Mexico

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a predominant approach for BERT compression. Previous KD-based methods focus on designing extra alignment losses for the student model to mimic the behavior of the teacher model. These methods transfer the knowledge in an indirect way. In this paper, we propose a novel Weight-Inherited Distillation (WID), which directly transfers knowledge from the teacher. WID does not require any additional alignment loss and trains a compact student by inheriting the weights, showing a new perspective of knowledge distillation. Specifically, we design the row compactors and column compactors as mappings and then compress the weights via structural re-parameterization. Experimental results on the GLUE and SQuAD benchmarks show that WID outperforms previous state-of-the-art KD-based baselines. Further analysis indicates that WID can also learn the attention patterns from the teacher model without any alignment loss on attention distributions. The code is available at https://github.com/wutaiqiang/WID-NAACL2024.

NAACL 2024

Weight-Inherited Distillation for Task-Agnostic BERT Compression

structural re-parameterization

language model

knowledge distillation

ICPR 2020 is the premier international conference on Pattern Recognition, gathering leading researchers from around the world to present their latest achievements in Pattern Analysis and Recognition, applied Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The topic of the year is " Putting Artificial intelligence to work on Patterns". 
For the first time, ICPR has employed a two-round review process similar to journal submissions, with new papers allowed to be submitted in either the first or second round and papers submitted in the first round and not accepted allowed to be revised and re-submitted for second round review. 

In this edition of the **ICPR 2020** Conference, there are 1407 Oral/Poster presentations organized in five Tracks: 
- Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning for Pattern Analysis; 
- Biometrics, Human Analysis and Behavior Understanding; Computer Vision, Robotics and Intelligent Systems; 
- Document and Media Analysis; and 
- Image and Signal Processing. 

The **ICPR 2020** Main Conference program also includes 7 Keynotes from prominent world-renowned scientists, 8 Tutorials, 28 Demos, 8 Challenges, 2 Panels, as well as an Industry/Sponsor Exhibition. In addition, 41 Workshops on a range of important current and emerging research topics complete the ICPR 2020 program. 


ICPR 2020

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

Standard extractive systems suffer from the lack of gold training signals since existing corpora solely provide document and human-written summary pairs while disregarding extractive labels. As a result, existing methods resort to imperfect pseudo-labels that are both biased and error-prone, thereby hindering the learning process of extractive models. In contrast, text generators which are commonly employed in abstractive summarization can effortlessly overcome this predicament on account of flexible sequence-to-sequence architectures. Motivated to bypass this inherent limitation, we investigate the possibility of conducting extractive summarization with text generators. Through extensive experiments covering six summarization benchmarks, we show that high-quality extractive summaries can be assembled via approximating the outputs (abstractive summaries) of these generators. Moreover, we find that the approximate summaries correlate positively with the auxiliary summaries (i.e. a better generator enables the production of better extractive summaries). Our results signify a new paradigm for training extractive summarizers i.e. learning with generation (abstractive) objectives rather than extractive schemes.

Extractive Summarization with Text Generator

Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) or its weighted variants has significantly progressed in compressing language models. Previous works assume the same importance for all operations and assign the same number of ranks for different layers in a language model. However, such a uniform rank selection is sub-optimal since different operations (layers) have non-uniform demand in capacity. In other words, a desired SVD strategy should allocate more ranks for important operations and vice versa. However, a globally-optimized selection of ranks for neural networks is still an open problem, and this is a non-trivial challenge since the selection is discrete. In this work, we propose a novel binary masking mechanism for optimizing the number of ranks in a differentiable framework. Our strategy uses a novel regularization to enable the masking to comply with the SVD property where the ranks have sorted singular values. The experiments examined both types of language models, encoder-only and decoder-only models, including large language models like LLaMA. Our compressed model achieves much better accuracy than previous SVD and their SOTA variants. More interestingly, our method retains significantly better accuracy with zero or limited fine-tuning, proving the substantial advantage of adaptive rank selection.

Adaptive Rank Selections for Low-Rank Approximation of Language Models

Human intelligence thrives on cognitive synergy, where collaboration among different minds yield superior outcomes compared to isolated individuals. In this work, we propose Solo Performance Prompting (SPP), which transforms a single LLM into a cognitive synergist by engaging in multi-turn self-collaboration with multiple personas. A cognitive synergist is an intelligent agent that collaboratively combines multiple minds' strengths and knowledge to enhance problem-solving in complex tasks. By dynamically identifying and simulating different personas based on task inputs, SPP unleashes the potential of cognitive synergy in LLMs. Our in-depth analysis shows that assigning multiple fine-grained personas in LLMs improves problem-solving abilities compared to using a single or fixed number of personas. We evaluate SPP on three challenging tasks: Trivia Creative Writing, Codenames Collaborative, and Logic Grid Puzzle, encompassing both knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive types. Unlike previous works, such as Chain-of-Thought, that solely enhance the reasoning abilities in LLMs, experimental results demonstrate that SPP effectively reduces factual hallucination, and maintains strong reasoning capabilities. Additionally, comparative experiments show that cognitive synergy only emerges in GPT-4 and does not appear in less capable models, such as GPT-3.5-turbo and Llama2-13b-chat, which draws an interesting analogy to human development. Code, data, and prompts can be found at: https://github.com/MikeWangWZHL/Solo-Performance-Prompting.git.

Unleashing the Emergent Cognitive Synergy in Large Language Models: A Task-Solving Agent through Multi-Persona Self-Collaboration

Prompt-based methods have achieved promising results in most few-shot text classification tasks. However, for readability assessment tasks, traditional prompt methods lack crucial linguistic knowledge, which has already been proven to be essential.Moreover, previous studies on utilizing linguistic features have shown non-robust performance in few-shot settings and may even impair model performance.To address these issues, we propose a novel prompt-based tuning framework that incorporates rich linguistic knowledge, called Feature Prompt Tuning (FPT). Specifically, we extract linguistic features from the text and embed them into trainable soft prompts. Further, we devise a new loss function to calibrate the similarity ranking order between categories. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method FTPnot only exhibits a significant performance improvement over the prior best prompt-based tuning approaches, but also surpasses the previous leading methods that incorporate linguistic features. Also, our proposed model significantly outperforms the large language model gpt-3.5-turbo-16k in most cases. Our proposed method establishes a new architecture for prompt tuning that sheds light on how linguistic features can be easily adapted to linguistic-related tasks.

FPT: Feature Prompt Tuning for Few-shot Readability Assessment

Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) aims to answer questions without explicitly providing specific background documents. This task becomes notably challenging in a zero-shot setting where no data is available to train tailored retrieval-reader models. While recent Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-3 have demonstrated their effectiveness in zero-shot ODQA using direct prompting methods, these methods still fall short of fully harnessing the potential of LLMs when implicitly invoked. In this paper, we propose a Self-Prompting framework to explicitly utilize the massive knowledge encoded in the parameters of LLMs and their strong instruction understanding abilities. Concretely, we prompt LLMs step by step to generate multiple pseudo QA pairs with background passages and explanations entirely from scratch. These generated elements are then utilized for in-context learning. Experimental results show that our method significantly surpasses previous state-of-the-art zero-shot methods on three widely-used ODQA datasets and even achieves comparable performance with various customized fine-tuned models on full training data. Our code is available at https://github.com/lockon-n/self-prompting.

Self-Prompting Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Open-Domain QA

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive generation capabilities, but they suffer from hallucinations when solely relying on their internal knowledge, especially when answering questions that require less commonly known information. Retrievalaugmented LLMs have emerged as a potential solution to ground LLMs in external knowledge. Nonetheless, recent approaches have primarily emphasized retrieval from unstructured text corpora, owing to its seamless integration into prompts. When using structured data such as knowledge graphs, most methods simplify it into natural text, neglecting the underlying structures. Moreover, a significant gap in the current landscape is the absence of a realistic benchmark for evaluating the effectiveness of grounding LLMs on heterogeneous knowledge sources (e.g., knowledge base and text). To fill this gap, we have curated a comprehensive dataset that poses two unique challenges: (1) Two-hop multi-source questions that require retrieving information from both open-domain structured and unstructured knowledge sources; retrieving information from structured knowledge sources is a critical component in correctly answering the questions. (2) Generation of symbolic queries (e.g., SPARQL for Wikidata) is a key requirement, which adds another layer of challenge. Our dataset is created using a combination of automatic generation through predefined reasoning chains and human annotation. We also introduce a novel approach that leverages multiple retrieval tools, including text passage retrieval and symbolic language-assisted retrieval. Our model outperforms previous approaches by a significant margin, demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing the above-mentioned reasoning challenges.

DIVKNOWQA: Assessing the Reasoning Ability of LLMs via Open-Domain Question Answering over Knowledge Base and Text

We present SeaEval, a benchmark for multilingual foundation models. In addition to characterizing how these models understand and reason with natural language, we also investigate how well they comprehend cultural practices, nuances, and values. Alongside standard accuracy metrics, we investigate the brittleness of foundation models in the dimensions of semantics and multilinguality. Our analyses span both open-sourced and closed models, leading to empirical results across classic NLP tasks, reasoning, and cultural comprehension. Key findings indicate (1) Many models exhibit varied behavior when given paraphrased instructions. (2) Many models still suffer from exposure bias (e.g., positional bias, majority label bias). (3) For questions rooted in factual, scientific, and commonsense knowledge, consistent responses are expected across multilingual queries that are semantically equivalent. Yet, most models surprisingly demonstrate inconsistent performance on these queries. (4) Multilingually-trained models have not attained ``balanced multilingual'' capabilities. Our endeavors underscore the need for more generalizable semantic representations and enhanced multilingual contextualization. SeaEval can serve as a launchpad for more thorough investigations and evaluations for multilingual and multicultural scenarios.

SeaEval for Multilingual Foundation Models: From Cross-Lingual Alignment to Cultural Reasoning

In-context learning (ICL) empowers large language models (LLMs) to perform diverse tasks in underrepresented languages using only short in-context information, offering a crucial avenue for narrowing the gap between high-resource and low-resource languages. Nonetheless, there is only a handful of works explored ICL for low-resource languages with most of them focusing on relatively high-resource languages, such as French and Spanish. In this work, we extensively study ICL and its cross-lingual variation (X-ICL) on 25 low-resource and 7 relatively higher-resource languages. Our study not only assesses the effectiveness of ICL with LLMs in low-resource languages but also identifies the shortcomings of in-context label alignment, and introduces a more effective alternative: query alignment. Moreover, we provide valuable insights into various facets of ICL for low-resource languages. Our study concludes the significance of few-shot in-context information on enhancing the low-resource understanding quality of LLMs through semantically relevant information by closing the language gap in the target language and aligning the semantics between the targeted low-resource and the high-resource language that the model is proficient in. Our work highlights the importance of advancing ICL research, particularly for low-resource languages.

LLMs Are Few-Shot In-Context Low-Resource Language Learners

Geocoding is the task of converting location mentions in text into structured geospatial data. We propose a new prompt-based paradigm for geocoding, where the machine learning algorithm encodes only the location mention and its context. We design a transformer network for predicting the country, state, and feature class of a location mention, and a deterministic algorithm that leverages the country, state, and feature class predictions as constraints in a search for compatible entries in the ontology. Our architecture, GeoPLACE, achieves new state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets. Code and models are available at \url{https://github.com/clulab/geonorm}.

Improving Toponym Resolution by Predicting Attributes to Constrain Geographical Ontology Entries

Document-level Relation Extraction (RE) aims to extract relation triples from documents. Existing document-RE models typically rely on supervised learning which requires substantial labeled data. To alleviate the amount of human supervision, Self-training (ST) has prospered again in language understanding by augmenting the fine-tuning of big pre-trained models whenever labeled data is insufficient. However, existing ST methods in RE fail to tackle the challenge of long-tail relations. In this work, we propose DuRE, a novel ST framework to tackle these problems. DuRE jointly models RE classification and text generation as a dual process. In this way, our model could construct and utilize both pseudo text generated from given labels and pseudo labels predicted from available unlabeled text, which are gradually refined during the ST phase. We proposed a contrastive loss to leverage the signal of the RE classifier to improve generation quality. In addition, we propose a self-adaptive way to sample pseudo text from different relation classes. Experiments on two document-level RE tasks show that DuRE significantly boosts recall and F1 score with comparable precision, especially for long-tail relations against several strong baselines.

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Extractive Summarization with Text Generator

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