Thailand

Text watermarking algorithms for large language models (LLMs) can effectively identify machine-generated texts by embedding and detecting hidden features in the text. Although the current text watermarking algorithms perform well in most high-entropy scenarios, its performance in low-entropy scenarios still needs to be improved. In this work, we opine that the influence of token entropy should be fully considered in the watermark detection process, $i.e.$, the weight of each token during watermark detection should be customized according to its entropy, rather than setting the weights of all tokens to the same value as in previous methods. Specifically, we propose \textbf{E}ntropy-based Text \textbf{W}atermarking \textbf{D}etection (\textbf{EWD}) that gives higher-entropy tokens higher influence weights during watermark detection, so as to better reflect the degree of watermarking. Furthermore, the proposed detection process is training-free and fully automated. From the experiments, we demonstrate that our EWD can achieve better detection performance in low-entropy scenarios, and our method is also general and can be applied to texts with different entropy distributions. Our code and data is available\footnote{\url{https://github.com/luyijian3/EWD}}. Additionally, our algorithm could be accessed through MarkLLM \cite{pan2024markllm}\footnote{\url{https://github.com/THU-BPM/MarkLLM}}.

ACL 2024

An Entropy-based Text Watermarking Detection Method

text watermarking

## 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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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.

Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction (ASQP) aims to predict all quads (aspect term, aspect category, opinion term, sentiment polarity) for a given review, which is the most representative and challenging task in aspect-based sentiment analysis. A key challenge in the ASQP task is the scarcity of labeled data, which limits the performance of existing methods. To tackle this issue, we propose a self-training framework with a pseudo-label scorer, wherein a scorer assesses the match between reviews and their pseudo-labels, aiming to filter out mismatches and thereby enhance the effectiveness of self-training. We highlight two critical aspects to ensure the scorer's effectiveness and reliability: the quality of the training dataset and its model architecture. To this end, we create a human-annotated comparison dataset and train a generative model on it using ranking-based objectives. Extensive experiments on public ASQP datasets reveal that using our scorer can greatly and consistently improve the effectiveness of self-training. Moreover, we explore the possibility of replacing humans with large language models for comparison dataset annotation, and experiments demonstrate its feasibility. We will release our code and data via GitHub.

Self-Training with Pseudo-Label Scorer for Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction

Recent studies have shown that Text-to-Image (T2I) model generations can reflect social stereotypes present in the real world. However, existing approaches for evaluating stereotypes have a noticeable lack of coverage of global identity groups and their associated stereotypes. To address this gap, we introduce the ViSAGe (Visual Stereotypes Around the Globe) dataset to enable the evaluation of known nationality-based stereotypes in T2I models, across 135 nationalities. We enrich an existing textual stereotype resource by distinguishing between stereotypical associations that are more likely to have visual depictions, such as 'sombrero', from those that are less visually concrete, such as 'attractive'. We demonstrate ViSAGe's utility through a multi-faceted evaluation of T2I generations. First, we show that stereotypical attributes in ViSAGe are thrice as likely to be present in generated images of corresponding identities as compared to other attributes, and that the offensiveness of these depictions is especially higher for identities from Africa, South America, and South East Asia. Second, we assess the 'stereotypical pull' of visual depictions of identity groups, which reveals how the 'default' representations of all identity groups in ViSAGe have a pull towards stereotypical depictions, and that this pull is even more prominent for identity groups from the Global South. CONTENT WARNING: Some examples contain offensive stereotypes.

ViSAGe: A Global-Scale Analysis of Visual Stereotypes in Text-to-Image Generation

Closed-source agents suffer from several issues such as a lack of affordability, transparency, and reproducibility, particularly on complex interactive tasks. This motivates the development of open-source alternatives. We introduce Lumos, one of the first frameworks for training open-source LLM-based agents. Lumos features a learnable, unified and modular architecture with a planning module that learns high-level subgoal generation, and a grounding module trained to translate these into the actions using various tools in the execution module. The design allows for modular upgrades and wider applicability to diverse interactive tasks. To foster generalizable agent learning, we collect large-scale, unified, and high-quality training annotations derived from diverse ground-truth reasoning rationales across various complex interactive tasks. On 9 datasets, Lumos exhibits several key advantages: (1) Lumos excels multiple larger open-source agents on the held-out datasets (unused for training) for each task type. Lumos even surpasses GPT agents on QA and web tasks; (2) Lumos outperforms open-source agents produced by chain-of-thoughts and unmodularized integrated training; and (3) Lumos effectively generalizes to unseen tasks, outperforming 33B-scale agents and domain-specific agents. Code and data will be released.

Agent Lumos: Unified and Modular Training for Open-Source Language Agents

Before being deployed for user-facing applications, developers align Large Language Models (LLMs) to user preferences through a variety of procedures, such as Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Current evaluations of these procedures focus on benchmarks of instruction following, reasoning, and truthfulness. However, human preferences are not universal, and aligning to specific preference sets may have unintended effects. We explore how alignment impacts performance along three axes of global representation: English dialects, multilingualism, and opinions from and about countries worldwide. Our results show that current alignment procedures create disparities between English dialects and global opinions. We find alignment improves capabilities in several languages. We conclude by discussing design decisions that led to these unintended impacts and recommendations for more equitable preference tuning. We make our code and data publicly available on Github.

Unintended Impacts of LLM Alignment on Global Representation

The field of sociolinguistics has studied factors affecting language use for the last century. Labov (1964) and Bernstein (1960) showed that socioeconomic class strongly influences our accents, syntax and lexicon. However, despite growing concerns surrounding fairness and bias in Natural Language Processing (NLP), there is a dearth of studies delving into the effects it may have on NLP systems. We show empirically that NLP systems’ performance is affected by speakers’ SES, potentially disadvantaging less-privileged socioeconomic groups. We annotate a corpus of 95K utterances from movies with social class, ethnicity and geographical language variety and measure the performance of NLP systems on three tasks: language modelling, automatic speech recognition, and grammar error correction. We find significant performance disparities that can be attributed to socioeconomic status as well as ethnicity and geographical differences. With NLP technologies becoming ever more ubiquitous and quotidian, they must accommodate all language varieties to avoid disadvantaging already marginalised groups. We argue for the inclusion of socioeconomic class in future language technologies.

Classist Tools: Social Class Correlates with Performance in NLP

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have proven effective in a wide range of tasks that require complex reasoning and linguistic comprehension. However, due to a lack of high-quality multimodal resources in languages other than English, the success of MLLMs remains relatively limited to English-based settings. This poses significant challenges in developing comparable models for other languages, even those with large speaker populations, such as Arabic. To alleviate this challenge, we introduce a comprehensive family of Arabic MLLMs, dubbed *Peacock*, with strong vision and language capabilities. Through comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analysis, we demonstrate the solid performance of our models on various visual reasoning tasks and further show their emerging dialectal potential. Additionally, we introduce *Henna*, a new benchmark specifically designed for assessing MLLMs on aspects related to Arabic culture, setting the first stone for culturally-aware Arabic MLLMs. The GitHub repository for the *Peacock* project is available at [https://github.com/UBC-NLP/peacock](https://github.com/UBC-NLP/peacock).

Peacock: A Family of Arabic Multimodal Large Language Models and Benchmarks

Low-resource African languages pose unique challenges for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including natural language generation (NLG). In this paper, we develop Cheetah, a massively multilingual NLG language model for African languages. Cheetah supports 517 African languages and language varieties, allowing us to address the scarcity of NLG resources and provide a solution to foster linguistic diversity. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Cheetah through comprehensive evaluations across six generation downstream tasks. In five of the six tasks, Cheetah significantly outperforms other models, showcasing its remarkable performance for generating coherent and contextually appropriate text in a wide range of African languages. We additionally conduct a detailed human evaluation to delve deeper into the linguistic capabilities of Cheetah. The findings of this study contribute to advancing NLP research in low-resource settings, enabling greater accessibility and inclusion for African languages in a rapidly expanding digital landscape. We will publicly release our models for research.

Cheetah: Natural Language Generation for 517 African Languages

Previous graph-based approaches in Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis(ABSA) have demonstrated impressive performance by utilizing graph neural networks and attention mechanisms to learn structures of static dependency trees and dynamic latent trees. However, incorporating both semantic and syntactic information simultaneously within complex global structures can introduce irrelevant contexts and syntactic dependencies during the process of graph structure learning, potentially resulting in inaccurate predictions. In order to address the issues above, we propose S$^2$GSL, incorporating \underline{S}egment to \underline{S}yntactic enhanced \underline{G}raph \underline{S}tructure \underline{L}earning for ABSA. Specifically, S$^2$GSL is featured with a segment-aware semantic graph learning and a syntax-based latent graph learning enabling the removal of irrelevant contexts and dependencies, respectively. We further propose a self-adaptive aggregation network that facilitates the fusion of two graph learning branches, thereby achieving complementarity across diverse structures. Experimental results on four benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

S$^2$GSL: Incorporating Segment to Syntactic Enhanced Graph Structure Learning for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Language style is often used by writers to convey their intentions, identities, and mastery of language. In this paper, we show that current large language models struggle to capture some language styles without fine-tuning. To address this challenge, we investigate whether LLMs can be meta-trained based on representative lexicons to recognize new styles they have not been fine-tuned on. Experiments on 13 established style classification tasks, as well as 63 novel tasks generated using LLMs, demonstrate that meta-training with style lexicons consistently improves zero-shot transfer across styles. We release the code and data at https://github.com/octaviaguo/Style-LLM.

Meta-Tuning LLMs to Leverage Lexical Knowledge for Generalizable Language Style Understanding

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in tasks such as summarization, arithmetic reasoning, and question answering. However, they encounter significant challenges in the domain of moral reasoning and ethical decision-making, especially in complex scenarios with multiple stakeholders. This paper introduces the Skin-in-the-Game (SKIG) framework, aimed at enhancing moral reasoning in LLMs by exploring decisions' consequences from multiple stakeholder perspectives. The core components of the framework consist of simulating accountability for decisions, conducting empathy exercises on different stakeholders, and evaluating the risks associated with the impacts of potential actions. We study SKIG's performance across various moral reasoning benchmarks with proprietary and open-source LLMs, and investigate its crucial components through extensive ablation analyses. Our framework exhibits marked improvements in performance compared to baselines across different language models and benchmarks.

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Self-Training with Pseudo-Label Scorer for Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction

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