Mexico

Planning in textual environments have been shown to be a long-standing challenge even for current models. A recent, promising line of work uses LLMs to generate a formal representation of the environment that can be solved by a symbolic planner. However, existing methods rely on a fully-observed environment where all entity states are initially known, so a one-off representation can be constructed, leading to a complete plan. In contrast, we tackle partially-observed environments where there is initially no sufficient information to plan for the end-goal. We propose PDDLEGO that **iteratively** construct a planning representation that can lead to a partial plan for a given sub-goal. By accomplishing the sub-goal, more information is acquired to augment the representation, eventually achieving the end-goal. We show that plans produced by few-shot PDDLEGO are 43% more efficient than generating plans end-to-end on the Coin Collector simulation, with strong performance (98%) on the more complex Cooking World simulation where end-to-end LLMs fail to generate coherent plans (4%).

NAACL 2024

PDDLEGO: Iterative Planning in Textual Environments

text games

simulation

planning

program synthesis

reasoning

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

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.
 
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The University of Texas at Austin 
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2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

In this work, we propose a new task, compositional structured explanation generation (CSEG), to facilitate research on compositional generalization in reasoning. Despite the success of language models in solving reasoning tasks, their compositional generalization capabilities are under-researched. Our new CSEG task tests a model's ability to generalize from generating entailment trees with a limited number of inference steps -- to more steps, focusing on the length and shapes of entailment trees. CSEG is challenging in requiring both reasoning and compositional generalization abilities, and by being framed as a generation task. Besides the CSEG task, we propose a new dynamic modularized reasoning model, MORSE, that factorizes the inference process into modules, where each module represents a functional unit. We adopt modularized self-attention to dynamically select and route inputs to dedicated heads, which specializes them to specific functions. Using CSEG, we compare MORSE to models from prior work. Our analyses show that the task is challenging, but that the dynamic reasoning modules of MORSE are effective, showing competitive compositional generalization abilities in a generation setting.

Compositional Structured Explanation Generation with Dynamic Modularized Reasoning

We present EDM3, a novel approach for Event Detection (ED) based on decomposing and reformulating ED, and fine-tuning over its atomic subtasks. EDM3 enhances knowledge transfer while mitigating prediction error propagation inherent in pipelined approaches. EDM3 infers dataset-specific knowledge required for the complex primary task from its atomic tasks, making it adaptable to any set of event types. We evaluate EDM3 on multiple ED datasets, achieving state-of-the-art results on RAMS (71.3% vs 65.1% F1), and competitive performance on WikiEvents, MAVEN (∆ = 0.2%), and MLEE (∆ = 1.8%). We present an ablation study over rare event types (<15 instances in training data) in MAVEN, where EDM3 achieves ~90% F1. To the best of the authors' knowledge, we are the first to analyze ED performance over non-standard event configurations (i.e., multi-word and multi-class triggers). Experimental results show that EDM3 achieves ~90% exact match accuracy on multi-word triggers and ~61% prediction accuracy on multi-class triggers. This work establishes the effectiveness of EDM3 in enhancing performance on a complex information extraction task.

EDM3: Event Detection as Multi-task Text Generation

Recently, large pre-trained language models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior language understanding abilities, including zero-shot causal reasoning. However, it is unclear to what extent their capabilities are similar to human ones. We here study the processing of an event $B$ in a script-based story, which causally depends on a previous event $A$. In our manipulation, event $A$ is stated, negated, or omitted in an earlier section of the text. 
We first conducted a self-paced reading experiment, which showed that humans exhibit significantly longer reading times when causal conflicts exist ($\neg A \rightarrow B$) than under logical conditions ($A \rightarrow B$). However, reading times remain similar when cause A is not explicitly mentioned, indicating that humans can easily infer event B from their script knowledge. 
We then tested a variety of LLMs on the same data to check to what extent the models replicate human behavior. 
Our experiments show that 1) only recent LLMs, like GPT-3 or Vicuna, correlate with human behavior in the $\neg A \rightarrow B$ condition. 
2) Despite this correlation, all models still fail to predict that $nil \rightarrow B$ is less surprising than $\neg A \rightarrow B$, indicating that LLMs still have difficulties integrating script knowledge.

Do large language models and humans have similar behaviours in causal inference with script knowledge?

We present an information retrieval based reverse dictionary system using modern pre-trained language models and approximate nearest neighbors search algorithms. The proposed approach is applied to an existing Estonian language lexicon resource, Sõnaveeb (word web), with the purpose of enhancing and enriching it by introducing cross-lingual reverse dictionary functionality powered by semantic search.
The performance of the system is evaluated using both an existing labeled English dataset of words and definitions that is extended to contain also Estonian and Russian translations, and a novel unlabeled evaluation approach that extracts the evaluation data from the lexicon resource itself using synonymy relations.
Evaluation results indicate that the information retrieval based semantic search approach without any model training is feasible, producing median rank of 1 in the monolingual setting and median rank of 2 in the cross-lingual setting using the unlabeled evaluation approach, with models trained for cross-lingual retrieval and including Estonian in their training data showing superior performance in our particular task.

Sõnajaht: Definition Embeddings and Semantic Search for Reverse Dictionary Creation

We outline our multimodal ensemble learning system for identifying persuasion techniques in memes. We contribute an approach which utilises the novel inclusion of consistent named visual entities extracted using Google Vision’s API as an external knowledge source, joined to our multimodal ensemble via late fusion. As well as detailing our experiments in ensemble combinations, fusion methods and data augmentation, we explore the impact of including external data and summarise post-evaluation improvements to our architecture based on analysis of the task results.

BDA at SemEval-2024 Task 4: Detection of Persuasion in Memes Across Languages with Ensemble Learning and External Knowledge

This work participates in SemEval 2024 Task 1 on Semantic Textural Relatedness (STR) in Track A (supervised regression) in two languages, English and Moroccan Arabic. The task consists of providing a score of how two sentences relate to each other. The system developed in this work leveraged a cross-encoder with a merged fine-tuned Low-Rank Adapter (LoRA). The system was ranked eighth in English with a Spearman coefficient of 0.842, while Moroccan Arabic was ranked seventh with a score of 0.816. Moreover, various experiments were conducted to see the impact of different models and adapters on the performance and accuracy of the system.

WarwickNLP at SemEval-2024 Task 1: Low-Rank Cross-Encoders for Efficient Semantic Textual Relatedness

This paper outlines the approach of the ISDS-NLP team in the SemEval 2024 Task 10: Emotion Discovery and Reasoning its Flip in Conversation (EDiReF). For Subtask 1 we obtained a weighted F1 score of 0.43 and placed 12 in the leaderboard. We investigate two distinct approaches: Masked Language Modeling (MLM) and Causal Language Modeling (CLM). For MLM, we employ pre-trained BERT-like models in a multilingual setting, fine-tuning them with a classifier to predict emotions. Experiments with varying input lengths, classifier architectures, and fine-tuning strategies demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. Additionally, we utilize Mistral 7B Instruct V0.2, a state-of-the-art model, applying zero-shot and few-shot prompting techniques. Our findings indicate that while Mistral shows promise, MLMs currently outperform them in sentence-level emotion classification.

ISDS-NLP at SemEval-2024 Task 10: Transformer based neural networks for emotion recognition in conversations

This paper reports on an innovative approach to Emotion Recognition in Conversation and Emotion Flip Reasoning for the SemEval-2024 competition with a specific focus on analyzing Hindi-English code-mixed language. By integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with Instruction-based Fine-tuning and Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA), this study introduces innovative techniques like Sentext-height and advanced prompting strategies to navigate the intricacies of emotional analysis in code-mixed conversational data. The results of the proposed work effectively demonstrate its ability to overcome label bias and the complexities of code-mixed languages. Our team achieved ranks of 5, 3, and 3 in tasks 1, 2, and 3 respectively. This study contributes valuable insights and methods for enhancing emotion recognition models, underscoring the importance of continuous research in this field.

FeedForward at SemEval-2024 Task 10: Trigger and sentext-height enriched emotion analysis in multi-party conversations

This paper presents our system developed for the SemEval-2024 Task 1: Semantic Textual Relatedness for African and Asian Languages. The shared task aims at measuring the semantic textual relatedness between pairs of sentences, with a focus on a range of under-represented languages. In this work, we propose using machine translation for data augmentation to address the low-resource challenge of limited training data. Moreover, we apply task-adaptive pre-training on unlabeled task data to bridge the gap between pre-training and task adaptation. For model training, we investigate both full fine-tuning and adapter-based tuning, and adopt the adapter framework for effective zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. We achieve competitive results in the shared task: our system performs the best among all ranked teams in both subtask A (supervised learning) and subtask C (cross-lingual transfer).

AAdaM at SemEval-2024 Task 1: Augmentation and Adaptation for Multilingual Semantic Textual Relatedness

In this paper, we present our novel systems developed for the SemEval-2024 hallucination detection task. Our investigation spans a range of strategies to compare model predictions with reference standards, encompassing diverse baselines, the refinement of pre-trained encoders through supervised learning, and an ensemble approaches utilizing several high-performing models. Through these explorations, we introduce three distinct methods that exhibit strong performance metrics. To amplify our training data, we generate additional training samples from unlabelled training subset. Furthermore, we provide a detailed comparative analysis of our approaches. Notably, our premier method achieved a commendable 9th place in the competition's model-agnostic track and 17th place in model-aware track, highlighting its effectiveness and potential.

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Compositional Structured Explanation Generation with Dynamic Modularized Reasoning

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Iterative Formalization and Planning in Partially Observable Environments

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Next from NAACL 2024

Compositional Structured Explanation Generation with Dynamic Modularized Reasoning

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Iterative Formalization and Planning in Partially Observable Environments

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PRESENTATIONS

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