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African languages are not well-represented in Natural Language Processing (NLP). The main reason is a lack of resources for training models. Low-resource languages, such as Amharic and Ge’ez, cannot benefit from modern NLP methods because of the lack of high-quality datasets. This paper presents AGE, an open-source tripartite alignment of Amharic, Ge’ez, and English parallel dataset. Additionally, we introduced a novel, 1,000 Ge’ez-centered sentences sourced from areas such as news and novels. Furthermore, we developed a model from a multilingual pre-trained language model, which brings 12.29 and 30.66 for English-Ge’ez and Ge’ez to English, respectively, and 9.39 and 12.29 for Amharic-Ge’ez and Ge’ez-Amharic respectively.

EMNLP 2024

AGE: Amharic, Ge’ez and English Parallel Dataset

machine translation

### 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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ACL 2024

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.

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPROgxjLAC96AJL7Ugy0tEnYm7dkrbHt/view?usp=sharing)

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.emnlp.org/registration/).** The EMNLP 2024 event page on Underline will be open to public one week prior to the event.

EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

This study presents a comprehensive, long-term project to explore the effectiveness of various prompting techniques in detecting dialogical mental manipulation. We implement Chain-of-Thought prompting with Zero-Shot and Few-Shot settings on a binary mental manipulation detection task, building upon existing work conducted with Zero-Shot and Few-Shot prompting. Our primary objective is to decipher why certain prompting techniques display superior performance so as to craft a novel framework tailored for the detection of mental manipulation. Preliminary findings suggest that advanced prompting techniques may not be suitable for more complex models if they are not trained through example-based learning.

Enhanced Detection of Conversational Mental Manipulation Through Advanced Prompting Techniques

Jack and the BeansTALK: Towards Question Answering in Plant Biology

Jack and the BeansTALK : Towards Question Answering in Plant Biology

Aspect-based sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is an advanced NLP task that identifies sentiments related to specific aspects of a product or service, offering more detailed consumer insights than general sentiment analysis. The proposed research introduces a hybrid model, Instruct-DeBERTa, which combines InstructABSA for aspect term extraction (ATE) and DeBERTa-V3-baseabsa-V1 for aspect sentiment classification (ASC). Using datasets from SemEval Restaurant 2014,2015,2016 and SemEval Laptop 2014, the model demonstrated improved performance across domains. Further enhancements included category classification using cosine similarity, linear layers with ReLU activation, regularization methods, and optimized attention heads for the hospitality domain. These improvements address existing model limitations, providing a comprehensive solution for analyzing consumer feedback, valuable for enhancing customer satisfaction and product development.

Instruct-DeBERTa: A Hybrid Approach for Enhanced Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Category Extraction

Ranking a set of items based on their relevance to a given query is a core problem in search and recommendation. Transformer-based ranking models are the state-of-the-art approaches for such tasks, but they score each query-item independently, ignoring the joint context of other relevant items. This leads to sub-optimal ranking accuracy and high computational costs. We propose Cross-encoders with Joint Efficient Modeling (CROSS-JEM), a novel ranking approach that enables transformer-based models to jointly score multiple items for a query, maximizing parameter utilization. CROSS-JEM leverages (a) redundancies and token overlaps to jointly score multiple items (short-text phrases in search and recommendations), and (b) a novel training objective that models ranking probabilities. CROSS-JEM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on publicly available ranking benchmarks with over 4x-lower ranking latency compared to the baselines.

CROSS-JEM: Accurate and Efficient Cross-encoders for Short-text Ranking Tasks

Latin America (LatAm) is mainly represented by developing or under-developed countries, and given that their investment in research and development may be lacking, their presence in high-impact research communities such as computational linguistics (CL) could be marginal. This work aims to measure the presence of LatAm researchers in the CL community and improve the visibility of those underrepresented investigators. We extracted the metadata of all ACL Anthology publications with at least one LatAm researcher affiliated with an institution located in an LatAm country at the time of the publication. We found that only a small percentage (2.4 \%) of CL publications have affiliations with institutions based in LatAm and that Alexander Gelbukh (Mexico) and Luciana Benotti (Argentina) are the most productive researchers. Our analysis also reveals that some countries in the region have not contributed to any CL publications. Despite these challenges, our results highlight the potential for growth and improvement. By shedding light on the underrepresentation of LatAm researchers in CL, this study aims to promote greater visibility and inclusivity within the community, ultimately fostering a more diverse and vibrant research landscape.

The faces of Latin American research on computational linguistics

Using medical data for Deep Learning models can be highly beneficial, but protecting sensitive and personal patient information in the clinical field is critical. One of the most common ways to use this data while protecting patient privacy is by generating synthetic text with Large Language Models (LLMs) using differential privacy (DP). Although DP techniques, such as the Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD), are often assumed to guarantee privacy, they require specific conditions to be met. This study shows how memorization in LLMs can occur when these privacy guarantees are compromised, potentially leading to the leakage of personal and sensitive information in generated clinical re017 ports. If these gaps are addressed, DP could offer more reliable safeguards for clinical data, improving privacy without sacrificing utility

Analyzing the Leakage of Personal Information in Synthetic Clinical Spanish Texts

Modern language models predict the next token in the sequence by considering the past text through a powerful function. However, language models have no explicit mechanism that allows them to spend computation time for planning long-distance future text, leading to a suboptimal token prediction. In this paper, we propose a planner that predicts a latent plan for many sentences into the future. By sampling multiple plans at once, we condition the language model on an accurate approximation of the distribution of text continuations, which leads to better next token prediction accuracy. In effect, this allows trading computation time for prediction accuracy.

Improving Language Modeling by Increasing Test-time Planning Compute

In this study, we propose several prompt-based methods for predicting ratings of reviews using large language models, specifically GPT-3.5 Turbo and Dorna. We utilize BaSalam dataset, sourced from an Iranian online marketplace. Our approach includes zero-shot and few-shot prompting, as well as Retrieval-Augmented Generation. We evaluate the effectiveness of our methods by comparing them to baseline models, demonstrating superior performance in terms of mean absolute error (MAE) and mean squared error (MSE). After conducting several experiment, the results shows the superiority of in-context learning method with examples retrieved.

Farsi Review Rating Prediction Using Prompt Engineering and RAG

Theory of Mind (ToM) is considered essential in understanding the intentions and beliefs of others. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have sparked claims that these models exhibit ToM capabilities. However, follow-up studies reveal that these capabilities vanish with slight task variations. This paper introduces a novel dataset comprising 68 tasks across 10 complexity classes, probing ToM in four open-source LLMs. Our results show that ToM abilities in these models are still limited. We highlight challenges and suggest future research directions.

Probing the Robustness of Theory of Mind in Large Language Models

Hate speech studies often focus on binary categories, neglecting its nuanced spectrum. This research introduces a dataset of 8,258 Amharic tweets annotated for category classification, hate target identification, and ratings of intensities. Most tweets are found to be less offensive, highlighting the need for early interventions. The dataset reveals significant ethnic and political hatred overlaps, reflecting Ethiopia's complex sociopolitical dynamics. The study shows that hate speech requires continuous analysis rather than simplistic classifications. The Afro-XLMR-large model achieved an F1 score of 75.30% for category classification, demonstrating effective performance in this area.

Next from EMNLP 2024

Enhanced Detection of Conversational Mental Manipulation Through Advanced Prompting Techniques

Similar lecture

AGE: Amharic, Ge’ez and English Parallel Dataset