United States

Prior efforts in building computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) systems often treat automatic pronunciation assessment (APA) and mispronunciation detection and diagnosis (MDD) as separate fronts: the former aims to provide multiple pronunciation aspect scores across diverse linguistic levels, while the latter focuses instead on pinpointing the precise phonetic pronunciation errors made by non-native language learners. However, it is generally expected that a full-fledged CAPT system should perform both functionalities simultaneously and efficiently. In response to this surging demand, we in this work first propose HMamba, a novel CAPT approach that seamlessly integrates APA and MDD tasks in parallel. In addition, we introduce a novel loss function, decoupled cross-entropy loss (deXent), specifically tailored for MDD to facilitate better-supervised learning for detecting mispronounced phones, thereby enhancing overall performance. A comprehensive set of empirical results on the speechocean762 benchmark dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach on APA. Notably, our proposed approach also yields a considerable improvement in MDD performance over a strong baseline, achieving an F1-score of 63.85%. Our codes are made available at https://github.com/Fuann/hmamba

NAACL 2025

Towards Efficient and Multifaceted Computer-assisted Pronunciation Training Leveraging Hierarchical Selective State Space Model and Decoupled Cross-entropy Loss

selective state space model

computer-assisted pronunciation training

multi-task learning

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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.

technical paper

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Previous text-to-SQL datasets and systems have primarily focused on user questions with clear intentions that can be answered. However, real user questions can often be ambiguous with multiple interpretations or unanswerable due to a lack of relevant data. In this work, we construct a practical conversational text-to-SQL dataset called PRACTIQ, consisting of ambiguous and unanswerable questions inspired by real-world user questions. We first identified four categories of ambiguous questions and four categories of unanswerable questions by studying existing text-to-SQL datasets. Then, we generate conversations with four turns: the initial user question, an assistant response seeking clarification, the user's clarification, and the assistant's clarified SQL response with the natural language explanation of the execution results. For some ambiguous queries, we also directly generate helpful SQL responses, that consider multiple aspects of ambiguity, instead of requesting user clarification. To benchmark the performance on ambiguous, unanswerable, and answerable questions, we implemented large language model (LLM)-based baselines using various LLMs. Our approach involves two steps: question category classification and clarification SQL prediction. Our experiments reveal that state-of-the-art systems struggle to handle ambiguous and unanswerable questions effectively. We release our code for data generation and experiments on GitHub.

PRACTIQ: A Practical Conversational Text-to-SQL dataset with Ambiguous and Unanswerable Queries

AIs can beat humans in game environments; however, how helpful those agents are to human remains understudied. We augment Cicero, a natural language agent that demonstrates superhuman performance in Diplomacy, to generate both move and message advice based on player intentions. A dozen Diplomacy games with novice and experienced players, with varying advice settings, show that some of the generated advice is beneficial. It helps novices compete with experienced players and in some instances even surpass them. The mere presence of advice can be advantageous, even if players do not follow it.

Personalized Help for Optimizing Low-Skilled Users' Strategy

Developing effective text summarizers remains a challenge due to issues like hallucinations, key information omissions, and verbosity in LLM-generated summaries. This work explores using LLM-generated feedback to improve summary quality by aligning the summaries with human preferences for faithfulness, completeness, and conciseness. We introduce FeedSum, a large-scale dataset containing multi-dimensional LLM feedback on summaries of varying quality across diverse domains. Our experiments show how feedback quality, dimensionality, and granularity influence preference learning, revealing that high-quality, multi-dimensional, fine-grained feedback significantly improves summary generation. We also compare two methods for using this feedback: supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization. Finally, we introduce SummLlama3-8b, a model that outperforms the nearly 10x larger Llama3-70b-instruct in generating human-preferred summaries, demonstrating that smaller models can achieve superior performance with appropriate training. The full dataset and SummLlama3-8B model are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/DISLab/FeedSum and https://huggingface.co/DISLab/SummLlama3-8B.

Learning to Summarize from LLM-generated Feedback

Performance prediction is a method to estimate the performance of Language Models (LMs) on various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, mitigating computational costs associated with model capacity and data for fine-tuning. Our paper presents ProxyLM, a scalable task- and language-agnostic framework designed to predict the performance of LMs using proxy models. These proxy models act as surrogates, approximating the performance of the LM of interest. By leveraging these proxy models, ProxyLM significantly reduces computational overhead in task evaluations, achieving up to a 37.08x speedup over traditional methods, even with our smallest proxy models. Our results across multiple multilingual NLP tasks and various robustness tests demonstrate that ProxyLM not only adapts well to previously unseen languages in pre-trained LMs, but also generalizes effectively across different datasets, outperforming the state-of-the-art by at least 1.78x in terms of root-mean-square error (RMSE).

ProxyLM: Predicting Language Model Performance on Multilingual Tasks via Proxy Models

Formulaic criteria for proportional analogies, which capture relational mappings between two ratios of terms, are mainly confined to the formal level. As analogy datasets grow more complex, especially in evaluating the cognitive abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), assessing parallelism in them becomes increasingly challenging and often requires human annotation. In this work, we propose AnaScore, an automatic metric for evaluating the strength of semantic parallelism in sentence analogies. AnaScore systematically provides formalized explanations for shared relational patterns at the level of conceptual knowledge. We apply AnaScore to annotate several existing datasets, considering different directions of the relations, and uncover artifacts in data construction. Our experiments with various LLMs demonstrate the efficacy of the AnaScore metric in capturing the inherent quality of analogical relationships, showing a positive correlation between analogy quality and model performance. Thanks to this metric, we clearly demonstrate that formally explainable examples are more beneficial for analogical reasoning, while ambiguous analogies with no clear criterion tend to hinder inference.

AnaScore: Understanding Semantic Parallelism in Proportional Analogies

Recommendation explanation systems have become increasingly vital with the widespread adoption of recommender systems. However, existing recommendation explanation evaluation benchmarks suffer from limited item diversity, impractical user profiling requirements, and unreliable and unscalable evaluation protocols. We present ALERT, a model-agnostic recommendation explanation evaluation benchmark. The benchmark comprises three main contributions: 1) a diverse dataset encompassing 15 Amazon e-commerce categories with 2,761 user-item interactions, incorporating implicit preferences through purchase histories; 2) two novel LLM-powered automatic evaluators that enable scalable and human-preference aligned evaluation of explanations; and 3) a robust divide-and-aggregate approach that synthesizes multiple LLM judgments, achieving 70% concordance with expert human evaluation and substantially outperforming existing methods. ALERT facilitates comprehensive evaluation of recommendation explanations across diverse domains, advancing the development of more effective explanation systems.

ALERT: An LLM-powered Benchmark for Automatic Evaluation of Recommendation Explanations

As LLMs become increasingly prevalent, it is interesting to consider how ``creative'' these models can be. From cognitive science, creativity consists of at least two key characteristics: *convergent* thinking (purposefulness to achieve a given goal) and *divergent* thinking (adaptability to explore new environments or constraints) [runco2003critical]. In this work, we introduce a framework for quantifying LLM creativity that incorporates the two design ingredients: (1) We introduce DENIAL PROMPTING which pushes LLMs to develop more creative solutions to a given problem by incrementally imposing new constraints on the previous solution, compelling LLMs to adopt new strategies. (2) We define NEOGAUGE, a metric that quantifies both convergent and divergent thinking in the generated creative responses by LLMs. We test the proposed framework on Codeforces problems, which serve as both a natural dataset for coding tasks and a collection of prior human solutions. We quantify NEOGAUGE for various proprietary and open-source models and find that even the most creative model, GPT-4, still falls short of demonstrating human-like creativity. We also experiment with advanced reasoning strategies (MCTS, self-correction, etc.) and observe no significant improvement in creativity. As a by-product of our analysis, we release NEOCODER dataset for reproducing our results on future models.

Benchmarking Language Model Creativity: A Case Study on Code Generation

The integration of tools has extended the capabilities of language models (LMs) beyond vanilla text generation to versatile scenarios. However, tool-augmented language models (TaLMs) often assume `perfect' information access and tool availability, which may not hold in the real world. To systematically study TaLMs imperfections, we introduce the FAIL-TaLMs benchmark, featuring two major failures: under-specified user queries and non-available tools. FAIL-TaLMS contains 1,749 examples using 906 tools across 21 categories, including single- and multi-tool usage. We evaluate top-performing proprietary and open-source models, and find all current models except for Claude struggle to recognize missing tools or information. Further, to study possible mitigation of the failures, we enable real-time human interaction, named the Ask-and-Help method, to provide missing information or replace non-functional tools. While Ask-and-Help can help models solve tasks more correctly when queries are under-specified, it brings minimal benefit when complex tools are broken.

Benchmarking Failures in Tool-Augmented Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in mathematical reasoning. However, despite these achievements, current evaluations are mostly limited to specific mathematical topics, and it remains unclear whether LLMs are genuinely engaging in reasoning. To address these gaps, we present the Mathematical Topics Tree (MaTT) benchmark, a challenging and structured benchmark that offers 1,958 questions across a wide array of mathematical subjects, each paired with a detailed hierarchical chain of topics. Upon assessing different LLMs using the MaTT benchmark, we find that GPT-4 achieved a mere 54% accuracy in a multiple-choice scenario. Interestingly, even when employing Chain-of-Thought prompting, we observe mostly no notable improvement. Moreover, LLMs accuracy dramatically reduced by up to 24.2 percentage point when the questions were presented without providing choices. Further detailed analysis of the LLMs' performance across a range of topics showed significant discrepancy even for closely related subtopics within the same general mathematical area. In an effort to pinpoint the reasons behind LLMs performances, we conducted a manual evaluation of the completeness and correctness of the explanations generated by GPT-4 when choices were available. Surprisingly, we find that in only 53.3% of the instances where the model provided a correct answer, the accompanying explanations were deemed complete and accurate, i.e., the model engaged in genuine reasoning.

LLMs Are Not Intelligent Thinkers: Introducing Mathematical Topic Tree Benchmark for Comprehensive Evaluation of LLMs

Leveraging external tools is a key feature for modern Language Models (LMs) to expand their capabilities and integrate them into existing systems. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on the accuracy of tool calling—whether the correct tool is called with the correct parameters—and less on evaluating when LMs should (not) call tools. We develop a new benchmark, When2Call, which evaluates tool-calling decision-making: when to generate a tool call, when to ask follow-up questions and when to admit the question can't be answered with the tools provided. We find that state-of-the-art tool-calling LMs show significant room for improvement on When2Call, indicating the importance of this benchmark. We also develop a training set for When2Call and leverage the multiple-choice nature of the benchmark to develop a preference optimization training regime, which shows considerably more improvement than traditional fine-tuning. We release the benchmark and training data as well as evaluation scripts.

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PRACTIQ: A Practical Conversational Text-to-SQL dataset with Ambiguous and Unanswerable Queries

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An Effective Pronunciation Assessment Approach Leveraging Hierarchical Transformers and Pre-training Strategies

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Next from NAACL 2025

PRACTIQ: A Practical Conversational Text-to-SQL dataset with Ambiguous and Unanswerable Queries

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An Effective Pronunciation Assessment Approach Leveraging Hierarchical Transformers and Pre-training Strategies

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

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