Mexico

Minimum Bayes-risk (MBR) decoding has recently gained renewed attention in text generation. MBR decoding considers texts sampled from a model as pseudo-references and selects the text with the highest similarity to the others. Therefore, sampling is one of the key elements of MBR decoding, and previous studies reported that the performance varies by sampling methods. From a theoretical standpoint, this performance variation is likely tied to how closely the samples approximate the true distribution of references. However, this approximation has not been the subject of in-depth study. In this study, we propose using anomaly detection to measure the degree of approximation. We first closely examine the performance variation and then show that previous hypotheses about samples do not correlate well with the variation, but our introduced anomaly scores do. The results are the first to empirically support the link between the performance and the core assumption of MBR decoding.

NAACL 2024

On the True Distribution Approximation of Minimum Bayes-Risk Decoding

minimum bayes-risk decoding

mbr decoding

anomaly detection

machine translation

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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## 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

Several large-scale datasets (e.g., WikiSQL, Spider) for developing natural language interfaces to databases have recently been proposed. These datasets cover a wide breadth of domains but fall short on some essential domains, such as finance and accounting. Given that accounting databases are used worldwide, particularly by non-technical people, there is an imminent need to develop models that could help extract information from accounting databases via natural language queries. In this resource paper, we aim to fill this gap by proposing a new large-scale Text-to-SQL dataset for the accounting and financial domain: BookSQL. The dataset consists of 100k natural language queries-SQL pairs, and accounting databases of 1 million records. We experiment with and analyze existing state-of-the-art models (including GPT-4) for the Text-to-SQL task on BookSQL. We find significant performance gaps, thus pointing towards developing more focused models for this domain.

BookSQL: A Large Scale Text-to-SQL Dataset for Accounting Domain

Recent progress in natural language processing (NLP) owes much to remarkable advances in large language models (LLMs). Nevertheless, LLMs frequently “hallucinate,” resulting in non-factual outputs. Our carefully-designed human evaluation substantiates the serious hallucination issue, revealing that even GPT-3.5 produces factual outputs less than 25% of the time. This underscores the importance of fact verifiers in order to measure and incentivize progress. Our systematic investigation affirms that LLMs can be repurposed as effective fact verifiers with strong correlations with human judgments. Surprisingly, FLAN-T5-11B , the least factual generator in our study, performs the best as a fact verifier, even outperforming more capable LLMs like GPT3.5 and ChatGPT. Delving deeper, we analyze the reliance of these LLMs on high-quality evidence, as well as their deficiencies in robustness and generalization ability. Our study presents insights for developing trustworthy generation models.

Language Models Hallucinate, but May Excel at Fact Verification

We present COPAL-ID, a novel, public Indonesian language common sense reasoning dataset. Unlike the previous Indonesian COPA dataset (XCOPA-ID), COPAL-ID incorporates Indonesian local and cultural nuances, and therefore, provides a more natural portrayal of day-to-day causal reasoning within the Indonesian cultural sphere. Professionally written by natives from scratch, COPAL-ID is more fluent and free from awkward phrases, unlike the translated XCOPA-ID. In addition, we present COPALID in both standard Indonesian and in Jakartan Indonesian–a dialect commonly used in daily conversation. COPAL-ID poses a greater challenge for existing open-sourced and closed state-of-the-art multilingual language models, yet is trivially easy for humans. Our findings suggest that general multilingual models struggle to perform well, achieving 66.91% accuracy on COPAL-ID. South-East Asian-specific models achieve slightly better performance of 73.88% accuracy. Yet, this number still falls short of near-perfect human performance. This shows that these language models are still way behind in comprehending the local nuances of Indonesian.

COPAL-ID: Indonesian Language Reasoning with Local Culture and Nuances

In this paper, we introduce a benchmark for evaluating the overall quality of emergent languages using data-driven methods. Specifically, we interpret the notion of the "quality" of an emergent language as its similarity to human language within a deep learning framework. We measure this by using the emergent language as pretraining data for a downstream NLP tasks in human language---the better the downstream performance, the better the emergent language. We implement this benchmark as an easy-to-use Python package that only requires a text file of utterances from the emergent language to be evaluated. Finally, we empirically test the benchmark's validity using human, synthetic, and emergent language baselines.

XferBench: a Data-Driven Benchmark for Emergent Language

This paper proposes a methodology for generating and perturbing detailed derivations of equations at scale, aided by a symbolic engine, to evaluate the generalisability of Transformers to out-of-distribution mathematical reasoning problems. Instantiating the framework in the context of sequence classification tasks, we compare the capabilities of GPT-4, GPT-3.5, and a canon of fine-tuned BERT models, exploring the relationship between specific operators and generalisation failure via the perturbation of reasoning aspects such as symmetry and variable surface forms. Surprisingly, our empirical evaluation reveals that the average in-distribution performance of fine-tuned models surpasses GPT-3.5, and rivals GPT-4. However, perturbations to input reasoning can reduce their performance by up to 80 F1 points. Overall, the results suggest that the in-distribution performance of smaller open-source models may potentially rival GPT by incorporating appropriately structured derivation dependencies during training, and highlight a shared weakness between BERT and GPT involving a relative inability to decode indirect references to mathematical entities. We release the full codebase, constructed datasets, and fine-tuned models to encourage future progress in the field.

A Symbolic Framework for Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning and Generalisation with Transformers

In this paper we present an exploratory research on quantifying the impact that data distribution has on the performance and evaluation of NLP models. We propose an automated framework that measures the data point distribution across 6 different dimensions: ambiguity, difficulty, discriminability, length, noise, and perplexity. We use disproportional stratified sampling to measure how much the data distribution affects absolute (Acc/F1) and relative (Rank) model performance. We experiment on 2 different datasets (SQUAD and MNLI) and test a total of 135 different models (125 on SQUAD and 10 on MNLI). We demonstrate that without explicit control of the data distribution, standard evaluation frameworks are inconsistent and unreliable. We find that the impact of the data is statistically significant and is often larger than the impact of changing the metric. In a second set of experiments, we demonstrate that the impact of data on evaluation is not just observable, but also predictable. We propose to use benchmark transparency as a method for comparing datasets and quantifying the similarity between them. We find that the ``dataset similarity vector'' can be used to predict how well a model generalizes out of distribution.

Benchmark Transparency: Measuring the Impact of Data on Evaluation

Current logical reasoning evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily focus on single-turn and static environments, such as arithmetic problems. The crucial problem of multi-turn, strategic reasoning is under-explored. In this work, we analyze the multi-turn strategic reasoning of LLMs through text-driven complete- and incomplete-information gaming, e.g., board games (Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect-4) and poker games (Texas Hold’em Poker). Specifically, we consider two distinct scenarios: 1) Online Racing, featuring multiple LLMs/agents to facilitate direct competition and comparison; 2) Offline Probing, constructing targeted questions with verified ground truth to evaluate LLMs’ strategic behaviors. Experimental results demonstrate that existing state-of-the-art LLMs and reasoning schemes are largely ineffective for strategic reasoning tasks. To mitigate these limitations, we propose a simple yet effective Recursively Thinking-Ahead (ReTA) agent, incorporating a recursive prompting mechanism that automatically analyzes the opponents’ future moves/actions and assigns reward signals for these situations, to strengthen the strategic reasoning of LLMs. We hope our work could spur further research and exploration in the multi-turn strategic reasoning of LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/jinhaoduan/ReTA.

ReTA: Recursively Thinking Ahead to Improve the Strategic Reasoning of Large Language Models

In machine translation, the problem of ambiguously gendered input has been pointed out, where the gender of an entity is not available in the source sentence. To address this ambiguity issue, the task of controlled translation that takes the gender of the ambiguous entity as additional input have been proposed. However, most existing works have only considered a simplified setup of one target gender for input. In this paper, we tackle controlled translation in a more realistic setting of inputs with multiple entities and propose Gender-of-Entity (GoE) prompting method for LLMs. Our proposed method instructs the model with fine-grained entity-level gender information to translate with correct gender inflections. By utilizing four evaluation benchmarks, we investigate the controlled translation capability of LLMs in multiple dimensions and find that LLMs reach state-of-the-art performance in controlled translation. Furthermore, we discover an emergence of gender interference phenomenon when controlling the gender of multiple entities. Finally, we address the limitations of existing gender accuracy evaluation metrics and propose leveraging LLMs as an evaluator for gender inflection in machine translation.

Fine-grained Gender Control in Machine Translation with Large Language Models

Despite the recent progress on scaling multilingual machine translation (MT) to several under-resourced African languages, accurately measuring this progress remains challenging, since evaluation is often performed on n-gram matching metrics such as BLEU, which typically show a weaker correlation with human judgments. Learned metrics such as COMET have higher correlation; however, the lack of evaluation data with human ratings for under-resourced languages, complexity of annotation guidelines like Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), and limited language coverage of multilingual encoders have hampered their applicability to African languages. In this paper, we address these challenges by creating high-quality human evaluation data with simplified MQM guidelines for error detection and direct assessment (DA) scoring for 13 typologically diverse African languages. Furthermore, we develop AfriCOMET: COMET evaluation metrics for African languages by leveraging DA data from well-resourced languages and an African-centric multilingual encoder (AfroXLM-R) to create the state-of-the-art MT evaluation metrics for African languages with respect to Spearman-rank correlation with human judgments (0.441).

AfriMTE and AfriCOMET: Enhancing COMET to Embrace Under-resourced African Languages

Insufficient modeling of human preferences within the reward model is a major obstacle for leveraging human feedback to improve translation quality. Fortunately, quality estimation (QE), which predicts the quality of a given translation without reference, has achieved impressive alignment with human evaluations in the last two years. In this work, we investigate the potential of employing the QE model as the reward model to predict human preferences for feedback training. We first identify the overoptimization problem during QE-based feedback training, manifested as an increase in reward while translation quality declines. We examine the problem and argue that the vulnerability of the QE model might lead to high rewards for incorrect translations, resulting in overoptimization and error propagation. To address the problem, we adopt a simple yet effective method that uses heuristic rules to detect the incorrect translations and assigns a penalty term to the reward scores of them. Experimental results show that the proposed QE-based feedback training achieves consistent and significant improvements across various settings, further verified through human preference studies. Our subsequent analysis demonstrates the high data efficiency of the proposed QE-based feedback training: it outperforms systems using larger parallel corpora by a small amount of monolingual data. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zwhe99/FeedbackMT

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BookSQL: A Large Scale Text-to-SQL Dataset for Accounting Domain

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Theoretical Guarantees for Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding