Thailand

In France, linguistic borrowings in the relatively conservative French language are an important site of cultural debate, and rap in particular is a hotspot for borrowings. In this work, we use computational methods to understand the factors that affect the prominence and prevalence of a borrowing. To do so, we manually annotate a lexicon of over 700 borrowings occurring in this context (including key aspects for each borrowing such as origin and semantic class). We analyze the prevalence of these borrowings in a newly collected corpus of over 8000 French rap song lyrics and find that there are increases in the proportion of linguistic borrowings, interjections, and Niger-Congo borrowings while terms related to the arts are decreasing in prevalence. Further research will include examining external factors (like song popularity) on the usage of words as well as machine learning methods to predict future lexical borrowing popularity trends.

ACL 2024

A Computational Analysis and Exploration of Linguistic Borrowings in French Rap Lyrics

wordlist and lyric collection

rap lyrics

france

linguistic borrowing

## 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.

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Llama, or Mistral assist programmers as copilots and knowledge sources to make the coding process faster and more efficient. This paper aims to improve the copilot performance by implementing different self-alignment processes and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, as well as their combination. To test the effectiveness of all approaches, we create a dataset and apply a model-based evaluation, using LLM as a judge. It is designed to check the model's abilities to understand the source code semantics, the dependency between files, and the overall meta-information about the repository. We also compare our approach with other existing solutions, e.g. ChatGPT-3.5, and evaluate on the existing benchmarks. Code and dataset are available online (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ma_llm-382D).

On Improving Repository-Level Code QA for Large Language Models

As diverse linguistic communities and users adopt Large Language Models (LLMs), assessing their safety across languages becomes critical. Despite ongoing efforts to align these models with safe and ethical guidelines, they can still be induced into unsafe behavior with jailbreaking, a technique in which models are prompted to act outside their operational guidelines. What research has been conducted on these vulnerabilities was predominantly on English, limiting the understanding of LLM behavior in other languages. We address this gap by investigating Many-Shot Jailbreaking (MSJ) in Italian, underscoring the importance of understanding LLM behavior in different languages. We base our analysis on a newly created Italian dataset to identify unique safety vulnerabilities in 4 families of open-source LLMs. We find that the models exhibit unsafe behaviors even with minimal exposure to harmful prompts, and--more alarmingly--this tendency rapidly escalates with more demonstrations.

Compromesso! Italian Many-Shot Jailbreaks undermine the safety of Large Language Models

Transformer model has been a de-facto standard in natural language processing. Its adaptations in other fields such as computer vision showed promising results that this architecture is a powerful neural network in representation learning regardless of the data type. This recent success has led to research in multimodal Large Language Model (LLM), which enabled us to new types of tasks and applications with multiple data types. However, multimodal LLM in the biomedical domain is primarily limited to images, text, and/or sequence data. Here I propose to work on multimodal LLM architecture for biomedical graphs such as protein structure and chemical molecules. The research hypothesis is based on the fact that clinicians and researchers in computational biology and clinical research take advantage of various information for their decision-making process. Therefore, an AI model being able to handle multiple data types should boost its ability to use diverse knowledge for improved performances in clinical applications.

Foundation Model for Biomedical Graphs: Integrating Knowledge Graphs and Protein Structures to Large Language Models

Question answering involves creating answers to questions. With the growth of large language models, the ability of question-answering systems has dramatically improved. However, there is a lack of Vietnamese abstractive question-answering datasets, especially in the medical domain. Therefore, this research aims to mitigate this gap by introducing ViMedAQA. This **Vi**etnamese **Med**ical **A**bstractive **Q**uestion-**A**nswering dataset covers four topics in the Vietnamese medical domain, including body parts, disease, drugs and medicine. Additionally, the empirical results on the proposed dataset examine the capability of the large language models in the Vietnamese medical domain, including reasoning, memorizing and awareness of essential information.

ViMedAQA: A Vietnamese Medical Abstractive Question-Answering Dataset and Findings of Large Language Model

Geoparsing, the task of assigning coordinates to locations extracted from free text, is invaluable in enabling us to place locations in time and space. In the historical domain, many geoparsing corpora are from large news collections. We examine the Svoboda Diaries, a small historical corpus written primarily in English, with many location names in transliterated Arabic. We develop a pipeline employing named entity recognition for geotagging, and a map-based generate-and-rank approach incorporating name augmentation and clustering of location context words for geocoding. Our system outperforms existing map-based geoparsers in terms of correct location identification and lowest mean distance error. As location names may vary from those in knowledge bases, we find that augmented candidate generation is instrumental in the system's performance. Among our candidate generation methods, the generation of translated names contributed the most to increased location matches in the knowledge base. Our main contribution is proposing an integrated pipeline for geoparsing of historical corpora using augmented candidate location name generation and clustering methods -- an approach that can be generalized to other texts with foreign or non-standard spellings.

Basreh or Basra? Geoparsing Historical Locations in the Svoboda Diaries

Knowledge distillation allows smaller neural networks to emulate the performance of larger, teacher models with reduced computational demands. Traditional methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) often necessitate extensive fine-tuning, which limits their accessibility. To address this, we introduce Trace-of-Thought Prompting, a novel framework designed to distill critical reasoning capabilities from high-resource teacher models (over 8 billion parameters) to low-resource student models (up to 8 billion parameters). This approach leverages problem decomposition to enhance interpretability and facilitate human-in-the-loop interventions. Empirical evaluations on the GSM8K and MATH datasets show that student models achieve accuracy gains of up to 113\% on GSM8K and 20\% on MATH, with significant improvements particularly notable in smaller models like Llama 2 and Zephyr. Our results suggest a promising pathway for open-source, low-resource models to eventually serve as both students and teachers, potentially reducing our reliance on high-resource, proprietary models. Our code, featuring data analytics and testing scripts, is provided here: https://github.com/traceofthought/trace-of-thought-prompting/tree/main.

Trace-of-Thought Prompting: Investigating Prompt-Based Knowledge Distillation Through Question Decomposition

Neural networks (NN) perform well in diverse tasks, but sometimes produce nonsensical results to humans. Most NN models "solely" learn from (input, output) pairs, occasionally conflicting with human knowledge. Many studies indicate injecting human knowledge by reducing output constraints during training can improve model performance and reduce constraint violations. While there have been several attempts to compare different existing algorithms under the same programming framework, nonetheless, there has been no previous work that categorizes learning algorithms with output constraints in a unified manner. Our contributions are as follows: (1) We categorize the previous studies based on three axes: type of constraint loss used (e.g. probabilistic soft logic, REINFORCE), exploration strategy of constraint-violating examples, and integration mechanism of learning signals from main task and constraint. (2) We propose new algorithms to integrate the information of main task and constraint injection, inspired by continual-learning algorithms. (3) Furthermore, we propose the $H\beta$-score as a metric for considering the main task metric and constraint violation simultaneously. To provide a thorough analysis, we examine all the algorithms on three NLP tasks: natural language inference (NLI), synthetic transduction examples (STE), and semantic role labeling (SRL). We explore and reveal the key factors of various algorithms associated with achieving high $H\beta$-scores.

An Analysis under a Unified Formulation of Learning Algorithms with Output Constraints

The biomedical field relies on cost and time intensive systematic reviews of publications to enable practitioners to keep up to date with research. Impressive recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have made the task of automating at least part of the systematic review process feasible, but progress is slow. This paper identifies some factors that may have been holding research back, and proposes a new, enhanced dataset and prompting-based method for automatic synthesis generation, the most challenging step for automation. We test different models and types of information from and about biomedical studies for their usefulness in obtaining high-quality results. We find that, surprisingly, inclusion of paper abstracts generally worsens results. Instead, study summary information, and system instructions informed by domain knowledge are key to producing high-quality syntheses.

Beyond Abstracts: A New Dataset, Prompt Design Strategy and Method for Biomedical Synthesis Generation

Decoder-based large language models (LLMs) have shown high performance on many tasks in natural language processing. This is also true for sentence embedding learning, where a decoder-based model, PromptEOL, has achieved the best performance on semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks. However, PromptEOL requires a manually annotated natural language inference (NLI) dataset for fine-tuning. We aim to improve sentence embeddings without using large manually annotated datasets by automatically generating an NLI dataset with an LLM and using it for fine-tuning of PromptEOL. To achieve this, we explore methods of data generation suitable for sentence embedding learning in this study. Specifically, we will focus on automatic dataset generation through few-shot learning and explore the appropriate methods to leverage few-shot examples. Experimental results on the STS tasks demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing models in settings without large manually annotated datasets.

Improving Sentence Embeddings with Automatic Generation of Training Data Using Few-shot Examples

Research on understanding and generating diagrams has used vision models such as CLIP. However, it remains unclear whether these models accurately identify diagram attributes, such as node colors and shapes, along with edge colors and connection patterns. This study evaluates how well vision models recognize the diagram attributes by probing the model and retrieving diagrams using text queries. Experimental results showed that while vision models can recognize differences in node colors, shapes, and edge colors, they struggle to identify differences in edge connection patterns that play a pivotal role in the semantics of diagrams. Moreover, we revealed inadequate alignment between diagram attributes and language representations in the embedding space.

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