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Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant success in complex tasks across various domains, but they come with high computational costs and inference latency issues. Pruning, as an effective method, can significantly reduce inference costs. However, current pruning algorithms for encoder-based language models often focus on locally optimal solutions, neglecting a comprehensive exploration of the global solution space. This oversight can lead to instability in the solution process, thereby affecting the overall performance of the model. To address these challenges, we propose a structured pruning algorithm named G-Pruner (Global Pruner), comprising two integral components: PPOM (Proximal Policy Optimization Mask) and CG²MT (Conjugate Gradient Squared Mask Tuning), utilizing a global optimization strategy. This strategy not only eliminates the need for retraining but also ensures the algorithm&#39;s stability and adaptability to environmental changes, effectively addressing the issue of focusing solely

EMNLP 2024

Global-Pruner: A Stable and Efficient Pruner for Retraining-Free Pruning of Encoder-Based Language Models

global optimization strategy

encoder-based language models

retraining-free pruning

pruning

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant success in complex tasks across various domains, but they come with high computational costs and inference latency issues. Pruning, as an effective method, can significantly reduce inference costs. However, current pruning algorithms for encoder-based language models often focus on locally optimal solutions, neglecting a comprehensive exploration of the global solution space. This oversight can lead to instability in the solution process, thereby affecting the overall performance of the model. To address these challenges, we propose a structured pruning algorithm named G-Pruner (Global Pruner), comprising two integral components: PPOM (Proximal Policy Optimization Mask) and CG²MT (Conjugate Gradient Squared Mask Tuning), utilizing a global optimization strategy. This strategy not only eliminates the need for retraining but also ensures the algorithm's stability and adaptability to environmental changes, effectively addressing the issue of focusing solely

## 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.
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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.

This paper presents the results of the patent translation shared task at the 11th Workshop on Asian Translation and 9th Conference on Machine Translation. Two teams participated in this task, and their submitted translation results for one or more of the six language directions were automatically and manually evaluated. The evaluation results demonstrate the strong performance of large language modelbased systems from both participants.

Results of the WAT/WMT 2024 Shared Task on Patent Translation

We present the joint CUNI and LMU submission to the MRL~2024 Shared Task on Multi-lingual Multi-task Information Retrieval. The shared task objective was to explore how we can deploy modern methods in NLP in multi-lingual low-resource settings, tested on two sub-tasks: Named-entity recognition and question answering. Our solutions to the subtasks are based on data acquisition and model adaptation. We compare the performance of our submitted systems with the translate-test approach which proved to be the most useful in the previous edition of the shared task. Our results show that using more data as well as fine-tuning recent multilingual pre-trained models leads to considerable improvements over the translate-test baseline. Our code is available at https://github.com/ufal/mrl2024-multilingual-ir-shared-task.

CUNI at WMT24 General Translation Task: LLMs, (Q)LoRA, CPO and Model Merging

This paper describes the development process of NMT systems that were submitted to the WMT~2024 General Translation and Biomedical shared tasks by the team of AIST AIRC. At WMT 2024 AIST AIRC participated in the General Machine Translation shared task and the Biomedical Translation task. We trained constrained track models for translation between English, German, and Japanese. Before training our models, we first filtered the parallel data, then performed iterative back-translation and additional filtering. We experimented with training baseline Transformer models, Mega models, and fine-tuning open-source T5 and Gemma model checkpoints using the filtered parallel data. Our primary submissions contain translations from ensembles of two Mega model checkpoints and our contrastive submissions are generated by our fine-tuned T5 model checkpoints.

AIST AIRC Systems for the WMT 2024 Shared Tasks

This poster describes the submission of the very first version of the Occiglot open-source large language model to the General MT Shared Task of the 9th Conference of Machine Translation (WMT24). Occiglot is an open-source, community-based LLM based on Mistral-7B, which went through language-specific continual pre-training and subsequent instruction tuning, including instructions relevant to machine translation. We examine the automatic metric scores for translating the WMT24 test set and provide a detailed linguistically-motivated analysis. Despite Occiglot performing worse than many of the other system submissions, we observe that it performs better than Mistral7B, which has been based upon, which indicates the positive effect of the language specific continual-pretraining and instruction tuning. We see the submission of this very early version of the model as a motivation to unite community forces and pursue future LLM research on the translation task.

Occiglot at WMT24: European Open-source Large Language Models Evaluated on Translation

This paper presents an evaluation of 16 machine translation systems submitted to the Shared Task of the 9th Conference of Machine Translation (WMT24) for the English-Hindi (en-hi) language pair using our Complex Structures Test (CoST) suite. Aligning with this year’s test suite sub- task theme, “Help us break LLMs”, we curated a comprehensive test suite encompassing diverse datasets across various categories, including autobiography, poetry, legal, conversation, play, narration, technical, and mixed genres. Our evaluation reveals that all the systems struggle significantly with the archaic style of text like legal and technical writings or text with creative twist like conversation and poetry datasets, highlighting their weaknesses in handling complex linguistic structures and stylistic nuances inherent in these text types. Our evaluation identifies the strengths and limitations of the submitted models, pointing to specific areas where further research and development are needed to enhance their performance.

CoST of breaking the LLMs

We assess the difficulty of gender resolution in literary-style dialogue settings and the influence of gender stereotypes. Instances of the test suite contain spoken dialogue interleaved with external meta-context about the characters and the manner of speaking. We find that character and manner stereotypes outside of the dialogue significantly impact the gender agreement of referents within the dialogue.

WMT24 Test Suite: Gender Resolution in Speaker-Listener Dialogue Roles

The GenderQueer Test Suite is designed to probe MT systems’ capabilities and limitations in handling gender agreement in morphologically rich languages such as Icelandic as well as non-binary pronouns and LGBTQIA+ terminology.

The GenderQueer Test Suite

This paper summarizes the results of our test suite evaluation on 39 machine translation systems submitted at the Shared Task of the Ninth Conference of Machine Translation (WMT24). It offers a fine-grained linguistic evaluation of machine translation outputs for English– German and English–Russian, resulting from a significant manual linguistic effort. Based on our results, LLMs are inferior to NMT in English–German, both in overall scores and when translating specific linguistic phenomena, such as punctuation, complex future verb tenses, and stripping. LLMs show quite a competitive performance in English-Russian, although top-performing systems might struggle with some cases of named entities and terminology, function words, mediopassive voice, and semantic roles. Additionally, some LLMs generate very verbose or empty outputs, posing challenges to the evaluation process.

Investigating the Linguistic Performance of Large Language Models in Machine Translation

We present MetaMetrics-MT, an innovative metric designed to evaluate machine translation (MT) tasks by aligning closely with human preferences through Bayesian optimization with Gaussian Processes. MetaMetrics-MT enhances existing MT metrics by optimizing their correlation with human judgments. Our experiments on the WMT24 metric shared task dataset demonstrate that MetaMetrics-MT outperforms all existing baselines, setting a new benchmark for state-of-the-art performance in the referencebased setting. Furthermore, it achieves comparable results to leading metrics in the referencefree setting, offering greater efficiency.

MetaMetrics-MT: Tuning Meta-Metrics for Machine Translation via Human Preference Calibration

Machine translation (MT) evaluation metrics like BLEU and chrF++ are widely used reference-based metrics that do not require training and are language-independent. How- ever, these metrics primarily focus on n- gram matching and often overlook semantic depth and contextual understanding. To ad- dress this gap, we introduce chrF-S (Seman- tic chrF++), an enhanced metric that integrates sentence embeddings to evaluate translation quality more comprehensively. By combining traditional character and word n-gram analysis with semantic information derived from em- beddings, chrF-S captures both syntactic ac- curacy and sentence-level semantics. This pa- per presents our contributions to the WMT24 shared metrics task, showcasing our partici- pation and the development of chrF-S. We also demonstrate that, according to prelimi- nary results on the leaderboard, our metric performs on par with other supervised and LLM-based metrics. By merging semantic in- sights with n-gram precision, chrF-S offers a significant enhancement in the assessment of machine-generated translations, advancing the field of MT evaluation.

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Results of the WAT/WMT 2024 Shared Task on Patent Translation

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