Mexico

The Mayan languages comprise a language family with an ancient history, millions of speakers, and immense cultural value, that, nevertheless, remains severely underrepresented in terms of resources and global exposure. In this paper we develop, curate, and publicly release a set of corpora in several Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala and Southern Mexico, which we call MayanV. The datasets are parallel with Spanish, the dominant language of the region, and are taken from official native sources focused on representing informal, day-to-day, and non-domain-specific language. As such, and according to our dialectometric analysis, they differ in register from most other available resources. Additionally, we present neural machine translation models, trained on as many resources and Mayan languages as possible, and evaluated exclusively on our datasets. We observe lexical divergences between the dialects of Spanish in our resources and the more widespread written standard of Spanish, and that resources other than the ones we present do not seem to improve translation performance, indicating that many such resources may not accurately capture common, real-life language usage. The MayanV dataset is available at https://github.com/transducens/mayanv.

NAACL 2024

Curated Datasets and Neural Models for Machine Translation of Informal Registers between Mayan and Spanish Vernaculars

indigneous languages

low-resource languages

neural machine translation

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

poster

Text classification systems have continuously improved in performance over the years. How- ever, nearly all current SOTA classifiers have a similar shortcoming, they process text in a hor- izontal manner. Vertically written words will not be recognized by a classifier. In contrast, humans are easily able to recognize and read words written both horizontally and vertically. Hence, a human adversary could write problem- atic words vertically and the meaning would still be preserved to other humans. We simulate such an attack, VertAttack. VertAttack identifies which words a classifier is reliant on and then rewrites those words vertically. We find that VertAttack is able to greatly drop the accuracy of 4 different transformer models on 5 datasets. For example, on the SST2 dataset, VertAttack is able to drop RoBERTa’s accuracy from 94 to 13%. Furthermore, since VertAttack does not replace the word, meaning is easily preserved. We verify this via a human study and find that crowdworkers are able to correctly label 77% perturbed texts perturbed, compared to 81% of the original texts. We believe VertAttack offers a look into how humans might circumvent clas- sifiers in the future and thus inspire a look into more robust algorithms.

VertAttack: Taking Advantage of Text Classifiers’ Horizontal Vision

Understanding when two pieces of text convey the same information is a goal touching many subproblems in NLP, including textual entailment and fact-checking. This problem becomes more complex when those two pieces of text are in different languages. Here, we introduce X-PARADE (Cross-lingual Paragraph-level Analysis of Divergences and Entailments), the first cross-lingual dataset of paragraph-level information divergences. Annotators label a paragraph in a target language at the span level and evaluate it with respect to a corresponding paragraph in a source language, indicating whether a given piece of information is the same, new, or new but can be inferred. This last notion establishes a link with cross-language NLI. Aligned paragraphs are sourced from Wikipedia pages in different languages, reflecting real information divergences observed in the wild. Armed with our dataset, we investigate a diverse set of approaches for this problem, including classic token alignment from machine translation, textual entailment methods that localize their decisions, and prompting LLMs. Our results show that these methods vary in their capability to handle inferable information, but they all fall short of human performance.

X-PARADE: Cross-Lingual Textual Entailment and Information Divergence across Paragraphs

For long document summarization, discourse structure is important to discern the key content of the text and the differences in importance level between sentences. Unfortunately, the integration of rhetorical structure theory (RST) into parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategies for long document summarization remains unexplored. Therefore, this paper introduces RST-LoRA and proposes four RST-aware variants to explicitly incorporate RST into the LoRA model. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that incorporating the type and uncertainty of rhetorical relations can complementarily enhance the performance of LoRA in summarization tasks. Furthermore, the best-performing variant we introduced outperforms the vanilla LoRA and full-parameter fine-tuning models, as confirmed by multiple automatic and human evaluations, and even surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods.

RST-LoRA: A Discourse-Aware Low-Rank Adaptation for Long Document Abstractive Summarization

Spanish is one of the most widespread languages: the official language in 20 countries and the second most-spoken native language. Its contact with other languages across different regions and the rich regional and cultural diversity has produced varieties which divert from each other, particularly in terms of lexicon. Still, available corpora, and models trained upon them, generally treat Spanish as one monolithic language, which dampers prediction and generation power when dealing with different varieties. To alleviate the situation, we compile and curate datasets in the different varieties of Spanish around the world at an unprecedented scale and create the CEREAL corpus. With such a resource at hand, we perform a stylistic analysis to identify and characterise varietal differences. We implement a classifier specially designed to deal with long documents and identify Spanish varieties (and therefore expand CEREAL further). We produce varietal-specific embeddings, and analyse the cultural differences that they encode. We make data, code and models publicly available.

Elote, Choclo and Mazorca: on the Varieties of Spanish

Systematic Reviews (SRs) are foundational in healthcare for synthesising evidence to inform clinical practices. Traditionally skewed towards English-language databases, SRs often exclude significant research in other languages, leading to potential biases. This study addresses this gap by focusing on Spanish, a language notably underrepresented in SRs. We present a foundational zero-shot dual information retrieval (IR) baseline system, integrating traditional retrieval methods with pre-trained language models and cross-attention re-rankers for enhanced accuracy in Spanish biomedical literature retrieval. Utilising the LILACS database, known for its comprehensive coverage of Latin American and Caribbean biomedical literature, we evaluate the approach with three real-life case studies in Spanish SRs. The findings demonstrate the system's efficacy and underscore the importance of query formulation. This study contributes to the field of IR by promoting language inclusivity and supports the development of more comprehensive and globally representative healthcare guidelines.

A Zero-Shot Monolingual Dual Stage Information Retrieval System for Spanish Biomedical Systematic Literature Reviews

Cross-lingual transfer can be achieved through two main approaches: zero-shot transfer or machine translation (MT). While the former has been the dominant approach, both have been shown to be competitive. In this work, we compare the current performance and long-term viability of these methods. We leverage lexical gaps to create a multilingual question answering dataset, which provides a difficult domain for evaluation. Both approaches struggle in this setting, though zero-shot transfer performs better, as current MT outputs are not specific enough for the task. Using oracle translation offers the best performance, showing that this approach can perform well long-term, however current MT quality is a bottleneck. We also conduct an exploratory study to see if humans produce translations sufficient for the task with only general instructions. We find this to be true for the majority of translators, but not all. This indicates that while translation has the potential to outperform zero-shot approaches, creating MT models that generate accurate task-specific translations may not be straightforward.

Zero-Shot vs. Translation-Based Cross-Lingual Transfer: The Case of Lexical Gaps

One of the main problems low-resource languages face in NLP can be pictured as a vicious circle: data is needed to build and test tools, but the available text is scarce and there are not powerful tools to collect it. In order to break this circle for Guarani, we explore if text automatically generated from a grammar can work as a Data Augmentation technique to boost the performance of Guarani-Spanish Machine Translation (MT) systems. After building a grammar-based system that generates Spanish text and syntactically transfers it to Guarani, we perform several experiments by pretraining models using this synthetic text. We find that the MT systems that are pretrained with synthetic text perform better, even outperforming previous baselines.

Grammar-based Data Augmentation for Low-Resource Languages: The Case of Guarani-Spanish Neural Machine Translation

We present experiments on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for Bribri and Cabécar, two languages from the Chibchan family. We fine-tune four ASR algorithms (Wav2Vec2, Whisper, MMS & WavLM) to create monolingual models, with the Wav2Vec2 model demonstrating the best performance. We then proceed to use Wav2Vec2 for (1) experiments on training joint and transfer learning models for both languages, and (2) an analysis of the errors, with a focus on the transcription of tone. Results show effective transfer learning for both Bribri and Cabécar, but especially for Bribri. A post-processing spell checking step further reduced character and word error rates. As for the errors, tone is where the Bribri models make the most errors, whereas the simpler tonal system of Cabécar is better transcribed by the model. Our work contributes to developing better ASR technology, an important tool that could facilitate transcription, one of the major bottlenecks in language documentation efforts. Our work also assesses how existing pre-trained models and algorithms perform for genuine extremely low resource-languages.

Multilingual Models for ASR in Chibchan Languages

The recent progress of AI can be largely attributed to large language models (LLMs). However, their escalating memory requirements introduce challenges for machine learning (ML) researchers and engineers. Addressing this requires developers to partition a large model to distribute it across multiple GPUs or TPUs. This necessitates considerable coding and intricate configuration efforts with existing model parallel tools, such as Megatron-LM, DeepSpeed, and Alpa. These tools require users' expertise in machine learning systems (MLSys), creating a bottleneck in LLM development, particularly for developers without MLSys background. In this work, we present RedCoast (Redco), a lightweight and user-friendly tool crafted to automate distributed training and inference for LLMs, as well as to simplify ML pipeline development. The design of Redco emphasizes two key aspects. Firstly, to automate model parallelism, our study identifies two straightforward rules to generate tensor parallel strategies for any given LLM. Integrating these rules into Redco facilitates effortless distributed LLM training and inference, eliminating the need of additional coding or complex configurations. We demonstrate the effectiveness by applying Redco on a set of LLM architectures, such as GPT-J, LLaMA, T5, and OPT, up to the size of 66B. Secondly, we propose a mechanism that allows for the customization of diverse ML pipelines through the definition of merely three functions, avoiding redundant and formulaic code like multi-host related processing. This mechanism proves adaptable across a spectrum of ML algorithms, from foundational language modeling to complex algorithms like meta-learning and reinforcement learning. As a result, Redco implementations exhibit significantly fewer lines of code compared to their official counterparts. RedCoast (Redco) has been released under Apache 2.0 license at https://github.com/tanyuqian/redco.

RedCoast: A Lightweight Tool to Automate Distributed Training of LLMs on Any GPU/TPUs

Interventions on model-internal states are fundamental operations in many areas of AI, including model editing, steering, robustness, and interpretability. To facilitate such research, we introduce $pyvene$, an open-source Python library that supports customizable interventions on a range of different PyTorch modules. $pyvene$ supports complex intervention schemes with an intuitive configuration format, and its interventions can be static or include trainable parameters. We show how $pyvene$ provides a unified and extensible framework for performing interventions on neural models and sharing the intervened upon models with others. We illustrate the power of the library via interpretability analyses using causal abstraction and knowledge localization. We publish our library through Python Package Index (PyPI) and provide code, documentation, and tutorials at `https://github.com/stanfordnlp/pyvene`.

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VertAttack: Taking Advantage of Text Classifiers’ Horizontal Vision

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