United States

We present Storybranch - an automated system for generating multimedia content from long texts such as novels and fanfiction.
The Storybranch pipeline includes structured information extraction, text parsing and processing, content generation using Gen-AI models and syncronization of different streams (audio, video, background). 
Our system is highly modular and can efficiently generate three different types of multimodal content: audiobooks, simple animated videos, and visual novel text-and-image-style video games.


Storybranch successfully addresses challenges such as generating unique and consistent image and voice for each character and narrator, identifying and generating background images and sounds effects, and syncronizing character expressions and lip movement with text.


As part of the Storybranch , we develop and release BookNLP2 - a new open-source library for parsing and extracting information from books, based on the legacy library BookNLP.

NAACL 2025

Storybranch - generating multimedia content from novels

comfyui

video generation

demo

### 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

The metaphor studies community has developed numerous valuable labelled corpora in various languages over the years. Many of these resources are not only unknown to the NLP community, but are also often not easily shared among the researchers. Both in human sciences and in NLP, researchers could benefit from a centralised database of labelled resources, easily accessible and unified under an identical format. To facilitate this, we present MetaphorShare, a website to integrate metaphor datasets making them open and accessible. With this effort, our aim is to encourage researchers to share and upload more datasets in any language in order to facilitate metaphor studies and the development of future metaphor processing NLP systems. The website has four main functionalities: upload, download, search and label metaphor datasets. It is accessible at www.metaphorshare.com.

METAPHORSHARE: A Dynamic Collaborative Repository of Open Metaphor Datasets

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to be effective in guiding Large Language Models (LLMs) to decompose complex tasks into multiple intermediate steps, and constructing a rational reasoning chain for inferring answers. However, the linear nature of CoT falls short from enabling LLMs to effectively handle graph structures, which are essential for personalized recommendation tasks that rely on user-item interaction graphs. To bridge this gap, we introduce GollaRec, which leverages a Graph-of-Thought (GoT) prompting technique in a Multi-modal LLM, namely LLaVA, to effectively exploit the complex structure of the interaction graphs. GollaRec enhances the recommendation effectiveness by integrating both visual and textual ''thoughts'' into a graph-structured prompt, using both item images and descriptions to produce richer multi-modal user/item representations. In our proposed approach, GollaRec leverages text-graph alignment and graph instruction tuning to allow the Multi-modal LLM to capture complex graph structures. In addition, GollaRec leverages a graph adaptor to integrate user-item interactions into the resulting user/item embeddings, therefore effectively adapting the model to the recommendation task. Our extensive experiments on 6 benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed GollaRec model over 12 existing state-of-the-art models in various multi-modal recommendation tasks, including general and multi-domain recommendation tasks.

A Multi-modal Large Language Model with Graph-of-Thought for Effective Recommendation

The rapid proliferation of online news has posed significant challenges in tracking the continuous development of news topics. Traditional timeline summarization constructs a chronological summary of the events but often lacks the flexibility to meet the diverse granularity needs. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a new paradigm, $\textbf{D}$ynamic-granularity $\textbf{T}$im$\textbf{EL}$ine $\textbf{S}$ummarization, ($\textbf{DTELS}$), which aims to construct adaptive timelines based on user instructions or requirements. This paper establishes a comprehensive benchmark for DTLES that includes: (1) an evaluation framework grounded in journalistic standards to assess the timeline quality across four dimensions: $\textit{Informativeness}$, $\textit{Granular Consistency}$, $\textit{Factuality}$, and $\textit{Coherence}$; (2) a large-scale, multi-source dataset with multiple granularity timeline annotations based on a consensus process to facilitate authority; (3) extensive experiments and analysis with two proposed solutions based on Large Language Models (LLMs) and existing state-of-the-art TLS methods. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM-based solutions. However, even the most advanced LLMs struggle to consistently generate timelines that are both informative and granularly consistent, highlighting the challenges of the DTELS task.

DTELS: Towards Dynamic Granularity of Timeline Summarization

Semantic map models (SMMs) construct a network-like conceptual space from cross-linguistic instances or forms, based on the connectivity hypothesis. This approach has been widely used to represent similarity and entailment relationships in cross-linguistic concept comparisons. However, most SMMs are manually built by human experts using bottom-up procedures, which are often labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a novel graph-based algorithm that automatically generates conceptual spaces and SMMs in a top-down manner. The algorithm begins by creating a dense graph, which is subsequently pruned into minimal spanning trees, selected according to metrics we propose. These evaluation metrics include both intrinsic and extrinsic measures, considering factors such as network structure and the trade-off between precision and coverage. A case study on cross-linguistic supplementary adverbs demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of our model compared to human annotations and other automated methods. The tool is available at https://github.com/RyanLiut/SemanticMapModel.

A Top-down Graph-based Tool for Modeling Classical Semantic Maps: A Case Study of Supplementary Adverbs

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential as generalist assistants, showcasing powerful task understanding and problem-solving capabilities. To deploy LLMs as AI assistants, it is crucial that these models exhibit desirable behavioral traits, such as non-toxicity and resilience against jailbreak attempts. Current approaches for detoxification or preventing jailbreaking usually involve Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which requires finetuning billions of parameters through gradient descent with substantial computational cost. Furthermore, models modified through SFT and RLHF may deviate from the pretrained models, potentially leading to a degradation in foundational LLM capabilities. In this paper, we observe that surprisingly, directly editing a small subset of parameters can effectively modulate specific behaviors of LLMs, such as detoxification and resistance to jailbreaking, with only inference-level computational resources. Experiments demonstrate that in the detoxification task, our approach achieves reductions of up to 90.0\% in toxicity on the RealToxicityPrompts dataset and 49.2\% on ToxiGen, while maintaining the LLM's general capabilities in areas such as common sense, question answering, and mathematics.

Model Surgery: Modulating LLM's Behavior Via Simple Parameter Editing

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have a significant issue with object hallucinations, where researchers have noted that LVLMs often mistakenly determine objects as present in images where they do not actually exist. Some recent studies evaluate the occurrence of object hallucinations by asking LVLMs whether they see objects that do not exist in input images. However, we observe that these evaluation methods have some limitations, such as the objects being questioned potentially having little relevance to the image. In this paper, we introduce a more challenging benchmark for evaluating object hallucinations by removing objects from images and then asking the model whether it can still see the removed objects. Our evaluation result reveals that LVLMs suffer from severe hallucinations, as they often still claim to see the removed objects. Through our analysis, we find that biases in training result in LVLMs lacking guidance on learning about the absence of objects, which in turn leads to a lack of ability to determine that objects do not exist in images. To address this issue, we further propose oDPO, a direct preference optimization objective based on visual objects. By guiding LVLMs to learn to determine the existence of objects, oDPO effectively alleviates object hallucinations. It achieves more competitive results than other hallucination mitigation approaches across multiple object hallucination benchmarks and enhances the performance of LVLMs in various vision-language tasks.

Evaluating and Mitigating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models: Can They Still See Removed Objects?

The detection of scenes in literary texts is a recently introduced segmentation task in computational literary studies. Its goal is to partition a fictional text into segments that are coherent across the dimensions time, space, action and character constellation. This task is very challenging for automatic methods, since it requires a high-level understanding of the text. In this paper, we provide a thorough analysis of the State of the Art and challenges in this task, identifying and solving a problem in the training procedure for previous approaches, analysing the generalisation capabilities of the models and comparing the BERT-based SotA to current Llama models, as well as providing an analysis of what causes errors in the models. Our change in training procedure provides a significant increase in performance. We find that Llama-based models are more robust to different types of texts, while their overall performance is slightly worse than that of BERT-based models.

Assessing the State of the Art in Scene Segmentation

Recent research has focused on literary machine translation (MT) as a new challenge in MT. However, the evaluation of literary MT remains an open problem. We contribute to this ongoing discussion by introducing LITEVAL-CORPUS, a paragraph-level parallel corpus containing verified human translations and outputs from 9 MT systems, which totals over 2k translations and 13k evaluated sentences across four language pairs, costing 4.5k€. This corpus enables us to (i) examine the consistency and adequacy of human evaluation schemes with various degrees of complexity, (ii) compare evaluations by students and professionals, assess the effectiveness of (iii) LLM-based metrics and (iv) LLMs themselves. Our findings indicate that the adequacy of human evaluation is controlled by two factors: the complexity of the evaluation scheme (more complex is less adequate) and the expertise of evaluators (higher expertise yields more adequate evaluations). For instance, MQM (Multidimensional Quality Metrics), a complex scheme and the de facto standard for non-literary human MT evaluation, is largely inadequate for literary translation evaluation: with student evaluators, nearly 60% of human translations are misjudged as indistinguishable or inferior to machine translations. In contrast, BWS (BEST-WORST SCALING), a much simpler scheme, identifies human translations at a rate of 80-100%. Automatic metrics fare dramatically worse, with rates of at most 20%. Our overall evaluation indicates that published human translations consistently outperform LLM translations, where even the most recent LLMs tend to produce considerably more literal and less diverse translations compared to humans.

How Good Are LLMs for Literary Translation, Really? Literary Translation Evaluation with Humans and LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable advances in language generation and understanding but are also prone to exhibiting harmful social biases. While recognition of these behaviors has generated an abundance of bias mitigation techniques, most require modifications to the training data, model parameters, or decoding strategy, which may be infeasible without access to a trainable model. In this work, we leverage the zero-shot capabilities of LLMs to reduce stereotyping in a technique we introduce as zero-shot self-debiasing. With two approaches, self-debiasing via explanation and self-debiasing via reprompting, we show that self-debiasing can significantly reduce the degree of stereotyping across nine different social groups while relying only on the LLM itself and a simple prompt, with explanations correctly identifying invalid assumptions and reprompting delivering the greatest reductions in bias. We hope this work opens inquiry into other zero-shot techniques for bias mitigation.

Self-Debiasing Large Language Models: Zero-Shot Recognition and Reduction of Stereotypes

Large language models (LLM) hold significant potential for applications in biomedicine, but they struggle with hallucinations and outdated knowledge. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is generally employed to address these issues, it also has its own set of challenges: (1) LLMs are vulnerable to irrelevant or unhelpful context, (2) medical queries are often not well-targeted for helpful information, and (3) retrievers are prone to bias toward the specific source corpus they were trained on. In this study, we present RAG^2 (RAtionale-Guided RAG), a new framework for enhancing the reliability of RAG in biomedical contexts. RAG^2 incorporates three key innovations: a small filtering model trained on perplexity-based labels of rationales, which selectively augments informative snippets of documents while filtering out distractors; LLM-generated rationales as queries to improve the utility of retrieved snippets; a structure designed to retrieve snippets evenly from a comprehensive set of four biomedical corpora, effectively mitigating retriever bias. Our experiments demonstrate that RAG^2 improves the state-of-the-art LLMs of varying sizes, with improvements of up to 6.1\%, and it outperforms the previous best medical RAG model by up to 5.6\% across three medical question-answering benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/dmis-lab/RAG2

Storybranch - generating multimedia content from novels

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