Canada

End-to-End speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) is generally evaluated with text-based metrics. This means that generated speech has to be automatically transcribed, making the evaluation dependent on the availability and quality of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems.In this paper, we propose a text-free evaluation metric for end-to-end S2ST, named BLASER, to avoid the dependency on ASR systems. BLASER leverages a multilingual multimodal encoder to directly encode the speech segments for source input, translation output and reference into a shared embedding space and computes a score of the translation quality that can be used as a proxy to human evaluation. To evaluate our approach, we construct training and evaluation sets from more than 40k human annotations covering seven language directions.The best results of BLASER are achieved by training with supervision from human rating scores. We show that when evaluated at the sentence level, BLASER correlates significantly better with human judgment compared to ASR dependent metrics including ASR-SENTBLEU in all translation directions and ASR-COMET in five of them. Our analysis shows combining speech and text as inputs to BLASER does not increase the correlation with human scores, but best correlations are achieved when using speech, which motivates the goal of our research. Moreover, we show that using ASR for references is detrimental for text-based metrics.

ACL 2023

BLASER: A Text-Free Speech-to-Speech Translation Evaluation Metric

metric

speech translation

evaluation

machine translation

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPROgxjLAC96AJL7Ugy0tEnYm7dkrbHt/view?usp=sharing)<br><br><br>

You are required to register for this event. <br>**Please register [here](https://2024.emnlp.org/registration/).**<br> The EMNLP 2024 event page on Underline will be open to public one week prior to the event.

Please register!

EMNLP 2024

EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

poster

### 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)**
<br><br><br><br>

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.

Recent works have shown that chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting can elicit language models to solve complex reasoning tasks, step-by-step. However, prompt-based CoT methods are dependent on very large models such as GPT-3 175B which are prohibitive to deploy at scale. In this paper, we use these large models as reasoning teachers to enable complex reasoning in smaller models and reduce model size requirements by several orders of magnitude. We propose Fine-tune-CoT, a method that generates reasoning samples from very large teacher models to fine-tune smaller models. We evaluate our method on a wide range of public models and complex tasks. We find that Fine-tune-CoT enables substantial reasoning capability in small models, far outperforming prompt-based baselines and even the teacher model in many tasks. Additionally, we extend our method by leveraging the teacher model's ability to generate multiple distinct rationales for each original sample. Enriching the fine-tuning data with such diverse reasoning results in a substantial performance boost across datasets, even for very small models. We conduct ablations and sample studies to understand the emergence of reasoning capabilities of student models. Our code implementation and data are available at https://github.com/itsnamgyu/reasoning-teacher.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/oApzFnCrRo86e5qieE2QHQ/embed/polls/5760a5ba-c91e-4a35-ae71-10291a3e4a13" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Large Language Models Are Reasoning Teachers

Visual spatial description (VSD) aims to generate texts that describe the spatial relations of the given objects within images. Existing VSD work merely models the 2D geometrical vision features, thus inevitably falling prey to the problem of skewed spatial understanding of target objects. In this work, we investigate the incorporation of 3D scene features for VSD. With an external 3D scene extractor, we obtain the 3D objects and scene features for input images, based on which we construct a target object-centered 3D spatial scene graph (Go3D-S2G), such that we model the spatial semantics of target objects within the holistic 3D scenes. Besides, we propose a scene subgraph selecting mechanism, sampling topologically-diverse subgraphs from Go3D-S2G, where the diverse local structure features are navigated to yield spatially-diversified text generation. Experimental results on two VSD datasets demonstrate that our framework outperforms the baselines significantly, especially improving on the cases with complex visual spatial relations. Meanwhile, our method can produce more spatially-diversified generation.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/oApzFnCrRo86e5qieE2QHQ/embed/polls/242e9082-2298-4478-8c7c-7556d4693ab8" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Generating Visual Spatial Description via Holistic 3D Scene Understanding

Ensembling BERT models often significantly improves accuracy, but at the cost of significantly more computation and memory footprint. In this work, we propose Multi-CLS BERT, a novel ensembling method for CLS-based prediction tasks that is almost as efficient as a single BERT model. Multi-CLS BERT uses multiple CLS tokens with a parameterization and objective that encourages their diversity. Thus instead of fine-tuning each BERT model in an ensemble (and running them all at test time), we need only fine-tune our single Multi-CLS BERT model (and run the one model at test time, ensembling just the multiple final CLS embeddings). To test its effectiveness, we build Multi-CLS BERT on top of a state-of-the-art pretraining method for BERT (Aroca-Ouellette and Rudzicz, 2020). In experiments on GLUE and SuperGLUE we show that our Multi-CLS BERT reliably improves both overall accuracy and confidence estimation. When only 100 training samples are available in GLUE, the Multi-CLS BERT_Base model can even outperform the corresponding BERT_Large model. We analyze the behavior of our Multi-CLS BERT, showing that it has many of the same characteristics and behavior as a typical BERT 5-way ensemble, but with nearly 4-times less computation and memory.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/nDU9hzdsVZXUCPdEbR3oSF/embed/polls/e234035e-9635-40b2-8bc6-eaf55c04a496" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Multi-CLS BERT: An Efficient Alternative to Traditional Ensembling

Paraphrase generation is a long-standing task in natural language processing (NLP). Supervised paraphrase generation models, which rely on human-annotated paraphrase pairs, are cost-inefficient and hard to scale up. On the other hand, automatically annotated paraphrase pairs (e.g., by machine back-translation), usually suffer from the lack of syntactic diversity -- the generated paraphrase sentences are very similar to the source sentences in terms of syntax. In this work, we present ParaAMR, a large-scale syntactically diverse paraphrase dataset created by abstract meaning representation back-translation. Our quantitative analysis, qualitative examples, and human evaluation demonstrate that the paraphrases of ParaAMR are syntactically more diverse compared to existing large-scale paraphrase datasets while preserving good semantic similarity. In addition, we show that ParaAMR can be used to improve on three NLP tasks: learning sentence embeddings, syntactically controlled paraphrase generation, and data augmentation for few-shot learning. Our results thus showcase the potential of ParaAMR for improving various NLP applications.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/kgQkh7cPzt9VEM52HG3MJu/embed/polls/12111c7b-9f78-46c1-a4fe-c6fdb79ac07c" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

ParaAMR: A Large-Scale Syntactically Diverse Paraphrase Dataset by AMR Back-Translation

We present PESCO, a novel contrastive learning framework that substantially improves the performance of zero-shot text classification. We formulate text classification as a neural text retrieval problem where each document is treated as a query, and the system learns the mapping from each query to the relevant class labels by (1) adding prompts to enhance label retrieval, and (2) using retrieved labels to enrich the training set in a self-training loop of contrastive learning. PESCO achieves state-of-the-art performance on four benchmark text classification datasets. On DBpedia, we achieve 98.5\% accuracy without any labeled data, which is close to the fully-supervised result. Extensive experiments and analyses show all the components of PESCO are necessary for improving the performance of zero-shot text classification.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/kgQkh7cPzt9VEM52HG3MJu/embed/polls/a0be82f1-0c22-4909-9b21-8f81a697591d" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

PESCO: Prompt-enhanced Self Contrastive Learning for Zero-shot Text Classification

Multilingual Machine Translation promises to improve translation quality between non-English languages. This is advantageous for several reasons, namely lower latency (no need to translate twice), and reduced error cascades (e.g., avoiding losing gender and formality information when translating through English).On the downside, adding more languages reduces model capacity per language, which is usually countered by increasing the overall model size, making training harder and inference slower.In this work, we introduce Language-Specific Transformer Layers (LSLs), which allow us to increase model capacity, while keeping the amount of computation and the number of parameters used in the forward pass constant. The key idea is to have some layers of the encoder be source or target language-specific, while keeping the remaining layers shared. We study the best way to place these layers using a neural architecture search inspired approach, and achieve an improvement of 1.3 chrF (1.5 spBLEU) points over not using LSLs on a separate decoder architecture, and 1.9 chrF (2.2 spBLEU) on a shared decoder one.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/kgQkh7cPzt9VEM52HG3MJu/embed/polls/7ba221c7-36db-4fe5-a7b5-32d4f3bbc6db" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Learning Language-Specific Layers for Multilingual Machine Translation

Tense inconsistency frequently occurs in machine translation. However, there are few criteria to assess the model's mastery of tense prediction from a linguistic perspective. In this paper, we present a parallel tense test set, containing French-English 552 utterances. We also introduce a corresponding benchmark, tense prediction accuracy. With the tense test set and the benchmark, researchers are able to measure the tense consistency performance of machine translation systems for the first time.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/kgQkh7cPzt9VEM52HG3MJu/embed/polls/3bdc5ffb-0d60-4470-b1fa-8892cac7c674" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

TeCS: A Dataset and Benchmark for Tense Consistency of Machine Translation

Consistently scaling pre-trained language models (PLMs) imposes substantial burdens on model adaptation, necessitating more efficient alternatives to conventional fine-tuning.Given the advantage of prompting in the zero-shot setting and the observed performance fluctuation among different prompts, we explore the instance-level prompt and their generalizability.By searching through the prompt space, we first validate the assumption that for every instance, there is almost always a lottery prompt that induces the correct prediction from the PLM, and such prompt can be obtained at a low cost thanks to the inherent ability of PLMs.Meanwhile, it is shown that some strong lottery prompts have high performance over the whole training set, and they are equipped with distinguishable linguistic features.Lastly, we attempt to generalize the searched strong lottery prompts to unseen data with prompt ensembling method.Experiments are conducted on various types of NLP classification tasks and demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve comparable results with other gradient-free and optimization-free baselines.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/kgQkh7cPzt9VEM52HG3MJu/embed/polls/d187034a-3021-4727-9147-b06b9cc5548f" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Exploring Lottery Prompts for Pre-trained Language Models

Existing research has shown that a multilingual pre-trained language model fine-tuned with one (source) language also performs well on downstream tasks for non-source languages, even though no fine-tuning is done on these languages. However, there is a clear gap between the performance of the source language and that of the non-source languages. This paper analyzes the fine-tuning process, discovers when the performance gap changes and identifies which network weights affect the overall performance most. Additionally, the paper seeks to answer to what extent the gap can be reduced by reducing forgetting. Based on the analysis results, a method named Fine-tuning slow and fast with four training policies is proposed to address these issues. Experimental results show the proposed method outperforms baselines by a clear margin.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/kgQkh7cPzt9VEM52HG3MJu/embed/polls/3445174b-cc76-4907-8af8-e312cb91d245" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Analyzing and Reducing the Performance Gap in Cross-Lingual Transfer with Fine-tuning Slow and Fast

While pre-trained language models achieve impressive performance on various NLP benchmarks, they still struggle with tasks that require numerical reasoning. Recent advances in improving numerical reasoning are mostly achieved using very large language models that contain billions of parameters and are not accessible to everyone. In addition, numerical reasoning is measured using a single score on existing datasets. As a result, we do not have a clear understanding of the strengths and shortcomings of existing models on different numerical reasoning aspects and therefore, potential ways to improve them apart from scaling them up. Inspired by CheckList (Ribeiro et al., 2020), we introduce a multi-view evaluation set for numerical reasoning in English, called FERMAT. Instead of reporting a single score on a whole dataset, FERMAT evaluates models on various key numerical reasoning aspects such as number understanding, mathematical operations, and training dependency. Apart from providing a comprehensive evaluation of models on different numerical reasoning aspects, FERMAT enables a systematic and automated generation of an arbitrarily large training or evaluation set for each aspect.The datasets and codes are publicly available to generate further multi-view data for ulterior tasks and languages.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/kgQkh7cPzt9VEM52HG3MJu/embed/polls/1f579f36-0bfe-459f-8839-80b39a619657" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Downloads

Next from ACL 2023

Large Language Models Are Reasoning Teachers

Similar lecture

BLASER 2.0: a metric for evaluation and quality estimation of massively multilingual speech and text translation