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Neural metrics for machine translation (MT) evaluation have become increasingly prominent due to their superior correlation with human judgments compared to traditional lexical metrics. Researchers have therefore utilized neural metrics through quality-informed decoding strategies, achieving better results than likelihood-based methods. With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), preference-based alignment techniques have gained attention for their potential to enhance translation quality by optimizing model weights directly on preferences induced by quality estimators. This study focuses on Contrastive Preference Optimization (CPO) and conducts extensive experiments to evaluate the impact of preference-based alignment on translation quality. Our findings indicate that while CPO consistently outperforms Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on high-quality data with regard to the alignment metric, it may lead to instability across downstream evaluation metrics, particularly between neural and lexical ones. Additionally, we demonstrate that relying solely on the base model for generating candidate translations achieves performance comparable to using multiple external systems, while ensuring better consistency across downstream metrics.

EMNLP 2024

Is Preference Alignment Always the Best Option to Enhance LLM-Based Translation? An Empirical Analysis

metric alignment

preference optimization

machine translation

## 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.
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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.

Despite the recent popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Machine Translation (MT), their performance in low-resource languages (LRLs) still lags significantly behind Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models. In this work, we explore what it would take to adapt LLMs for the low-resource setting. Particularly, we re-examine the role of two factors: a) the importance and application of parallel data, and b) diversity in Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Recently, parallel data has seen reduced use in adapting LLMs for MT, while data diversity has been embraced to promote transfer across languages and tasks. However, for low-resource LLM-MT, we show that the opposite is true for both considerations: a) parallel data is critical during both pre-training and SFT; b) diversity tends to cause interference instead of transfer. Our experiments with three LLMs across two low-resourced language groups---Indigenous American and North-East Indian---reveal consistent trends, underscoring the generalizability of our findings. We believe these insights will be valuable for scaling to massively multilingual LLM-MT models that can effectively serve LRLs.

Quality or Quantity? On Data Scale and Diversity in Adapting Large Language Models for Low-Resource Translation

High-quality Machine Translation (MT) evaluation relies heavily on human judgments. Comprehensive error classification methods, such as Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), are expensive as they are time-consuming and can only be done by experts, whose availability may be limited especially for low-resource languages. On the other hand, just assigning overall scores, like Direct Assessment (DA), is simpler and faster and can be done by translators of any level, but are less reliable. In this paper, we introduce Error Span Annotation (ESA), a human evaluation protocol which combines the continuous rating of DA with the high-level error severity span marking of MQM. We validate ESA by comparing it to MQM and DA for 12 MT systems and one human reference translation (English to German) from WMT23. The results show that ESA offers faster and cheaper annotations than MQM at the same quality level, without the requirement of expensive MQM experts.

Error Span Annotation: A Balanced Approach for Human Evaluation of Machine Translation

While NLP research into hate speech detection has grown exponentially in the last three decades, there has been minimal uptake or engagement from policy makers and non-profit organisations. We argue the absence of ethical frameworks have contributed to this rift between current practice and best practice. By adopting appropriate ethical frameworks, NLP researchers may enable the social impact potential of hate speech research. This position paper is informed by reviewing forty-eight hate speech detection systems associated with thirty-seven publications from different venues.

What is the social benefit of hate speech detection research? A Systematic Review

NLP analysis of news articles can play an important role in understanding the dynamics and causes of violent conflict. Despite the availability of datasets categorizing various conflict events, the existing labels often do not cover all of the fine-grained violent conflict event types relevant to areas like the Horn of Africa. In this paper, we propose a new task for identifying violent conflict events using online resources under which we introduce a new benchmark dataset Conflict Events in the Horn of Africa region (CEHA). The dataset consists of 500 English news articles regarding conflict events in the Horn of Africa region with fine-grained event-type definitions that emphasize the cause of the conflict. This dataset categorizes the the key categories of conflict risk according to specific areas required by stakeholders in the Humanitarian-Peace-Development Nexus, such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (UN DPPA). Additionally, we conduct extensive experiments on two tasks supported by this dataset: Event-relevance Classification and Event-type Classification. Our baseline models demonstrate the challenging nature of these tasks and the usefulness of our dataset for model evaluations in low-resource settings.

CEHA: A Dataset of Conflict Events in the Horn of Africa

We propose a method to predict toxicity and other textual attributes through the use of natural language processing (NLP) techniques for two recent events: the Ukraine-Russia and Hamas-Israel conflicts. This article provides a basis for exploration in future conflicts with hopes to mitigate risk through the analysis of social media before and after a conflict begins. Our work compiles several datasets from Twitter and Reddit for both conflicts in a before and after separation with an aim of predicting a future state of social media for avoidance. More specifically, we show that: (1) there is a noticeable difference in social media discussion leading up to and following a conflict and (2) social media discourse on platforms like Twitter and Reddit is useful in identifying future conflicts before they arise. Our results show that through the use of advanced NLP techniques (both supervised and unsupervised) toxicity and other attributes about language before and after a conflict is predictable with a low error of nearly 1.2 percent for both conflicts.

An NLP Case Study on Predicting the Before and After of the Ukraine–Russia and Hamas–Israel Conflicts

Agriculture, vital for global sustenance, necessitates innovative solutions due to a lack of organized domain experts, particularly in developing countries where many farmers are impoverished and cannot afford expert consulting. Initiatives like Farmers Helpline play a crucial role in such countries, yet challenges such as high operational costs persist. 
Automating query resolution can alleviate the burden on traditional call centers, providing farmers with immediate and contextually relevant information.
The integration of Agriculture and Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers a transformative opportunity to empower farmers and bridge information gaps.
Language models like transformers, the rising stars of AI, possess remarkable language understanding capabilities, making them ideal for addressing information gaps in agriculture.
This work explores and demonstrates the transformative potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in automating query resolution for agricultural farmers, leveraging their expertise in deciphering natural language and understanding context. Using a subset of a vast dataset of real-world farmer queries collected in India, our study focuses on approximately 4 million queries from the state of Tamil Nadu, spanning various sectors, seasonal crops, and query types.

AgriLLM:Harnessing Transformers for Framer Queries

Conversation forecasting tasks a model with predicting the outcome of an unfolding conversation. For instance, it can be applied in social media moderation to predict harmful user behaviors before they occur, allowing for preventative interventions. While large language models (LLMs) have recently been proposed as an effective tool for conversation forecasting, it's unclear what biases they may have, especially against forecasting the (potentially harmful) outcomes we request them to predict during moderation. This paper explores to what extent model uncertainty can be used as a tool to mitigate potential biases. Specifically, we ask three primary research questions: 1) how does LLM forecasting accuracy change when we ask models to represent their uncertainty; 2) how does LLM bias change when we ask models to represent their uncertainty; 3) how can we use uncertainty representations to reduce or completely mitigate biases without many training data points. We address these questions for 5 open-source language models tested on 2 datasets designed to evaluate conversation forecasting for social media moderation.

Eliciting Uncertainty in Chain-of-Thought to Mitigate Bias against Forecasting Harmful User Behaviors

Due to the recent rise in digital misinformation, there has been great interest shown in using LLMs for fact-checking and claim verification. In this paper, we answer the question: Do LLMs know multilingual facts and can they use this knowledge for effective fact-checking? To this end, we create a benchmark by filtering multilingual claims from the X-fact dataset and evaluating the multilingual fact-checking capabilities of five LLMs across five diverse languages: Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, and Tamil on our benchmark. We employ three different prompting techniques: Zero-Shot, English Chain-of-Thought, and Cross-Lingual Prompting, using both greedy and self-consistency decoding. We extensively analyze our results and find that GPT-4o achieves the highest accuracy, but zero-shot prompting with self-consistency was the most effective overall. We also show that techniques like Chain-of-Thought and Cross-Lingual Prompting, which are designed to improve reasoning abilities, do not necessarily improve the fact-checking abilities of LLMs. Interestingly, we find a strong negative correlation between model accuracy and the amount of internet content for a given language. This suggests that LLMs are better at fact-checking from knowledge in low-resource languages. We hope that this study will encourage more work on multilingual fact-checking using LLMs.

Multilingual Fact-Checking using LLMs

Islamophobic language on online platforms fosters intolerance, making detection and elimination crucial for promoting harmony. Traditional hate speech detection models rely on NLP techniques like tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, and encoder-decoder models. However, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), with their ability to utilize relationships between data points, offer more effective detection and greater explainability. In this work, we represent speeches as nodes and connect them with edges based on their context and similarity to develop the graph. This study introduces a novel paradigm using GNNs to identify and explain hate speech towards Islam. Our model leverages GNNs to understand the context and patterns of hate speech by connecting texts via pretrained NLP-generated word embeddings, achieving state-of-the-art performance and enhancing detection accuracy while providing valuable explanations. This highlights the potential of GNNs in combating online hate speech and fostering a safer, more inclusive online environment.

Explainable Identification of Hate Speech towards Islam using Graph Neural Networks

Epidemiological datasets are essential for public health analysis and decision-making, yet they remain scarce and often difficult to compile due to inconsistent data formats, language barriers, and evolving political boundaries. Traditional methods of creating such datasets involve extensive manual effort and are prone to errors in accurate location extraction. To address these challenges, we propose utilizing large language models (LLMs) to automate the extraction and geotagging of epidemiological data from textual documents. Our approach significantly reduces the manual effort required, limiting human intervention to validating a subset of records against text snippets and verifying the geotagging reasoning, as opposed to reviewing multiple entire documents manually to extract, clean, and geotag. Additionally, the LLMs identify information often overlooked by human annotators, further enhancing the dataset's completeness. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs can be effectively used to semi-automate the extraction and geotagging of epidemiological data, offering several key advantages: (1) comprehensive information extraction with minimal risk of missing critical details; (2) minimal human intervention; (3) higher-resolution data with more precise geotagging; and (4) significantly reduced resource demands compared to traditional methods.

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