Mexico

Recently, deep learning-based language models have significantly enhanced text-to-SQL tasks, with promising applications in retrieving patient records within the medical domain. One notable challenge in such applications is discerning unanswerable queries. Through fine-tuning model, we demonstrate the feasibility of converting medical record inquiries into SQL queries. Additionally, we introduce an entropy-based method to identify and filter out unanswerable results. We further enhance result quality by filtering low-confidence SQL through log probability-based distribution, while grammatical and schema errors are mitigated by executing queries on the actual database.
We experimentally verified that our method can filter unanswerable questions, which can be widely utilized even when the parameters of the model are not accessible, and that it can be effectively utilized in practice.

NAACL 2024

ProbGate at EHRSQL 2024: Enhancing SQL Query Generation Accuracy through Probabilistic Threshold Filtering and Error Handling

electronic health records

large language model

sequence-to-sequence

text-to-sql

filtering

### 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)**

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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas 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. 
 
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Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

As the media landscape evolves, the study of news framing, key to shaping public opinion, has expanded. Our study presents a methodology for framing analysis in Spanish media using NLP to uncover the cultural and political factors shaping narratives. This method enhances linguistic inclusivity in framing studies and highlights Spanish media's role in public opinion, showing NLP's utility in diverse linguistic contexts and contributing to a more comprehensive global media analysis.

Cross-Linguistic Framing Analysis: Unveiling Political and Cultural Narratives in Spanish-Language News

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful capabilities in natural language processing, yet their vast number of parameters poses challenges for deployment and inference efficiency. Structured model pruning emerges as a viable approach to reduce model size and accelerate inference, without requiring specialized operators and libraries for deployment. However, structured pruning often severely weakens the model's capability.Despite repetitive fine-tuning can restore the capability to a certain extent, it impairs LLMs' utility as versatile problem solvers.To address this issue, we propose a novel structured pruning algorithm tailored for LLMs. It derives the importance of different components, namely rows and columns in parameter matrices, based on intermediate data dependencies. Then it removes coupled components across different layers simultaneously and preserves dependency relationships within remaining parameters, avoiding significant performance degradation. The pruned model requires only few epochs of fine-tuning to restore its performance, ensuring the model's ability to generalize.Empirical evaluations on LLaMA, Vicuna, and ChatGLM3 demonstrate our algorithm's efficacy, yielding 20% parameter reduction while retaining at least 94.4% of original performance metrics.

Structured Pruning for Large Language Models Using Coupled Components Elimination and Minor Fine-tuning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable proficiency in language understanding and have been successfully applied to a variety of real-world tasks through task-specific fine-tuning or prompt engineering. Despite these advancements, it remains an open question whether LLMs are fundamentally capable of reasoning and planning, or if they primarily rely on recalling and synthesizing information from their training data. In our research, we introduce a novel task---Minesweeper---specifically designed in a format unfamiliar to LLMs and absent from their training datasets. This task challenges LLMs to identify the locations of mines based on numerical clues provided by adjacent opened cells. Successfully completing this task requires an understanding of each cell's state, discerning spatial relationships between the clues and mines, and strategizing actions based on logical deductions drawn from the arrangement of the cells. Our experiments, including trials with the advanced GPT-4 model, indicate that while LLMs possess the foundational abilities required for this task, they struggle to integrate these into a coherent, multi-step logical reasoning process needed to solve Minesweeper. These findings highlight the need for further research to understand the nature of reasoning capabilities in LLMs under similar circumstances, and to explore pathways towards more sophisticated AI reasoning and planning models.

Assessing Logical Puzzle Solving in Large Language Models: Insights from a Minesweeper Case Study

Consistency regularization methods, such as R-Drop (Liang et al., 2021) and CrossConST (Gao et al., 2023), have achieved impressive supervised and zero-shot performance in the neural machine translation (NMT) field. Can we also boost end-to-end (E2E) speech-to-text translation (ST) by leveraging consistency regularization? In this paper, we conduct empirical studies on intra-modal and cross-modal consistency and propose two training strategies, SimRegCR and SimZeroCR, for E2E ST in regular and zero-shot scenarios. Experiments on the MuST-C benchmark show that our approaches achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in most translation directions. The analyses prove that regularization brought by the intra-modal consistency, instead of the modality gap, is crucial for the regular E2E ST, and the cross-modal consistency could close the modality gap and boost the zero-shot E2E ST performance.

An Empirical Study of Consistency Regularization for End-to-End Speech-to-Text Translation

Since the recent prosperity of Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been interleaved discussions regarding how to reduce hallucinations from LLM responses, how to increase the factuality of LLMs, and whether Knowledge Graphs (KGs), which store the world knowledge in a symbolic form, will be replaced with LLMs. In this paper, we try to answer these questions from a new angle: How knowledgeable are LLMs? To answer this question, we constructed Head-to-Tail, a benchmark that consists of 18K question-answer (QA) pairs regarding head, torso, and tail facts in terms of popularity. We designed an automated evaluation method and a set of metrics that closely approximate the knowledge an LLM confidently internalizes. Through a comprehensive evaluation of 16 publicly available LLMs, we show that existing LLMs are still far from being perfect in terms of their grasp of factual knowledge, especially for facts of torso-to-tail entities.

Head-to-Tail: How Knowledgeable are Large Language Models (LLMs)? A.K.A. Will LLMs Replace Knowledge Graphs?

Task-Oriented Parsing (TOP) enables conversational assistants to interpret user commands expressed in natural language, transforming them into structured outputs that combine elements of both natural language and intent/slot tags. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance in synthesizing computer programs based on a natural-language prompt, mitigating the gap between natural language and structured programs. Our paper focuses on harnessing the capabilities of LLMs for semantic parsing tasks, addressing the following three key research questions: 1) How can LLMs be effectively utilized for semantic parsing tasks? 2) What defines an effective prompt? and 3) How can LLM overcome the length constraint and streamline prompt design by including all examples as prompts? We introduce k Nearest Neighbor In-Context Learning (kNN-ICL), which simplifies prompt engineering by allowing it to be built on top of any design strategy while providing access to all demo examples. Extensive experiments show that: 1) Simple ICL without kNN search can achieve a comparable performance with strong supervised models on the TOP tasks, and 2) kNN-ICL significantly improves the comprehension of complex requests by seamlessly integrating ICL with a nearest-neighbor approach. Notably, this enhancement is achieved without the need for additional data or specialized prompts.

kNN-ICL: Compositional Task-Oriented Parsing Generalization with Nearest Neighbor In-Context Learning

Image-text matching has been a long-standing problem, which seeks to connect vision and language through semantic understanding. Due to the capability to manage large-scale raw data, unsupervised hashing-based approaches have gained prominence recently. They typically construct a semantic similarity structure using the natural distance, which subsequently guides the optimization of the hashing network. However, the similarity structure could be biased at the boundaries of semantic distributions, causing error accumulation during sequential optimization. To tackle this, we introduce a novel hashing approach termed Distribution-based Structure Mining with Consistency Learning (DEMO) for efficient image-text matching. From a statistical view, DEMO characterizes each image using multiple augmented views, which are considered as samples drawn from its intrinsic semantic distribution. Then, we employ a non-parametric distribution divergence to ensure a robust and precise similarity structure. In addition, we introduce collaborative consistency learning which not only preserves the similarity structure in the Hamming space but also encourages consistency between retrieval distribution from different directions in a self-supervised manner. Extensive experiments on several widely used datasets demonstrate that DEMO achieves superior performance compared with various state-of-the-art methods.

DEMO: A Statistical Perspective for Efficient Image-Text Matching

Machine learning shows promise in predicting the outcome of legal cases, but most research has concentrated on civil law cases rather than case law systems. We identified two unique challenges in making legal case outcome predictions with case law. First, it is crucial to identify relevant precedent cases that serve as fundamental evidence for judges during decision-making. Second, it is necessary to consider the evolution of legal principles over time, as early cases may adhere to different legal contexts. In this paper, we proposed a new framework named PILOT (PredictIng Legal case OuTcome) for case outcome prediction. It comprises two modules for relevant case retrieval and temporal pattern handling, respectively. To benchmark the performance of existing legal case outcome prediction models, we curated a dataset from a large-scale case law database. We demonstrate the importance of accurately identifying precedent cases and mitigating the temporal shift when making predictions for case law, as our method shows a significant improvement over the prior methods that focus on civil law case outcome predictions.

PILOT: Legal Case Outcome Prediction with Case Law

In this project, we demonstrate that phoneme-based models for speech processing can achieve strong crosslinguistic generalizability to unseen languages. We curated the IPAPACK, a massively multilingual speech corpora with phonemic transcriptions, encompassing more than 115 languages from diverse language families, selectively checked by linguists. Based on the IPAPACK, we propose CLAP-IPA, a multi-lingual phoneme-speech contrastive embedding model capable of open-vocabulary matching between arbitrary speech signals and phonemic sequences. The proposed model was tested on 95 unseen languages, showing strong generalizability across languages. Temporal alignments between phonemes and speech signals also emerged from contrastive training, enabling zeroshot forced alignment in unseen languages. We further introduced a neural forced aligner IPA-ALIGNER by finetuning CLAP-IPA with the Forward-Sum loss to learn better phone-to-audio alignment. Evaluation results suggest that IPA-ALIGNER can generalize to unseen languages without adaptation.

The taste of IPA: Towards open-vocabulary keyword spotting and forced alignment in any language

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in utilizing tools, but their closed-source nature and high inference costs pose limitations on their adaptability, necessitating a valid method that leverages smaller, open-sourced models. In this paper, we introduce Toolink, a comprehensive framework that performs task-solving by first creating a toolkit and then integrating the planning and calling of tools through a chain-of-solving (CoS) approach. We first validate the efficacy of Toolink in harnessing the model's creativity and CoS ability on ChatGPT. Subsequently, we curate CoS-GPT, a chain-of-solving dataset designed for tool-using, and finetune the LLaMA-7B model. It results in LLaMA-CoS, a powerful open-source model with advanced tool-planning and tool-calling capabilities. Evaluation of diverse tasks from BIG-bench demonstrates its CoS ability matches that of ChatGPT while its performance surpasses the chain-of-thought approach. Further studies highlight the generalization of LLaMA-CoS to unseen tasks and showcase its capability in using toolkits not explicitly tailored for the target task, affirming its robustness in real-world scenarios. All codes and data are released.

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Cross-Linguistic Framing Analysis: Unveiling Political and Cultural Narratives in Spanish-Language News

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

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