Austria

Active learning (AL) aims to reduce annotation effort by iteratively selecting the most informative samples for labeling. The dominant strategy in AL involves fully finetuning the model on all acquired data after each round, which is computationally expensive in multilingual and low-resource settings. This paper investigates \textit{continual finetuning} (CF), an alternative update strategy where the model is updated only on newly acquired samples at each round. We evaluate CF against full finetuning (FA) across 28 African languages using MasakhaNEWS and SIB-200. Our analysis reveals three key findings. First, CF matches or outperforms FA for languages included in the model&#39;s pretraining, achieving up to 35\% reductions in GPU memory, FLOPs, and training time. Second, CF performs comparably even for languages not seen during pretraining when they are typologically similar to those that were. Third, CF&#39;s effectiveness depends critically on uncertainty-based acquisition; without it, performance deteriorates significantly. While FA remains preferable for some low-resource languages, the overall results establish CF as a robust, cost-efficient alternative for active learning in multilingual NLP. These findings motivate developing hybrid AL strategies that adapt fine-tuning behavior based on pretraining coverage, language typology, and acquisition dynamics.

ACL 2025

Rethinking Full Finetuning from Pretraining Checkpoints in Active Learning for African Languages

efficient methods in nlp

low-resource language

active learning

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
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, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 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 will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
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ACL 2022

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 (NLP). 

Active learning (AL) aims to reduce annotation effort by iteratively selecting the most informative samples for labeling. The dominant strategy in AL involves fully finetuning the model on all acquired data after each round, which is computationally expensive in multilingual and low-resource settings. This paper investigates \textit{continual finetuning} (CF), an alternative update strategy where the model is updated only on newly acquired samples at each round. We evaluate CF against full finetuning (FA) across 28 African languages using MasakhaNEWS and SIB-200. Our analysis reveals three key findings. First, CF matches or outperforms FA for languages included in the model's pretraining, achieving up to 35\% reductions in GPU memory, FLOPs, and training time. Second, CF performs comparably even for languages not seen during pretraining when they are typologically similar to those that were. Third, CF's effectiveness depends critically on uncertainty-based acquisition; without it, performance deteriorates significantly. While FA remains preferable for some low-resource languages, the overall results establish CF as a robust, cost-efficient alternative for active learning in multilingual NLP. These findings motivate developing hybrid AL strategies that adapt fine-tuning behavior based on pretraining coverage, language typology, and acquisition dynamics.

workshop paper

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Music has long served as a vehicle for political expression, with protest songs playing a central role in articulating dissent and mobilizing collective action. Yet, despite their cultural significance, the linguistic and acoustic signatures that define protest music remain understudied. We present a multimodal computational analysis of protest and non-protest songs spanning multiple decades. Using NLP and audio analysis, we identify the linguistic and musical features that differentiate protest songs. Instead of focusing on classification performance, we treat classification as a diagnostic tool to investigate these features and reveal broader patterns. Protest songs are not just politically charged they are acoustically and linguistically distinct, and we quantify how.

Voices of Dissent: A Multimodal Analysis of Protest Songs through Lyrics and Audio

This paper introduces CausalGraphBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to construct Causal Graphs (CGs), a critical component of reasoning models like Bayesian Networks. The benchmark comprises 35 CGs sourced from publicly available repositories and academic papers, each enriched with detailed metadata to facilitate systematic and consistent evaluation. We explore various LLM-driven methods for CG discovery, analyzing their performance across different graph sizes and complexity levels. Additionally, we examine the effects of data contamination on the quality of the generated CGs.

Our findings reveal that methods relying on approaches with a limited number of queries to LLM, particularly those leveraging the full graph context, consistently outperform query-intensive and exhaustive approaches, which tend to overemphasize local relationships. Across all methods, performance declines as graph size increases, emphasizing scalability as a key challenge.

CausalGraphBench: a Benchmark for Evaluating Language Models capabilities of Causal Graph discovery

This paper presents a novel geometric interpretation of LayerNorm and explores how LayerNorm influences the norm and orientation of hidden vectors in the representation space. We show that the definition of LayerNorm is innately linked to the uniform vector, defined as $\boldsymbol{1} = [1, 1, 1, 1, \cdots, 1]^T \in \mathbb{R}^d$. We then show that the standardization step in LayerNorm can be understood in three simple steps: (i) remove the component of a vector along the uniform vector, (ii) normalize the remaining vector, and (iii) scale the resultant vector by $\sqrt{d}$, where $d$ is the dimensionality of the representation space. Finally, we compare the hidden representations of LayerNorm-based LLMs with models trained using RMSNorm and show that all LLMs naturally operate orthogonal to the uniform vector both during training and inference, that is, on average they do not have a component along the uniform vector during training or inference. This presents the first mechanistic evidence that removing the component along the uniform vector in LayerNorm is a redundant step. These results advocate for using RMSNorm over LayerNorm which is also more computationally efficient.

LayerNorm vs RMSNorm: A Geometric Perspective and the Case Against Mean Subtraction

In Recent years, advances in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) heavily rely on large-scale parallel corpora. Within the context of China's Belt and Road Initiative, there is increasing demand for improving translation quality from agglutinative languages (e.g., Mongolian, Arabic) to Chinese. However, the translation scenarios for agglutinative languages (which form words by concatenating morphemes with clear boundaries) face significant challenges including data sparsity, quality imbalance, and inactive sample proliferation due to their morphological complexity and syntactic flexibility. This study presents a systematic analysis of data distribution characteristics in agglutinative languages and proposes a dual-module framework combining fine-grained inactive sample identification with target-side rejuvenation. Our framework first establishes a multi-dimensional evaluation system to accurately identify samples exhibiting low-frequency morphological interference or long-range word order mismatches. Subsequently, the target-side rejuvenation mechanism generates diversified noise-resistant translations through iterative optimization of sample contribution weights. Experimental results on four low-resource agglutinative language tasks demonstrate significant performance improvements (BLEU +2.1--3.4) across mainstream NMT architectures. Architecture-agnostic validation further confirms the framework's generalizability.

Neural Machine Translation for Agglutinative Languages via Data Rejuvenation

Structured code comments in docstring format are essential for code comprehension and maintenance, but existing machine learning models for their generation perform poorly for Russian compared to English. To bridge this gap, we present StRuCom — the first large-scale dataset (153K examples) specifically designed for Russian code documentation. Unlike machine-translated English datasets that distort terminology (e.g., technical loanwords vs. literal translations) and docstring structures, StRuCom combines human-written comments from Russian GitHub repositories with synthetically generated ones, ensuring compliance with Python, Java, JavaScript, C#, and Go standards through automated validation. Fine-tuning Qwen2.5-Coder models (0.5B-7B) on StRuCom shows statistically significant improvements of chrf++ and BERTScore over baseline models.

StRuCom: A Novel Dataset of Structured Code Comments in Russian

Back-translation has been proven effective in enhancing the performance of Neural Machine Translation (NMT), with its core mechanism relying on synthesizing parallel corpora to strengthen model training. However, while traditional back-translation methods alleviate the data scarcity in low-resource machine translation, their dependence on random sampling strategies ignores the semantic quality of monolingual data. This results in the contamination of model training through the inclusion of substantial low-quality samples in the generated corpora. To mitigate noise interference, additional training iterations or model scaling are required, significantly increasing computational costs. To address this challenge, this study proposes a Semantic Uncertainty Sampling strategy, which prioritizes sentences with higher semantic uncertainty as training samples by computationally evaluating the complexity of unannotated monolingual data. Experiments were conducted on three typical low-resource agglutinative language pairs: Mongolian-Chinese, Uyghur-Chinese, and Korean-Chinese. Results demonstrate an average BLEU score improvement of +1.7 on test sets across all three translation tasks, confirming the method’s effectiveness in enhancing translation accuracy and fluency. This approach provides a novel pathway for the efficient utilization of unannotated data in low-resource language scenarios.

A Semantic Uncertainty Sampling Strategy for Back-Translation in Low-Resources Neural Machine Translation

This paper presents a workflow that compels an audio-enabled large language model to recite Latin poetry with metrically accurate stress. One hundred hexameters from the Aeneid and the opening elegiac epistula of Ovid’s Heroides constitute the test bed, drawn from the Pedecerto XML corpus, where ictic syllables are marked. A preprocessing pipeline syllabifies each line, converts alien graphemes into approximate English-Italian counterparts, merges obligatory elisions, adds commas on caesurae, upper-cases every ictic syllable, and places a grave accent on its vowel. Verses are then supplied, one at a time, to an LLM-based Text-to-Speech model under a compact system prompt that instructs slow, articulated delivery. From ten stochastic realisations per verse, a team of Latin experts retained the best; at least one fully correct file was found for 91% of the 216 lines. Upper-casing plus accent marking proved the strongest cue, while hyphenating syllables offered no benefit. Remaining errors cluster around cognates where the model inherits a Romance or English stress template. The corpus of validated audio and all scripts are openly released on Zenodo, opening avenues for pedagogy, accessibility, and prosodic research.

Prompting the Muse: Generating Prosodically-Correct Latin Speech with Large Language Models

Large language models, mostly trained on high-resource programming languages, but perform sub-optimally for low-resource ones. This study investigates the impact of tokenizer adaptation methods on improving code generation for LRPLs. We evaluate popular StarCoder 2 and DeepSeek-Coder model adapted to Elixir and Racket using methods such as Fast Vocabulary Transfer (FVT), FOCUS, and Zero-shot Tokenizer Transfer (ZeTT). Our experiments reveal that ZeTT outperforms other methods, achieving significant improvements in handling syntax, program logic, and data types for LRPLs. However, we also highlight performance declines in non-target languages like Python after tokenizer adaptation. The study approves the positive impact of tokenizer adaptation in enhancing LRPL code generation and suggest directions for future research, including token embeddings improvement.

Evaluating Tokenizer Adaptation Methods for Large Language Models on Low-Resource Programming Languages

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in dealing with new tasks with the help of in-context learning (ICL). In the study of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), when implementing ICL, researchers usually adopt the naive strategies like fixed demonstrations across different samples, or selecting demonstrations directly via a visual-language embedding model. These methods do not guarantee the configured demonstrations fit the need of the LVLMs. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, \underline{d}emonstration \underline{r}etriever for large m\underline{u}lti-modal \underline{m}odel (DRUM), which fine-tunes the CLIP embedding model to better meet the LVLM's needs. First, we discuss the retrieval strategies for a visual-language task, assuming an embedding model is given. And we propose to concate the image and text embeddings to enhance the retrieval performance. Second, we propose to re-rank the the embedding model's retrieved demonstrations via the LVLM's feedbacks, and calculate a list-wise ranking loss for training the embedding model. Third, we propose an iterative demonstration mining strategy to improve the training of the embedding model. Through extensive experiments on 3 types of visual-language tasks, 7 benchmark datasets, our DRUM framework is proven to be effective in boosting the LVLM's in-context learning performance via retrieving more proper demonstrations.

DRUM: Learning Demonstration Retriever for Large MUlti-modal Models

Tasks are central in machine learning, as they are the most natural objects to assess the capabilities of current models. The trend is to build general models able to address any task. Even though transfer learning and multitask learning try to leverage the underlying task space, no well-founded tools are available to study its structure. This study proposes a theoretically grounded setup to define the notion of task and to compute the inclusion between two tasks from a statistical deficiency point of view. We propose a tractable proxy as information sufficiency to estimate the degree of inclusion between tasks, show its soundness on synthetic data, and use it to reconstruct empirically the classic NLP pipeline.

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