Austria

This paper argues that the relationship between lexical identity and prosody---one well-studied parameter of linguistic variation---can be characterized using information theory. We predict that languages that use prosody to make lexical distinctions should exhibit a higher mutual information between word identity and prosody, compared to languages that don&#39;t. We test this hypothesis in the domain of pitch, which is used to make lexical distinctions in tonal languages, like Cantonese. We use a dataset of speakers reading sentences aloud in ten languages across five language families to estimate the mutual information between the text and their pitch curves. We find that, across languages, pitch curves display similar amounts of entropy. However, these curves are easier to predict given their associated text in the tonal languages, compared to pitch- and stress-accent languages, and thus the mutual information is higher in these languages, supporting our hypothesis. Our results support perspectives that view linguistic typology as gradient, rather than categorical.

ACL 2025

Using Information Theory to Characterize Prosodic Typology: The Case of Tone, Pitch-Accent and Stress-Accent

entropy estimation

typology

prosody

information theory

mutual information

**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

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EMNLP 2023

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

This paper argues that the relationship between lexical identity and prosody---one well-studied parameter of linguistic variation---can be characterized using information theory. We predict that languages that use prosody to make lexical distinctions should exhibit a higher mutual information between word identity and prosody, compared to languages that don't. We test this hypothesis in the domain of pitch, which is used to make lexical distinctions in tonal languages, like Cantonese. We use a dataset of speakers reading sentences aloud in ten languages across five language families to estimate the mutual information between the text and their pitch curves. We find that, across languages, pitch curves display similar amounts of entropy. However, these curves are easier to predict given their associated text in the tonal languages, compared to pitch- and stress-accent languages, and thus the mutual information is higher in these languages, supporting our hypothesis. Our results support perspectives that view linguistic typology as gradient, rather than categorical.

technical paper

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s 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.* 
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Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

The Middle East is characterized by remarkable linguistic diversity, with over 400 million inhabitants speaking more than 60 languages across multiple language families. This study presents a pioneering work in developing the first parallel corpora for eight severely under-resourced varieties in the region–PARME, addressing fundamental challenges in low-resource scenarios including non-standardized writing and dialectal complexity. Through an extensive community-driven initiative, volunteers contributed to the creation of over 36,000 translated sentences, marking a significant milestone in resource development. We evaluate machine translation capabilities through zero-shot approaches and fine-tuning experiments with pretrained machine translation models and provide a comprehensive analysis of limitations. Our findings reveal significant gaps in existing technologies for processing the selected languages, highlighting critical areas for improvement in language technology for Middle Eastern languages.

PARME: Parallel Corpora for Low-Resourced Middle Eastern Languages

Examining logical inconsistencies among multiple statements (such as collections of sentences or question-answer pairs) is a crucial challenge in machine learning, particularly for ensuring the safety and reliability of models. Traditional methods that rely on 1:1 pairwise comparisons often fail to capture inconsistencies that only emerge when more than two statements are evaluated collectively. To address this gap, we introduce the task of set-consistency verification, an extension of natural language inference (NLI) that assesses the logical coherence of entire sets rather than isolated pairs. Building on this task, we present the Set-Consistency Energy Network (SC-Energy), a novel model that employs a margin-based loss to learn the compatibility among a collection of statements. Our approach not only efficiently verifies inconsistencies and pinpoints the specific statements responsible for logical contradictions, but also significantly outperforms existing methods, including prompting-based LLM models. Furthermore, we release two new datasets: Set-LConVQA and Set-SNLI for set-consistency verification task.

Introducing Verification Task of Set Consistency with Set-Consistency Energy Networks

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) enables zero-shot inference in downstream tasks such as image-text retrieval and classification. However, recent works extending CLIP suffer from the issue of *modality gap*, which arises when the image and text embeddings are projected to disparate manifolds, deviating from the intended objective of image-text contrastive learning. We discover that this phenomenon is linked to the modality-specific characteristic that each image or text encoder independently possesses. Herein, we propose two methods to address the modality gap: (1) a post-hoc embedding standardization method, $I0T_{post}$ that reduces the modality gap approximately to zero and (2) a trainable method, $I0T_{async}$, to alleviate the modality gap problem by adding two normalization layers for each encoder. Our I0T framework can significantly reduce the modality gap while preserving the original embedding representations of trained models with their locked parameters. In practice, $I0T_{post}$ can serve as an alternative explainable automatic evaluation metric of widely used CLIPScore (CLIP-S). The code is available in https://github.com/xfactlab/I0T.

I0T: Embedding Standardization Method Towards Zero Modality Gap

Safety concerns in large language models (LLMs) have gained significant attention due to their exposure to potentially harmful data during pre-training. In this paper, we identify a new safety vulnerability in LLMs: their susceptibility to \textit{natural distribution shifts} between attack prompts and original toxic prompts, where seemingly benign prompts, semantically related to harmful content, can bypass safety mechanisms. To explore this issue, we introduce a novel attack method, \textit{ActorBreaker}, which identifies actors related to toxic prompts within pre-training distribution to craft multi-turn prompts that gradually lead LLMs to reveal unsafe content. ActorBreaker is grounded in Latour's actor-network theory, encompassing both human and non-human actors to capture a broader range of vulnerabilities. Our experimental results demonstrate that ActorBreaker outperforms existing attack methods in terms of diversity, effectiveness, and efficiency across aligned LLMs. To address this vulnerability, we propose expanding safety training to cover a broader semantic space of toxic content. We thus construct a multi-turn safety dataset using ActorBreaker. Fine-tuning models on our dataset shows significant improvements in robustness, though with some trade-offs in utility. Code is available at https://github.com/AI45Lab/ActorAttack.

LLMs know their vulnerabilities: Uncover Safety Gaps through Natural Distribution Shifts

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly advanced multi-turn conversation systems, emphasizing the need for proactive guidance to enhance users' interactions. However, these systems face challenges in dynamically adapting to shifts in users' goals and maintaining low latency for real-time interactions. In the Baidu Search AI assistant, an industrial-scale multi-turn search system, we propose a novel two-phase framework to provide proactive guidance. The first phase, Goal-adaptive Supervised Fine-Tuning (G-SFT), employs a goal adaptation agent that dynamically adapts to user goal shifts and provides goal-relevant contextual information. G-SFT also incorporates scalable knowledge transfer to distill insights from LLMs into a lightweight model for real-time interaction. The second phase, Click-oriented Reinforcement Learning (C-RL), adopts a generate-rank paradigm, systematically constructs preference pairs from user click signals, and proactively improves click-through rates through more engaging guidance. This dual-phase architecture achieves complementary objectives: G-SFT ensures accurate goal tracking, while C-RL optimizes interaction quality through click signal-driven reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves 86.10\% accuracy in offline evaluation (+23.95\% over baseline) and 25.28\% CTR in online deployment (149.06\% relative improvement), while reducing inference latency by 69.55\% through scalable knowledge distillation.

Proactive Guidance of Multi-Turn Conversation in Industrial Search

Artificial agents are increasingly central to complex interactions and decision-making tasks, yet aligning their behaviors with desired human values remains an open challenge. In this work, we investigate how human-like personality traits influence agent behavior and performance within text-based interactive environments. We introduce PANDA: Personality Adapted Neural Decision Agents, a novel method for projecting human personality traits onto agents to guide their behavior. To induce personality in a text-based game agent, (i) we train a personality classifier to identify what personality type the agent’s actions exhibit, and (ii) we integrate the personality profiles directly into the agent’s policy-learning pipeline. By deploying agents embodying 16 distinct personality types across 25 text-based games and analyzing their trajectories, we demonstrate that an agent’s action decisions can be guided toward specific personality profiles. Moreover, certain personality types, such as those characterized by higher levels of Openness, display marked advantages in performance. These findings underscore the promise of personality-adapted agents for fostering more aligned, effective, and human-centric decision-making in interactive environments.

Persona Dynamics: Unveiling the Impact of Persona Traits on Agents in Text-Based Games

Visual information has been introduced for enhancing machine translation (MT), and its effectiveness heavily relies on the availability of large amounts of bilingual parallel sentence pairs with manual image annotations. In this paper, we introduce a stable diffusion-based imagination network into a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to explicitly generate an image for each source sentence, thereby advancing the multimodel MT. Particularly, we build heuristic feedback with reinforcement learning to ensure the consistency of the generated image with the source sentence without the supervision of visual information, which breaks the high-cost bottleneck of image annotation in MT. Furthermore, the proposed method enables imaginative visual information to be integrated into text-only MT in addition to multimodal MT. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms existing multimodal MT and text-only MT, especially achieving an average improvement of more than 14 BLEU points on Multi30K and MSCOCO multimodal MT benchmarks.

Make Imagination Clearer! Stable Diffusion-based Visual Imagination for Multimodal Machine Translation

Cross-lingual sentence encoders (CLSE) create fixed-size sentence representations with aligned translations. Current pre-trained CLSE approaches use sentence-level objectives only. This can lead to loss of information, especially for tokens, which then degrades the sentence representation. We propose MEXMA, a novel approach that integrates both sentence-level and token-level objectives. The sentence representation in one language is used to predict masked tokens in another language, with both the sentence representation and *all tokens directly update the encoder*. We show that adding token-level objectives greatly improves the sentence representation quality across several tasks. Our approach outperforms current pre-trained cross-lingual sentence encoders on bitext mining as well as several downstream tasks. We also analyse the information encoded in our tokens, and how the sentence representation is built from them.

MEXMA: Token-level objectives improve sentence representations

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on historical web data inevitably become outdated. We investigate evaluation strategies and update methods for LLMs as new data becomes available. We introduce a web-scale dataset for time-continual pretraining of LLMs derived from 114 dumps of Common Crawl (CC) -- orders of magnitude larger than previous continual language modeling benchmarks. We also design time-stratified evaluations across both general CC data and specific domains (Wikipedia, StackExchange, and code documentation) to assess how well various continual learning methods adapt to new data while retaining past knowledge. Our findings demonstrate that, on general CC data, autoregressive meta-schedules combined with a fixed-ratio replay of older data can achieve comparable held-out loss to re-training from scratch, while requiring significantly less computation (2.6x). However, the optimal balance between incorporating new data and replaying old data differs as replay is crucial to avoid forgetting on generic web data but less so on specific domains.

TiC-LM: A Web-Scale Benchmark for Time-Continual LLM Pretraining

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance in capability, prompt engineering has emerged as a crucial method for optimizing their performance on specialized tasks. While prompting strategies like Zero-shot, Few-shot, Chain-of-Thought, and Tree-of-Thought have demonstrated significant improvements in reasoning tasks, their application to machine translation has received comparatively less attention. This paper systematically evaluates these prompting techniques across diverse language pairs and domains, measuring their effect on translation quality. Our findings reveal substantial performance variations between prompting methods, with certain strategies offering consistent improvements for specific language directions and complexity levels. These results provide valuable insights for developing more effective LLM-based translation systems without requiring model fine-tuning and complement existing works in the field.

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PARME: Parallel Corpora for Low-Resourced Middle Eastern Languages

Similar lecture

Quantifying the redundancy between prosody and text