Mexico

Lexical resemblances among a group of languages indicate that the languages could be genetically related, i.e., they could have descended from a common ancestral language. However, such resemblances can arise by chance and, hence, need not always imply an underlying genetic relationship. Many tests of significance based on permutation of wordlists and word similarity measures appeared in the past to determine the statistical significance of such relationships. We demonstrate that although existing tests may work well for bilateral comparisons, i.e., on pairs of languages, they are either infeasible by design or are prone to yield false positives when applied to groups of languages or language families. To this end, inspired by molecular phylogenetics, we propose a likelihood ratio test to determine if given languages are related based on the proportion of invariant character sites in the aligned wordlists applied during tree inference. Further, we evaluate some language families and show that the proposed test solves the problem of false positives. Finally, we demonstrate that the test supports the existence of macro language families such as Nostratic and Macro-Mayan.

NAACL 2024

A Likelihood Ratio Test of Genetic Relationship among Languages

genetic relationship

likelihood ratio test

significance testing

computational historical linguistics

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

poster

## 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 
*You can read the full Welcome message in the [Conference Handbook (downloadable)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H1NvW0VASQjkSCYgw3mr-3l4yYDSxz6B/view?usp=sharing)*

To access the event page you need to register [**here.**](http://acl.swoogo.com/naacl2024) 
Your access to the event page is limited based on your registration type. If you registered for workshops only, you will gain access to full workshops content on the day of the workshops program.

Please register!

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

Learning argumentative writing is challenging. Besides writing fundamentals such as syntax and grammar, learners must select and arrange argument components meaningfully to create high-quality essays. To support argumentative writing computationally, one step is to mine the argumentative structure. When combined with automatic essay scoring, interactions of the argumentative structure and quality scores can be exploited for comprehensive writing support. Although studies have shown the usefulness of using information about the argumentative structure for essay scoring, no argument mining corpus with ground-truth essay quality annotations has been published yet. Moreover, none of the existing corpora contain essays written by school students specifically. To fill this research gap, we present a German corpus of 1,320 essays from school students of two age groups. Each essay has been manually annotated for argumentative structure and quality on multiple levels of granularity. We propose baseline approaches to argument mining and essay scoring, and we analyze interactions between both tasks, thereby laying the ground for quality-oriented argumentative writing support.

A School Student Essay Corpus for Analyzing Interactions of Argumentative Structure and Quality

Embedding spaces contain interpretable dimensions indicating gender, formality in style, or even object properties. This has been observed multiple times. Such interpretable dimensions are becoming valuable tools in different areas of study, from social science to neuroscience. The standard way to compute these dimensions uses contrasting seed words and computes difference vectors over them. This is simple but does not always work well. We combine seed-based vectors with guidance from human ratings of where words fall along a specific dimension, and evaluate on predicting both object properties like size and danger, and the stylistic properties of formality and complexity. We obtain interpretable dimensions with markedly better performance especially in cases where seed-based dimensions do not work well.

Adjusting Interpretable Dimensions in Embedding Space with Human Judgments

In this work, we measure the impact of affixal negation on modern English large language models (LLMs). In affixal negation, the negated meaning is expressed through a negative morpheme, which is potentially challenging for LLMs as their tokenizers are often not morphologically plausible. We conduct extensive experiments using LLMs with different subword tokenization methods, which lead to several insights on the interaction between tokenization performance and negation sensitivity. Despite some interesting mismatches between tokenization accuracy and negation detection performance, we show that models can, on the whole, reliably recognize the meaning of affixal negation.

Revisiting subword tokenization: A case study on affixal negation in large language models

Byte-pair encoding (BPE) has become the default subword tokeniser in language models (LMs), allowing the representation of an infinite space of text with a finite set of units. Yet, BPE training is unsupervised, receiving no explicit information about a language's morphology. This results in a subword vocabulary wherein many units are a concatenation of partial morphemes, preventing their formation as tokens. This, in turn, causes consistent intra-word patterns to be displayed inconsistently to downstream models, and bloats the vocabulary, hence requiring unnecessary embedding storage. In this paper, we address this issue by identifying blameworthy BPE merges and removing the resulting subwords from the BPE vocabulary, without impeding further use of merges that relied on them. We find that our method, BPE-knockout, is effective at making BPE's segmentation positions adhere better to derivational and compound boundaries in English, Dutch and German, and improves token-based tasks in Dutch RoBERTa models, indicating that a tokeniser's adherence to morphology impacts downstream models. We demonstrate the latter not only by training LMs from scratch, but also by continuing the pre-training of existing LMs. This proves promising, showing that suboptimal tokenisers can be remedied whilst salvaging training cost of downstream LMs.

BPE-knockout: Pruning Pre-existing BPE Tokenisers with Backwards-compatible Morphological Semi-supervision

Situations and events evoke emotions in humans, but to what extent do they inform the prediction of emotion detection models? This work investigates how well human-annotated emotion triggers correlate with features that models deemed salient in their prediction of emotions. First, we introduce a novel dataset EmoTrigger, consisting of 900 social media posts sourced from three different datasets; these were annotated by experts for emotion triggers with high agreement. Using EmoTrigger, we evaluate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to identify emotion triggers, and conduct a comparative analysis of the features considered important for these tasks between LLMs and fine-tuned models. Our analysis reveals that emotion triggers are largely not considered salient features for emotion prediction models, instead there is intricate interplay between various features and the task of emotion detection.

Language Models (Mostly) Do Not Consider Emotion Triggers When Predicting Emotion

Unlike traditional unsupervised clustering, semi-supervised clustering allows users to provide meaningful structure to the data, which helps the clustering algorithm to match the user's intent. Existing approaches to semi-supervised clustering require a significant amount of feedback from an expert to improve the clusters. In this paper, we ask whether a large language model can amplify an expert's guidance to enable query-efficient, few-shot semi-supervised text clustering. We show that LLMs are surprisingly effective at improving clustering. We explore three stages where LLMs can be incorporated into clustering: before clustering (improving input features), during clustering (by providing constraints to the clusterer), and after clustering (using LLMs post-correction). We find incorporating LLMs in the first two stages routinely provides significant improvements in cluster quality, and that LLMs enable a user to make trade-offs between cost and accuracy to produce desired clusters. We release our code and LLM prompts for the public to use.

Large Language Models Enable Few-Shot Clustering

As transformers have gained prominence in natural language processing, some researchers have investigated theoretically what problems they can and cannot solve, by treating problems as formal languages. Exploring such questions can help clarify the power of transformers relative to other models of computation, their fundamental capabilities and limits, and the impact of architectural choices. Work in this subarea has made considerable progress in recent years. Here, we undertake a comprehensive survey of this work, documenting the diverse assumptions that underlie different results and providing a unified framework for harmonizing seemingly contradictory findings.

What Formal Languages Can Transformers Express? A Survey

Sentences containing multiple semantic operators with overlapping scope often create ambiguities in interpretation, known as scope ambiguities. These ambiguities offer rich insights into the interaction between semantic structure and world knowledge in language processing. Despite this, there has been little research into how modern large language models treat them. In this paper, we investigate how different versions of certain autoregressive language modelsGPT-2, GPT-3/3.5, Llama 2 and GPT-4treat scope ambiguous sentences, and compare this with human judgments. We introduce novel datasets that contain a joint total of almost 1,000 unique scope-ambiguous sentences, containing interactions between a range of semantic operators, and annotated for human judgments. Using these datasets, we find evidence that several models (i) are sensitive to the meaning ambiguity in these sentences, in a way that patterns well with human judgments, and (ii) can successfully identify human-preferred readings at a high level of accuracy (over 90% in some cases).

Scope Ambiguities in Large Language Models

MIRACL is a multilingual dataset for ad hoc retrieval across 18 languages that collectively encompass over three billion native speakers around the world. This resource is designed to support monolingual retrieval tasks, where the queries and the corpora are in the same language. In total, we have gathered over 726k high-quality relevance judgments for 78k queries over Wikipedia in these languages, where all annotations have been performed by native speakers hired by our team. MIRACL covers languages that are both typologically close as well as distant from 10 language families and 13 sub-families, associated with varying amounts of publicly available resources. Extensive automatic heuristic verification and manual assessments were performed during the annotation process to control data quality. In total, MIRACL represents an investment of around five person years of human annotator effort. Our goal is to spur research on improving retrieval across a continuum of languages, thus enhancing information access capabilities for diverse populations around the world, particularly those that have traditionally been underserved. MIRACL is available at http://miracl.ai/.

MIRACL: A Multilingual Retrieval Dataset Covering 18 Diverse Languages

We present a syntactic dependency treebank for naturalistic child and child-directed spoken English. Our annotations largely follow the guidelines of the Universal Dependencies project (UD (Zeman et al., 2022)), with detailed extensions to lexical and syntactic structures unique to spontaneous spoken language, as opposed to written texts or prepared speech. Compared to existing UD-style spoken treebanks and other dependency corpora of child-parent interactions specifically, our data set is much larger (44,744 utterances; 233,907 words) and contains data from 10 children covering a wide age range (18-66 months). We conduct thorough dependency parser evaluations using both graph-based and transition-based parsers, trained on three different types of out-of-domain written texts: news, tweets, and learner data. Out-of-domain parsers demonstrate reasonable performance for both child and parent data. In addition, parser performance for child data increases along childrens developmental paths, especially between 18-48 months, and gradually approaches the performance for parent data. These results are further validated with in-domain training.

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A School Student Essay Corpus for Analyzing Interactions of Argumentative Structure and Quality

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Character Alignment in Morphologically Complex Translation Sets for Related Languages