Mexico

We present the first shared task on Semantic Textual Relatedness (STR). While earlier shared tasks primarily focused on semantic similarity, we instead investigate the broader phenomenon of semantic relatedness across 14 languages: Afrikaans, Algerian Arabic, Amharic, English, Hausa, Hindi, Indonesian, Kinyarwanda, Marathi, Moroccan Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Punjabi, Spanish, and Telugu. These languages originate from five distinct language families and are predominantly spoken in Africa and Asia -- regions characterised by the relatively limited availability of NLP resources. Each instance in the datasets is a sentence pair associated with a score that represents the degree of semantic textual relatedness between the two sentences. Participating systems were asked to rank sentence pairs by their closeness in meaning (i.e., their degree of semantic relatedness) in the 14 languages in three main tracks: (a) supervised, (b) unsupervised, and (c) crosslingual. The task attracted 163 participants. We received 70 submissions in total (across all tasks) from 51 different teams, and 38 system description papers. We report on the best-performing systems as well as the most common and the most effective approaches for the three different tracks.

NAACL 2024

SemEval Task 1: Semantic Textual Relatedness for African and Asian Languages

semantic relatedness

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

workshop paper

## 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.
 
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Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The use of machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies can assist in the preservation and revitalization of indigenous languages, particularly those classified as "low-resource." Given the increasing digitization of information, the development of translation tools for these languages is of significant importance. These tools not only facilitate better access to digital resources for indigenous communities but also stimulate language preservation efforts and potentially foster more inclusive, equitable societies, as demonstrated by the AmericasNLP workshop since 2021. The focus of this paper is Colombia, a country home to 65 distinct indigenous languages, presenting a vast spectrum of linguistic characteristics. This cultural and linguistic diversity is an inherent pillar of the nation's identity, and safeguarding it has been increasingly challenging given the dwindling number of native speakers and the communities' inclination towards oral traditions. Considering this context, scattered initiatives exist to develop translation systems for these languages. However, these endeavors suffer from a lack of consolidated, comparable data. This paper consolidates a dataset of parallel data in four Colombian indigenous languages - Wayuunaiki, Arhuaco, Inga, and Nasa - gathered from existing digital resources. It also presents the creation of baseline models for future translation and comparison, ultimately serving as a catalyst for incorporating more digital resources progressively.

Translation systems for low-resource Colombian Indigenous languages, a first step towards cultural preservation

Plains Cree (nêhiyawêwin) is a morphologically complex and predominantly prefixing language. The combinatory potential of inflectional and derivational/lexical prefixes and verb stems in Plains Cree makes it challenging for traditional auto-completion (or word suggestion) approaches to handle. The lack of a large corpus of Plains Cree also complicates the situation. This study attempts to investigate how well a BiLSTM model trained on a small Cree corpus can handle a word suggestion task. Moreover, this study evaluates whether the use of semantically and morphosyntactically refined Word2Vec embeddings can improve the overall accuracy and quality of BiLSTM suggestions. The results show that some models trained with the refined vectors provide semantically and morphosyntactically better suggestions. They are also more accurate in predictions of content words. The model trained with the non-refined vectors, in contrast, was better at predicting conjunctions, particles, and other non-inflecting words. The models trained with different refined vector combinations provide the expected next word among top-10 predictions in 36.73 to 37.88\% of cases (depending on the model).

Word-level prediction in Plains Cree: First steps

Languages can encode temporal subordination lexically, via subordinating conjunctions, and morphologically, by marking the relation on the predicate. Systematic cross-linguistic variation among the former can be studied using well-established token-based typological approaches to token-aligned parallel corpora. Variation among different morphological means is instead much harder to tackle and therefore more poorly understood, despite being predominant in several language groups. This paper explores variation in the expression of generic temporal subordination ('when'-clauses) among the languages of Latin America and the Caribbean, where morphological marking is particularly common. It presents probabilistic semantic maps computed on the basis of the languages of the region, thus avoiding bias towards the many world's languages that exclusively use lexified connectors, incorporating associations between character n-grams and English when. The approach allows capturing morphological clause-linkage devices in addition to lexified connectors, paving the way for larger-scale, strategy-agnostic analyses of typological variation in temporal subordination.

Mapping 'when'-clauses in Latin American and Caribbean languages: an experiment in subtoken-based typology

We investigate how useful are machine translators based on the fine-tuning of LLMs with very small amounts of training data, typical of extremely low-resource languages such as Indigenous languages. We started by developing translators for the Guarani Mbya and Nheengatu languages by fine-tuning a WMT-19 German-English translator. We then performed a human evaluation of the usefulness of the results of test sets and compared them to their SacreBLUE scores. We had a level of alignment around 60-70\%, although there were about 40\% of very wrong translations.
The results suggest the need of a filter for bad translations as a way to make the translators useful, possibly only in scenarios of human-AI collaboration such as writing-support assistants.

Human Evaluation of the Usefulness of Fine-Tuned English Translators for the Guarani Mbya and Nheengatu Indigenous Languages

Throughout history, pictorial record-keeping has been used to document events, stories, and concepts.  A popular example of this is the Tzolk'in Maya calendar. The pre-Columbian Mixtec society also recorded many works through graphical media called codices that depict both stories and real events. Mixtec codices are unique because the depicted scenes are highly structured within and across documents. As a first effort toward translation, we created two binary classification tasks over Mixtec codices, namely, gender and pose. The composition of figures within a codex is essential for understanding the codex's narrative. We labeled a dataset with around 1300 figures drawn from three codices of varying qualities. We finetuned the Visual Geometry Group 16 (VGG-16) and Vision Transformer 16 (ViT-16) models, measured their performance, and compared learned features with expert opinions found in literature.  The results show that when finetuned, both VGG and ViT perform well, with the transformer-based architecture (ViT) outperforming the CNN-based architecture (VGG) at higher learning rates.  We are releasing this work to allow collaboration with the Mixtec community and domain scientists.

Analyzing Finetuned Vision Models for Mixtec Codex Interpretation

Kalaallisut, also known as (West) Greenlandic, poses a number of unique challenges to contemporary natural language processing (NLP). In particular, the language has historically lacked benchmarking datasets and robust evaluation of specific NLP tasks, such as neural machine translation (NMT). 

In this paper, we present a new benchmark dataset for Greenlandic to Danish NMT comprising over 1.2m words of Greenlandic and 2.1m words of parallel Danish translations. We provide initial metrics for models trained on this dataset and conclude by suggesting how these findings can be taken forward to other NLP tasks for the Greenlandic language.

A New Benchmark for Kalaallisut-Danish Neural Machine Translation

This paper presents the results of the SHROOM, a shared task focused on detecting hallucinations: outputs from natural language generation (NLG) systems that are fluent, yet inaccurate. Such cases of overgeneration put in jeopardy many NLG applications, where correctness is often mission-critical. The shared task was conducted with a newly constructed dataset of 4000 model outputs labeled by 5 annotators each, spanning 3 NLP tasks: machine translation, paraphrase generation and definition modeling. The shared task was tackled by a total of 58 different users grouped in 42 teams, out of which 26 elected to write a system description paper; collectively, they submitted over 300 prediction sets on both tracks of the shared task. We observe a number of key trends in how this approach was tackled---many participants rely on a handful of model, and often rely either on synthetic data for fine-tuning or zero-shot prompting strategies. While a majority of the teams did outperform our proposed baseline system, the performances of top-scoring systems are still consistent with a random handling of the more challenging items.

SemEval-2024 Task 6: SHROOM, a Shared-task on Hallucinations and Related Observable Overgeneration Mistakes

While vertical thinking relies on logical and commonsense reasoning, lateral thinking requires systems to defy commonsense associations and overwrite them through unconventional thinking. Lateral thinking has been shown to be challenging for current models but has received little attention. A recent benchmark, BRAINTEASER, aims to evaluate current models’ lateral thinking ability in a zeroshot setting. In this paper, we split the original benchmark to also support fine-tuning setting and present SemEval Task 9: BRAINTEASER(S), 1 the first task at this competition designed to test the system’s reasoning and lateral thinking ability. As a popular task, BRAINTEASER(S)’s two subtasks receive 483 team submissions from 182 participants during the competition. This paper provides a fine-grained system analysis of the competition results, together with a reflection on what this means for the ability of the systems to reason laterally. We hope that the BRAINTEASER(S) subtasks and findings in this paper can stimulate future work on lateral thinking and robust reasoning by computational models.

SemEval-2024 Task 9: BRAINTEASER: A Novel Task Defying Common Sense

We summarize the results of SemEval- 2024 Task 5: Argument Reasoning in Civil Procedure, consisting of a single task on judging and reasoning about the answers to questions in U.S. civil procedure. The dataset for this task contains question, answer and explanation pairs taken from The Glannon Guide To Civil Procedure (Glannon, 2018). The task was to classify in a binary manner if the answer is a correct choice for the question or not.

SemEval-2024 Task 5: Argument Reasoning in Civil Procedure

We present the results and the main findings of SemEval-2024 Task 8: Multigenerator, Multidomain, and Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detection. The task featured three subtasks. Subtask A is a binary classification task determining whether a text is written by a human or generated by a machine. This subtask has two tracks: a monolingual track focused solely on English texts and a multilingual track. Subtask B is to detect the exact source of a text, discerning whether it is written by a human or generated by a specific LLM. Subtask C aims to identify the changing point within a text, at which the authorship transitions from human to machine. The task attracted a large number of participants: subtask A monolingual (126), subtask A multilingual (59), subtask B (70), and subtask C (30). In this paper, we present the task, analyze the results, and discuss the system submissions and the methods they used. For all subtasks, the best systems used LLMs.

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