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Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in high-resource languages but underperform in low-resource ones. As an effective alternative to the direct fine-tuning on target tasks in specific languages, cross-lingual transfer addresses the challenges of limited training data. It decouples &#39;&#39;task ability&#39;&#39; and &#39;&#39;language ability&#39;&#39; by fine-tuning on the target task in the source language and another selected task in the target language, respectively. However, they fail to fully separate the task ability from the source language or the language ability from the chosen task. In this paper, we acknowledge the mutual reliance between task ability and language ability and direct our attention toward the gap between the target language and the source language on tasks. As the gap removes the impact of tasks, we assume that it remains consistent across tasks. Based on this assumption, we propose a new cross-lingual transfer method called `AdaMergeX` that utilizes adaptive adapter merging. By introducing a reference task, we can determine that the divergence of adapters fine-tuned on the reference task in both languages follows the same distribution as the divergence of adapters fine-tuned on the target task in both languages. Hence, we can obtain target adapters by combining the other three adapters. Furthermore, we propose a structure-adaptive adapter merging method. Our empirical results demonstrate that our approach yields new and effective cross-lingual transfer, outperforming existing methods across all settings.

NAACL 2025

AdaMergeX: Cross-Lingual Transfer with Large Language Models via Adaptive Adapter Merging

adapter merging

large language model

cross-lingual transfer

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
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This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

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ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in high-resource languages but underperform in low-resource ones. As an effective alternative to the direct fine-tuning on target tasks in specific languages, cross-lingual transfer addresses the challenges of limited training data. It decouples ''task ability'' and ''language ability'' by fine-tuning on the target task in the source language and another selected task in the target language, respectively. However, they fail to fully separate the task ability from the source language or the language ability from the chosen task. In this paper, we acknowledge the mutual reliance between task ability and language ability and direct our attention toward the gap between the target language and the source language on tasks. As the gap removes the impact of tasks, we assume that it remains consistent across tasks. Based on this assumption, we propose a new cross-lingual transfer method called `AdaMergeX` that utilizes adaptive adapter merging. By introducing a reference task, we can determine that the divergence of adapters fine-tuned on the reference task in both languages follows the same distribution as the divergence of adapters fine-tuned on the target task in both languages. Hence, we can obtain target adapters by combining the other three adapters. Furthermore, we propose a structure-adaptive adapter merging method. Our empirical results demonstrate that our approach yields new and effective cross-lingual transfer, outperforming existing methods across all settings.

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

Human Preference Alignment (HPA) can assist large language models (LLMs) to generate safe content. Due to the heavy cost of fine-tuning, tuning-free methods have emerged, typically modifying LLM decoding via post-processing. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective approach for HPA in a tuning-free way, named In-Context Direct Preference Optimization (ICDPO). We first rethink the derivation procedures of DPO, based on which we conversely build an instant scorer using the states of the LLM before and after ICL. It enables LLMs to both generate and select the well-aligned response, which is precisely estimated by the aforementioned instant scorer, thereby enhancing the final performance. ICDPO can be further enhanced with a two-stage retriever and an upgraded scorer. Extensive experiments show its effectiveness, particularly in outperforming multiple tuning-free baselines, even competitiveness with SFT and DPO. We also conduct detailed analyses to offer comprehensive insights into ICDPO.

Instantly Learning Preference Alignment via In-context DPO

Hate speech (HS) classifiers do not perform equally well in detecting hateful expressions towards different target identities. They also demonstrate systematic biases in predicted hatefulness scores. Tapping on two recently proposed functionality test datasets for HS detection, we quantitatively analyze the impact of different factors on HS prediction. Experiments on popular industrial and academic models demonstrate that HS detectors assign a higher hatefulness score merely based on the mention of specific target identities. Besides, models often confuse hatefulness and the polarity of emotions. This result is worrisome as the effort to build HS detectors might harm the vulnerable identity groups we wish to protect: posts expressing anger or disapproval of hate expressions might be flagged as hateful themselves. We also carry out a study inspired by social psychology theory, which reveals that the accuracy of hatefulness prediction correlates strongly with the intensity of the stereotype.

What the #?*!: Disentangling Hate Across Target Identities

Generative spoken language models produce speech in a wide range of voices, prosody, and recording conditions, seemingly approaching the diversity of natural speech. However, the extent to which generated speech is acoustically diverse remains unclear due to a lack of appropriate metrics. We address this gap by developing lightweight metrics of acoustic diversity, which we collectively refer to as MAD Speech. We focus on measuring five facets of acoustic diversity: voice, gender, emotion, accent, and background noise. We construct the metrics as a composition of specialized, per-facet embedding models and an aggregation function that measures diversity within the embedding space. Next, we build a series of datasets with a priori known diversity preferences for each facet. Using these datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed metrics achieve a stronger agreement with the ground-truth diversity than baselines. Finally, we showcase the applicability of our proposed metrics across several real-life evaluation scenarios. MAD Speech is made publicly available.

MAD Speech: Measures of Acoustic Diversity of Speech

We introduce UFO, a UI-Fcused agent designed to fulfill user requests tailored to Windows OS applications by observing and analyzing the GUI and control information of these applications. UFO utilizes a hierarchical dual-agent framework that decomposes user requests using a divide-and-conquer approach, enabling seamless navigation and addressing sub-tasks across multiple applications. It also incorporates a control interaction module tailored for Windows OS, which detects control elements effectively and allows for fully automated execution. As a result, UFO simplifies complex and time-consuming processes into tasks that can be completed with natural language commands. We conducted testing of UFO across 9 popular Windows applications, encompassing a variety of scenarios. The results derived from both quantitative metrics and real-case studies, underscore the superior effectiveness of UFOin fulfilling user requests. To the best of our knowledge, UFO stands as the first UI agent specifically tailored for task completion within the Windows OS.

UFO: A UI-Focused Agent for Windows OS Interaction

Preference modeling techniques, such as direct preference optimization (DPO), has shown effective in enhancing the generalization abilities of large language model (LLM). However, in tasks involving video instruction-following, providing informative feedback, especially for open-ended conversations, remains a significant challenge. While previous studies have explored using large multimodal models (LMMs) as reward models for guiding preference modeling, their ability to accurately assess the quality of generated responses and their alignment with video content has not been conclusively demonstrated. This paper introduces a novel framework that utilizes detailed video captions as a proxy of video content, enabling language models to incorporate this information as supporting evidence for scoring video Question Answering (QA) predictions. Our approach demonstrates robust alignment with OpenAI GPT-4V model's reward mechanism, which directly takes video frames as input. Furthermore, we show that applying our reward mechanism to DPO algorithm significantly improves model performance on open-ended video QA tasks.

Direct Preference Optimization of Video Large Multimodal Models from Language Model Reward

Identifying cause-and-effect relationships is critical to understanding real-world dynamics and ultimately causal reasoning. Existing methods for identifying event causality in NLP, including those based on Large Language Models (LLMs), exhibit difficulties in out-of-distribution settings due to the limited scale and heavy reliance on lexical cues within available benchmarks. Modern benchmarks, inspired by probabilistic causal inference, have attempted to construct causal graphs of events as a robust representation of causal knowledge, where `CRAB` (Romanou et al., 2023) is one such recent benchmark along this line. In this paper, we introduce `ACCESS`, a benchmark designed for discovery and reasoning over abstract causal events. Unlike existing resources, `ACCESS` focuses on causality of everyday life events on the abstraction level. We propose a pipeline for identifying abstractions for event generalizations from `GLUCOSE` (Mostafazadeh et al., 2020), a large-scale dataset of implicit commonsense causal knowledge, from which we subsequently extract 1,4K causal pairs. Our experiments highlight the ongoing challenges of using statistical methods and/or LLMs for automatic abstraction identification and causal discovery in NLP. Nonetheless, we demonstrate that the abstract causal knowledge provided in `ACCESS` can be leveraged for enhancing QA reasoning performance in LLMs.

ACCESS : A Benchmark for Abstract Causal Event Discovery and Reasoning

Question decomposition has been found to help large language models' (LLMs) performance on complex question answering (QA) by breaking these questions into simpler sub-questions for answering. Nonetheless, performance on the task remains dominated by supervised approaches, suggesting room for making LLMs better decomposers. One way of improving LLM training and fine-tuning is to leverage synthetic training data, but the superior performance of supervised approaches collapses in the face of distribution shifts, making them unsuitable for generating synthetic data across new domains and at scale. To address this, we propose an approach to generate synthetic decomposition data with only five annotated examples; we do this by (i) extending recent advancements in using LLM-as-judge and for reranking in novel ways, as well as (ii) using a panel of smaller-sized LLMs for data generation instead of resource-intensive larger models. Through careful validation of our approach over two benchmark datasets, we show that our data generation and modelling approaches bring consistent improvements over using few-shot prompting with LLMs for the task. Our code and models can be found at https://github.com/hankelvin/complex_question_decomposition.

Generating Complex Question Decompositions in the Face of Distribution Shifts

Next location prediction plays a crucial role in various real-world applications. Recently, due to the limitation of existing deep learning methods, attempts have been made to apply large language models (LLMs) to zero-shot next location prediction task. However, they directly generate the final output using LLMs without systematic design, which limits the potential of LLMs to uncover complex mobility patterns and underestimates their extensive reserve of global geospatial knowledge. In this paper, we introduce AgentMove, a systematic agentic prediction framework to achieve generalized next location prediction. In AgentMove, we first decompose the mobility prediction task and design specific modules to complete them, including spatial-temporal memory for individual mobility pattern mining, world knowledge generator for modeling the effects of urban structure and collective knowledge extractor for capturing the shared patterns among population. Finally, we combine the results of three modules and conduct a reasoning step to generate the final predictions. Extensive experiments utilizing mobility data from two distinct sources reveal that AgentMove surpasses the leading baseline by 3.33% to 8.57% across 8 out of 12 metrics and it shows robust predictions with various LLMs as base and also less geographical bias across cities. Our codes are available via https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/AgentMove.

AgentMove: A Large Language Model based Agentic Framework for Zero-shot Next Location Prediction

Studying human values is instrumental for cross-cultural research, enabling a better understanding of preferences and behaviour of society at large and communities therein. To study the dynamics of communities online, we propose a method to computationally analyse values present on Reddit. Our method allows analysis at scale, complementing survey based approaches. We train a value relevance and a value polarity classifier, which we thoroughly evaluate using in-domain and out-of-domain human annotations. Using these, we automatically annotate over nine million posts across 12k subreddits with Schwartz values. Our analysis unveils both previously recorded and novel insights into the values prevalent within various online communities. For instance, we discover a very negative stance towards conformity in the Vegan and AbolishTheMonarchy subreddits. Additionally, our study of geographically specific subreddits highlights the correlation between traditional values and conservative U.S. states. Through our work, we demonstrate how our dataset and method can be used as a complementary tool for qualitative study of online communication.

Investigating Human Values in Online Communities

Humans have strong capabilities of decomposition and composition in natural-to-formal language conversion (N2F) when faced with an unfamiliar formal language, and can easily cope with compositional gaps and counter-intuitive symbolic names. To investigate whether large language models (LLMs) have this set of basic capabilities in N2F, we propose the STD framework. This framework semi-automatically performs sample and task construction, allowing decoupled evaluation of the set of decomposition and composition capabilities of LLMs in N2F. Based on this framework, we evaluate and analyze the most advanced LLMs, and the main findings include that: (1) the LLMs are deficient in both decomposition and composition; (2) the LLMs show a wide coverage of error types that can be attributed to deficiencies in natural language understanding and the learning and use of symbolic systems; (3) compositional gaps and counter-intuitive symbolic names both affect the decomposition and composition of the LLMs. Our work provides a new perspective for investigating the basic capabilities of decomposition and composition of LLMs in N2F. The detailed analysis of deficiencies and attributions can help subsequent improvements of LLMs.

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Instantly Learning Preference Alignment via In-context DPO

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