Mexico

Existing English-teaching chatbots rarely incorporate empathy explicitly in their feedback, but empathetic feedback could help keep students engaged and reduce learner anxiety. Toward this end, we propose the task of negative emotion detection via audio, for recognizing empathetic feedback opportunities in language learning. We then build the first spoken English-teaching chatbot with adaptive, empathetic feedback. This feedback is synthesized through automatic prompt optimization of ChatGPT and is evaluated with English learners. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system through a preliminary user study.

NAACL 2024

Using Adaptive Empathetic Responses for Teaching English

english as a second language

empathetic chatbot

chatbot

education

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

workshop paper

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
*You can read the full Welcome message in the [Conference Handbook (downloadable)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H1NvW0VASQjkSCYgw3mr-3l4yYDSxz6B/view?usp=sharing)*

To access the event page you need to register [**here.**](http://acl.swoogo.com/naacl2024) 
Your access to the event page is limited based on your registration type. If you registered for workshops only, you will gain access to full workshops content on the day of the workshops program.

Please register!

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

One of the key challenges in programming education is being able to provide high-quality feedback to learners. Such feedback often includes explanations of the issues in students' programs coupled with suggestions on how to fix these issues. Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as valuable tools that can help in this effort. In this article, we explore the relationship between the program repair ability of LLMs and their proficiency in providing natural language explanations of coding mistakes. We outline a benchmarking study that evaluates leading LLMs (including open-source ones) on program repair and explanation tasks. Our experiments study the capabilities of LLMs both on a course level and on a programming concept level, allowing us to assess whether the programming concepts practised in exercises with faulty student programs relate to the performance of the models. Our results highlight that LLMs proficient in repairing student programs tend to provide more complete and accurate natural language explanations of code issues. Overall, these results enhance our understanding of the role and capabilities of LLMs in programming education. Using program repair as a proxy for explanation evaluation opens the door for cost-effective assessment methods.

Using Program Repair as a Proxy for Language Models' Feedback Ability in Programming Education

This work explores a novel data augmentation method based on Large Language Models (LLMs) for predicting item difficulty and response time of retired USMLE Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQs) in the BEA 2024 Shared Task. Our approach is based on augmenting the dataset with answers from zero-shot LLMs (Falcon, Meditron, Mistral) and employing transformer-based models based on six alternative feature combinations. The results suggest that predicting the difficulty of questions is more challenging. Notably, our top performing methods consistently include the question text, and benefit from the variability of LLM answers, highlighting the potential of LLMs for improving automated assessment in medical licensing exams. We make our code available at: https://github.com/ana-rogoz/BEA-2024.

UnibucLLM: Harnessing LLMs for Automated Prediction of Item Difficulty and Response Time for Multiple-Choice Questions

In this paper, we present the details of our
contribution to the BEA Shared Task on Automated Prediction of Item Difficulty and Response Time. Participants in this collaborative
effort are tasked with developing models to predict the difficulty and response time of multiplechoice items within the medical domain. These
items are sourced from the United States Medical Licensing Examination® (USMLE®), a
significant medical assessment. In order to
achieve this, we experimented with two featurization techniques, one using lingusitic features and the other using embeddings generated by BERT fine-tuned over MS-MARCO
dataset. Further, we tried several different machine learning models such as Linear Regression, Decision Trees, KNN and Boosting models such as XGBoost and GBDT. We found that
out of all the models we experimented with
Random Forest Regressor trained on Linguistic
features gave the least root mean squared error.

Utilizing Machine Learning to Predict Question Difficulty and Response Time for Enhanced Test Construction

Transformer-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, pre-training such models can take considerable resources that are almost only available to high-resource languages. On the contrary, static word embeddings are easier to train in terms of computing resources and the amount of data required. In this paper, we introduce MoSECroT (Model Stitching with Static Word Embeddings for Crosslingual Zero-shot Transfer, a novel and challenging task that is especially relevant to low-resource languages for which static word embeddings are available. To tackle the task, we present the first framework that leverages relative representations to construct a common space for the embeddings of a source language PLM and the static word embeddings of a target language. In this way, we can train the PLM on source-language training data and perform zero-shot transfer to the target language by simply swapping the embedding layer. However, through extensive experiments on two classification datasets, we show that although our proposed framework is competitive with weak baselines when addressing MoSECroT, it fails to achieve competitive results compared with some strong baselines. In this paper, we attempt to explain this negative result and provide several thoughts on possible improvement.

MoSECroT: Model Stitching with Static Word Embeddings for Crosslingual Zero-shot Transfer

Few-shot learning aims to learn representations that can tackle novel tasks given a small number of examples. Recent studies show that cross-modal learning can improve representations for few-shot classification. More specifically, language is a rich modality that can be used to guide visual learning. In this work, we experiment with a multi-modal architecture for few-shot learning that consists of three components: a classifier, an auxiliary network, and a bridge network. While the classifier performs the main classification task, the auxiliary network learns to predict language representations from the same input, and the bridge network transforms high-level features of the auxiliary network into modulation parameters for layers of the few-shot classifier using conditional batch normalization. The bridge should encourage a form of lightweight semantic alignment between language and vision which could be useful for the classifier. However, after evaluating the proposed approach on two popular few-shot classification benchmarks we find that a) the improvements do not reproduce across benchmarks, and b) when they do, the improvements are due to the additional compute and parameters introduced by the bridge network. We contribute insights and recommendations for future work in multi-modal meta-learning, especially when using language representations.

On the Limits of Multi-modal Meta-Learning with Auxiliary Task Modulation Using Conditional Batch Normalization

While Transformer-based neural machine translation (NMT) is very effective in high-resource settings, many languages lack the necessary large parallel corpora to benefit from it. In the context of low-resource (LR) MT between two closely-related languages, a natural intuition is to seek benefits from structural ``shortcuts'', such as copying subwords from the source to the target, given that such language pairs often share a considerable number of identical words, cognates, and borrowings. We test Pointer-Generator Networks for this purpose for six language pairs over a variety of resource ranges, and find weak improvements for most settings. However, analysis shows that the model does not show greater improvements for closely-related vs. more distant language pairs, or for lower resource ranges, and that the models do not exhibit the expected usage of the mechanism for shared subwords. Our discussion of the reasons for this behaviour highlights several general challenges for LR NMT, such as modern tokenization strategies, noisy real-world conditions, and linguistic complexities. We call for better scrutiny of linguistically motivated improvements to NMT given the blackbox nature of Transformer models, as well as for a focus on the above problems in the field.

Pointer-Generator Networks for Low-Resource Machine Translation: Don't Copy That!

Deploying large language models (LLMs) encounters challenges due to intensive computational and memory requirements. Our research examines vocabulary trimming (VT) inspired by restricting embedding entries to the language of interest to bolster time and memory efficiency. While such modifications have been proven effective in tasks like machine translation, tailoring them to LLMs demands specific modifications given the diverse nature of LLM applications. We apply two language heuristics to trim the full vocabulary---Unicode-based script filtering and corpus-based selection---to different LLM families and sizes. The methods are straightforward, interpretable, and easy to implement. It is found that VT reduces the memory usage of small models by nearly 50% and has an upper bound of 25% improvement in generation speed. Yet, we reveal the limitations of these methods in that they do not perform consistently well for each language with diminishing returns in larger models.

The Ups and Downs of Large Language Model Inference with Vocabulary Trimming by Language Heuristics

We present a multi-task learning approach to predicting semantic plausibility by leveraging 50+ adapters categorized into 17 tasks within an efficient training framework. Across four plausibility datasets in English of varying size and linguistic constructions, we compare how models provided with knowledge from a range of NLP tasks perform in contrast to models without external information.
Our results show that plausibility prediction benefits from complementary knowledge (e.g., provided by syntactic tasks) are significant but non-substantial, while performance may be hurt when injecting knowledge from an unsuitable task. Similarly important, we find that knowledge transfer may be hindered by class imbalance, and demonstrate the positive yet minor effect of balancing training data, even at the expense of size.

Multi-Task Learning with Adapters for Plausibility Prediction: Bridging the Gap or Falling into the Trenches?

Attributing answer text to its source document for information-seeking questions is crucial for building trustworthy, reliable, and accountable systems. We formulate a new task of post-hoc answer attribution for long document comprehension (LDC). Owing to the lack of long-form abstractive and information-seeking LDC datasets, we refactor existing datasets to assess the strengths and weaknesses of existing retrieval-based and proposed answer decomposition and textual entailment-based optimal selection attribution systems for this task. We throw light on the limitations of existing datasets and the need for datasets to assess the actual performance of systems on this task.

Post-Hoc Answer Attribution for Grounded and Trustworthy Long Document Comprehension: Task, Insights, and Challenges

To develop high-performance and robust natural language processing (NLP) models, it is important to have various question answering (QA) datasets to train, evaluate, and analyze them. Although there are various QA datasets available in English, there are only a few QA datasets in other languages. We focus on Japanese, a language with only a few basic QA datasets, and aim to build a Japanese version of Natural Questions (NQ) consisting of questions that naturally arise from human information needs. We collect natural questions from query logs of a Japanese search engine and build the dataset using crowdsourcing. We construct Japanese Natural Questions (JNQ) and a Japanese version of BoolQ (JBoolQ), which is derived from NQ and consists of yes/no questions. JNQ consists of 16,871 questions, and JBoolQ consists of 6,467 questions. We also define two tasks from JNQ and one from JBoolQ and establish baselines using competitive methods drawn from related literature. We hope that these datasets will facilitate research on QA and NLP models in Japanese.
We are planning to release JNQ and JBoolQ.

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Next from NAACL 2024

Using Program Repair as a Proxy for Language Models' Feedback Ability in Programming Education

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