art. Based on this observation, we develop the jailbreak attack ArtPrompt, which leverages the poor performance of LLMs in recognizing ASCII art to bypass safety measures and elicit undesired behaviors from LLMs. ArtPrompt only requires black-box access to the victim LLMs, making it a practical attack. We evaluate ArtPrompt on five SOTA LLMs, and show that ArtPrompt can effectively and efficiently induce undesired behaviors from all five LLMs.

ArtPrompt: ASCII Art-based Jailbreak Attacks against Aligned LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable multilingual capabilities without being pre-trained on specially curated multilingual parallel corpora.
It remains a challenging problem to explain the underlying mechanisms by which LLMs process multilingual texts.
In this paper, we delve into the composition of Transformer architectures in LLMs to pinpoint language-specific regions.
Specially, we propose a novel detection method, language activation probability entropy (LAPE), to identify language-specific neurons within LLMs.
Based on LAPE, we conduct comprehensive experiments on several representative LLMs, such as LLaMA-2, BLOOM, and Mistral. Our findings indicate that LLMs' proficiency in processing a particular language is predominantly due to a small subset of neurons, primarily situated in the models' top and bottom layers.
Furthermore, we showcase the feasibility to ``steer'' the output language of LLMs by selectively activating or deactivating language-specific neurons. 
Our research provides important evidence to the understanding and exploration of the multilingual capabilities of LLMs.

Language-Specific Neurons: The Key to Multilingual Capabilities in Large Language Models

Detecting critical moments, such as emotional outbursts or changes in decisions during conversations, is crucial for understanding shifts in human behavior and their consequences. Our work introduces a novel problem setting focusing on these moments as turning points (TPs), accompanied by a meticulously curated, high-consensus, human-annotated multi-modal dataset. We provide precise timestamps, descriptions, and visual-textual evidence high-lighting changes in emotions, behaviors, perspectives, and decisions at these turning points. We also propose a framework, TPMaven, utilizing state-of-the-art vision-language models to construct a narrative from the videos and large language models to classify and detect turning points in our multi-modal dataset. Evaluation results show that TPMaven achieves an F1-score of 0.88 in classification and 0.61 in detection, with additional explanations aligning with human expectations.

MTP: A Dataset for Multi-Modal Turning Points in Casual Conversations

Accurate evaluation of financial question answering (QA) systems necessitates a comprehensive dataset encompassing diverse question types and contexts. However, current financial QA datasets lack scope diversity and question complexity. This work introduces FinTextQA, a novel dataset for long-form question answering (LFQA) in finance. FinTextQA comprises 1,262 high-quality, source-attributed QA pairs extracted and selected from finance textbooks and government agency websites.Moreover, we developed a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based LFQA system, comprising an embedder, retriever, reranker, and generator. A multi-faceted evaluation approach, including human ranking, automatic metrics, and GPT-4 scoring, was employed to benchmark the performance of different LFQA system configurations under heightened noisy conditions. The results indicate that: (1) Among all compared generators, Baichuan2-7B competes closely with GPT-3.5-turbo in accuracy score; (2) The most effective system configuration on our dataset involved setting the embedder, retriever, reranker, and generator as Ada2, Automated Merged Retrieval, Bge-Reranker-Base, and Baichuan2-7B, respectively; (3) models are less susceptible to noise after the length of contexts reaching a specific threshold. The dataset is publicly available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/GPS-Lab/FinTextQA.

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The Echoes of Multilinguality: Tracing Cultural Value Shifts during Language Model Fine-tuning

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