Mexico

We study the patent phrase similarity inference task, which measures the semantic similarity between two patent phrases. As patent documents employ legal and highly technical language, existing semantic textual similarity methods that use localized contextual information do not perform satisfactorily in inferring patent phrase similarity. To address this, we introduce a graph-augmented approach to amplify the global contextual information of the patent phrases. For each patent phrase, we construct a phrase graph that links to its focal patents and a list of patents that are either cited by or cite these focal patents. The augmented phrase embedding is then derived from combining its localized contextual embedding with its global embedding within the phrase graph. We further propose a self-supervised learning objective that capitalizes on the retrieved topology to refine both the contextualized embedding and the graph parameters in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results from a unique patent phrase similarity dataset demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the representation of patent phrases, resulting in marked improvements in similarity inference in a self-supervised fashion. Substantial improvements are also observed in the supervised setting, underscoring the potential benefits of leveraging retrieved phrase graph augmentation.

NAACL 2024

Connecting the Dots: Inferring Patent Phrase Similarity with Retrieved Phrase Graphs

retrieval-augmented embedding

phrase graph

patent phrase similarity

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

EACL 2023

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

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)*

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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

Argument mining has focused so far mainly on the identification, extraction, and formalization of arguments. An important yet unaddressed task consists in the prediction of the argumentative behavior of stakeholders in a debate. Predicting the argumentative behavior in advance can support foreseeing issues in public policy making or help recognize potential disagreements early on and help to resolve them. In this paper, we consider the novel task of predicting the argumentative behavior of individual stakeholders. We present ARGENST, a framework that relies on a recommender-based architecture to predict the stance and the argumentative main point on a specific controversial topic for a given stakeholder, which is described in terms of a profile including properties related to demographic attributes, religious and political orientation, socio-economic background, etc. We evaluate our approach on the well-known debate.org dataset in terms of accuracy for predicting stance as well as in terms of similarity of the generated arguments to the ground truth arguments using BERTScore. As part of a case study, we show how juries of members representing different stakeholder groups and perspectives can be assembled to simulate the public opinion on a given topic.

“Tell me who you are and I tell you how you argue”: Predicting Stances and Arguments for Stakeholder Groups

Opinion summarization is automatically generating summaries from a variety of subjective information, such as product reviews or political opinions. The challenge of opinions summarization lies in presenting divergent or even conflicting opinions. We conduct an analysis of previous summarization models, which reveals their inclination to amplify the polarity bias, emphasizing the majority opinions while ignoring the minority opinions. To address this issue and make the summarizer express both sides of opinions, we introduce the concept of polarity calibration, which aims to align the polarity of output summary with that of input text. Specifically, we develop a reinforcement training approach for polarity calibration. This approach feeds the polarity distance between output summary and input text as reward into the summarizer, and also balance polarity calibration with content preservation and language naturality. We evaluate our Polarity Calibration model (PoCa) on two types of opinions summarization tasks: summarizing product reviews and political opinions articles. Automatic and human evaluation demonstrate that our approach can mitigate the polarity mismatch between output summary and input text, as well as maintain the content semantic and language quality.

Polarity Calibration for Opinion Summarization

Media outlets are becoming more partisan and polarized nowadays. In this paper, we identify media bias at the sentence level, and pinpoint bias sentences that intend to sway readers' opinions. As bias sentences are often expressed in a neutral and factual way, considering broader context outside a sentence can help reveal the bias. In particular, we observe that events in a bias sentence need to be understood in associations with other events in the document. Therefore, we propose to construct an event relation graph to explicitly reason about event-event relations for sentence-level bias identification. The designed event relation graph consists of events as nodes and four common types of event relations: coreference, temporal, causal, and subevent relations. Then, we incorporate event relation graph for bias sentences identification in two steps: an event-aware language model is built to inject the events and event relations knowledge into the basic language model via soft labels; further, a relation-aware graph attention network is designed to update sentence embedding with events and event relations information based on hard labels. Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach with the aid of event relation graph improves both precision and recall of bias sentence identification.

Sentence-level Media Bias Analysis with Event Relation Graph

Grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (G2P) is a critical component of the text-to-speech system (TTS), where polyphone disambiguation is the most crucial task. However, polyphone disambiguation datasets often suffer from the long-tail problem, and context learning for polyphonic characters commonly stems from a single dimension. In this paper, we propose a novel model DLM: a Decoupled Learning Model for long-tailed polyphone disambiguation in Mandarin. Firstly, DLM decouples representation and classification learnings. It can apply different data samplers for each stage to obtain an optimal training data distribution. This can mitigate the long-tail problem. Secondly, two improved attention mechanisms and a gradual conversion strategy are integrated into the DLM, which achieve transition learning of context from local to global. Finally, to evaluate the effectiveness of DLM, we construct a balanced polyphone disambiguation corpus via in-context learning. Experiments on the benchmark CPP dataset demonstrate that DLM achieves a boosted accuracy of 99.07%. Moreover, DLM improves the disambiguation performance of long-tailed polyphonic characters. For many long-tailed characters, DLM even achieves an accuracy of 100%.

DLM: A Decoupled Learning Model for Long-tailed Polyphone Disambiguation in Mandarin

Prompt Engineering has garnered significant attention for enhancing the performance of large language models across a multitude of tasks. Techniques such as the Chain-of-Thought not only bolster task performance but also delineate a clear trajectory of reasoning steps, offering a tangible form of explanation for the audience. Prior works on interpretability assess the reasoning chains yielded by Chain-of-Thought solely along a singular axis, namely faithfulness. We present a comprehensive and multifaceted evaluation of interpretability, examining not only faithfulness but also robustness and utility across multiple commonsense reasoning benchmarks. Likewise, our investigation is not confined to a single prompting technique; it expansively covers a multitude of prevalent prompting techniques employed in large language models, thereby ensuring a wide-ranging and exhaustive evaluation. In addition, we introduce a simple interpretability alignment technique, termed Self-Entailment-Alignment Chain-of-thought, that yields more than 70\% improvements across multiple dimensions of interpretability. Code is available at https://github.com/SenticNet/CoT_interpretability

How Interpretable are Reasoning Explanations from Prompting Large Language Models?

Large-scale pre-trained language models have displayed unrivaled capacity in generating text that closely resembles human-written text. Nevertheless, generating texts adhering to specific conditions without fine-tuning or adding new parameters can be challenging. Contemporary approaches commonly rely on either prompts or auxiliary models to avoid modifying the language models. These auxiliary models are designed to assess whether a generated token contributes to meeting the desired requirements. These approaches adjust the distribution of the next token during the inference phase by leveraging the prediction score of the desired attribute to calculate gradients. However, these auxiliary models typically require the language model's latent states. This prerequisite challenges integrating various existing black box attribute models or tools. We present the Plug-in Language Model (PiLM) as a solution to address the limitations. PiLM leverages reinforcement learning to utilize black box tools directly, adjusting the latent state to control text generation. However, performing backpropagation during the inference phase is time-consuming for PiLM. By replacing backpropagation with a simple regression model, PiLM can achieve an inference time comparable to that of the original LLM. Experiment results show that our approaches in this paper outperform existing state-of-the-art methods that rely on gradient-based, weighted decoding, or prompt-based methodologies.

Plug-in Language Model: Controlling Text Generation with a Simple Regression Model

Verifiable generation aims to let the large language model (LLM) generate text with supporting documents, which enables the user to flexibly verify the answer and makes the LLM's output more reliable. Retrieval plays a crucial role in verifiable generation. Specifically, the retrieved documents not only supplement knowledge to help the LLM generate correct answers, but also serve as supporting evidence for the user to verify the LLM's output. However, the widely used retrievers become the bottleneck of the entire pipeline and limit the overall performance. Their capabilities are usually inferior to LLMs since they often have much fewer parameters than the large language model and have not been demonstrated to scale well to the size of LLMs. If the retriever does not correctly find the supporting documents, the LLM can not generate the correct and verifiable answer, which overshadows the LLM's remarkable abilities. To address these limitations, we propose **LLatrieval** (**L**arge **La**nguage Model Verified Re**trieval**), where the LLM updates the retrieval result until it verifies that the retrieved documents can sufficiently support answering the question. Thus, the LLM can iteratively provide feedback to retrieval and facilitate the retrieval result to fully support verifiable generation. Experiments on ALCE show that LLatrieval significantly outperforms extensive baselines and achieves state-of-the-art results.

LLatrieval: LLM-Verified Retrieval for Verifiable Generation

Dealing with language heterogeneity has always been one of the challenges in neural machine translation (NMT). The idea of using mixture-of-experts (MoE) naturally excels in addressing this issue by employing different experts to take responsibility for different problems. However, the parameter-inefficiency problem in MoE results in less performance improvement when boosting the number of parameters. Moreover, most of the MoE models are suffering from the training instability problem. This paper proposes MoA (Mixture-of-Adapters), a lightweight MoE-based NMT model that is trained via an elaborately designed stage-wise training strategy. With the standard Transformer as the backbone model, we introduce lightweight adapters as experts for easy expansion. To improve the parameter efficiency, we explicitly model and distill the language heterogeneity into the gating network with clustering. After freezing the gating network, we adopt the Gumbel-Max sampling as the routing scheme when training experts to balance the knowledge of generalization and specialization while preventing expert over-fitting. Empirical results show that MoA achieves stable improvements in different translation tasks by introducing much fewer extra parameters compared to other MoE baselines. Additionally, the performance evaluations on a multi-domain translation task illustrate the effectiveness of our training strategy.

A Lightweight Mixture-of-Experts Neural Machine Translation Model with Stage-wise Training Strategy

Most existing retrieval-augmented language models (LMs) assume a naive dichotomy within a retrieved document set: query-relevance and irrelevance. Our work investigates a more challenging scenario in which even the "relevant" documents may contain misleading or incorrect information, causing conflict among the retrieved documents and thereby negatively influencing model decisions as noise. We observe that existing LMs are highly brittle to the presence of conflicting information in both the fine-tuning and in-context few-shot learning scenarios. We propose approaches for handling knowledge conflicts among retrieved documents by explicitly fine-tuning a discriminator or prompting GPT-3.5 to elicit its discriminative capability. Our empirical results on open-domain QA show that these approaches significantly enhance model robustness. We also provide our findings on incorporating the fine-tuned discriminator's decision into the in-context learning process, proposing a way to exploit the benefits of two disparate learning schemes. Alongside our findings, we provide MacNoise, a machine-generated, conflict-induced dataset to further encourage research in this direction.

Why So Gullible? Enhancing the Robustness of Retrieval-Augmented Models against Counterfactual Noise

In this work, we extend the instruction-tuned Llama-2 model with end-to-end general-purpose speech processing and reasoning abilities while maintaining the wide range of original LLM capabilities, without using any carefully curated paired data. The resulting end-to-end model, named \textit{AudioChatLlama}, can utilize audio prompts as a replacement for text and sustain a conversation. Such a model also has extended cross-modal capabilities such as being able to perform spoken question answering (QA), speech translation, and audio summarization amongst many other closed and open-domain tasks. This is unlike prior approaches in speech, in which LLMs are extended to handle audio for a limited number of pre-designated tasks. On both synthesized and recorded speech QA test sets, evaluations show that our end-to-end approach is on par with or outperforms cascaded systems (speech recognizer + LLM) in terms of modelling the response to a prompt. Furthermore, unlike cascades, our approach can interchange text and audio modalities and intrinsically utilize prior context in a conversation to provide better results.

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“Tell me who you are and I tell you how you argue”: Predicting Stances and Arguments for Stakeholder Groups

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