Mexico

Structured data, prevalent in tables, databases, and knowledge graphs, poses a significant challenge in its representation. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), there has been a shift towards linearization-based methods, which process structured data as sequential token streams, diverging from approaches that explicitly model structure, often as a graph. Crucially, there remains a gap in our understanding of how these linearization-based methods handle structured data, which is inherently non-linear. This work investigates the linear handling of structured data in encoder-decoder language models, specifically T5. Our findings reveal the model&#39;s ability to mimic human-designed processes such as schema linking and syntax prediction, indicating a deep, meaningful learning of structure beyond simple token sequencing. We also uncover insights into the model&#39;s internal mechanisms, including the ego-centric nature of structure node encodings and the potential for model compression due to modality fusion redundancy. Overall, this work sheds light on the inner workings of linearization-based methods and could potentially provide guidance for future research.

NAACL 2024

On Linearizing Structured Data in Encoder-Decoder Language Models: Insights from Text-to-SQL

model interpretation

structured data

text-to-sql

Structured data, prevalent in tables, databases, and knowledge graphs, poses a significant challenge in its representation. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), there has been a shift towards linearization-based methods, which process structured data as sequential token streams, diverging from approaches that explicitly model structure, often as a graph. Crucially, there remains a gap in our understanding of how these linearization-based methods handle structured data, which is inherently non-linear. This work investigates the linear handling of structured data in encoder-decoder language models, specifically T5. Our findings reveal the model's ability to mimic human-designed processes such as schema linking and syntax prediction, indicating a deep, meaningful learning of structure beyond simple token sequencing. We also uncover insights into the model's internal mechanisms, including the ego-centric nature of structure node encodings and the potential for model compression due to modality fusion redundancy. Overall, this work sheds light on the inner workings of linearization-based methods and could potentially provide guidance for future research.

poster

## 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

This paper introduces Robust Spin (R-Spin), a data-efficient domain-specific self-supervision method for speaker and noise-invariant speech representations by learning discrete acoustic units with speaker-invariant clustering (Spin). R-Spin resolves Spin's issues and enhances content representations by learning to predict acoustic pieces. R-Spin offers a 12X reduction in computational resources compared to previous state-of-the-art methods while outperforming them in severely distorted speech scenarios. This paper provides detailed analyses to show how discrete units contribute to speech encoder training and improving robustness in diverse acoustic environments.

R-Spin: Efficient Speaker and Noise-invariant Representation Learning with Acoustic Pieces

Analyzing large hierarchical tables with multi-level headers presents challenges due to their complex structure, implicit semantics, and calculation relationships. While recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in flat table analysis, their application to hierarchical tables is constrained by the reliance on manually curated exemplars and the model's token capacity limitations. Addressing these challenges, we introduce a novel code-augmented LLM-based framework, $E^5$, for zero-shot hierarchical table question answering. This approach encompasses self-explaining the table's hierarchical structures, code generation to extract relevant information and apply operations, external code execution to prevent hallucinations, and leveraging LLMs' reasoning for final answer derivation. Empirical results indicate that our method, based on GPT-4, outperforms state-of-the-art fine-tuning methods with a 44.38 Exact Match improvement. Furthermore, we present $F^3$, an adaptive algorithm designed for token-limited scenarios, effectively condensing large tables while maintaining useful information. Our experiments prove its efficiency, enabling the processing of large tables even with models having limited context lengths. The code is available at https://github.com/zzh-SJTU/E5-Hierarchical-Table-Analysis.

E^5: Zero-shot Hierarchical Table Analysis using Augmented LLMs via Explain, Extract, Execute, Exhibit and Extrapolate

Prior work shows that program-aided reasoning, in which large language models (LLMs) are combined with programs written in programming languages such as Python, can significantly improve accuracy on various reasoning tasks. However, while accuracy is essential, it is also important for such reasoners to “know what they know”, which can be quantified through the calibration of the model. In this paper, we compare the calibration of Program Aided Language Models (PAL) and text-based Chain-of-thought (COT) prompting techniques over 5 datasets and 2 model types - LLaMA models and OpenAI models. Our results indicate that PAL leads to improved calibration in 75% of the instances. Our analysis uncovers that prompting styles that produce lesser diversity in generations also have more calibrated results, and thus we also experiment with inducing lower generation diversity using temperature scaling and find that for certain temperatures, PAL is not only more accurate but is also more calibrated than COT. Overall, we demonstrate that, in the majority of cases, program-aided reasoners better know what they know than text-based counterparts.

Program-Aided Reasoners (Better) Know What They Know

Teaching large language models (LLMs) to generate text with attribution to evidence sources can reduce hallucinations, improve verifiability in question answering systems (QA), and increase reliability of retrieval augmented LLMs. Despite gaining increasing popularity for usage in QA systems and search engines, current LLMs struggle with attribution for long-form responses which require reasoning over multiple evidence sources. To address this, in this paper we aim to improve the attribution capability of LLMs for long-form answer generation to multiple sources, with multiple citations per sentence. However, data for training multi-source attributable QA systems is difficult and expensive to annotate, and therefore scarce. To overcome this challenge, we transform existing QA datasets for this task (MultiAttr), and empirically demonstrate, on a wide range of attribution benchmark datasets, that fine-tuning on MultiAttr provides significant improvements over training only on the target QA domain. Lastly, to fill a gap in existing benchmarks, we present a multi-source attribution dataset containing multi-paragraph answers, PolitiICite, based on PolitiFact articles that discuss events closely related to implementation statuses of election promises.

Towards Improved Multi-Source Attribution for Long-Form Answer Generation

Text and vision foundation models can perform many tasks in a zero-shot setting, a desirable property that enables these systems to be applied in general and low-resource settings. There has been far less work, however, on the zero-shot abilities of ASR foundation models, with these systems typically fine-tuned to specific tasks or constrained to applications that match their training criterion and data annotation. In this work we investigate the ability of Whisper and MMS, ASR foundation models trained primarily for speech recognition, to perform zero-shot audio classification. We use simple template-based text prompts at the decoder and use the resulting decoding probabilities to generate zero-shot predictions. Without training the model on extra data or adding any new parameters, we demonstrate that Whisper shows promising zero-shot classification performance on a range of 8 audio-classification datasets, outperforming the accuracy of existing state-of-the-art zero-shot baselines by an average of 9%. One important step to unlock the emergent ability is debiasing, where a simple unsupervised reweighting method of the class probabilities yields consistent significant performance gains. We further show that performance increases with model size, implying that as ASR foundation models scale up, they may exhibit improved zero-shot performance.

Investigating the Emergent Audio Classification Ability of ASR Foundation Models

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements in natural language understanding and generation. However, one major issue towards their widespread deployment in the real world is that they can generate "hallucinated" answers that are not factual. Towards this end, this paper focuses on improving LLMs by grounding their responses in retrieved passages and by providing citations. We propose a new framework, AGREE, Adaptation for GRounding EnhancEment, that improves the grounding from a holistic perspective. Our framework tunes LLMs to self-ground the claims in their responses and provide accurate citations to retrieved documents. This tuning on top of the pre-trained LLMs requires well-grounded responses (with citations) for paired queries, for which we introduce a method that can automatically construct such data from unlabeled queries. The self-grounding capability of tuned LLMs further grants them a test-time adaptation (TTA) capability that can actively retrieve passages to support the claims that have not been grounded, which iteratively improves the responses of LLMs. Across five datasets and two LLMs, our results show that the proposed tuning-based \agre{} framework generates superior grounded responses with more accurate citations compared to prompting-based approaches and post-hoc citing-based approaches.

Effective Large Language Model Adaptation for Improved Grounding and Citation Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (LLMs), which incorporate the non-parametric knowledge from external knowledge bases into LLMs, have emerged as a promising approach to enhancing response accuracy in several tasks, such as Question-Answering (QA). However, even though there are various approaches dealing with queries of different complexities, they either handle simple queries with unnecessary computational overhead or fail to adequately address complex multi-step queries; yet, not all user requests fall into only one of the simple or complex categories. In this work, we propose a novel adaptive QA framework that can dynamically select the most suitable strategy for (retrieval-augmented) LLMs from the simplest to the most sophisticated ones based on the query complexity. Also, this selection process is operationalized with a classifier, which is a smaller LM trained to predict the complexity level of incoming queries with automatically collected labels, obtained from actual predicted outcomes of models and inherent inductive biases in datasets. This approach offers a balanced strategy, seamlessly adapting between the iterative and single-step retrieval-augmented LLMs, as well as the no-retrieval methods, in response to a range of query complexities. We validate our model on a set of open-domain QA datasets, covering multiple query complexities, and show that ours enhances the overall efficiency and accuracy of QA systems, compared to relevant baselines including the adaptive retrieval approaches. Code is available at: https://github.com/starsuzi/Adaptive-RAG.

Adaptive-RAG: Learning to Adapt Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models through Question Complexity

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with complex logical reasoning due to logical inconsistencies and the inherent difficulty of such reasoning. We use Lean, a theorem proving framework, to address these challenges. By formalizing logical reasoning problems into theorems within Lean, we can solve them by proving or disproving the corresponding theorems. This method reduces the risk of logical inconsistencies with the help of Lean’s symbolic solver. It also enhances our ability to treat complex reasoning tasks using Lean’s extensive library of theorem proofs. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the FOLIO dataset and achieves performance near this level on ProofWriter. Notably, these results were accomplished by fine-tuning on fewer than 100 in-domain samples for each dataset

LeanReasoner: Boosting Complex Logical Reasoning with Lean

Instructing large language models (LLMs) to solve elementary school math problems has shown great success using Chain of Thought (CoT). However, the CoT approach relies on an LLM to generate a sequence of arithmetic calculations which can be prone to cascaded calculation errors. We hypothesize that an LLM should focus on extracting predicates and generating symbolic formulas from the math problem description so that the underlying calculation can be done via an external code interpreter. We investigate using LLM to generate Prolog programs to solve mathematical questions. Experimental results show that our Prolog-based arithmetic problem-solving outperforms CoT generation in the GSM8K benchmark across three distinct LLMs. In addition, given the insensitive ordering of predicates and symbolic formulas in Prolog, we propose to permute the ground truth predicates for more robust LLM training via data augmentation.

Arithmetic Reasoning with LLM: Prolog Generation & Permutation

Narrative Question Answering is an important task for evaluating and improving reading comprehension abilities in both humans and machines. However, there is a lack of consensus on the skill taxonomy that would enable systematic and comprehensive assessment and learning of the various aspects of Narrative Question Answering. Existing task-level skill views oversimplify the multidimensional nature of tasks, while question-level taxonomies face issues in evaluation and methodology. To address these challenges, we introduce a more inclusive skill taxonomy that synthesizes and redefines narrative understanding skills from previous taxonomies and includes a generation skill dimension from the answering perspective.

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On Linearizing Structured Data in Encoder-Decoder Language Models: Insights from Text-to-SQL

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R-Spin: Efficient Speaker and Noise-invariant Representation Learning with Acoustic Pieces

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