United States

Recent research efforts have explored the potential of leveraging natural language inference (NLI) techniques to enhance relation extraction (RE). In this vein, we introduce MetaEntail-RE, a novel adaptation method that harnesses NLI principles to enhance RE performance. Our approach follows past works by verbalizing relation classes into class-indicative hypotheses, aligning a traditionally multi-class classification task to one of textual entailment. We introduce three key enhancements: (1) Meta-class analysis which, instead of labeling non-entailed premise-hypothesis pairs with the less informative &#39;&#39;neutral&#39;&#39; entailment label, provides additional context by analyzing overarching meta-relationships between classes; (2) Feasible hypothesis filtering, which removes unlikely hypotheses from consideration based on domain knowledge derived from data; and (3) Group-based prediction selection, which further improves performance by selecting highly confident predictions. MetaEntail-RE is conceptually simple and empirically powerful, yielding significant improvements over conventional relation extraction techniques and other NLI formulations. We observe surprisingly large F1 gains of 17.6 points on BioRED and 13.4 points on ReTACRED compared to conventional methods, underscoring the versatility of MetaEntail-RE across both biomedical and general domains.

NAACL 2025

Entangled Relations: Leveraging NLI and Meta-analysis to Enhance Biomedical Relation Extraction

knowledge graph completion

relation extraction

information extraction

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Recent research efforts have explored the potential of leveraging natural language inference (NLI) techniques to enhance relation extraction (RE). In this vein, we introduce MetaEntail-RE, a novel adaptation method that harnesses NLI principles to enhance RE performance. Our approach follows past works by verbalizing relation classes into class-indicative hypotheses, aligning a traditionally multi-class classification task to one of textual entailment. We introduce three key enhancements: (1) Meta-class analysis which, instead of labeling non-entailed premise-hypothesis pairs with the less informative ''neutral'' entailment label, provides additional context by analyzing overarching meta-relationships between classes; (2) Feasible hypothesis filtering, which removes unlikely hypotheses from consideration based on domain knowledge derived from data; and (3) Group-based prediction selection, which further improves performance by selecting highly confident predictions. MetaEntail-RE is conceptually simple and empirically powerful, yielding significant improvements over conventional relation extraction techniques and other NLI formulations. We observe surprisingly large F1 gains of 17.6 points on BioRED and 13.4 points on ReTACRED compared to conventional methods, underscoring the versatility of MetaEntail-RE across both biomedical and general domains.

poster

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Large language models (LLMs) have been used to generate query expansions augmenting original queries for improving information search. Recent studies also explore providing LLMs with initial retrieval results to generate query expansions more grounded to document corpus. However, these methods mostly focus on enhancing textual similarities between search queries and target documents, overlooking document relations. For queries like ''Find me a highly rated camera for wildlife photography compatible with my Nikon F-Mount lenses'', existing methods may generate expansions that are semantically similar but structurally unrelated to user intents. To handle such semi-structured queries with both textual and relational requirements, in this paper we propose a knowledge-aware query expansion framework, augmenting LLMs with structured document relations from knowledge graph (KG). To further address the limitation of entity-based scoring in existing KG-based methods, we leverage document texts as rich KG node representations and use document-based relation filtering for our Knowledge-Aware Retrieval (KAR). Extensive experiments on three datasets of diverse domains show the advantages of our method compared against state-of-the-art baselines on textual and relational semi-structured retrieval.

Knowledge-Aware Query Expansion with Large Language Models for Textual and Relational Retrieval

Automatic summarization of legal documents requires a thorough understanding of their specificities, mainly with respect to the vocabulary used by legal experts. Indeed, the latter rely heavily on their external knowledge when writing summaries, in order to contextualize the main entities of the source document. This leads to reference summaries containing many abstractions, that sota models struggle to generate. In this paper, we propose an entity-driven approach aiming at learning the model to generate factual hallucinations, as close as possible to the abstractions of the reference summaries. We evaluated our approach on two different datasets, with legal documents in English and French. Results show that our approach allows to reduce non-factual hallucinations and maximize both summary coverage and factual hallucinations at entity-level. Moreover, the overall quality of summaries is also improved, showing that guiding summarization with entities is a valuable solution for legal documents summarization.

Not all Hallucinations are Good to Throw Away When it Comes to Legal Abstractive Summarization

Automatically summarizing large text collections is a valuable tool for document research, with applications in journalism, academic research, legal work, and many other fields. In this work, we contrast two classes of systems for large-scale multi-document summarization (MDS): compression and full-text. Compression-based methods use a multi-stage pipeline and often lead to lossy summaries. Full-text methods promise a lossless summary by relying on recent advances in long-context reasoning. To understand their utility on large-scale MDS, we evaluated them on three datasets, each containing approximately one hundred documents per summary. Our experiments cover a diverse set of long-context transformers (Llama-3.1, Command-R, Jamba-1.5-Mini) and compression methods (retrieval-augmented, hierarchical, incremental). Overall, we find that full-text and retrieval methods perform the best in most settings. With further analysis into the salient information retention patterns, we show that compression-based methods show strong promise at intermediate stages, even outperforming full-context. However, they suffer information loss due to their multi-stage pipeline and lack of global context. Our results highlight the need to develop hybrid approaches that combine compression and full-text approaches for optimal performance on large-scale multi-document summarization.

Scaling Multi-Document Event Summarization: Evaluating Compression vs. Full-Text Approaches

We introduce GLiREL, an efficient architecture and training paradigm for zero-shot relation classification. Identifying relationships between entities is a key task in information extraction pipelines. The zero-shot setting for relation extraction, where a taxonomy of relations is not pre-specified, has proven to be particularly challenging because of the computational complexity of inference, and because of the lack of labeled training data with sufficient coverage. Existing approaches rely upon distant supervision using auxiliary models to generate training data for unseen labels, upon very large general-purpose large language models (LLMs), or upon complex pipelines models with multiple inference stages. Inspired by the recent advancements in zero-shot named entity recognition, this paper introduces an approach to efficiently and accurately predict zero-shot relationship labels between multiple entities in a single forward pass. Experiments using the FewRel and WikiZSL benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the zero-shot relation classification task. In addition, we contribute a protocol for synthetically-generating datasets with diverse relation labels.

GLiREL - Generalist Model for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction

Graph databases like Neo4j are gaining popularity for handling complex, interconnected data, over traditional relational databases in modeling and querying relationships. While translating natural language into SQL queries is well-researched, generating Cypher queries for Neo4j remains relatively underexplored. In this work, we present an automated, LLM Supervised, pipeline to generate high quality synthetic data for Text2Cypher. Our Cypher data generation pipeline introduces LLM-As-Database-Filler, a novel strategy for ensuring Cypher query correctness, thus resulting in high quality generations. Using our pipeline, we generate high quality Text2Cypher data - SynthCypher containing 29.8k instances across various domains and queries with varying complexities. Training open-source LLMs like LLaMa-3.1-8B, Mistral-7B, and QWEN7B on SynthCypher results in performance gains of up to 40% on the Text2Cypher test split and 30% on the SPIDER benchmark, adapted for graph databases.

Auto-Cypher: Improving LLMs on Cypher generation via LLM-supervised generation-verification framework

Fairness in multi-document summarization (MDS) measures whether a system can generate a summary fairly representing information from documents with different social attribute values. Fairness in MDS is crucial since a fair summary can offer readers a comprehensive view. Previous works focus on quantifying summary-level fairness using Proportional Representation, a fairness measure based on Statistical Parity. However, Proportional Representation does not consider redundancy in input documents and overlooks corpus-level unfairness. In this work, we propose a new summary-level fairness measure, Equal Coverage, which is based on coverage of documents with different social attribute values and considers the redundancy within documents. To detect the corpus-level unfairness, we propose a new corpus-level measure, Coverage Parity. Our human evaluations show that our measures align more with our definition of fairness. Using our measures, we evaluate the fairness of thirteen different LLMs. We find that Claude3-sonnet is the fairest among all evaluated LLMs. We also find that almost all LLMs overrepresent different social attribute values. The code is available at https://github.com/leehaoyuan/coverage_fairness

Coverage-based Fairness in Multi-document Summarization

Multi-agent collaboration among models has shown promise in reasoning tasks but is underexplored in long-form generation tasks like summarization and question-answering. We extend multi-agent multi-model reasoning to generation, specifically to improving faithfulness through refinement, i.e., revising model-generated outputs to remove factual inconsistencies. We investigate how iterative collaboration among multiple instances and types of large language models (LLMs) enhances subtasks in the refinement process, such as error detection, critiquing unfaithful sentences, and making corrections based on critiques. We design intrinsic evaluations for each subtask, with our findings indicating that both multi-agent (multiple instances) and multi-model (diverse LLM types) approaches benefit error detection and critiquing. Additionally, reframing critiquing and refinement as reranking rather than generation tasks improves multi-agent performance. We consolidate these insights into a final ''recipe'' called **M**ulti-**A**gent **M**ulti-**M**odel **Refine**ment (MAMM-Refine), where multi-agent and multi-model collaboration significantly boosts performance on three summarization datasets as well as on long-form question answering, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalizability of our recipe. Our code is publicly available.

MAMM-Refine: A Recipe for Improving Faithfulness in Generation with Multi-Agent Collaboration

Modern Language Models (LMs) are capable of following long and complex instructions that enable a large and diverse set of user requests. While Information Retrieval (IR) models use these LMs as the backbone of their architectures, virtually none of them allow users to provide detailed instructions alongside queries, thus limiting their ability to satisfy complex information needs. In this work, we study the use of instructions in IR systems. First, we introduce our dataset FollowIR, which contains a rigorous instruction evaluation benchmark as well as a training set for helping IR models learn to better follow real-world instructions. FollowIR repurposes detailed instructions -- also known as narratives -- developed for professional assessors to evaluate retrieval systems. In particular, we build our benchmark from three collections curated for shared tasks at the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC). These collections contains hundreds to thousands of labeled documents per query, making them suitable for our exploration. Through this process, we can measure how well IR models follow instructions, through a new pairwise evaluation framework. Our results indicate that existing retrieval models fail to correctly use instructions, using them for basic keywords and struggling to understand long-form information. However, we show that it is possible for IR models to learn to follow complex instructions: our new FollowIR-7B model has significant improvements after fine-tuning on our training set.

FollowIR: Evaluating and Teaching Information Retrieval Models to Follow Instructions

Summarizing movie screenplays presents a unique set of challenges compared to standard document summarization. Screenplays are not only lengthy, but also feature a complex interplay of characters, dialogues, and scenes, with numerous direct and subtle relationships and contextual nuances that are difficult for machine learning models to accurately capture and comprehend. Recent attempts at screenplay summarization focus on fine-tuning transformer-based pre-trained models, but these models often fall short in capturing long-term dependencies and latent relationships, and frequently encounter the ''lost in the middle'' issue. To address these challenges, we introduce DiscoGraMS, a novel resource that represents movie scripts as a movie character-aware discourse graph (CaD Graph). This approach is well-suited for various downstream tasks, such as summarization, question-answering, and salience detection. The model aims to preserve all salient information, offering a more comprehensive and faithful representation of the screenplay's content. We further explore a baseline method that combines the CaD Graph with the corresponding movie script through a late fusion of graph and text modalities, and we present very initial promising results. We have made our code and dataset publicly available.

DiscoGraMS: Enhancing Movie Screen-Play Summarization using Movie Character-Aware Discourse Graph

Open-vocabulary Extreme Multi-label Classification (OXMC) extends traditional XMC by allowing prediction beyond an extremely large, predefined label set (typically 103
to 1012 labels), addressing the dynamic nature of real-world labeling tasks. However, self-selection bias in data annotation leads to significant missing labels in both training and test data, particularly for less popular inputs. This creates two critical challenges: generation models learn to be “lazy” by under-generating labels, and evaluation becomes unreliable due to insufficient annotation in the test set. In this work, we introduce Positive-Unlabeled Sequence Learning (PUSL), which reframes OXMC as an infinite keyphrase generation task, addressing the generation model’s laziness. Additionally, we propose a suite of evaluation metrics, F1@O and BudgetAccuracy@K, to reliably assess OXMC models with incomplete ground truths. In a highly skewed e-commerce dataset, PUSL generates 30% more unique labels, and 72% of its predictions align with actual user queries. On the less skewed EURLex-4.3k dataset, PUSL demonstrates superior F1 scores, especially as label counts increase from 15 to 30. Our approach effectively tackles both the modeling and evaluation challenges in OXMC with missing labels. Our data split was released in huggingface datasets https://huggingface.co/datasets/windchimeran/pusl

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Knowledge-Aware Query Expansion with Large Language Models for Textual and Relational Retrieval

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Improving Distantly Supervised Document-Level Relation Extraction Through Natural Language Inference