Mexico

Label projection, which involves obtaining translated labels and texts jointly, is essential for leveraging machine translation to facilitate cross-lingual transfer in structured prediction tasks. Prior research exploring label projection often compromise translation accuracy by favoring simplified label translation or relying solely on word-level alignments. In this paper, we introduce a novel label projection approach, CLaP, which translates text to the target language and performs *contextual translation* on the labels using the translated text as the context, ensuring better accuracy for the translated labels. We leverage instruction-tuned language models with multilingual capabilities as our contextual translator, imposing the constraint of the presence of translated labels in the translated text via instructions. We benchmark CLaP with other label projection techniques on zero-shot cross-lingual transfer across 39 languages on two representative structured prediction tasks - event argument extraction (EAE) and named entity recognition (NER), showing over 2.4 F1 improvement for EAE and 1.4 F1 improvement for NER. We further explore the applicability of CLaP on ten extremely low-resource languages to showcase its potential for cross-lingual structured prediction.

NAACL 2024

Contextual Label Projection for Cross-Lingual Structured Prediction

cross-lingual

structured prediction

multilingual

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

Recently, code language models have achieved notable advancements in addressing a diverse array of essential code comprehension and generation tasks. Yet, the field lacks a comprehensive deep dive and understanding of the code embeddings of multilingual code models. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on multilingual code embeddings, focusing on the cross-lingual capabilities of these embeddings across different programming languages. Through probing experiments, we demonstrate that code embeddings comprise two distinct components: one deeply tied to the nuances and syntax of a specific language, and the other remaining agnostic to these details, primarily focusing on semantics. Further, we show that when we isolate and eliminate this language-specific component, we witness significant improvements in downstream code retrieval tasks, leading to an absolute increase of up to +17 in the Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR).

Language Agnostic Code Embeddings

Topic modeling is a well-established technique for exploring text corpora. Conventional topic models (e.g., LDA) represent topics as bags of words that often require "reading the tea leaves" to interpret; additionally, they offer users minimal control over the formatting and specificity of resulting topics. To tackle these issues, we introduce TopicGPT, a prompt-based framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to uncover latent topics in a text collection. TopicGPT produces topics that align better with human categorizations compared to competing methods: it achieves a harmonic mean purity of 0.74 against human-annotated Wikipedia topics compared to 0.64 for the strongest baseline. Its topics are also more interpretable, dispensing with ambiguous bags of words in favor of topics with natural language labels and associated free-form descriptions. Moreover, the framework is highly adaptable, allowing users to specify constraints and modify topics without the need for model retraining. By streamlining access to high-quality and interpretable topics, TopicGPT represents a compelling, human-centered approach to topic modeling.

TopicGPT: A Prompt-based Topic Modeling Framework

We address the challenge of ensuring differential privacy (DP) guarantees in training deep retrieval systems. Training these systems often involves the use of contrastive-style losses, which are typically non-per-example decomposable, making them difficult to directly DP-train with since common techniques require per-example gradients. To address this issue, we propose an approach that prioritizes ensuring query privacy prior to training a deep retrieval system. Our method employs DP language models (LMs) to generate private synthetic queries representative of the original data. These synthetic queries can be used in downstream retrieval system training without compromising privacy. Our approach demonstrates a significant enhancement in retrieval quality compared to direct DP-training, all while maintaining query-level privacy guarantees. This work highlights the potential of harnessing LMs to overcome limitations in standard DP-training methods.

Synthetic Query Generation for Privacy-Preserving Deep Retrieval Systems using Differentially Private Language Models

Ranking documents using Large Language Models (LLMs) by directly feeding the query and candidate documents into the prompt is an interesting and practical problem. However, researchers have found it difficult to outperform fine-tuned baseline rankers on benchmark datasets. We analyze pointwise and listwise ranking prompts used by existing methods and argue that off-the-shelf LLMs do not fully understand these challenging ranking formulations. In this paper, we propose to significantly reduce the burden on LLMs by using a new technique called Pairwise Ranking Prompting (PRP). Our results are the first in the literature to achieve state-of-the-art ranking performance on standard benchmarks using moderate-sized open-sourced LLMs. On TREC-DL 2019\&2020, PRP based on the Flan-UL2 model with 20B parameters performs favorably with the previous best approach in the literature, which is based on the blackbox commercial GPT-4 that has 50x (estimated) model size, while outperforming other LLM-based solutions, such as InstructGPT which has 175B parameters, by over 10\% for all ranking metrics. By using the same prompt template on seven BEIR tasks, PRP outperforms supervised baselines and outperforms the blackbox commercial ChatGPT solution by 4.2\% and pointwise LLM-based solutions by more than 10\% on average NDCG@10. Furthermore, we propose several variants of PRP to improve efficiency and show that it is possible to achieve competitive results even with linear complexity.

Large Language Models are Effective Text Rankers with Pairwise Ranking Prompting

Entity disambiguation (ED), which links the mentions of ambiguous entities to their referent entities in a knowledge base, serves as a core component in entity linking (EL). Existing generative approaches demonstrate improved accuracy compared to classification approaches under the standardized ZELDA benchmark. Nevertheless, generative approaches suffer from the need for large-scale pre-training and inefficient generation. Most importantly, entity descriptions, which could contain crucial information to distinguish similar entities from each other, are often overlooked. We propose an encoder-decoder model to disambiguate entities with more detailed entity descriptions. Given text and candidate entities, the encoder learns interactions between the text and each candidate entity, producing representations for each entity candidate. The decoder then fuses the representations of entity candidates together and selects the correct entity. Our experiments, conducted on various entity disambiguation benchmarks, demonstrate the strong and robust performance of this model, particularly +1.5\% in the ZELDA benchmark compared with GENRE. Furthermore, we integrate this approach into the retrieval/reader framework and observe +1.5\% improvements in end-to-end entity linking in the GERBIL benchmark compared with EntQA.

Entity Disambiguation via Fusion Entity Decoding

There has been limited success for dense retrieval models in multilingual retrieval, due to uneven and scarce training data available across multiple languages. Synthetic training data generation is promising (e.g., InPars or Promptagator), but has been investigated only for English. Therefore, to study model capabilities across both cross-lingual and monolingual retrieval tasks, we develop **SWIM-IR**, a synthetic retrieval training dataset containing 33 (high to very-low resource) languages for fine-tuning multilingual dense retrievers without requiring any human supervision. To construct SWIM-IR, we propose SAP (summarize-then-ask prompting), where the large language model (LLM) generates a textual summary prior to the query generation step. SAP assists the LLM in generating informative queries in the target language. Using SWIM-IR, we explore synthetic fine-tuning of multilingual dense retrieval models and evaluate them robustly on three retrieval benchmarks: XOR-Retrieve (cross-lingual), MIRACL (monolingual) and XTREME-UP (cross-lingual). Our models, called SWIM-X, are competitive with human-supervised dense retrieval models, e.g., mContriever-X, finding that SWIM-IR can cheaply substitute for expensive human-labeled retrieval training data. SWIM-IR dataset and SWIM-X models are available at: https://github.com/google-research-datasets/SWIM-IR.

Leveraging LLMs for Synthesizing Training Data Across Many Languages in Multilingual Dense Retrieval

Recent advances in named entity recognition (NER) have pushed the boundary of the task to incorporate visual signals, leading to many variants, including multi-modal NER (MNER) or grounded MNER (GMNER). A key challenge to these tasks is that the model should be able to generalize to the entities unseen during the training, and should be able to handle the training samples with noisy annotations. To address this obstacle, we propose SCANNER (Span CANdidate detection and recognition for NER), a model capable of effectively handling all three NER variants. SCANNER is a two-stage structure; we extract entity candidates in the first stage and use it as a query to get knowledge, effectively pulling knowledge from various sources. We can boost our performance by utilizing this entity-centric extracted knowledge to address unseen entities. Furthermore, to tackle the challenges arising from noisy annotations in NER datasets, we introduce a novel self-distillation method, enhancing the robustness and accuracy of our model in processing training data with inherent uncertainties. Our approach demonstrates competitive performance on the NER benchmark and surpasses existing methods on both MNER and GMNER benchmarks. Further analysis shows that the proposed distillation and knowledge utilization methods improve the performance of our model on various benchmarks.

SCANNER: Knowledge-Enhanced Approach for Robust Multi-modal Named Entity Recognition of Unseen Entities

Understanding event descriptions is a central aspect of language processing, but current approaches focus overwhelmingly on single sentences or documents. Aggregating information about an event across documents can offer a much richer understanding. To this end, we present FAMuS, a new corpus of Wikipedia passages that report on some event, paired with underlying, genre-diverse (non-Wikipedia) source articles for the same event. Events and (cross-sentence) arguments in both report and source are annotated against FrameNet, providing broad coverage of different event types. We present results on two key event understanding tasks enabled by FAMuS: source validation---determining whether a document is a valid source for a target report event---and cross-document argument extraction---full-document argument extraction for a target event from both its report and the correct source article.

FAMuS: Frames Across Multiple Sources

Named entities -- typically expressed via proper nouns -- play a key role in Natural Language Processing, as their identification and comprehension are crucial in tasks such as Relation Extraction, Coreference Resolution and Question Answering, among others. Tasks like these also often entail dealing with concepts -- typically represented by common nouns -- which, however, have not received as much attention. Indeed, the potential of their identification and understanding remains underexplored, as does the benefit of a synergistic formulation with named entities. To fill this gap, we introduce Concept and Named Entity Recognition (CNER), a new unified task that handles concepts and entities mentioned in unstructured texts seamlessly. We put forward a comprehensive set of categories that can be used to model concepts and named entities jointly, and propose new approaches for the creation of CNER datasets. We evaluate the benefits of performing CNER as a unified task extensively, showing that a CNER model gains up to +5.4 and +8 macro F1 points when compared to specialized named entity and concept recognition systems, respectively. Finally, to encourage the development of CNER systems, we release our datasets and models at https://github.com/Babelscape/cner.

CNER: Concept and Named Entity Recognition

Current research in form understanding predominantly relies on large pre-trained language models, necessitating extensive data for pre-training. However, the importance of layout structure (i.e., the spatial relationship between the entity blocks in the visually rich document) to relation extraction has been overlooked. In this paper, we propose $\textbf{RE}$gion-Aware $\textbf{R}$elation $\textbf{E}$xtraction ($\bf{RE^2}$) that leverages region-level spatial structure among the entity blocks to improve their relation prediction. We design an edge-aware graph attention network to learn the interaction between entities while considering their spatial relationship defined by their region-level representations. We also introduce a constraint objective to regularize the model towards consistency with the inherent constraints of the relation extraction task. To support the research on relation extraction from visually rich documents and demonstrate the generalizability of $\bf{RE^2}$, we build a new benchmark dataset, ${DiverseForm}$, that covers a wide range of domains. Extensive experiments on ${DiverseForm}$ and several public benchmark datasets demonstrate significant superiority and transferability of $\bf{RE^2}$ across various domains and languages, with up to 18.88\% absolute F-score gain over all high-performing baselines

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