Mexico

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with maintaining accuracy throughout multiple multiple reasoning steps, especially in mathematical reasoning where an error in earlier steps can propagate to subsequent ones and it ultimately leading to an incorrect answer. To reduce error propagation, guided decoding is employed to direct the LM decoding on a step-by-step basis. We argue that in guided decoding, assessing the potential of an incomplete reasoning path can be more advantageous than simply ensuring per-step correctness, as the former approach leads towards a correct final answer. This transforms the task into a $\textit{value estimation}$ problem in planning. Inspired by the findings that $\textit{outcome supervision for guided decoding essentially acts as a value model}$, we propose Outcome-supervised Value Model (OVM) that employs outcome supervision for training a value model, which prioritizes steps that lead to accurate conclusions. Furthermore, the OVM eliminates the need for labor-intensive annotations of step-level correctness, thereby significantly enhancing its scalability. Our experiments on two multi-step mathematical reasoning datasets, GSM8K and Game of 24, demonstrate the superior performance of the OVM model. Notably, in GSM8K, our $\textbf{OVM-7B model achieves state-of-the-art results among LLMs up to 13B parameters}$; especially it does not utilize GPT-4 or code execution. These findings offer a novel perspective on the role of outcome supervision in training value models for multi-step reasoning tasks and provide theoretical justification for its advantage in value estimation for guided decoding.

NAACL 2024

OVM, Outcome-supervised Value Models for Planning in Mathematical Reasoning

outcome supervision

value model

guided decoding

planning

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.

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.
 
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The University of Texas at Austin 
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2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Recent work has proposed explicitly inducing language-wise modularity in multilingual LMs via sparse fine-tuning (SFT) on per-language subnetworks as a means of better guiding cross-lingual sharing. In this paper, we investigate (1) the degree to which language-wise modularity *naturally* arises within models with no special modularity interventions, and (2) how cross-lingual sharing and interference differ between such models and those with explicit SFT-guided subnetwork modularity. In order to do so, we use XLM-R as our multilingual LM. Moreover, to quantify language specialization and cross-lingual interaction, we use a Training Data Attribution method that estimates the degree to which a model's predictions are influenced by in-language or cross-language training examples. Our results show that language-specialized subnetworks do naturally arise, and that SFT, rather than always increasing modularity, can decrease language specialization of subnetworks in favor of more cross-lingual sharing.

Examining Modularity in Multilingual LMs via Language-Specialized Subnetworks

Large language models trained primarily in a monolingual setting have demonstrated their ability to generalize to machine translation using zero- and few-shot examples with in-context learning. However, even though zero-shot translations are relatively good, there remains a discernible gap comparing their performance with the few-shot setting. In this paper, we investigate the factors contributing to this gap and find that this gap can largely be closed (for about 70\%) by matching the writing styles of the target corpus. Additionally, we explore potential approaches to enhance zero-shot baselines without the need for parallel demonstration examples, providing valuable insights into how these methods contribute to improving translation metrics.

Narrowing the Gap between Zero- and Few-shot Machine Translation by Matching Styles

We propose on-the-fly ensembling of a neural machine translation (NMT) model with a large language model (LLM), prompted on the same task and input. Through experiments on 4 language directions with varying data amounts, we find that a slightly weaker-at-translation LLM can improve translations of a NMT model, and such an ensemble can produce better translations than ensembling two stronger NMT models. We demonstrate that our ensemble method can be combined with various techniques from LLM prompting, such as in context learning and translation context.

On-the-Fly Fusion of Large Language Models and Machine Translation

This paper introduces Q-tuning, a novel approach for continual prompt tuning that enables the lifelong learning of a pre-trained language model. When learning a new task, Q-tuning trains a task-specific prompt by adding it to a prompt queue consisting of the prompts from older tasks. To better transfer the knowledge of old tasks, we design an adaptive knowledge aggregation technique that reweighs previous prompts in the queue with a learnable low-rank matrix. Once the prompt queue reaches its maximum capacity, we leverage a PCA-based eviction rule to reduce the queue's size, allowing the newly trained prompt to be added while preserving the primary knowledge of old tasks. In order to mitigate the accumulation of information loss caused by the eviction, we additionally propose a globally shared prefix prompt and a memory retention regularization based on information theory. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods substantially on continual prompt tuning benchmarks. Moreover, our approach enables lifelong learning on linearly growing task sequences while requiring constant complexity for training and inference.

Q-Tuning: Queue-based Prompt Tuning for Lifelong Few-shot Language Learning

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in handling multilingual machine translation (MMT). In this paper, we systematically investigate the advantages and challenges of LLMs for MMT by answering two questions: 1) How well do LLMs perform in translating massive languages? 2) Which factors affect LLMs' performance in translation? We thoroughly evaluate eight popular LLMs, including ChatGPT and GPT-4. Our empirical results show that translation capabilities of LLMs are continually involving. GPT-4 has beat the strong supervised baseline NLLB in 40.91\% of translation directions but still faces a large gap towards the commercial translation system like Google Translate, especially on low-resource languages. Through further analysis, we discover that LLMs exhibit new working patterns when used for MMT. First, LLM can acquire translation ability in a resource-efficient way and generate moderate translation even on zero-resource languages. Second, instruction semantics can surprisingly be ignored when given in-context exemplars. Third, cross-lingual exemplars can provide better task guidance for low-resource translation than exemplars in the same language pairs. Code will be released at: https://github.com/NJUNLP/MMT-LLM.

Multilingual Machine Translation with Large Language Models: Empirical Results and Analysis

Retrieval-Augmented Neural Machine Translation (RAMT) architectures retrieve examples from memory to guide the generation process. While most works in this trend explore new ways to exploit the retrieved examples, the upstream retrieval step is mostly unexplored. In this paper, we study the effect of varying retrieval methods for several translation architectures to better understand the interplay between these two processes. We conduct experiments in two language pairs in a multi-domain setting and consider several downstream architectures based on a standard autoregressive model, an edit-based model, and a large language model with in-context learning. Our experiments show that the choice of the retrieval technique impacts the translation scores, with variance across architectures. We also discuss the effects of increasing the number and diversity of examples, which are mostly positive across the board.

Retrieving Examples from Memory for Retrieval Augmented Neural Machine Translation: A Systematic Comparison

Tamil, a Dravidian language of South Asia, is a highly diglossic language with two very different registers in everyday use: Literary Tamil (preferred in writing and formal communication) and Spoken Tamil (confined to speech and informal media). Spoken Tamil is under-studied in modern NLP systems compared to Literary Tamil written in the Tamil script, as evidenced by a lack of datasets explicitly targetting the Spoken variety. In this paper, we release IruMozhi, a human-translated dataset of parallel text in Literary and Spoken Tamil. Using IruMozhi, we train classifiers on the task of identifying which Tamil variety a text belongs to. We use these models to gauge the availability of pretraining data in Spoken Tamil, to audit the composition of existing labelled datasets for Tamil, and to encourage future work on the variety.

IruMozhi: Automatically classifying diglossia in Tamil

Most pretrained language models rely on subword tokenization, which processes text as a sequence of subword tokens. However, different granularities of text, such as characters, subwords, and words, can contain different kinds of information. Previous studies have shown that incorporating multiple input granularities improves model generalization, yet very few of them outputs useful representations for each granularity. In this paper, we introduce the entanglement model, aiming to combine character and subword language models. Inspired by vision-language models, our model treats characters and subwords as separate modalities, and it generates mutually informed representations for both granularities as output. We evaluate our model on text classification, named entity recognition, POS-tagging, and character-level sequence labeling (intraword code-switching). Notably, the entanglement model outperforms its backbone language models, particularly in the presence of noisy texts and low-resource languages. Furthermore, the entanglement model even outperforms larger pre-trained models on all English sequence labeling tasks and classification tasks. We make our code publically available.

Learning Mutually Informed Representations for Characters and Subwords

Typologically diverse benchmarks are increasingly created to track the progress achieved in multilingual NLP. Linguistic diversity of these data sets is typically measured as the number of languages or language families included in the sample, but such measures do not consider structural properties of the included languages. In this paper, we propose assessing linguistic diversity of a data set against a reference language sample as a means of maximising linguistic diversity in the long run. We represent languages as sets of features and apply a version of the Jaccard index suitable for comparing sets of measures. In addition to the features extracted from typological data bases, we propose an automatic text-based measure, which can be used as a means of overcoming the well-known problem of data sparsity in manually collected features. Our diversity score is interpretable in terms of linguistic features and can identify the types of languages that are not represented in a data set. Using our method, we analyse a range of popular multilingual data sets (UD, Bible100, mBERT, XTREME, XGLUE, XNLI, XCOPA, TyDiQA, XQuAD). In addition to ranking these data sets, we find, for example, that (poly)synthetic languages are missing in almost all of them.

A Measure for Transparent Comparison of Linguistic Diversity in Multilingual NLP Data Sets

Traditional Automatic Video Dubbing (AVD) pipeline consists of three key modules, namely, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Neural Machine Translation (NMT), and Text-to-Speech (TTS). Within AVD pipelines, isometric-NMT algorithms are employed to regulate the length of the synthesized output text. This is done to guarantee synchronization with respect to the alignment of video and audio subsequent to the dubbing process. Previous approaches have focused on aligning the number of characters and words in the source and target language texts of Machine Translation models. However, our approach aims to align the number of phonemes instead, as they are closely associated with speech duration. In this paper, we present the development of an isometric NMT system using Reinforcement Learning (RL), with a focus on optimizing the alignment of phoneme counts in the source and target language sentence pairs. To evaluate our models, we propose the Phoneme Count Compliance (PCC) score, which is a measure of length compliance. Our approach demonstrates a substantial improvement of approximately 36% in the PCC score compared to the state-of-the-art models when applied to English-Hindi language pairs. Moreover, we propose a student-teacher architecture within the framework of our RL approach to maintain a trade-off between the phoneme count and translation quality.

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Examining Modularity in Multilingual LMs via Language-Specialized Subnetworks

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