United States

Desire is a strong wish to do or have something, which involves not only a linguistic expression, but also underlying cognitive phenomena driving human feelings. As the most primitive and basic human instinct, conscious desire is often accompanied by a range of emotional responses. As a strikingly understudied task, it is difficult for machines to model and understand desire due to the unavailability of benchmarking datasets with desire and emotion labels. To bridge this gap, we present MSED, the first multi-modal and multi-task sentiment, emotion and desire dataset, which contains 9,190 text-image pairs, with English text. Each multi-modal sample is annotated with six desires, three sentiments and six emotions. We also propose the state-of-the-art baselines to evaluate the potential of MSED and show the importance of multi-task and multi-modal clues for desire understanding. We hope this study provides a  benchmark for human desire analysis. MSED will be publicly available for research.

NAACL 2022

Beyond Emotion: A Multi-Modal Dataset for Human Desire Understanding

multi-modal dataset

desire detection

multi-task learning

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. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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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 NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Recent works have empirically shown the effectiveness of data augmentation (DA) in NLP tasks, especially for those suffering from data scarcity. Intuitively, given the size of generated data, their diversity and quality are crucial to the performance of targeted tasks. However, to the best of our knowledge, most existing methods consider only either the diversity or the quality of augmented data, thus cannot fully mine the potential of DA for NLP.  In this paper, we present an easy and plug-in data augmentation framework EPiDA to support effective text classification. EPiDA employs two mechanisms: relative entropy maximization (REM) and conditional entropy minimization (CEM) to control data generation, where REM is designed to enhance the diversity of augmented data while CEM is exploited to ensure their semantic consistency. EPiDA can support efficient and continuous data generation for effective classifier training. Extensive experiments show that EPiDA outperforms existing SOTA methods in most cases, though not using any agent networks or pre-trained generation networks, and it works well with various DA algorithms and classification models.

EPiDA: An Easy Plug-in Data Augmentation Framework for High Performance Text Classification

Interpolative data augmentation has proven to be effective for NLP tasks. Despite its merits, the sample selection process in mixup is random, which might make it difficult for the model to generalize better and converge faster. We propose CIAug, a novel curriculum-based learning method that builds upon mixup. It leverages the relative position of samples in hyperbolic embedding space as a complexity measure to gradually mix up increasingly difficult and diverse samples along training. CIAug achieves state-of-the-art results over existing interpolative augmentation methods on 10 benchmark datasets across 4 languages in text classification and named-entity recognition tasks. It also converges and achieves benchmark F1 scores 3 times faster. We empirically analyze the various components of CIAug, and evaluate its robustness against adversarial attacks.

CIAug: Equipping Interpolative Augmentation with Curriculum Learning

Although Transformers with fully connected self-attentions are powerful to model long-term dependencies, they are struggling to scale to long texts with thousands of words in language modeling. One of the solutions is to equip the model with a recurrence memory. However, existing approaches directly reuse hidden states from the previous segment that encodes contexts in a uni-directional way. As a result, this prohibits the memory to dynamically interact with the current context that provides up-to-date information for token prediction. To remedy this issue, we propose Look-Ahead Memory (LaMemo) that enhances the recurrence memory by incrementally attending to the right-side tokens, and interpolating with the old memory states to maintain long-term information in the history. LaMemo embraces bi-directional attention and segment recurrence with an additional computation overhead only linearly proportional to the memory length. Experiments on widely used language modeling benchmarks demonstrate its superiority over the baselines equipped with different types of memory.

LaMemo: Language Modeling with Look-Ahead Memory

Lexically constrained neural machine translation (NMT) draws much industrial attention for its practical usage in specific domains. However, current autoregressive approaches suffer from high latency. In this paper, we focus on non-autoregressive translation (NAT) for this problem for its efficiency advantage. We identify that current constrained NAT models, which are based on iterative editing, do not handle low-frequency constraints well. To this end, we propose a plug-in algorithm for this line of work, i.e., Aligned Constrained Training (ACT), which alleviates this problem by familiarizing the model with the source-side context of the constraints. Experiments on the general and domain datasets show that our model improves over the backbone constrained NAT model in constraint preservation and translation quality, especially for rare constraints.

Neighbors Are Not Strangers: Improving Non-Autoregressive Translation under Low-Frequency Lexical Constraints

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is an efficient and widely used input method that transcribes speech signals into text. As the errors introduced by ASR systems will impair the performance of downstream tasks, we introduce a post-processing error correction method, PhVEC, to correct errors in text space. For the errors in ASR result, existing works mainly focus on fixed-length corrections, modifying each wrong token to a correct one (one-to-one correction), but rarely consider the variable-length correction (one-to-many or many-to-one correction). In this paper, we propose an efficient non-autoregressive (NAR) method for Chinese ASR error correction for both cases. Instead of conventionally predicting the sentence length in NAR methods, we propose a novel approach that uses phonological tokens to extend the source sentence for variable-length correction, enabling our model to generate phonetically similar corrections. Experimental results on datasets of different domains show that our method achieves significant improvement in word error rate reduction and speeds up the inference by 6.2 times compared with the autoregressive model.

Non-Autoregressive Chinese ASR Error Correction with Phonological Training

Long documents like contracts, financial documents, etc., are often tedious to read through. Linearly consuming (via scrolling or navigation through default table of content) these documents is time-consuming and challenging. These documents are also authored to be consumed by varied entities (referred to as persona in the paper) interested in only certain parts of the document. In this work, we describe DynamicToC, a dynamic table of content-based navigator, to aid in the task of non-linear, persona-based document consumption. DynamicToC highlights sections of interest in the document as per the aspects relevant to different personas. DynamicToC is augmented with short questions to assist the users in understanding underlying content. This uses a novel deep-reinforcement learning technique to generate questions on these persona-clustered paragraphs. Human and automatic evaluations suggest the efficacy of both end-to-end pipeline and different components of DynamicToC. 

DynamicTOC: Persona-based Table of Contents for Consumption of Long Documents

Adversarial texts help explore vulnerabilities in language models, improve model robustness, and explain their working mechanisms. However, existing word-level attack methods trap in a one-to-one attack pattern, i.e., only a single word can be modified in one transformation round, such that they cannot perturb several consecutive words as a whole. In this paper, we propose ValCAT, a black-box attack framework that misleads the language model by applying variable-length contextualized transformations to the original text. Compared to word-level methods, ValCAT expands the basic unit of perturbation from single words to spans composed of multiple consecutive words, enhancing the perturbation capability. Experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of attack success rate, perplexity, and semantic similarity on several classification tasks and inference tasks. The comprehensive human evaluation demonstrates that ValCAT has a significant advantage in ensuring the fluency of the adversarial examples and achieves better semantic consistency. We release the code at https://github.com/linerxliner/ValCAT.

ValCAT: Variable-Length Contextualized Adversarial Transformations Using Encoder-Decoder Language Model

We present a comprehensive work on automated veracity assessment from dataset creation to developing novel methods based on Natural Language Inference (NLI), focusing on misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We first describe the construction of the novel PANACEA dataset consisting of heterogeneous claims on COVID-19 and their respective information sources. The dataset construction includes work on retrieval techniques and similarity measurements to ensure a unique set of claims. We then propose novel techniques for automated veracity assessment based on Natural Language Inference including graph convolutional networks and attention based approaches. We have carried out experiments on evidence retrieval and veracity assessment on the dataset using the proposed techniques and found them competitive with SOTA methods, and provided a detailed discussion.

Natural Language Inference with Self-Attention for Veracity Assessment of Pandemic Claims

As demonstrated by GPT-3 and T5, transformers grow in capability as parameter spaces become larger and larger.  However, for tasks that require a large amount of knowledge, non-parametric memory allows models to grow dramatically with a sub-linear increase in computational cost and GPU memory requirements.  Recent models such as RAG and REALM have introduced retrieval into conditional generation.  These models incorporate neural initial retrieval from a corpus of passages.  We build on this line of research, proposing Re2G, which combines both neural initial retrieval and reranking into a BART-based sequence-to-sequence generation.  Our reranking approach also permits merging retrieval results from sources with incomparable scores, enabling an ensemble of BM25 and neural initial retrieval.  To train our system end-to-end, we introduce a novel variation of knowledge distillation to train the initial retrieval, reranker and generation using only ground truth on the target sequence output.  We find large gains in four diverse tasks: zero-shot slot filling, question answering, fact checking and dialog, with relative gains of 9% to 34% over the previous state-of-the-art on the KILT leaderboard.  We make our code available as open source.

Re2G: Retrieve, Rerank, Generate

This work studies temporal reading comprehension (TRC), which reads a free-text passage and answers temporal ordering questions. Precise question understanding is critical for temporal reading comprehension. For example, the question "What happened before the victory" and "What happened after the victory" share almost all words except one, while their answers are totally different. Moreover, even if two questions query about similar temporal relations, different varieties might also lead to various answers. For example, although both the question "What usually happened during the press release?" and "What might happen during the press release" query events which happen after "the press release", they convey divergent semantics.
To this end, we propose a novel reading comprehension approach with precise question understanding. Specifically, a temporal ordering question is embedded into two vectors to capture the referred event and the temporal relation. Then we evaluate the temporal relation between candidate events and the referred event based on that. Such fine-grained representations offer two benefits. First, it enables a better understanding of the question by focusing on different elements of a question. Second, it provides good interpretability when evaluating temporal relations. Furthermore, we also harness an auxiliary contrastive loss for representation learning of temporal relations, which aims to distinguish relations with subtle but critical changes. 
The proposed approach outperforms strong baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the TORQUE dataset. It also increases the accuracy of four pre-trained language models (BERT base, BERT large, RoBERTa base, and RoBETRa large), demonstrating its generic effectiveness on divergent models.

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Next from NAACL 2022

EPiDA: An Easy Plug-in Data Augmentation Framework for High Performance Text Classification

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