Canada

Feature attribution methods (FAs) are popular approaches for providing insights into the model reasoning process of making predictions. The more faithful a FA is, the more accurately it reflects which parts of the input are more important for the prediction. Widely used faithfulness metrics, such as sufficiency and comprehensiveness use a hard erasure criterion, i.e. entirely removing or retaining the top most important tokens ranked by a given FA and observing the changes in predictive likelihood. However, this hard criterion ignores the importance of each individual token, treating them all equally for computing sufficiency and comprehensiveness. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective soft erasure criterion. Instead of entirely removing or retaining tokens from the input, we randomly mask parts of the token vector representations proportionately to their FA importance. Extensive experiments across various natural language processing tasks and different FAs show that our soft-sufficiency and soft-comprehensiveness metrics consistently prefer more faithful explanations compared to hard sufficiency and comprehensiveness.

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ACL 2023

Incorporating Attribution Importance for Improving Faithfulness Metrics

model explanation

faithfulness

interpretability

## 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.
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Katrin Erk<br>
The University of Texas at Austin<br>
NAACL-2024 General Chair<br><br>
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NAACL 2024

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

Feature attribution methods (FAs) are popular approaches for providing insights into the model reasoning process of making predictions. The more faithful a FA is, the more accurately it reflects which parts of the input are more important for the prediction. Widely used faithfulness metrics, such as sufficiency and comprehensiveness use a hard erasure criterion, i.e. entirely removing or retaining the top most important tokens ranked by a given FA and observing the changes in predictive likelihood. However, this hard criterion ignores the importance of each individual token, treating them all equally for computing sufficiency and comprehensiveness. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective soft erasure criterion. Instead of entirely removing or retaining tokens from the input, we randomly mask parts of the token vector representations proportionately to their FA importance. Extensive experiments across various natural language processing tasks and different FAs show that our soft-sufficiency and soft-comprehensiveness metrics consistently prefer more faithful explanations compared to hard sufficiency and comprehensiveness.

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technical paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
<br>The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023.<br><br>
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience.<br>
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**
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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Addressing the issues of who saying what to whom in multi-party conversations (MPCs) has recently attracted a lot of research attention. However, existing methods on MPC understanding typically embed interlocutors and utterances into sequential information flows, or utilize only the superficial of inherent graph structures in MPCs. To this end, we present a plug-and-play and lightweight method named graph-induced fine-tuning (GIFT) which can adapt various Transformer-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) for universal MPC understanding. In detail, the full and equivalent connections among utterances in regular Transformer ignore the sparse but distinctive dependency of an utterance on another in MPCs. To distinguish different relationships between utterances, four types of edges are designed to integrate graph-induced signals into attention mechanisms to refine PLMs originally designed for processing sequential texts. We evaluate GIFT by implementing it into three PLMs, and test the performance on three downstream tasks including addressee recognition, speaker identification and response selection. Experimental results show that GIFT can significantly improve the performance of three PLMs on three downstream tasks and two benchmarks with only 4 additional parameters per encoding layer, achieving new state-of-the-art performance on MPC understanding.

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GIFT: Graph-Induced Fine-Tuning for Multi-Party Conversation Understanding

The NLP community has mainly focused on scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) vertically, i.e., making them better for about 100 languages. We instead scale LLMs horizontally: we create, through continued pretraining, Glot500-m, an LLM that covers 511 predominantly low-resource languages. An important part of this effort is to collect and clean Glot500-c, a corpus that covers these 511 languages and allows us to train Glot500-m. We evaluate Glot500-m on five diverse tasks across these languages. We observe large improvements for both high-resource and low-resource languages compared to an XLM-R baseline. Our analysis shows that no single factor explains the quality of multilingual LLM representations. Rather, a combination of factors determines quality including corpus size, script, "help from related languages and the total capacity of the model. Our work addresses an important goal of NLP research: we should notlimit NLP to a small fraction of the world's languages and instead strive to support as many languages as possible to bring the benefits of NLP technology to all languages and cultures. Code, data and models are available at https://github.com/cisnlp/Glot500.

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Glot500: Scaling Multilingual Corpora and Language Models to 500 Languages

The wide accessibility of social media has provided linguistically under-represented communities with an extraordinary opportunity to create content in their native languages. This, however, comes with certain challenges in script normalization, particularly where the speakers of a language in a bilingual community rely on another script or orthography to write their native language. This paper addresses the problem of script normalization for several such languages that are mainly written in a Perso-Arabic script. Using synthetic data with various levels of noise and a transformer-based model, we demonstrate that the problem can be effectively remediated. We conduct a small-scale evaluation of real data as well. Our experiments indicate that script normalization is also beneficial to improve the performance of downstream tasks such as machine translation and language identification.

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Script Normalization for Unconventional Writing of Under-Resourced Languages in Bilingual Communities

Due to the huge amount of parameters, finetuning of pretrained language models (PLMs) is prone to overfitting in the low resource scenarios. In this work, we present a novel method that operates on the hidden representations of a PLM to reduce overfitting. During fine-tuning, our method inserts random autoencoders between the hidden layers of a PLM, which transform activations from the previous layers into multi-view compressed representations before feeding them into the upper layers. The autoencoders are plugged out after fine-tuning, so our method does not add extra parameters or increase computation cost during inference. Our method demonstrates promising performance improvement across a wide range of sequence- and token-level lowresource NLP tasks.

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Towards Robust Low-Resource Fine-Tuning with Multi-View Compressed Representations

Current image generation models struggle to reliably produce well-formed visual text. In this paper, we investigate a key contributing factor: popular text-to-image models lack character-level input features, making it much harder to predict a word's visual makeup as a series of glyphs. To quantify this effect, we conduct a series of experiments comparing character-aware vs. character-blind text encoders. In the text-only domain, we find that character-aware models provide large gains on a novel spelling task (WikiSpell). Applying our learnings to the visual domain, we train a suite of image generation models, and show that character-aware variants outperform their character-blind counterparts across a range of novel text rendering tasks (our DrawText benchmark). Our models set a much higher state-of-the-art on visual spelling, with 30+ point accuracy gains over competitors on rare words, despite training on far fewer examples.

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Character-Aware Models Improve Visual Text Rendering

Semantic proto-role labeling (SPRL) assigns properties to arguments based on a series of binary labels. While multiple studies have evaluated various approaches to SPRL, it has only been studied in-depth as a standalone task using gold predicate/argument pairs. How do SPRL systems perform as part of an information extraction pipeline? We model SPRL jointly with predicate-argument extraction using a deep transformer model. We find that proto-role labeling is surprisingly robust in this setting, with only a small decrease when using predicted arguments. We include a detailed analysis of each component of the joint system, and an error analysis to understand correlations in errors between system stages. Finally, we study the effects of annotation errors on SPRL.

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Joint End-to-end Semantic Proto-role Labeling

Multi-level implicit discourse relation recognition (MIDRR) aims at identifying hierarchical discourse relations among arguments. Previous methods achieve the promotion through fine-tuning PLMs. However, due to the data scarcity and the task gap, the pre-trained feature space cannot be accurately tuned to the task-specific space, which even aggravates the collapse of the vanilla space. Besides, the comprehension of hierarchical semantics for MIDRR makes the conversion much harder. In this paper, we propose a prompt-based Parameter-Efficient Multi-level IDRR (PEMI) framework to solve the above problems. First, we leverage parameter-efficient prompt tuning to drive the inputted arguments to match the pre-trained space and realize the approximation with few parameters. Furthermore, we propose a hierarchical label refining (HLR) method for the prompt verbalizer to deeply integrate hierarchical guidance into the prompt tuning. Finally, our model achieves comparable results on PDTB 2.0 and 3.0 using about 0.1% trainable parameters compared with baselines and the visualization demonstrates the effectiveness of our HLR method.

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Infusing Hierarchical Guidance into Prompt Tuning: A Parameter-Efficient Framework for Multi-level Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition

In simultaneous speech translation (SimulST), effective policies that determine when to write partial translations are crucial to reach high output quality with low latency. Towards this objective, we propose EDAtt (Encoder-Decoder Attention), an adaptive policy that exploits the attention patterns between audio source and target textual translation to guide an offline-trained ST model during simultaneous inference. EDAtt exploits the attention scores modeling the audio-translation relation to decide whether to emit a partial hypothesis or wait for more audio input. This is done under the assumption that, if attention is focused towards the most recently received speech segments, the information they provide can be insufficient to generate the hypothesis (indicating that the system has to wait for additional audio input). Results on en->{de, es} show that EDAtt yields better results compared to the SimulST state of the art, with gains respectively up to 7 and 4 BLEU points for the two languages, and with a reduction in computational-aware latency up to 1.4s and 0.7s compared to existing SimulST policies applied to offline-trained models.

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Attention as a Guide for Simultaneous Speech Translation

Language identification (LID) is a fundamental step in many natural language processing pipelines. However, current LID systems are far from perfect, particularly on lower-resource languages. We present a LID model which achieves a macro-average F1 score of 0.93 and a false positive rate of 0.033 across 201 languages, outperforming previous work. We achieve this by training on a curated dataset of monolingual data, which we audit manually to ensure reliability. We make both the model and the dataset available to the research community. Finally, we carry out detailed analysis into our model's performance, both in comparison to existing open models and by language class.

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An Open Dataset and Model for Language Identification

Although pretrained language models (PLMs) can be prompted to perform a wide range of language tasks, it remains an open question how much this ability comes from generalizable linguistic understanding versus surface-level lexical patterns. To test this, we present a structured prompting approach for linguistic structured prediction tasks, allowing us to perform zero- and few-shot sequence tagging with autoregressive PLMs. We evaluate this approach on part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, and sentence chunking, demonstrating strong few-shot performance in all cases. We also find that while PLMs contain significant prior knowledge of task labels due to task leakage into the pretraining corpus, structured prompting can also retrieve linguistic structure with arbitrary labels. These findings indicate that the in-context learning ability and linguistic knowledge of PLMs generalizes beyond memorization of their training data.

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Downloads

Next from ACL 2023

GIFT: Graph-Induced Fine-Tuning for Multi-Party Conversation Understanding

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Comparing Explanation Faithfulness between Multilingual and Monolingual Fine-tuned Language Models