United States

Accurately attributing answer text to its source document is crucial for developing a reliable question-answering system. However, attribution for long documents remains largely unexplored. Post-hoc attribution systems are designed to map answer text back to the source document, yet the granularity of this mapping has not been addressed. Furthermore, a critical question arises: What exactly should be attributed? This involves identifying the specific information units within an answer that require grounding. In this paper, we propose and investigate a novel approach to the factual decomposition of generated answers for attribution, employing template-based in-context learning. To accomplish this, we utilize the question and integrate negative sampling during few-shot in-context learning for decomposition. This approach enhances the semantic understanding of both abstractive and extractive answers. We examine the impact of answer decomposition by providing a thorough examination of various attribution approaches, ranging from retrieval-based techniques to LLM-based attributors.

EMNLP 2024

Enhancing Post-Hoc Attributions in Long Document Comprehension via Coarse Grained Answer Decomposition

generative caption enrichment

hallucination

gender bias

fairness

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

poster

## 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.

Available training data for named entity recognition (NER) often contains a significant percentage of incorrect labels for entity types and entity boundaries. Such label noise poses challenges for supervised learning and may significantly deteriorate model quality. To address this, prior work proposed various noise-robust learning approaches capable of learning from data with partially incorrect labels. These approaches are typically evaluated using simulated noise where the labels in a clean dataset are automatically corrupted. However, as we show in this paper, this leads to unrealistic noise that is far easier to handle than real noise caused by human error or semi-automatic annotation. To enable the study of the impact of various types of real noise, we introduce NoiseBench, an NER benchmark consisting of clean training data corrupted with 6 types of real noise, including expert errors, crowdsourcing errors, automatic annotation errors and LLM errors. We present an analysis that shows that real noise is significantly more challenging than simulated noise, and show that current state-of-the-art models for noise-robust learning fall far short of their achievable upper bound. We release NoiseBench for both English and German to the research community.

NoiseBench: Benchmarking the Impact of Real Label Noise on Named Entity Recognition

Full-parameter fine-tuning (FPFT) has become the go-to choice for adapting language models (LMs) to downstream tasks due to its excellent performance. As LMs grow in size, fine-tuning the full parameters of LMs requires a prohibitively large amount of GPU memory. Existing approaches utilize zeroth-order optimizer to conserve GPU memory, which potentially compromises the performance of LMs as non-zero order optimizers tend to converge more readily on most downstream tasks. We propose a novel, memory-efficient, optimizer-independent, end-to-end hierarchical fine-tuning strategy, HiFT, which only updates a subset of parameters at each training step. HiFT significantly reduces the amount of gradients and optimizer state parameters residing in GPU memory at the same time, thereby reducing GPU memory usage. Our results demonstrate that: (1) HiFT achieves comparable performance with parameter-efficient fine-tuning and standard FPFT. (2) Results on six models show that HiFT reduces the number of trainable parameters by about 89.18% on average compared to FPFT. (3) HiFT supports FPFT of 7B models for 24G GPU memory devices under mixed precision without using any memory saving techniques. (4) HiFT supports various optimizers including AdamW, AdaGrad, SGD, etc. The source code link is https://github.com/misonsky/HiFT.

HiFT: A Hierarchical Full Parameter Fine-Tuning Strategy

Offensive speech is highly prevalent on online platforms. Being trained on online data, Large Language Models (LLMs) display undesirable behaviors, such as generating harmful text or failing to recognize it. Despite these shortcomings, the models are becoming a part of our everyday lives by being used as tools for information search, content creation, writing assistance, and many more. Furthermore, the research explores using LLMs in applications with immense social risk, such as late-life companions and online content moderators. Despite the potential harms from LLMs in such applications, whether LLMs can reliably identify offensive speech and how they behave when they fail are open questions. This work addresses these questions by probing sixteen widely used LLMs and showing that most fail to identify (non-)offensive online language. Our experiments reveal undesirable behavior patterns in the context of offensive speech detection, such as erroneous response generation, over-reliance on profanity, and failure to recognize stereotypes. Our work highlights the need for extensive documentation of model reliability, particularly in terms of the ability to detect offensive language.

Please note that I’m just an AI: Analysis of Behavior Patterns of LLMs in (Non-)offensive Speech Identification

Text clustering is a fundamental task in natural language processing with numerous applications. However, traditional clustering methods often struggle with domain-specific fine-tuning and the presence of outliers. To address these challenges, we introduce LLMEdgeRefine, an iterative clustering method enhanced by large language models (LLMs), focusing on edge points refinement. LLMEdgeRefine enhances current clustering methods by creating super-points to mitigate outliers and iteratively refining clusters using LLMs for improved semantic coherence. Our method demonstrates superior performance across multiple datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art techniques, and offering robustness, adaptability, and cost-efficiency for diverse text clustering applications.

LLMEdgeRefine: Enhancing Text Clustering with LLM-Based Boundary Point Refinement

Active Learning (AL) addresses the high costs of collecting human annotations by strategically annotating the most informative samples. However, for subjective NLP tasks, incorporating a wide range of perspectives in the annotation process is crucial to capture the variability in human judgments. We introduce Annotator-Centric Active Learning (ACAL), which incorporates an annotator selection strategy following data sampling. Our objective is two-fold: (1) to efficiently approximate the full diversity of human judgments, and (2) to assess model performance using annotator-centric metrics, which value minority and majority perspectives equally. We experiment with multiple annotator selection strategies across seven subjective NLP tasks, employing both traditional and novel, human-centered evaluation metrics. Our findings indicate that ACAL improves data efficiency and excels in annotator-centric performance evaluations. However, its success depends on the availability of a sufficiently large and diverse pool of annotators to sample from.

Annotator-Centric Active Learning for Subjective NLP Tasks

While large language models (LLMs) excel at understanding and generating plain text, they are not tailored to handle hierarchical text structures or directly predict task-specific properties such as text rating. In fact, selectively and repeatedly grasping the hierarchical structure of large-scale text is pivotal for deciphering its essence. To this end, we propose a novel framework for hierarchical text rating utilizing LLMs, which incorporates Recurrent Alignment with Hard Attention (RAHA). Particularly, hard attention mechanism prompts a frozen LLM to selectively focus on pertinent leaf texts associated with the root text and generate symbolic representations of their relationships. Inspired by the gradual stabilization of the Markov Chain, recurrent alignment strategy involves feeding predicted ratings iteratively back into the prompts of another trainable LLM, aligning it to progressively approximate the desired target. Experimental results demonstrate that RAHA outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on three hierarchical text rating datasets. Theoretical and empirical analysis confirms RAHA’s ability to gradually converge towards the underlying target through multiple inferences. Additional experiments on plain text rating datasets verify the effectiveness of this Markov-like alignment. Our data and code can be available in https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/Markov-LLM.

Recurrent Alignment with Hard Attention for Hierarchical Text Rating

Extracting and aggregating information from clinical trial registries could provide invaluable insights into the drug development landscape and advance the treatment of neurologic diseases. However, achieving this at scale is hampered by the volume of available data and the lack of an annotated corpus to assist in the development of automation tools. Thus, we introduce NeuroTrialNER, a new and fully open corpus for named entity recognition (NER). It comprises 1093 clinical trial summaries sourced from ClinicalTrials.gov, annotated for neurological diseases, therapeutic interventions, and control treatments. 
We describe our data collection process and the corpus in detail. We demonstrate its utility for NER using large language models and achieve a close-to-human performance. By bridging the gap in data resources, we hope to foster the development of text processing tools that help researchers navigate clinical trials data more easily.

NeuroTrialNER: An Annotated Corpus for Neurological Diseases and Therapies in Clinical Trial Registries

Despite the recent advancements in information retrieval (IR), zero-shot IR remains a significant challenge, especially when dealing with new domains, languages, and newly-released use cases that lack historical query traffic from existing users. For such cases, it is common to use query augmentations followed by fine-tuning pre-trained models on the document data paired with synthetic queries. In this work, we propose a novel Universal Document Linking (UDL) algorithm, which links similar documents to enhance synthetic query generation across multiple datasets with different characteristics. UDL leverages entropy for the choice of similarity models and named entity recognition (NER) for the link decision of documents using similarity scores. Our empirical studies demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of the UDL across diverse datasets and IR models, surpassing state-of-the-art methods in zero-shot cases. The developed code for reproducibility is included in https://github.com/eoduself/UDL

Link, Synthesize, Retrieve: Universal Document Linking for Zero-Shot Information Retrieval

Recent studies have addressed intricate phonological phenomena in French, relying on either extensive linguistic knowledge or a significant amount of sentence-level pronunciation data. However, creating such resources is expensive and non-trivial. To this end, we propose a novel two-step approach that encompasses two pronunciation tasks: grapheme-to-phoneme and post-lexical processing. We then investigate the efficacy of the proposed approach with a notably limited amount of sentence-level pronunciation data. Our findings demonstrate that the proposed two-step approach effectively mitigates the lack of extensive labeled data, and serves as a feasible solution for addressing French phonological phenomena even under resource-constrained environments.

A Two-Step Approach for Data-Efficient French Pronunciation Learning

Prior works on detoxification are scattered in the sense that they do not cover all aspects of detoxification needed in a real-world scenario. Notably, prior works restrict the task of developing detoxification models to only a seen subset of platforms, leaving the question of how the models would perform on unseen platforms unexplored. Additionally, these works do not address non-detoxifiability, a phenomenon whereby the toxic text cannot be detoxified without altering the meaning. We propose DetoxLLM, the first comprehensive end-to-end detoxification framework, which attempts to alleviate the aforementioned limitations. We first introduce a cross-platform pseudo-parallel corpus applying multi-step data processing and generation strategies leveraging ChatGPT. We then train a suite of detoxification models with our cross-platform corpus. We show that our detoxification models outperform the SoTA model trained with human-annotated parallel corpus. We further introduce explanation to promote transparency and trustworthiness. DetoxLLM additionally offers a unique paraphrase detector especially dedicated for the detoxification task to tackle the non-detoxifiable cases. Through experimental analysis, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our cross-platform corpus and the robustness of DetoxLLM against adversarial toxicity.

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Next from EMNLP 2024

NoiseBench: Benchmarking the Impact of Real Label Noise on Named Entity Recognition

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Post-Hoc Answer Attribution for Grounded and Trustworthy Long Document Comprehension: Task, Insights, and Challenges