Thailand

Equipping a conversational search engine with strategies regarding when to ask clarification questions is becoming increasingly important across various domains. 
Attributing to the context understanding capability of LLMs and their access to domain-specific sources of knowledge, LLM-based clarification strategies feature rapid transfer to various domains in a post-hoc manner.
However, they still struggle to deliver promising performance on unseen domains, struggling to achieve effective domain transferability.
We take the first step to investigate this issue and existing methods tend to produce one-size-fits-all strategies across diverse domains, limiting their search effectiveness.
In response, we introduce a novel method, called STYLE,
to achieve effective domain transferability.
Our experimental results indicate that STYLE bears strong domain transferability, resulting in an average search performance improvement of 10% on four unseen domains.

ACL 2024

STYLE: Improving Domain Transferability of Asking Clarification Questions in Large Language Model Powered Conversational Agents

clarification question

conversational search

agent

large language models

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
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, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 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 will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
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ACL 2022

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 (NLP). 

poster

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.aclweb.org/registration). **

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Please register!

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Indian Sign Language has limited resources for developing machine learning and data-driven approaches for automated language processing. Though text/audio-based language processing techniques have shown colossal research interest and tremendous improvements in the last few years, Sign Languages still need to catch up due to the need for more resources. To bridge this gap, in this work, we propose \textbf{iSign}: a benchmark for Indian Sign Language (ISL) Processing. We make three primary contributions to this work. First, we release one of the largest ISL-English datasets with more than \iSignCountShort video-sentence/phrase pairs. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest sign language dataset available for ISL. Second, we propose multiple NLP-specific tasks (including SignVideo2Text, SignPose2Text, Text2Pose, Word Prediction, and Sign Semantics) and benchmark them with the baseline models for easier access to the research community. Third, we provide detailed insights into the proposed benchmarks with a few linguistic insights into the working of ISL. We streamline the evaluation of Sign Language processing, addressing the gaps in the NLP research community for Sign Languages. We release the dataset, tasks and models via the following website: https://exploration-lab.github.io/iSign/

iSign: A Benchmark for Indian Sign Language Processing

Lifelong prompt tuning has significantly advanced parameter-efficient lifelong learning with its efficiency and minimal storage demands on various tasks.
Our empirical studies, however, highlights certain transferability constraints in the current methodologies: a universal algorithm that guarantees consistent positive transfer across all tasks is currently unattainable, especially when dealing dissimilar tasks that may engender negative transfer.
Identifying the misalignment between algorithm selection and task specificity as the primary cause of negative transfer, we present the Similarity Heuristic Lifelong Prompt Tuning (SHLPT) framework. This innovative strategy partitions tasks into two distinct subsets by harnessing a learnable similarity metric, thereby facilitating fruitful transfer from tasks regardless of their similarity or dissimilarity. Additionally, SHLPT incorporates a parameter pool to combat catastrophic forgetting effectively. Our experiments shows that SHLPT outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in lifelong learning benchmarks and demonstrates robustness against negative transfer in diverse task sequences.

Mitigate Negative Transfer with Similarity Heuristic Lifelong Prompt Tuning

Minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding achieved state-of-the-art translation performance by using COMET, a neural metric that has a high correlation with human evaluation.
However, MBR decoding requires quadratic time since it computes the expected score between a translation hypothesis and all reference translations.
We propose centroid-based MBR (CBMBR) decoding to improve the speed of MBR decoding.
Our method clusters the reference translations in the feature space, and then calculates the score using the centroids of each cluster.
The experimental results show that our CBMBR not only improved the decoding speed of the expected score calculation 5.7 times, but also outperformed vanilla MBR decoding in translation quality by up to 0.5 COMET in the WMT'22 En$\leftrightarrow$Ja, En$\leftrightarrow$De, En$\leftrightarrow$Zh, and WMT'23 En$\leftrightarrow$Ja translation tasks.

Centroid-Based Efficient Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding

Research on abusive language detection and content moderation is crucial to combat online harm. However, current limitations set by regulatory bodies and social media platforms can make it difficult to share collected data. We address this challenge by exploring the possibility to replace existing datasets in English for abusive language detection with synthetic data obtained by rewriting original texts with an instruction-based generative model.

We show that such data can be effectively used to train a classifier whose performance is in line, and sometimes better, than a classifier trained on original data. Training with synthetic data also seems to improve robustness in a cross-dataset setting. A manual inspection of the generated data confirms that rewriting makes it impossible to retrieve the original texts online.

Don’t Augment, Rewrite? Assessing Abusive Language Detection with Synthetic Data

This paper investigates how machine translation for low-resource languages can be improved by incorporating information from bilingual lexicons during the training process for mainly translation between Mandarin and Formosan languages, which are all moribund or critically endangered, and we also show that our techniques work for translation between Spanish and Nahuatl, a language pair consisting of languages from completely different language families. About 70% of the approximately 7,000 languages of the world have data in the form of lexicons, a valuable resource for improving low-resource language translation. 
We collect a dataset of parallel data and bilingual lexicons between Mandarin and 16 different Formosan languages and examine mainly three different approaches: (1) simply using lexical data as additional parallel data, (2) generating pseudo-parallel sentence data to use during training by replacing words in the original parallel sentence data using the lexicon, and (3) a combination of (1) and (2). All three approaches give us gains in both Bleu scores and chrF scores, and we found that (3) provided the most gains, followed by (1) and then (2), which we observed for both translation between Mandarin and the Formosan languages and Spanish-Nahuatl. With technique (3), we saw an average increase of 5.55 in Bleu scores and 10.33 in chrF scores.

Improving Low-Resource Machine Translation for Formosan Languages Using Bilingual Lexical Resources

As large language models (LLM) are increasingly used for text generation tasks, it is critical to audit their usages, govern their applications, and mitigate their potential harms. Existing watermark techniques are shown effective in embedding single human-imperceptible and machine-detectable patterns without significantly affecting generated text quality and semantics. However, the efficiency in detecting watermarks, i.e., the minimum number of tokens required to assert detection with significance and robustness against post-editing, is still debatable. In this paper, we propose, Duwak, to fundamentally enhance the efficiency and quality of watermarking by embedding dual secret patterns in both token probability distribution and sampling schemes. To mitigate expression degradation caused by biasing toward certain tokens, we design a contrastive search to watermark the sampling scheme, which minimizes the token repetition and enhances the diversity. We theoretically explain the interdependency of the two watermarks within Duwak. We evaluate Duwak extensively on Llama2 and Vicuna under various post-editing attacks, against four state-of-the-art watermarking techniques and combinations of them. Our results show that Duwak marked text achieves the highest watermarked text quality at the lowest required token count for detection, up to 70% tokens less than existing approaches, especially under post paraphrasing.

Duwak: Dual Watermarks in Large Language Models

Large Language Model (LLM) services and models often come with legal rules on *who* can use them and *how* they must use them. Assessing the compliance of the released LLMs is crucial, as these rules protect the interests of the LLM contributor and prevent misuse. In this context, we describe the novel fingerprinting problem of Black-box Identity Verification (BBIV). The goal is to determine whether a third-party application uses a certain LLM through its chat function. We propose a method called Targeted Random Adversarial Prompt (TRAP) that identifies the specific LLM in use. We repurpose adversarial suffixes, originally proposed for jailbreaking, to get a pre-defined answer from the target LLM, while other models give random answers. TRAP detects the target LLMs with over 95% true positive rate at under 0.2% false positive rate even after a single interaction. TRAP remains effective even if the LLM has minor changes that do not significantly alter the original function.

TRAP: Targeted Random Adversarial Prompt Honeypot for Black-Box Identification

Stochastic sampling strategies such as top-k and top-p have been widely used in dialogue generation task. However, as an open-domain chatting system, there will be two different conversation scenarios, i.e. chit-chat and knowledge-based question answering. In the former situation, responses diversity is essential due to the one-to-many nature in dialogue. The latter, on the other hand, requires less randomness given that stochastic decoding strategy entails the risk of generating incorrect information. As a result, an adaptive and flexible decoding strategy is needed to cope with these two scenarios simultaneously. To this end, we propose the dynamic decoding strategy (DDS), which can adjust the decoding space w.r.t. different contexts. In DDS, both sequence-level and token-level adaptive search can be achieved to adjust the decoding process in a unified framework. Besides, our adaptive algorithm can not only be used during model inference, but it can also be applied during the model training stage to further enhance the performance. Comprehensive experiments indicate that the proposed decoding strategy can consistently improve the performance of pre-trained dialogue models when coupled with four well-used stochastic decoding algorithms.

Dynamic Stochastic Decoding Strategy for Open-Domain Dialogue Generation

Neural machine translation (NMT) systems often produce inadequate translations for named entities. In this study, we conducted preliminary experiments to examine the factors affecting the translation accuracy of named entities, specifically focusing on their translation difficulty and context diversity. Based on our observations, we propose a novel data augmentation strategy to enhance the accuracy of named entity translation. The main concept behind our approach is to increase both the context diversity and translation probability for the targeted named entity pair. To achieve this, we construct additional samples for named entities that exhibit high translation difficulty or low context diversity and use the augmented training data to re-train the final translation model. Furthermore, we propose an entity-aware machine translation metric that prefers the translation output to generate more accurate named entities. Our experimental results demonstrate significant improvements over the baseline in terms of general translation performance and named entity translation accuracy across various test sets, such as WMT news translation and terminology test sets.

Addressing Entity Translation Problem via Translation Difficulty and Context Diversity

For dialogue systems, the utilization of multimodal dialogue responses, as opposed to relying solely on text-only responses, offers the capability to describe different concepts through various modalities. This enhances the effectiveness of communication and elevates the overall conversational experience. However, current methods for dialogue-to-image retrieval are constrained by the capabilities of the pre-trained vision language models (VLMs). They struggle to accurately extract key information from conversations and are unable to handle long-turn conversations. In this paper, we leverage the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to predict the potential features that may be present in the images to be shared, based on the dialogue context. This approach allows us to obtain succinct and precise descriptors, thereby improving the performance of text-image retrieval. Experimental results shows that our method outperforms previous approaches significantly in terms of Recall@k.

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Next from ACL 2024

iSign: A Benchmark for Indian Sign Language Processing

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Conversational Search with Mixed-Initiative - Asking Good Clarification Questions backed-up by Passage Retrieval

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