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Productive interactions between diverse users and language technologies require outputs from the latter to be culturally relevant and sensitive. Prior works have evaluated models&#39; knowledge of cultural norms, values, and artefacts, without considering how this knowledge manifests in downstream applications. In this work, we focus on extrinsic evaluation of cultural competence in two text generation tasks, open-ended question answering and story generation. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate model outputs when an explicit cue of culture, specifically nationality, is perturbed in the prompts. Although we find that model outputs do vary when varying nationalities and feature culturally relevant words, we also find weak correlations between text similarity of outputs for different countries and the cultural values of these countries. Finally, we discuss important considerations in designing comprehensive evaluation of cultural competence in user-facing tasks.

EMNLP 2024

Extrinsic Evaluation of Cultural Competence in Large Language Models

translation metrics

quality estimation

machine translation

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Productive interactions between diverse users and language technologies require outputs from the latter to be culturally relevant and sensitive. Prior works have evaluated models' knowledge of cultural norms, values, and artefacts, without considering how this knowledge manifests in downstream applications. In this work, we focus on extrinsic evaluation of cultural competence in two text generation tasks, open-ended question answering and story generation. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate model outputs when an explicit cue of culture, specifically nationality, is perturbed in the prompts. Although we find that model outputs do vary when varying nationalities and feature culturally relevant words, we also find weak correlations between text similarity of outputs for different countries and the cultural values of these countries. Finally, we discuss important considerations in designing comprehensive evaluation of cultural competence in user-facing tasks.

poster

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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.

Conversational systems must be robust to user interactions that naturally exhibit diverse conversational traits. Capturing and simulating these diverse traits coherently and efficiently presents a complex challenge. This paper introduces Multi-Trait Adaptive Decoding (mTAD), a method that generates diverse user profiles at decoding-time by sampling from various trait-specific Language Models (LMs). mTAD provides an adaptive and scalable approach to user simulation, enabling the creation of multiple user profiles without the need for additional fine-tuning. By analyzing real-world dialogues from the Conversational Task Assistant (CTA) domain, we identify key conversational traits and developed a framework to generate profile-aware dialogues that enhance conversational diversity. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach in modeling single-traits using specialized LMs, which can capture less common patterns, even in out-of-domain tasks. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that mTAD is a robust and flexible framework for combining diverse user simulators.

Multi-trait User Simulation with Adaptive Decoding for Conversational Task Assistants

Reasoning about time and temporal relations is an integral aspect of human cognition, essential for perceiving the world and navigating our experiences. Though large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in many reasoning tasks, temporal reasoning remains challenging due to its intrinsic complexity. In this work, we first study an essential task of temporal reasoning—temporal graph generation, to unveil LLMs’ inherent, global reasoning capabilities. We show that this task presents great challenges even for the most powerful LLMs, such as GPT-3.5/4. We also notice a significant performance gap by small models (< 10B) that lag behind LLMs by 50%. Next, we study how to close this gap with a budget constraint, e.g., not using model finetuning. We propose a new prompting technique tailored for temporal reasoning, Narrative-of-Thought (NoT), that first converts the events set to a Python class, then prompts a small model to generate a temporally grounded narrative, guiding the final generation of a temporal graph. Extensive experiments showcase the efficacy of NoT in improving various metrics. Notably, NoT attains the highest F1 on the Schema-11 evaluation set, while securing an overall F1 on par with GPT-3.5. NoT also achieves the best structural similarity across the board, even compared with GPT-3.5/4.

Improving Temporal Reasoning of Language Models via Recounted Narratives

In this paper, we introduce Auto-Intent, a method to adapt a pre-trained large language model (LLM) as an agent for a target domain without direct fine-tuning, where we empirically focus on web navigation tasks. Our approach first discovers the underlying intents from target domain demonstrations unsupervisedly, in a highly compact form (up to three words). With the extracted intents, we train our intent predictor to predict the next intent given the agent’s past observations and actions. In particular, we propose a self-exploration approach where top-k probable intent predictions are provided as a hint to the pre-trained LLM agent, which leads to enhanced decision-making capabilities. Auto-Intent substantially improves the performance of GPT-{3.5, 4} and Llama-3.1-{70B, 405B} agents on the large-scale real-website navigation benchmarks from Mind2Web and online navigation tasks from WebArena with its cross-benchmark generalization from Mind2Web.

Auto-Intent: Automated Intent Discovery and Self-Exploration for Large Language Model Agents

This study introduces ValueScope, a framework leveraging language models to quantify social norms and values within online communities, grounded in social science perspectives on normative structures. We employ ValueScope to dissect and analyze linguistic and stylistic expressions across 13 Reddit communities categorized under gender, politics, science, and finance. Our analysis provides a quantitative foundation confirming that even closely related communities exhibit remarkably diverse norms. This diversity supports existing theories and adds a new dimension to understanding community interactions. ValueScope not only delineates differences in social norms but also effectively tracks their evolution and the influence of significant external events like the U.S. presidential elections and the emergence of new sub-communities. The framework thus highlights the pivotal role of social norms in shaping online interactions, presenting a substantial advance in both the theory and application of social norm studies in digital spaces.

ValueScope: Unveiling Implicit Norms and Values via Return Potential Model of Social Interactions

Chart question answering (CQA) is a crucial area of Visual Language Understanding. However, the robustness and consistency of current Visual Language Models (VLMs) in this field remain under-explored. This paper evaluates state-of-the-art VLMs on comprehensive datasets, developed specifically for this study, encompassing diverse question categories and chart formats. We investigate two key aspects: 1) the models' ability to handle varying levels of chart and question complexity, and 2) their robustness across different visual representations of the same underlying data. Our analysis reveals significant performance variations based on question and chart types, highlighting both strengths and weaknesses of current models. Additionally, we identify areas for improvement and propose future research directions to build more robust and reliable CQA systems. This study sheds light on the limitations of current models and paves the way for future advancements in the field.

Unraveling the Truth: Do LLMs really Understand Charts? A Deep Dive into Consistency and Robustness

Citation intention Classification (CIC) tools classify citations by their intention (e.g., background, motivation) and assist readers in evaluating the contribution of scientific literature. Prior research has shown that pretrained language models (PLMs) such as SciBERT can achieve state-of-the-art performance on CIC benchmarks. PLMs are trained via self-supervision tasks on a large corpus of general text and can quickly adapt to CIC tasks via moderate fine-tuning on the corresponding dataset. Despite their advantages, PLMs can easily overfit small datasets during fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning (MTL) framework that jointly fine-tunes PLMs on a dataset of primary interest together with multiple auxiliary CIC datasets to take advantage of additional supervision signals. We develop a data-driven task relation learning (TRL) method that controls the contribution of auxiliary datasets to avoid negative transfer and expensive hyper-parameter tuning. We conduct experiments on three CIC datasets and show that fine-tuning with additional datasets can improve the PLMs' generalization performance on the primary dataset. PLMs fine-tuned with our proposed framework outperform the current state-of-the-art models by 7% to 11% on small datasets while aligning with the best-performing model on a large dataset.

Fine-Tuning Language Models on Multiple Datasets for Citation Intention Classification

Recent large vision-language multimodal models pre-trained with huge amount of image-text pairs show remarkable performances in downstream tasks. However, the multimodal pre-training has limitations in terms of resources and training time when it comes to obtaining new models that surpass existing models. To overcome these issues, we propose TransferCVLM, a method of efficient knowledge transfer that integrates pre-trained uni-modal models (and cross-modal fusion-encoder) into a combined vision-language model (CVLM), without pre-training the CVLM with large amount of multimodal data, and then for each task application, fine-tunes the CVLM and transfers the multimodal knowledge of a teacher vision-language model to the CVLM by using knowledge distillation techniques. We demonstrate that 1) the fine-tuned CVLM performs comparable to other vision-language models of similar size, that 2) the multimodal knowledge transfer consistently enhances the CVLM, and the knowledge-transferred CVLM composed of large-size unimodal models outperforms the teacher multimodal model in most of downstream tasks, and that 3) TransferCVLM can also be used for model compression when using small-size unimodal models. We estimate that the training of TransferCVLM takes only 6\% of pre-training of other vision-language models. Our code is available at https://github.com/DMCB-GIST/TransferCVLM.

TransferCVLM: Transferring Cross-Modal Knowledge for Vision-Language Modeling

Generating personalized responses, particularly in the context of video, poses a unique challenge for language models. This paper introduces the novel task of \textbf{Personalized Video Comment Generation} (PVCG), aiming to predict user comments tailored to both the input video and the user's comment history, where the user is unseen during the model training process. Unlike existing video captioning tasks that ignores the personalization in the text generation process, we introduce PerVidCom, a new dataset specifically collected for this novel task with diverse personalized comments from YouTube. 
Recognizing the limitations of existing captioning metrics for evaluating this task, we propose a new automatic metric based on Large Language Models (LLMs) with few-shot in-context learning, named FICL-Score, specifically measuring quality from the aspects of emotion, language style and content relevance. We verify the proposed metric with human evaluations. We establish baselines using prominent Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), analyze their performance discrepancies through extensive evaluation, and identifies directions for future improvement on this important task. Our research opens up a new direction of personalizing MLLMs and paves the way for future research.

Personalized Video Comment Generation

The primary aim of Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGE) is to learn low-dimensional representations of entities and relations for predicting missing facts. While rotation-based methods like RotatE and QuatE perform well in KGE, they face two challenges: limited model flexibility requiring proportional increases in relation size with entity dimension, and difficulties in generalizing the model for higher-dimensional rotations. To address these issues, we introduce OrthogonalE, a novel KGE model employing matrices for entities and block-diagonal orthogonal matrices with Riemannian optimization for relations. This approach not only enhances the generality and flexibility of KGE models but also captures several relation patterns that rotation-based methods can identify. Experimental results indicate that our new KGE model, OrthogonalE, offers generality and flexibility, captures several relation patterns, and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art KGE models while substantially reducing the number of relation parameters.

Block-Diagonal Orthogonal Relation and Matrix Entity for Knowledge Graph Embedding

In this paper, we introduce BiMediX, the first bilingual medical mixture of experts LLM designed for seamless interaction in both English and Arabic. Our model facilitates a wide range of medical interactions in English and Arabic, including multi-turn chats to inquire about additional details such as patient symptoms and medical history, multiple-choice question answering, and open-ended question answering. We propose a semi-automated English-to-Arabic translation pipeline with human refinement to ensure high-quality translations. We also introduce a comprehensive evaluation benchmark for Arabic medical LLMs. Furthermore, we introduce BiMed1.3M, an extensive Arabic-English bilingual instruction set that covers 1.3 Million diverse medical interactions, including 200k synthesized multi-turn doctor-patient chats, in a 1:2 Arabic-to-English ratio. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art Med42 and Meditron by average absolute gains of 2.5% and 4.1%, respectively, computed across multiple medical evaluation benchmarks in English, while operating at 8-times faster inference. Moreover, our BiMediX outperforms the generic Arabic-English bilingual LLM, Jais-30B, by average absolute gains of 10% on our Arabic and 15% on our bilingual evaluations across multiple datasets. Additionally, BiMediX exceeds the accuracy of GPT4 by 4.4% in open-ended question UPHILL evaluation and largely outperforms state-of-the-art open source medical LLMs in human evaluations of multi-turn conversations. Our trained models, instruction set, and source code are available at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/BiMediX.

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Multi-trait User Simulation with Adaptive Decoding for Conversational Task Assistants

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