Mexico

Comparative knowledge (e.g., steel is stronger and heavier than styrofoam) is an essential component of our world knowledge, yet understudied in prior literature. In this paper, we harvest the dramatic improvements in knowledge capabilities of language models into a large-scale comparative knowledge base. While the ease of acquisition of such comparative knowledge is much higher from extreme-scale models like GPT-4, compared to their considerably smaller and weaker counterparts such as GPT-2, not even the most powerful models are exempt from making errors. We thus ask: to what extent are models at different scales able to generate valid and diverse comparative knowledge? We introduce NeuroComparatives, a novel framework for comparative knowledge distillation overgenerated from language models such as GPT-variants and LLaMA, followed by stringent filtering of the generated knowledge. Our framework acquires comparative knowledge between everyday objects, producing a corpus of up to 8.8M comparisons over 1.74M entity pairs - 10X larger and 30% more diverse than existing resources. Moreover, human evaluations show that NeuroComparatives outperform existing resources in terms of validity (up to 32% absolute improvement). Our acquired NeuroComparatives leads to performance improvements on five downstream tasks. We find that neuro-symbolic manipulation of smaller models offers complementary benefits to the currently dominant practice of prompting extreme-scale language models for knowledge distillation.

NAACL 2024

NeuroComparatives: Neuro-Symbolic Distillation of Comparative Knowledge

comparative

data source

synthetic data

low-resource

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

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

Parameter-efficient (PE) methods (like Prompts or Adapters) for adapting pre-trained language models (PLM) to downstream tasks have been popular recently. However, hindrances still prevent these methods from reaching their full potential. For example, two significant challenges are few-shot adaptation and cross-task generalization. To tackle these issues, we propose a general PE priming framework to enhance and explore the few-shot adaptation and generalization ability of PE methods. In this framework, PLMs are primed with PE methods for rapidly adapting to various target tasks. To evaluate the generalization ability of these PE methods, we conduct experiments on a few-shot cross-domain benchmark containing 160 diverse NLP tasks. Our experiment not only reveals the best priming strategy but also verifies that priming facilitates the adaptation to target tasks.

Systematic Analysis for Pretrained Language Model Priming for Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning

Misunderstandings occur all the time in human conversation but deciding on when to ask for clarification is a challenging task for conversational systems that requires a balance between asking too many unnecessary questions and running the risk of providing incorrect information. This work investigates clarification identification based on the task and data from (Xu et al., 2019), reproducing their Transformer baseline and extending it by comparing pre-trained language model fine-tuning, prompt tuning and manual prompt engineering on the task of clarification identification. Our experiments show strong performance with LM and a prompt tuning approach with BERT and RoBERTa, outperforming standard LM fine-tuning, while manual prompt engineering with GPT-3.5 proved to be less effective, although informative prompt instructions have the potential of steering the model towards generating more accurate explanations for why clarification is needed.

To Clarify or not to Clarify: A Comparative Analysis of Clarification Classification with Fine-Tuning, Prompt Tuning, and Prompt Engineering

Amidst the flourishing era of Large Language Models (LLMs), there has been a surge in proposing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) that integrate LLM with vision capabilities. 
However, it has been observed that LVLMs, after visual instruction tuning, often fail to exhibit the instruction-following ability inherent to the LLM before integration, leading to results where they do not follow task instructions as expected. 
This study quantitatively demonstrates that the instruction-following ability of LVLMs declines after visual instruction tuning for the first time. 
We further investigate factors contributing to the deterioration of this instruction-following ability. 
Our evaluation reveals that specifying the output format in instructions during (visual) instruction tuning could significantly impact the instruction-following ability of models.

Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Vision-Language Models

Cross-lingual transfer has become an effective way of transferring knowledge between languages. In this paper, we explore an often overlooked aspect in this domain: the influence of the source language of a language model on language transfer performance. We consider a case where the target language and its script are not part of the pre-trained model. We conduct a series of experiments on monolingual and multilingual models that are pre-trained on different tokenization methods to determine factors that affect cross-lingual transfer to a new language with a unique script. Our findings reveal the importance of the tokenizer as a stronger factor than the shared script, language similarity, and model size.

Unknown Script: Impact of Script on Cross-Lingual Transfer

Making decent multi-lingual sentence representations is critical to achieve high performances in cross-lingual downstream tasks. In this work, we propose a novel method to align multi-lingual embeddings based on the similarity of sentences measured by a pre-trained mono-lingual embedding model. Given translation sentence pairs, we train a multi-lingual model in a way that the similarity between cross-lingual embeddings follows the similarity of sentences measured at the mono-lingual teacher model. Our method can be considered as contrastive learning with soft labels defined as the similarity between sentences. Our experimental results on five languages show that our contrastive loss with soft labels far outperforms conventional constrastive loss with hard labels in various benchmarks for bitext mining tasks and STS tasks. In addition, our method outperforms existing multi-lingual embeddings including LaBSE, for Tatoeba dataset.

Improving Multi-lingual Alignment Through Soft Contrastive Learning

Text Style Transfer (TST) seeks to alter the style of text while retaining its core content. Given the constraints of limited parallel datasets for TST, we propose CoTeX, a framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) alongside chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to facilitate TST. CoTeX distills the complex rewriting and reasoning capabilities of LLMs into more streamlined models capable of working with both non-parallel and parallel data. Through experimentation across four TST datasets, CoTeX is shown to surpass traditional supervised fine-tuning and knowledge distillation methods, particularly in low-resource settings. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation, comparing CoTeX against current unsupervised, supervised, in-context learning (ICL) techniques, and instruction-tuned LLMs. Furthermore, CoTeX distinguishes itself by offering transparent explanations for its style transfer process.

Distilling Text Style Transfer With Self-Explanation From LLMs

Enabling autonomous language agents to drive application user interfaces (UIs) as humans do can significantly expand the capability of today's API-based agents. Essential to this vision is the ability of agents to ground natural language commands to on-screen UI elements. Prior UI grounding approaches work by relaying on developer-provided UI metadata (UI trees, such as web DOM, and accessibility labels) to detect on-screen elements. However, such metadata is often unavailable or incomplete. Object detection techniques applied to UI screens remove this dependency, by inferring location and types of UI elements directly from the UI's visual appearance. The extracted semantics, however, are too limited to directly enable grounding. We overcome the limitations of both approaches by introducing the task of visual UI grounding, which unifies detection and grounding. A model takes as input a UI screenshot and a free-form language expression, and must identify the referenced UI element. We propose a solution to this problem, LVG, which learns UI element detection and grounding using a new technique called layout-guided contrastive learning, where the semantics of individual UI objects are learned also from their visual organization. Due to the scarcity of UI datasets, LVG integrates synthetic data in its training using multi-context learning. LVG outperforms baselines pre-trained on much larger datasets by over 4.9 points in top-1 accuracy, thus demonstrating its effectiveness.

Visual Grounding for User Interfaces

Conversational Task Assistants (CTAs) guide users in performing a multitude of activities, such as making recipes. However, ensuring that interactions remain engaging, interesting, and enjoyable for CTA users is not trivial, especially for time-consuming or challenging tasks. Grounded in psychological theories of human interest, we propose to engage users with contextual and interesting statements or facts during interactions with a multi-modal CTA, to reduce fatigue and task abandonment before a task is complete. To operationalize this idea, we train a high-performing classifier (82% F1-score) to automatically identify relevant and interesting facts for users. We use it to create an annotated dataset of task-specific interesting facts for the domain of cooking. Finally, we design and validate a dialogue policy to incorporate the identified relevant and interesting facts into a conversation, to improve user engagement and task completion. Live testing on a leading multi-modal voice assistant shows that 66% of the presented facts were received positively, leading to a 40% gain in the user satisfaction rating, and a 37% increase in conversation length. These findings emphasize that strategically incorporating interesting facts into the CTA experience can promote real-world user participation for guided task interactions.

Leveraging Interesting Facts to Enhance User Engagement with Conversational Interfaces

Optimization problems seek to find the best solution to an objective under a set of constraints, and have been widely investigated in real-world applications. Modeling and solving optimization problems in a specific domain typically require a combination of domain knowledge, mathematical skills, and programming ability, making it difficult for general users and even domain professionals. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called OptLLM that augments LLMs with external solvers. Specifically, OptLLM accepts user queries in natural language, convert them into mathematical formulations and programming codes, and calls the solvers to calculate the results for decision-making. In addition, OptLLM supports multi-round dialogues to gradually refine the modeling and solving of optimization problems. To illustrate the effectiveness of OptLLM, we provide tutorials on three typical optimization applications and conduct experiments on both prompt-based GPT models and a fine-tuned Qwen model using a large-scale selfdeveloped optimization dataset. Experimental results show that OptLLM works with various LLMs, and the fine-tuned model achieves an accuracy boost compared to the promptbased models. Some features of OptLLM framework have been available for trial since June 2023 (https://opt.alibabacloud.com/chat or https://opt.aliyun.com/chat).

Solving General Natural-Language-Description Optimization Problems with Large Language Models

Many natural language processing (NLP) tasks rely on labeled data to train machine learning models with high performance. However, data annotation is time consuming and expensive, especially when the task involves a large amount of data or requires specialized domains. Recently, GPT-3.5 series models have demonstrated remarkable few-shot and zero-shot ability across various NLP tasks. In this paper, we first claim that large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3.5, can serve as an excellent crowdsourced annotator when provided with sufficient guidance and demonstrated examples. Accordingly, we propose AnnoLLM, an annotation system powered by LLMs, which adopts a two-step approach, explain-then-annotate.
Concretely, we first prompt LLMs to provide explanations for why the specific ground truth answer/label was assigned for a given example. Then, we construct the few-shot chainof-thought prompt with the self-generated explanation and employ it to annotate the unlabeled data with LLMs. Our experiment results on three tasks, including user input and keyword relevance assessment, BoolQ, and WiC, demonstrate that AnnoLLM surpasses or performs on par with crowdsourced annotators. Furthermore, we build the first conversationbased information retrieval dataset employing AnnoLLM. This dataset is designed to facilitate the development of retrieval models capable of retrieving pertinent documents for conversational text. Human evaluation has validated the dataset’s high quality.

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Next from NAACL 2024

Systematic Analysis for Pretrained Language Model Priming for Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning

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Pre-training Language Models for Comparative Reasoning