United Arab Emirates

Pre-trained multilingual language models are the foundation of many NLP approaches, including cross-lingual transfer solutions. However, languages with small available monolingual corpora are often not well-supported by these models leading to poor performance. We propose an unsupervised approach to improve the cross-lingual representations of low-resource languages by bootstrapping word translation pairs from monolingual corpora and using them to improve language alignment in pre-trained language models. We perform experiments on nine languages, using contextual word retrieval and zero-shot named entity recognition to measure both intrinsic cross-lingual word representation quality and downstream task performance, showing improvements on both tasks. Our results show that it is possible to improve pre-trained multilingual language models by relying only on non-parallel resources.

EMNLP 2022

Improving Low-Resource Languages in Pre-Trained Multilingual Language Models

unsupervised alignment

cross-lingual representations

low-resource languages

multilinguality

multilingual language models

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/9eec7d4a287ee18c278b08229290aa83.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OlPv6QBeo62VVTughj2jkiLeyHd1WnUt/view)
 
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To access this site you need to register. Please register [here](https://2022.emnlp.org/registration/).

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Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Query language identification (Q-LID) plays a crucial role in cross-lingual search engine. There exist two main challenges in Q-LID: 1) insufficient contextual information in queries for disambiguation; and 2) the lack of query-style training examples for low-resource languages. In this paper, we propose a neural Q-LID model by alleviating the above problems from both model architecture and data augmentation perspectives. Concretely, we build our model upon the advanced TRANSFORMER model. In order to enhance the discrimination of queries, a variety of external features, e.g. character, word as well as script, are fed into the model and fused by a multi-scale attention mechanism. Moreover, to remedy the low resource challenge in this task, a novel machine translation based strategy is proposed to automatically generate synthetic query style data for low-resource languages. We contribute the first Q-LID test set called QID-21, which consists of search queries in 21 languages. Experimental results reveal that our model yields better classification accuracy than strong baselines and existing LID systems on both query and traditional LID tasks.

Effective Approaches to Neural Query Language Identification

We present a novel benchmark and associated evaluation metrics for assessing the performance of text anonymization methods. Text anonymization, defined as the task of editing a text document to prevent the disclosure of personal information, currently suffers from a shortage of privacy-oriented annotated text resources, making it difficult to properly evaluate the level of privacy protection offered by various anonymization methods. This paper presents TAB (Text Anonymization Benchmark), a new, open-source annotated corpus developed to address this shortage. The corpus comprises 1,268 English-language court cases from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) enriched with comprehensive annotations about the personal information appearing in each document, including their semantic category, identifier type, confidential attributes, and co-reference relations. Compared to previous work, the TAB corpus is designed to go beyond traditional de-identification (which is limited to the detection of predefined semantic categories), and explicitly marks which text spans ought to be masked in order to conceal the identity of the person to be protected. 
Along with presenting the corpus and its annotation layers, we also propose a set of evaluation metrics that are specifically tailored towards measuring the performance of text anonymization, both in terms of privacy protection and utility preservation. We illustrate the use of the benchmark and the proposed metrics by assessing the empirical performance of several baseline text anonymization models.

The Text Anonymization Benchmark (TAB): A Dedicated Corpus and Evaluation Framework for Text Anonymization

Knowledge-grounded dialogue systems powered by large language models often generate responses that, while fluent, are not attributable to a relevant source of information. Progress towards models that do not exhibit this issue requires evaluation metrics that can quantify its prevalence. To this end, we introduce the Benchmark for Evaluation of Grounded INteraction (BEGIN), comprised of 12k dialogue turns generated by neural dialogue systems trained on three knowledge-grounded dialogue corpora. We collect human annotations assessing the extent to which the models' responses can be attributed to the given background information. We then use BEGIN to analyze eight evaluation metrics. We find that these metrics rely on spurious correlations, do not reliably distinguish attributable abstractive responses from unattributable ones, and perform substantially worse when the knowledge source is longer. Our findings underscore the need for more sophisticated and robust evaluation metrics for knowledge-grounded dialogue. We make BEGIN publicly available at https://github.com/google/BEGIN-dataset .

Evaluating Attribution in Dialogue Systems: The BEGIN Benchmark

Cross-lingual summarization is the task of generating a summary in one language (e.g., English) for the given document(s) in a different language (e.g., Chinese). Under the globalization background, this task has attracted increasing attention of the computational linguistics community. Nevertheless, there still remains a lack of comprehensive review for this task. Therefore, we present the first systematic critical review on the datasets, approaches, and challenges in this field. Specifically, we carefully organize existing datasets and approaches according to different construction methods and solution paradigms, respectively. For each type of datasets or approaches, we thoroughly introduce and summarize previous efforts and further compare them with each other to provide deeper analyses. In the end, we also discuss promising directions and offer our thoughts to facilitate future research. This survey is for both beginners and experts in cross-lingual summarization, and we hope it will serve as a starting point as well as a source of new ideas for researchers and engineers interested in this area.

A Survey on Cross-Lingual Summarization

This paper presents Summary Workbench, a new tool for developing and evaluating text summarization models. New models and evaluation measures can be easily integrated as Docker-based plugins, allowing to examine the quality of their summaries against any input and to evaluate them using various evaluation measures. Visual analyses combining multiple measures provide insights into the models' strengths and weaknesses. The tool is hosted at https://tldr.demo.webis.de and also supports local deployment for private resources.

SUMMARY WORKBENCH: Unifying Application and Evaluation of Text Summarization Models

Pre-Trained Models (PTMs) have reshaped the development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and achieved significant improvement in various benchmarks. Yet, it is not easy for industrial practitioners to obtain high-performing PTM-based models without a large amount of labeled training data and deploy them online with fast inference speed. To bridge this gap, EasyNLP is designed to make it easy to build NLP applications, which supports a comprehensive suite of NLP algorithms. It further features knowledge-enhanced pre-training, knowledge distillation and few-shot learning functionalities, and provides a unified framework of model training, inference and deployment for real-world applications. EasyNLP has powered over ten business units within Alibaba Group and is seamlessly integrated to the Platform of AI (PAI) products on Alibaba Cloud. The source code of EasyNLP is released at GitHub (https://github.com/alibaba/EasyNLP).

EasyNLP: A Comprehensive and Easy-to-use Toolkit for Natural Language Processing

We present an open-source and extensible knowledge extraction toolkit DeepKE, supporting complicated low-resource, document-level and multimodal scenarios in knowledge base population. DeepKE implements various information extraction tasks, including named entity recognition, relation extraction and attribute extraction. With a unified framework, DeepKE allows developers and researchers to customize datasets and models to extract information from unstructured data according to their requirements. Specifically, DeepKE not only provides various functional modules and model implementation for different tasks and scenarios but also organizes all components by consistent frameworks to maintain sufficient modularity and extensibility. We release the source code at GitHub: https://github.com/zjunlp/DeepKE with Google Colab tutorials and comprehensive documents for beginners. Besides, we present an online system at http://deepke.zjukg.cn/ for real-time extraction of various tasks, and a demo video in http://deepke.zjukg.cn/demo.mp4.

DeepKE: A Deep Learning Based Knowledge Extraction Toolkit for Knowledge Base Population

Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success on various NLP tasks and have shown a trend of exponential growth in model size. To alleviate the unaffordable computational costs brought by the size growth, model compression has been widely explored. Existing efforts have achieved promising results in compressing medium-sized models for specific tasks, while task-agnostic compression for big models with over billions of parameters is rarely studied. Task-agnostic compression can provide an efficient and versatile big model for both prompting and delta tuning, leading to a more general impact than task-specific compression. Hence, we introduce a task-agnostic compression toolkit BMCook for big models. In BMCook, we implement four representative compression methods, including quantization, pruning, distillation, and MoEfication. Developers can easily combine these methods towards better efficiency. To evaluate BMCook, we apply it to compress T5-3B (a PLM with 3 billion parameters). We achieve nearly 12x efficiency improvement while maintaining over 97% of the original T5-3B performance on three typical NLP benchmarks. Moreover, the final compressed model also significantly outperforms T5-base (a PLM with 220 million parameters), which has a similar computational cost. BMCook is publicly available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/BMCook.

BMCook: A Task-agnostic Compression Toolkit for Big Models

TextBox 2.0 is a comprehensive and unified library, focusing on the use of pre-trained language models (PLMs) to facilitate research on text generation.
To be comprehensive, our library covers 13 common text generation tasks and their corresponding 83 datasets and further incorporates 45 PLMs. We also implement 4 efficient training strategies and provide 4 generation objectives for pre-training new PLMs from scratch.
To be unified, we design the interfaces to support the entire research pipeline (from data loading to training and evaluation), ensuring that each step can be fulfilled in a unified way. Despite the rich functionality, it is easy to use our library, either through the friendly Python API or command line.
We conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of our library, and the results show that it can accurately reproduce existing models. Besides, we exemplify four types of research scenarios. The project is released at the link: https://github.com/RUCAIBox/TextBox.

TextBox 2.0: A Text Generation Library with Pre-trained Language Models

Diagnostic coding, or ICD coding, is the task of assigning diagnosis codes defined by the ICD (International Classification of Diseases) standard to patient visits based on clinical notes. The current process of manual ICD coding is time-consuming and often error-prone, which suggests the need for automatic ICD coding. However, despite the long history of automatic ICD coding, there have been no standardized frameworks for benchmarking ICD coding models.
We open-source an easy-to-use tool named AnEMIC, which provides a streamlined pipeline for preprocessing, training, and evaluating for automatic ICD coding. We correct errors in preprocessing by existing works, and provide key models and weights trained on the correctly preprocessed datasets. We also provide an interactive demo performing real-time inference from custom inputs, and visualizations drawn from explainable AI to analyze the models. We hope the framework helps move the research of ICD coding forward and helps professionals explore the potential of ICD coding. The framework and the associated code are available here.

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Effective Approaches to Neural Query Language Identification

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