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Machine translation systems for high resource languages perform exceptionally well and produce high quality translations. Unfortunately, the vast majority of languages are not considered high resource and lack the quantity of parallel sentences needed to train such systems. These under-represented languages are not without resources, however, and bilingual dictionaries and grammar books are available as linguistic reference material. With current large language models (LLMs) supporting near book-length contexts, we can begin to use the available material to ensure advancements are shared among all of the world&#39;s languages. In this paper, we demonstrate incorporating grammar books in the prompt of GPT-4 to improve machine translation and evaluate the performance on 16 topologically diverse low-resource languages, using a combination of reference material to show that the machine translation performance of LLMs can be improved using this method.

EMNLP 2024

Back to School: Translation Using Grammar Books

video captioning; entity-aware

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Machine translation systems for high resource languages perform exceptionally well and produce high quality translations. Unfortunately, the vast majority of languages are not considered high resource and lack the quantity of parallel sentences needed to train such systems. These under-represented languages are not without resources, however, and bilingual dictionaries and grammar books are available as linguistic reference material. With current large language models (LLMs) supporting near book-length contexts, we can begin to use the available material to ensure advancements are shared among all of the world's languages. In this paper, we demonstrate incorporating grammar books in the prompt of GPT-4 to improve machine translation and evaluate the performance on 16 topologically diverse low-resource languages, using a combination of reference material to show that the machine translation performance of LLMs can be improved using this method.

poster

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Prior research in computational argumentation has mainly focused on scoring the quality of arguments, with less attention on explicating logical errors. In this work, we introduce four sets of explainable templates for common informal logical fallacies designed to explicate a fallacy's implicit logic. Using our templates, we conduct an annotation study on top of 400 fallacious arguments taken from LOGIC dataset and achieve a high agreement score (Krippendorf's $\alpha$ of 0.54) and reasonable coverage 83\%. Finally, we conduct an experiment for detecting the structure of fallacies and discover that state-of-the-art language models struggle with detecting fallacy templates (0.47 accuracy). To facilitate research on fallacies, we make our dataset and guidelines publicly available.

Flee the Flaw: Annotating the Underlying Logic of Fallacious Arguments Through Templates and Slot-filling

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential in advancing natural language processing (NLP) tasks, but their sequential token generation limits inference speed. 
Multi-Draft Speculative Decoding (MDSD) offers a promising solution by using a smaller draft model to generate multiple token sequences, which the target LLM verifies in parallel.
However, current heuristic approaches, such as Recursive Rejection Sampling (RRS), suffer from low acceptance rates in subsequent drafts, limiting the advantages of using multiple drafts. 
Meanwhile, Optimal Transport with Membership Cost (OTM) can theoretically improve acceptance rates, but its computational cost is too high for real-time use.
We present SpecHub, a novel, efficient sampling-verification method for MDSD that improves acceptance rates with only linear computational overhead. By simplifying the OTM problem into a compact Linear Programming model, SpecHub significantly reduces computational complexity. It further accelerates sampling by leveraging a sparse joint distribution, focusing computation on high-probability token sequences.
%It integrates seamlessly into existing MDSD frameworks.
In extensive experiments, Spechub consistently generates 0.05-0.27 and 0.02-0.16 more tokens per step than RRS and RRS without replacement. 
We attach our code at https://github.com/MasterGodzilla/Speculative_decoding_OT.

SpecHub: Provable Acceleration to Multi-Draft Speculative Decoding

Machine Translation (MT) evaluation metrics assess translation quality automatically. Recently, researchers have employed MT metrics for various new use cases, such as data filtering and translation re-ranking. However, most MT metrics return assessments as scalar scores that are difficult to interpret, posing a challenge to making informed design choices. Moreover, MT metrics' capabilities have historically been evaluated using correlation with human judgment, which, despite its efficacy, falls short of providing intuitive insights into metric performance, especially in terms of new metric use cases. To address these issues, we introduce an interpretable evaluation framework for MT metrics. Within this framework, we evaluate metrics in two scenarios that serve as proxies for the data filtering and translation re-ranking use cases. Furthermore, by measuring the performance of MT metrics using Precision, Recall, and F-score, we offer clearer insights into their capabilities than correlation with human judgments. Finally, we raise concerns regarding the reliability of manually curated data following the Direct Assessments+Scalar Quality Metrics (DA+SQM) guidelines, reporting a notably low agreement with Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) annotations.

How Good is my MT Metric? A Framework for the Interpretation of Metric Assessments

Research in the computational assessment of Argumentation Quality has gained popularity over the last ten years. Various quality dimensions have been explored through the creation of domain-specific datasets and assessment methods. We survey the related literature (211 publications and 32 datasets), while addressing potential overlaps and blurry boundaries to related domains. This paper provides a representative overview of the state of the art in Computational Argument Quality Assessment with a focus on quality dimensions and annotated datasets. The aim of the survey is to identify research gaps and to aid future discussions and work in the domain.

Let’s discuss! Quality Dimensions and Annotated Datasets for Computational Argument Quality

Certain abilities of Transformer-based language models consistently emerge in their later layers. Previous research has leveraged this phenomenon to improve factual accuracy through self-contrast, penalizing early-exit predictions based on the premise that later-layer updates are more factually reliable than earlier-layer associations. We observe a similar pattern for fine-grained emotion classification in text, demonstrating that self-contrast can enhance encoder-based text classifiers. Additionally, we reinterpret self-contrast as a form of linear extrapolation, which motivates a refined approach that dynamically adjusts the contrastive strength based on the selected intermediate layer. Experiments across multiple models and emotion classification datasets show that our method outperforms standard classification techniques in fine-grained emotion classification tasks.

Contrastive Classification via Linear Layer Extrapolation

Scientific literature is typically dense, requiring significant background knowledge and deep comprehension for effective engagement. We introduce SciDQA, a new dataset for reading comprehension that challenges language models to deeply understand scientific articles, consisting of 2,937 QA pairs. Unlike other scientific QA datasets, SciDQA sources questions from peer reviews by domain experts and answers by paper authors, ensuring a thorough examination of the literature. We enhance the dataset's quality through a process that carefully decontextualizes the content, tracks the source document across different versions, and incorporates a bibliography for multi-document question-answering. Questions in SciDQA necessitate reasoning across figures, tables, equations, appendices, and supplementary materials, and require multi-document reasoning. We evaluate several open-source and proprietary LLMs across various configurations to explore their capabilities in generating relevant and factual responses, as opposed to simple review memorization. Our comprehensive evaluation, based on metrics for surface-level and semantic similarity, highlights notable performance discrepancies. SciDQA represents a rigorously curated, naturally derived scientific QA dataset, designed to facilitate research on complex reasoning within the domain of question answering for scientific texts.

SciDQA: A Deep Reading Comprehension Dataset over Scientific Papers

Memory-efficient finetuning of large language models (LLMs) has recently attracted huge attention with the increasing size of LLMs, primarily due to the constraints posed by GPU memory limitations and the effectiveness of these methods compared to full finetuning. Despite the advancements, current strategies for memory-efficient finetuning, such as QLoRA, exhibit inconsistent performance across diverse bit-width quantizations and multifaceted tasks. This inconsistency largely stems from the detrimental impact of the quantization process on preserved knowledge, leading to catastrophic forgetting and undermining the utilization of pretrained models for finetuning purposes. In this work, we introduce a novel quantization framework named ApiQ, designed to restore the lost information from quantization by concurrently initializing the LoRA components and quantizing the weights of LLMs. This approach ensures the maintenance of the original LLM's activation precision while mitigating the error propagation from shallower into deeper layers. Through comprehensive evaluations conducted on a spectrum of language tasks with various LLMs, ApiQ demonstrably minimizes activation error during quantization. Consequently, it consistently achieves superior finetuning results across various bit-widths. Notably, one can even finetune a 2-bit Llama-2-70b with ApiQ on a single NVIDIA A100-80GB GPU without any memory-saving techniques, and achieve promising results.

ApiQ: Finetuning of 2-Bit Quantized Large Language Model

With the rise of digital communication memes have become a significant medium for cultural and political expression that is often used to mislead audience. Identification of such misleading and persuasive multimodal content become more important among various stakeholders, including social media platforms, policymakers, and the broader society as they often cause harm to the individuals, organizations and/or society. While there has been effort to develop AI based automatic system for resource rich languages (e.g., English), it is relatively little to none for medium to low resource languages. In this study, we focused on developing an Arabic memes dataset with manual annotations of propagandistic content. We annotated $\sim6K$ Arabic memes collected from various social media platforms, which is a first resource for Arabic multimodal research. We provide a comprehensive analysis aiming to develop computational tools for their detection. We made the dataset publicly available for the community.

ArMeme: Propagandistic Content in Arabic Memes

Multilingual neural machine translation models support fine-tuning hundreds of languages simultaneously. However, fine-tuning on full parameters solely is inefficient potentially leading to negative interactions among languages. In this work, we demonstrate that the fine-tuning for a language occurs in its intrinsic language-specific subspace with a tiny fraction of entire parameters. Thus, we propose language-specific LoRA to isolate intrinsic language-specific subspaces. Furthermore, we propose architecture learning techniques and introduce a gradual pruning schedule during fine-tuning to exhaustively explore the optimal setting and the minimal intrinsic subspaces for each language, resulting in a lightweight yet effective fine-tuning procedure. The experimental results on a 12-language subset and a 30-language subset of FLORES-101 show that our methods not only outperform full-parameter fine-tuning up to 2.25 spBLEU scores but also reduce trainable parameters to $0.4$% for high and medium-resource languages and $1.6$% for low-resource ones.

Exploring Intrinsic Language-specific Subspaces in Fine-tuning Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

Recent advancements of large language models (LLMs)
have led to claims of AI surpassing humans
in natural language processing NLP tasks such as textual understanding and reasoning.
%
This work investigates these assertions by introducing
CAIMIRA, a novel framework rooted in item response theory IRT
that enables quantitative assessment and comparison of problem-solving abilities in
question-answering QA agents.
%
Through analysis of over 300,000 responses from \textasciitilde~70 AI systems
and 155 humans across thousands of quiz questions, CAIMIRA uncovers distinct
proficiency patterns in knowledge domains and reasoning skills. 
%
Humans outperform AI systems in knowledge-grounded abductive and conceptual reasoning,
while state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-4 Turbo and Llama-3-70B demonstrate superior performance on
targeted information retrieval and fact-based reasoning, particularly when information gaps
are well-defined and addressable through pattern matching or data retrieval.
%
These findings identify key areas for future QA tasks and model development,
highlighting the critical need for questions that not only challenge
higher-order reasoning and scientific thinking, but also demand nuanced linguistic
and cross-contextual application.

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Flee the Flaw: Annotating the Underlying Logic of Fallacious Arguments Through Templates and Slot-filling

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Flee the Flaw: Annotating the Underlying Logic of Fallacious Arguments Through Templates and Slot-filling

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