United States

We present a suite of experiments that allow us to understand the underlying challenges of language model adaptation to nonstandard text. We do so by designing interventions that approximate core features of user-generated text and their interactions with existing biases of language models. Applying our interventions during language model adaptation to nonstandard text variations, we gain important insights into when such adaptation is successful, as well as the aspects of text variation and noise that are particularly difficult for language models to handle. For instance, on text with character-level variation, out-of-the-box performance improves even with a few additional training examples but approaches a plateau, suggesting that more data is not the solution. In contrast, on text with variation involving new words or meanings, far more data is needed, but it leads to a massive breakthrough in performance. Our findings reveal that existing models lack the necessary infrastructure to handle diverse forms of nonstandard text, guiding the development of more resilient language modeling techniques. We make the code for our interventions, which can be applied to any English text data, publicly available.

NAACL 2025

We’re Calling an Intervention: Exploring Fundamental Hurdles in Adapting Language Models to Nonstandard Text

language variation

adaptation

tokenization

language modeling

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

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EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

workshop paper

### 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

Detecting cynical comments in online communication poses a significant challenge in human-computer interaction, especially given the massive proliferation of discussions on platforms like YouTube. These comments often include offensive or disruptive patterns, such as sarcasm, negative feelings, specific reasons, and an attitude of being right. To address this problem, we present a web platform for the Spanish language that has been developed and leverages natural language processing and machine learning techniques. The platform detects comments and provides valuable information to users by focusing on analyzing comments. The core models are based on pre-trained architectures, including BETO, SpanBERTa, Multilingual BERT, RoBERTuito, and BERT, enabling robust detection of cynical comments. Our platform was trained and tested with Spanish comments from car analysis channels on YouTube. The results show that models achieve performance above 0.8 F1 for all types of cynical comments in the text classification task but achieve lower performance (around 0.6-0.7 F1) for the more arduous token classification task.

Applying Transformer Architectures to Detect Cynical Comments in Spanish Social Media

We introduce FaBERT, a Persian BERT-base model pre-trained on the HmBlogs corpus, encompassing both informal and formal Persian texts. FaBERT is designed to excel in traditional Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks, addressing the intricacies of diverse sentence structures and linguistic styles prevalent in the Persian language. In our comprehensive evaluation of FaBERT on 12 datasets in various downstream tasks, encompassing Sentiment Analysis (SA), Named Entity Recognition (NER), Natural Language Inference (NLI), Question Answering (QA), and Question Paraphrasing (QP), it consistently demonstrated improved performance, all achieved within a compact model size. The findings highlight the importance of utilizing diverse corpora, such as HmBlogs, to enhance the performance of language models like BERT in Persian Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications.

FaBERT: Pre-training BERT on Persian Blogs

Evaluating machine translation (MT) of user-generated content (UGC) involves unique challenges such as checking whether the nuance of emotions from the source are preserved in the target text. Recent studies have proposed emotion-related datasets, frameworks and models to automatically evaluate MT quality of Chinese UGC, without relying on reference translations. However, whether these models are robust to the challenge of preserving emotional nuances has been left largely unexplored. To this end, we introduce a novel method inspired by information theory which generates challenging Chinese homophone words related to emotions, by leveraging the concept of *self-information*. Our approach generates homophones that were observed to cause translation errors in emotion preservation, and exposes vulnerabilities in MT models struggling to preserve relevant emotions. We evaluate the efficacy of our method using human evaluation and compare it with an existing one, showing that our method achieves higher correlation with human judgments. The generated Chinese homophones, along with their manual translations, are utilized to generate perturbations and to probe the robustness of existing quality evaluation models, including models trained using multi-task learning, fine-tuned variants of multilingual language models, as well as large language models (LLMs). Our results indicate that LLMs with larger size exhibit higher stability and robustness to such perturbations. We release our data and code for reproducibility and further research.

Automatically Generating Chinese Homophone Words to Probe Machine Translation Estimation Systems

Multi-domain text analysis presents significant challenges, particularly in Persian name entity recognition (NER). Using a single model for multiple domains often fails to capture the specific features of different domains. That is why many scientists have focused on prompting chatbots for this issue. However, studies show that these models do not achieve remarkable results in NER tasks without proper fine-tuning while training and storing a chatbot is extremely costly. This paper presents a new approach using one core model with various sets of domain-specific parameters. By using techniques like LoRAs and pre-fix tuning, along with extra layers, we train each set of trainable parameters for a specific domain. This allows the model to perform as well as individual models for each domain. Tests on various formal and informal datasets show that by using these added parameters, the proposed model performs much better than existing practical models. The model needs only one instance for storage but achieves excellent results across all domains. This paper also examines each adaptation strategy, outlining its strengths, weaknesses, and the best settings and hyperparameters for Persian NER. Lastly, this study introduces a new document-based domain detection system for situations where text domains are unknown. This novel pipeline enhances the adaptability and practicality of the proposed approach for real-world applications.

Multi-BERT: Leveraging Adapters for Low-Resource Multi-Domain Adaptation

Named Entity Recognition (NER), a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), has shown significant advancements for high-resource languages. However, due to a lack of annotated datasets and limited representation in Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), it remains understudied and challenging for low-resource languages. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a data augmentation technique that generates culturally plausible sentences and experiments on four low-resource Pakistani languages; Urdu, Shahmukhi, Sindhi, and Pashto. By fine-tuning multilingual masked Large Language Models (LLMs), our approach demonstrates significant improvements in NER performance for Shahmukhi and Pashto. We further explore the capability of generative LLMs for NER and data augmentation using few-shot learning.

Enhancing NER Performance in Low-Resource Pakistani Languages using Cross-Lingual Data Augmentation

Automated content moderation for collaborative knowledge hubs like Wikipedia or Wikidata is an important yet challenging task due to multiple factors. In this paper, we construct a database of discussions happening around articles marked for deletion in several Wikis and in three languages, which we then use to evaluate a range of LMs on different tasks (from predicting the outcome of the discussion to identifying the implicit policy an individual comment might be pointing to). Our results reveal, among others, that discussions leading to deletion are easier to predict, and that, surprisingly, self-produced tags (keep, delete or redirect) don’t always help guiding the classifiers, presumably because of users’ hesitation or deliberation within comments.

Wikipedia is Not a Dictionary, Delete! Text Classification as a Proxy for Analysing Wiki Deletion Discussions

We present ongoing research on automatic post-processing approaches to enhance the readability of noisy speech transcripts in low-resource languages, with a focus on conversational speech in Latvian. We compare transformer-based sequence-labeling models and large language models (LLMs) for the standard punctuation and capitalization restoration task, while also considering automatic correction of mispronounced words and disfluency, and partial inverse text normalization. Our results show that very small LLMs (approx. 2B parameters), fine-tuned on a modest text corpus, can achieve near state-of-the-art performance, rivaling orders of magnitude larger LLMs. Additionally, we demonstrate that a fine-tuned Whisper model, leveraging acoustic cues, outperforms text-only systems on challenging conversational data, even for a low-resource language. Error analysis reveals recurring pitfalls in sentence boundary determination and disfluency handling, emphasizing the importance of consistent annotation and domain adaptation for robust post-processing. Our findings highlight the feasibility of developing efficient post-processing solutions that significantly refine ASR output in low-resource settings, while opening new possibilities for editing and formatting speech transcripts beyond mere restoration of punctuation and capitalization.

From Conversational Speech to Readable Text: Post-Processing Noisy Transcripts in a Low-Resource Setting

We manually normalize noisy Japanese expressions on social networking services (SNS) to improve the performance of sentiment polarity classification.Despite advances in pre-trained language models, informal expressions found in social media still plague natural language processing.In this study, we analyzed 6,000 posts from a sentiment analysis corpus for Japanese SNS text, and constructed a text normalization taxonomy consisting of 33 types of editing operations.Text normalization according to our taxonomy significantly improved the performance of BERT-based sentiment analysis in Japanese.Detailed analysis reveals that most types of editing operations each contribute to improve the performance of sentiment analysis.

Text Normalization for Sentiment Analysis in Japanese Social Media

Large language models (LLMs) serve as the foundation of numerous AI applications today. However, despite their remarkable proficiency in generating coherent text, questions linger regarding their ability in performing fine-grained linguistic annotation tasks, such as detecting nouns or verbs, or identifying more complex syntactic structures like clauses or T-units in input texts. These tasks require precise syntactic and semantic understanding of input text, and when LLMs underperform on specific linguistic structures, it raises concerns about their reliability for detailed linguistic analysis and whether their (even correct) outputs truly reflect an understanding of the inputs. In this paper, we empirically study recent LLMs performance across fine-grained linguistic annotation tasks. Through a series of experiments, we find that recent LLMs show limited efficacy in addressing linguistic queries and often struggle with linguistically complex inputs. We show that the most capable LLM (Llama3-70b) makes notable errors in detecting linguistic structures, such as misidentifying embedded clauses, failing to recognize verb phrases, and confusing complex nominals with clauses. Our study provides valuable insights to inform future endeavors in LLM design and development.

Linguistic Blind Spots of Large Language Models

We introduce ParaBLoCC, the Parallel Basic Locative Construction Corpus, the first multilingual compendium of this important grammatico-functional construction, and particularly the first such corpus containing semantically equivalent BLCs in source/target language pairs. The data -- taken from bitext corpora in English paired with twenty-six typologically diverse languages -- are likely to prove useful for studying questions of cognitive underpinnings and cross-linguistic usage patterns of spatial expressions, as well as for improving multilingual spatial relation extraction and related tasks. The data are being made available at https://github.com/pviechnicki/parablocc.

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Applying Transformer Architectures to Detect Cynical Comments in Spanish Social Media

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