Ireland

Improvements in text generation technologies such as machine translation have necessitated more costly and time-consuming human evaluation procedures to ensure an accurate signal. We investigate a simple way to reduce cost by reducing the number of text segments that must be annotated in order to accurately predict a score for a complete test set. Using a sampling approach, we demonstrate that information from document membership and automatic metrics can help improve estimates compared to a pure random sampling baseline. We achieve gains of up to 20% in average absolute error by leveraging stratified sampling and control variates. Our techniques can improve estimates made from a fixed annotation budget, are easy to implement, and can be applied to any problem with structure similar to the one we study.

ACL 2022

Toward More Effective Human Evaluation for Machine Translation

error bounds

control variates

stratified sampling

annotation cost

sampling methods

human evaluation

machine translation

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields 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.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

workshop paper

# 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! 
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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). 

It is often difficult to reliably evaluate models which generate text. Among them, text style transfer is a particularly difficult to evaluate, because its success depends on a number of parameters.
We conduct an evaluation of a large number of models on a detoxification task. We explore the relations between the manual and automatic metrics and find that there is only weak correlation between them, which is dependent on the type of model which generated text. Automatic metrics tend to be less reliable for better-performing models. However, our findings suggest that, ChrF and BertScore metrics can be used as a proxy for human evaluation of text detoxification to some extent.

A Study on Manual and Automatic Evaluation for Text Style Transfer: The Case of Detoxification

Although text style transfer has witnessed rapid development in recent years, there is as yet no established standard for evaluation, which is performed using several automatic metrics, lacking the possibility of always resorting to human judgement. We focus on the task of formality transfer, and on the three aspects that are usually evaluated: style strength, content preservation, and fluency. To cast light on how such aspects are assessed by common and new metrics, we run a human-based evaluation and perform a rich correlation analysis. We are then able to offer some recommendations on the use of such metrics in formality transfer, also with an eye to their generalisability (or not) to related tasks.

Human Judgement as a Compass to Navigate Automatic Metrics for Formality Transfer

Current evaluation practices for social dialog systems, dedicated to human-computer spontaneous conversation, exclusively focus on the quality of system-generated surface text, but not human-verifiable aspects of mutual understanding between the systems and their interlocutors. This work proposes Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) as an essential component of a valid and reliable human evaluation framework, whose long-term goal is to radically improve the usability of dialog systems in real-life human-computer collaboration. The practicality of this proposal is proved via experimentally investigating (1) the WordNet 3.0 sense inventory coverage of lexical meanings in spontaneous conversation between humans in American English, assumed as an upper bound of lexical diversity of human--computer communication, and (2) the effectiveness of state-of-the-art WSD models and pretrained transformer-based contextual embeddings on this type of data.

Towards Human Evaluation of Mutual Understanding in Human-Computer Spontaneous Conversation: An Empirical Study of Word Sense Disambiguation for Naturalistic Social Dialogs in American English

Knowledge graphs are often used to store common sense information that is useful for various tasks. However, the extraction of contextually-relevant knowledge is an unsolved problem, and current approaches are relatively simple. Here we introduce a triple selection method based on a ranking model and find that it improves question answering accuracy over existing methods. We additionally investigate methods to ensure that extracted triples form a connected graph. Graph connectivity is important for model interpretability, as paths are frequently used as explanations for the reasoning that connects question and answer.

Identifying relevant common sense information in knowledge graphs

Story comprehension that involves complex causal and temporal relations is a critical task in NLP, but previous studies have focused predominantly on English, leaving open the question of how the findings generalize to other languages, such as Indonesian. In this paper, we follow the Story Cloze Test framework of Mostafazadeh et al. (2016) in evaluating story understanding in Indonesian, by constructing a four-sentence story with one correct ending and one incorrect ending. To investigate commonsense knowledge acquisition in language models, we experimented with: (1) a classification task to predict the correct ending; and (2) a generation task to complete the story with a single sentence. We investigate these tasks in two settings: (i) monolingual training and ii) zero-shot cross-lingual transfer between Indonesian and English.

Cloze Evaluation for Deeper Understanding of Commonsense Stories in Indonesian

Neural language models have attracted a lot of attention in the past few years. More and more researchers are getting intrigued by how language models encode commonsense, specifically what kind of commonsense they understand, and why they do. This paper analyzed neural language models' understanding of commonsense pragmatics (i.e., implied meanings) through human behavioral and neurophysiological data. These psycholinguistic tests are designed to draw conclusions based on predictive responses in context, making them very well suited to test word-prediction models such as BERT in natural settings. They can provide the appropriate prompts and tasks to answer questions about linguistic mechanisms underlying predictive responses. This paper adopted psycholinguistic datasets to probe language models' commonsense reasoning. Findings suggest that GPT-3's performance was mostly at chance in the psycholinguistic tasks. We also showed that DistillBERT had some understanding of the (implied) intent that's shared among most people. Such intent is implicitly reflected in the usage of conversational implicatures and presuppositions. Whether or not fine-tuning improved its performance to human-level depends on the type of commonsense reasoning.

Psycholinguistic Diagnosis of Language Models’ Commonsense Reasoning

Large-scale visual-linguistic pre-training aims to capture the generic representations from multimodal features, which are essential for downstream vision-language tasks. Existing methods mostly focus on learning the seman- tic connections between visual objects and lin- guistic content, which tend to be recognition- level information and may not be sufficient for commonsensical reasoning tasks like VCR. In this paper, we propose a novel commonsen- sical vision-language pre-training framework to bridge the gap. We first augment the con- ventional image-caption pre-training datasets with commonsense inferences from a visual- linguistic GPT-2. To pre-train models on image, caption and commonsense inferences together, we propose two new tasks: masked common- sense modeling (MCM) and commonsense type prediction (CTP). To reduce the shortcut effect between captions and commonsense inferences, we further introduce the domain-wise adaptive masking that dynamically adjusts the mask- ing ratio. Experimental results on downstream tasks, VCR and VQA, show the improvement of our pre-training strategy over previous meth- ods. Human evaluation also validates the rel- evance, informativeness, and diversity of the generated commonsense inferences. Overall, we demonstrate the potential of incorporating commonsense knowledge into the conventional recognition-level visual-linguistic pre-training.

Bridging the Gap between Recognition-level Pre-training and Commonsensical Vision-language Tasks

Previous studies have shown the efficacy of knowledge augmentation methods in pretrained language models. However, these methods behave differently across domains and downstream tasks. In this work, we investigate the augmentation of pretrained language models with knowledge graph data in the cause-effect relation classification and commonsense causal reasoning tasks. After automatically verbalizing triples in ATOMIC2020, a wide coverage commonsense reasoning knowledge graph, we continually pretrain BERT and evaluate the resulting model on cause-effect pair classification and answering commonsense causal reasoning questions. Our results show that a continually pretrained language model augmented with commonsense reasoning knowledge outperforms our baselines on two commonsense causal reasoning benchmarks, COPA and BCOPA-CE, and a Temporal and Causal Reasoning (TCR) dataset, without additional improvement in model architecture or using quality-enhanced data for fine-tuning.

Knowledge-Augmented Language Models for Cause-Effect Relation Classification

Recently, models have been shown to predict the effects of unexpected situations, e.g., would cloudy skies help or hinder plant growth? Given a context, the goal of such situational reasoning is to elicit the consequences of a new situation (st) that arises in that context. We propose a method to iteratively build a graph of relevant consequences explicitly in a structured situational graph (st-graph) using natural language queries over a finetuned language model (M). Across multiple domains, CURIE generates st-graphs that humans find relevant and meaningful in eliciting the consequences of a new situation. We show that st-graphs generated by CURIE improve a situational reasoning end task (WIQA-QA) by 3 points on accuracy by simply augmenting their input with our generated situational graphs, especially for a hard subset that requires background knowledge and multi-hop reasoning.

CURIE: An Iterative Querying Approach for Reasoning About Situations

A major issue in open-domain dialogue generation is the agent's tendency to generate repetitive and generic responses. The lack in response diversity has been addressed in recent years via the use of latent variable models, such as the Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder (CVAE), which typically involve learning a latent Gaussian distribution over potential response intents. However, due to latent variable collapse, training latent variable dialogue models are notoriously complex, requiring substantial modification to the standard training process and loss function. Other approaches proposed to improve response diversity also largely entail a significant increase in training complexity. Hence, this paper proposes a Randomized Link (RL) Transformer as an alternative to the latent variable models. The RL Transformer does not require any additional enhancements to the training process or loss function. Empirical results show that, when it comes to response diversity, the RL Transformer achieved comparable performance compared to latent variable models.

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A Study on Manual and Automatic Evaluation for Text Style Transfer: The Case of Detoxification

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