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Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models have traditionally used Sinusoidal Positional Embeddings (PEs), which often struggle to capture long-range dependencies and are inefficient for handling extended context or document-level translation tasks. This work addresses the challenge of transitioning pre-trained NMT models from absolute Sinusoidal PEs to Relative PEs, such as RoPE and ALiBi, without compromising performance. We demonstrate that parameter-efficient fine-tuning, using only a small amount of high-quality data, can successfully facilitate this transition. Experimental results indicate that switching from Sinusoidal to Relative PEs results in competitive translation quality on sentence-level evaluation benchmarks. Additionally, models trained with RoPE consistently outperform those using ALiBi and Sinusoidal PEs on document-level benchmarks across both string-based metrics and qualitative evaluations. Moreover, we find that a small amount of long-context data in a few languages is sufficient for cross-lingual length generalization, thereby inducing long-context capabilities.

NAACL 2025

Towards Inducing Long-Context Abilities in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation Models

relative positional embeddings

long-context

machine translation

poster

### 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

Realignment techniques are often employed to enhance cross-lingual transfer in multilingual language models, still, they can sometimes degrade performance in languages that differ significantly from the fine-tuned source language. This paper introduces AlignFreeze, a method that freezes either the layers' lower half or upper half during realignment. Through controlled experiments on 4 tasks, 3 models, and in 35 languages, we find that realignment affects all the layers but can be the most detrimental to the lower ones. Freezing the lower layers can prevent performance degradation. Particularly, AlignFreeze improves Part-of-Speech (PoS) tagging performances in languages where full realignment fails: with XLM-R, it provides improvements of more than one standard deviation in accuracy in seven more languages than full realignment.

AlignFreeze: Navigating the Impact of Realignment on the Layers of Multilingual Models Across Diverse Languages

Humor recognition aims to identify whether a specific speaker’s text is humorous. Current methods for humor recognition mainly suffer from two limitations: (1) they solely focus on one aspect of humor commonalities, ignoring the multifaceted nature of humor; and (2) they typically overlook the critical role of speaker individuality, which is essential for a comprehensive understanding of humor expressions. To bridge these gaps, we introduce the Commonality and Individuality Incorporated Network for Humor Recognition (CIHR), a novel model designed to enhance humor recognition by integrating multifaceted humor commonalities with the distinctive individuality of speakers. The CIHR features a Humor Commonality Analysis module that explores various perspectives of multifaceted humor commonality within user texts, and a Speaker Individuality Extraction module that captures both static and dynamic aspects of a speaker’s profile to accurately model their distinctive individuality. Additionally, Static and Dynamic Fusion modules are introduced to effectively incorporate the humor commonality with speaker’s individuality in the humor recognition process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CIHR, underscoring the importance of concurrently addressing both multifaceted humor commonality and distinctive speaker individuality in humor recognition.

Commonality and Individuality! Integrating Humor Commonality with Speaker Individuality for Humor Recognition

One of the most important yet onerous tasks in the academic peer-reviewing process is composing meta-reviews, which involves assimilating diverse opinions from multiple expert peers, formulating one's self-judgment as a senior expert, and then summarizing all these perspectives into a concise holistic overview to make an overall recommendation. This process is time-consuming and can be compromised by human factors like fatigue, inconsistency, missing tiny details, etc. Given the latest major developments in Large Language Models (LLMs), it is very compelling to rigorously study whether LLMs can help meta-reviewers perform this important task better. In this paper, we perform a case study with three popular LLMs, i.e., GPT-3.5, LLaMA2, and PaLM2, to assist meta-reviewers in better comprehending multiple experts' perspectives by generating a controlled multi-perspective-summary (MPS) of their opinions. To achieve this, we prompt three LLMs with different types/levels of prompts based on the recently proposed TELeR taxonomy. Finally, we perform a detailed qualitative study of the MPSs generated by the LLMs and report our findings.

LLMs as Meta-Reviewers' Assistants: A Case Study

As Vision and Language models (VLMs) become accessible across the globe, it is important that they demonstrate cultural knowledge. In his paper, we introduce CROPE, a visual question answering benchmark designed to probe the knowledge of culture-specific concepts and evaluate the capacity for cultural adaptation through contextual information. This allows us to distinguish between parametric knowledge acquired during training and contextual knowledge provided during inference via visual and textual descriptions. Our evaluation of several state-of-the-art open VLMs shows large performance disparities between culture-specific and common concepts in the parametric setting. Moreover, experiments with contextual knowledge indicate that models struggle to effectively utilize multimodal information and bind culture specific concepts to their depictions. Our findings reveal limitations in the cultural understanding and adaptability of current VLMs that need to be addressed toward more culturally inclusive models.

CROPE: Evaluating In-Context Adaptation of Vision and Language Models to Culture-Specific Concepts

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit positional bias in long-context settings, under-attending to information in the middle of inputs. We investigate the presence of this bias in long-form summarization, its impact on faithfulness, and various techniques to mitigate this bias. To consistently evaluate faithfulness, we first compile a benchmark of eight human-annotated long-form summarization datasets and perform a meta-evaluation of faithfulness metrics. We show that LLM-based faithfulness metrics, though effective with full-context inputs, remain sensitive to document order, indicating positional bias. Analyzing LLM-generated summaries across six datasets, we find a ''U-shaped'' trend in faithfulness, where LLMs faithfully summarize the beginning and end of documents but neglect middle content. Perturbing document order similarly reveals models are less faithful when important documents are placed in the middle of the input. We find that this behavior is partly due to shifting focus with context length: as context increases, summaries become less faithful, but beyond a certain length, faithfulness improves as the model focuses on the end. Finally, we experiment with different generation techniques to reduce positional bias and find that prompting techniques effectively direct model attention to specific positions, whereas more sophisticated approaches offer limited improvements. Our data and code will be publicly available.

On Positional Bias of Faithfulness for Long-form Summarization

The growing popularity of large language models has raised concerns regarding the potential to misuse AI-generated text (AIGT). It becomes increasingly critical to establish an excellent AIGT detection method with high generalization and robustness. While, existing methods either focus on model generalization or concentrate on robustness. The unified mechanism, to simultaneously address the challenges of generalization and robustness, is less explored. In this paper, we first empirically reveal an intrinsic mechanism for model generalization and robustness of AIGT detection task. Then, we proposed a novel AIGT detection method (DP-Net) via dynamic perturbations introduced by a reinforcement learning with elaborated reward and action. Experimentally, extensive results show that the proposed DP-Net significantly outperforms some state-of-the-art AIGT detection methods for generalization capacity in three cross-domain scenarios. Meanwhile, the DP-Net achieves best robustness under two text adversarial attacks.

Kill two birds with one stone: generalized and robust AI-generated text detection via dynamic perturbations

Text corpora are essential for training models used in tasks like summarization, translation, and large language models (LLMs). While various efforts have been made to collect monolingual and multilingual datasets in many languages, Persian has often been underrepresented due to limited resources for data collection and preprocessing. Existing Persian datasets are typically small and lack content diversity, consisting mainly of weblogs and news articles. This shortage of high-quality, varied data has slowed the development of NLP models and open-source LLMs for Persian. Since model performance depends heavily on the quality of training data, we address this gap by introducing the Matina corpus, a new Persian dataset of 72.9B tokens, carefully preprocessed and deduplicated to ensure high data quality. We further assess its effectiveness by training and evaluating transformer-based models on key NLP tasks. Both the dataset and preprocessing codes are publicly available, enabling researchers to build on and improve this resource for future Persian NLP advancements.

Matina: A Large-Scale 73B Token Persian Text Corpus

In this study, we introduce ManaTTS, the most extensive publicly accessible single-speaker Persian corpus, and a comprehensive framework for collecting transcribed speech datasets for the Persian language. ManaTTS, released under the open CC-0 license, comprises approximately 86 hours of audio with a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz. The dataset is supported by a fully transparent, MIT-licensed pipeline, a testament to innovation in the field. It includes unique tools for sentence tokenization, bounded audio segmentation, and a novel forced alignment method. This alignment technique is specifically designed for low-resource languages, addressing a crucial need in the field. With this dataset, we trained a Tacotron2-based TTS model, achieving a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of 3.76, which is remarkably close to the MOS of 3.86 for the utterances generated by the same vocoder and natural spectrogram, and the MOS of 4.01 for the natural waveform, demonstrating the exceptional quality and effectiveness of the corpus.

ManaTTS Persian: a recipe for creating TTS datasets for lower resource languages

Self-reflection for Large Language Models (LLMs) has gained significant attention. Existing approaches involve models iterating and improving their previous responses based on LLMs' internal reflection ability or external feedback. However, recent research has raised doubts about whether intrinsic self-correction without external feedback may even degrade performance. Based on our empirical evidence, we find that current static reflection methods may lead to redundant, drift, and stubborn issues. To mitigate this, we introduce **I**nstruct-**o**f-**R**eflec**t**ion (**IoRT**), a novel and general reflection framework that leverages dynamic-meta instruction to enhance the iterative reflection capability of LLMs. Specifically, we propose the instructor driven by the meta-thoughts and self-consistency classifier, generates various instructions, including refresh, stop, and select, to guide the next reflection iteration. Our experiments demonstrate that IoRT achieves an average improvement of 10.1\% over established baselines in mathematical and commonsense reasoning tasks, highlighting its efficacy and applicability. Our code is available at https://github.com/llp635/IoRT.

Instruct-of-Reflection: Enhancing Large Language Models Iterative Reflection Capabilities via Dynamic-Meta Instruction

Large language models (LLM) have been attracting much attention from the community recently, due to their remarkable performance in all kinds of downstream tasks. According to the well-known scaling law, scaling up a dense LLM enhances its capabilities, but also significantly increases the computational complexity. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models address that by allowing the model size to grow without substantially raising training or inference costs. Yet MoE models face challenges regarding knowledge sharing among experts, making their performance somehow sensitive to routing accuracy. To tackle that, previous works introduced shared experts and combined their outputs with those of the top $K$ routed experts in an addition manner. In this paper, inspired by collective matrix factorization to learn shared knowledge among data, we propose CartesianMoE, which implements more effective knowledge sharing among experts in more like a multiplication manner. Extensive experimental results indicate that CartesianMoE outperforms previous MoE models for building LLMs, in terms of both perplexity and downstream task performance. And we also find that CartesianMoE achieves better expert routing robustness.

Towards Inducing Long-Context Abilities in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation Models

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AlignFreeze: Navigating the Impact of Realignment on the Layers of Multilingual Models Across Diverse Languages

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