Mexico

This study presents the development and evaluation of a ByteT5-based multilingual translation model tailored for translating the Bible into underrepresented languages. Utilizing the comprehensive Johns Hopkins University Bible Corpus, we trained the model to capture the intricate nuances of character-based and morphologically rich languages. Our results, measured by the BLEU score and supplemented with sample translations, suggest the model can improve accessibility to sacred texts. It effectively handles the distinctive biblical lexicon and structure, thus bridging the linguistic divide. The study also discusses the model’s limitations and suggests pathways for future enhancements, focusing on expanding access to sacred literature across linguistic boundaries.

NAACL 2024

Efficacy of ByteT5 in Multilingual Translation of Biblical Texts for Underrepresented Languages

byt5

multilingual translation

natural language processing

machine translation

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)*

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

We are 600 million Spanish speakers. We launched the #Somos600M Project because the diversity of the languages from LATAM, the Caribbean and Spain needs to be represented in Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Despite being the 7.5% of the world population, there is no open dataset to instruction-tune large language models (LLMs), nor a leaderboard to evaluate and compare them. In this paper, we present how we have created as an international open-source community the first versions of the instruction and evaluation datasets, indispensable resources for the advancement of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in our languages.

The #Somos600M Project: Generating NLP resources that represent the diversity of the languages from LATAM, the Caribbean, and Spain

In recent studies, linear recurrent neural networks (LRNNs) have achieved Transformer-level performance in natural language and long-range modeling, while offering rapid parallel training and constant inference cost. With the resurgence of interest in LRNNs, we study whether they can learn the hidden rules in training sequences, such as the grammatical structures of regular language. We theoretically analyze some existing LRNNs and discover their limitations in modeling regular language. Motivated by this analysis, we propose a new LRNN equipped with a block-diagonal and input-dependent transition matrix. Experiments suggest that the proposed model is the only LRNN capable of performing length extrapolation on regular language tasks such as Sum, Even Pair, and Modular Arithmetic. The code is released at \url{https://github.com/tinghanf/RegluarLRNN}.

Advancing Regular Language Reasoning in Linear Recurrent Neural Networks

Predicting unseen relations that cannot be observed during the training phase is a challenging task in relation extraction. Previous works have made progress by matching the semantics between input instances and label descriptions. However, fine-grained matching often requires laborious manual annotation, and rich interactions between instances and label descriptions come with significant computational overhead. In this work, we propose an efficient multi-grained matching approach that uses virtual entity matching to reduce manual annotation cost, and fuses coarse-grained recall and fine-grained classification for rich interactions with guaranteed inference speed. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the previous State Of The Art (SOTA) methods, and achieves a balance between inference efficiency and prediction accuracy in zero-shot relation extraction tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/longls777/EMMA.

Fusion Makes Perfection: An Efficient Multi-Grained Matching Approach for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction

Previous work on multimodal sentence embedding has proposed multimodal contrastive learning and achieved promising results. However, by taking the rest of the batch as negative samples without reviewing when forming contrastive pairs, those studies encountered many suspicious and noisy negative examples, significantly affecting the methods' overall performance. In this work, we propose KDMCSE (Knowledge Distillation Multimodal contrastive learning of Sentence Embeddings), a novel approach that enhances the discrimination and generalizability of multimodal representation and inherits the knowledge from the teacher model to learn the difference between positive and negative instances and via that, can detect noisy and wrong negative samples effectively before they are calculated in the contrastive objective. Furthermore, to overcome the limitation of modeling the variation within negative pairs, we introduce a new contrastive objective, AdapACSE (Adaptive Angular Margin Supervised Contrastive Learning for Multimodal sentence embeddings), that enhances the discriminative representation by strengthening the margin within the angular space while capturing varying semantics within the negative. Experimental results on widely used Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

KDMCSE: Knowledge Distillation Multimodal Sentence Embeddings with Adaptive Angular margin Contrastive Learning

We introduce Retrieval-Based Speculative Decoding (REST), a novel algorithm designed to speed up language model generation. The key insight driving the development of REST is the observation that the process of text generation often includes certain common phases and patterns. Unlike previous methods that rely on a draft language model for speculative decoding, REST harnesses the power of retrieval to generate draft tokens. This method draws from the reservoir of existing knowledge, retrieving and employing relevant tokens based on the current context. Its plug-and-play nature allows for seamless integration and acceleration of any language model, all without necessitating additional training. When benchmarked on 7B and 13B language models in a single-batch setting, REST achieves a significant speedup of $1.62 \times$ to $2.36 \times$ on code or text generation. The source code of REST is available at https://github.com/FasterDecoding/REST.

REST: Retrieval-Based Speculative Decoding

Language models pre-trained on general text have achieved impressive results in diverse fields. Yet, the distinct linguistic characteristics of task-oriented dialogues (TOD) compared to general text limit the practical utility of existing language models. Current task-oriented dialogue pre-training methods overlook the one-to-many property of conversations, where multiple responses can be appropriate given the same conversation context. In this paper, we propose a novel dialogue pre-training model called DivTOD, which collaborates with LLMs to learn diverse task-oriented dialogue representations. DivTOD guides LLMs in transferring diverse knowledge to smaller models while removing domain knowledge that contradicts task-oriented dialogues. Experiments show that our model outperforms strong TOD baselines on various downstream dialogue tasks and learns the intrinsic diversity of task-oriented dialogues.

DivTOD: Unleashing the Power of LLMs for Diversifying Task-Oriented Dialogue Representations

We explore the use of language as a perceptual representation for vision-and-language navigation (VLN), with a focus on low-data settings. Our approach uses off-the-shelf vision systems for image captioning and object detection to convert an agent's egocentric panoramic view at each time step into natural language descriptions. We then finetune a pretrained language model to select an action, based on the current view and the trajectory history, that would best fulfill the navigation instructions. In contrast to the standard setup which adapts a pretrained language model to work directly with continuous visual features from pretrained vision models, our approach instead uses (discrete) language as the perceptual representation. We explore several use cases of our language-based navigation (LangNav) approach on the R2R VLN benchmark: generating synthetic trajectories from a prompted language model (GPT-4) with which to finetune a smaller language model; domain transfer where we transfer a policy learned on one simulated environment (ALFRED) to another (more realistic) environment (R2R); and combining both vision- and language-based representations for VLN. Our approach is found to improve upon baselines that rely on visual features in settings where only a few expert trajectories (10-100) are available, demonstrating the potential of language as a perceptual representation for navigation.

LangNav: Language as a Perceptual Representation for Navigation

The improvement of LLMs' instruction-following capabilities relies heavily on the availability of high-quality instruction-response pairs. Unfortunately, the current methods used to collect the pairs suffer from either unaffordable labor costs or severe hallucinations in the self-generation of LLM. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a scalable solution. It involves training LLMs to generate instruction-response pairs based on human-written documents, rather than relying solely on self-generation without context. Our proposed method not only exploits the advantages of human-written documents in reducing hallucinations but also utilizes an LLM to wrap the expression of documents, which enables us to bridge the gap between various document styles and the standard AI response. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing typical methods on multiple benchmarks. In particular, compared to the best-performing baseline, the LLM trained using our generated dataset exhibits a 10\% relative improvement in performance on AlpacaEval, despite utilizing only 1/5 of its training data. Furthermore, a comprehensive manual evaluation validates the quality of the data we generated.

DoG-Instruct: Towards Premium Instruction-Tuning Data via Text-Grounded Instruction Wrapping

The Euclidean space is the familiar space for training neural models and performing arithmetic operations. However, many data types inherently possess complex geometries, and model training methods involve operating over their latent representations, which cannot be effectively captured in the Euclidean space. The hyperbolic space provides a more generalized representative geometry to model the hierarchical complexities of the tree-like structure of natural language. We propose AdaPT a set of guidelines for initialization, parametrization, and training of neural networks, which adapts to the dataset and can be used with different manifolds. AdaPT can be generalized over any existing neural network training methodology and leads to more stable training without a substantial increase in training time. We apply AdaPT guidelines over two state-of-the-art deep learning approaches and empirically demonstrate its effectiveness through experiments on three tasks over 12 languages across speech and text. Through extensive qualitative analysis, we put forward the applicability of AdaPT as a set of guidelines optimally utilizing the manifold geometry, which can be extended to various downstream tasks across languages and modalities.

AdaPT: A Set of Guidelines for Hyperbolic Multimodal Multilingual NLP

Previously, non-autoregressive models were widely recognized as being superior in generation efficiency but inferior in generation quality due to the challenges of modeling multiple target modalities. To enhance the multi-modality modeling ability, we propose the diffusion glancing transformer, which employs a modality diffusion process and residual glancing sampling. The modality diffusion process is a discrete process that interpolates the multi-modal distribution along the decoding steps, and the residual glancing sampling approach guides the model to continuously learn the remaining modalities across the layers. Experimental results on various machine translation and text generation benchmarks demonstrate that DIFFGLAT achieves better generation accuracy while maintaining fast decoding speed compared with both autoregressive and non-autoregressive models.

Next from NAACL 2024

The #Somos600M Project: Generating NLP resources that represent the diversity of the languages from LATAM, the Caribbean, and Spain

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