Mexico

The Directed Acyclic Transformer is a fast non-autoregressive (NAR) model that performs well in Neural Machine Translation. Two issues prevent its application to general Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks: frequent Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) errors and the inability to faithfully generate entity names. We introduce Control-DAG, a constrained decoding algorithm for our Directed Acyclic T5 (DA-T5) model which offers lexical, vocabulary and length control. We show that Control-DAG significantly enhances DA-T5 on the Schema Guided Dialogue and the DART datasets, establishing strong NAR results for Task-Oriented Dialogue and Data-to-Text NLG.

NAACL 2024

Control-DAG: Constrained Decoding for Non-Autoregressive Directed Acyclic T5 using Weighted Finite State Automata

constrained decoding.

directed acyclic transformer

finite state automata

non-autoregressive text generation

task-oriented dialogue

data-to-text

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
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Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

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ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

poster

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

We propose utilizing n-best reranking to enhance Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillation (Kim and Rush, 2016) where we extract pseudo-labels for student model’s training data from top n-best hypotheses and leverage a diverse set of models with different inductive biases, objective functions or architectures, including some publicly-available large language models, to pick the highest-quality hypotheses as labels. The effectiveness of our proposal is validated through experiments on the WMT’21 German ↔ English and Chinese ↔ English translation tasks. Our results demonstrate that utilizing pseudo-labels generated by our n-best reranker leads to a significantly more accurate student model. In fact, our best student model achieves comparable accuracy to a large translation model from (Tran et al., 2021) with 4.7 billion parameters, while having two orders of magnitude fewer parameters.

Accurate Knowledge Distillation via n-best Reranking

Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding can significantly improve translation performance of Multilingual Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, MBR decoding is computationally expensive. We show how the recently developed Reinforcement Learning technique, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), can fine-tune MLLMs to get the gains of MBR without any additional computation in inference. Our method uses only a small monolingual fine-tuning set and yields significantly improved performance on multiple NMT test sets compared to MLLMs without DPO.

Direct Preference Optimization for Neural Machine Translation with Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding

In this paper we study the fine-tuning of pre-trained large high-resource language models (LLMs) into many-to-one multilingual machine translators for extremely-low-resource languages such as endangered Indigenous languages. We explore those issues using datasets created from pseudo-parallel translations to English of The Bible} written in 39~Brazilian Indigenous languages using mBART50 and WMT19 as pre-trained models and multiple translation metrics. We examine bilingual and multilingual models and show that, according to machine translation metrics, same-linguistic family models tend to perform best. However, we also found that many-to-one multilingual systems have a tendency to learn a “rogue” strategy of storing output strings from the training data in the LLM structure and retrieving them instead of performing actual translations. We show that rephrasing the output of the training samples seems to solve the problem.

Fixing Rogue Memorization in Many-to-One Multilingual Translators of Extremely-Low-Resource Languages by Rephrasing Training Samples

Minimum Bayes-risk (MBR) decoding has recently gained renewed attention in text generation. MBR decoding considers texts sampled from a model as pseudo-references and selects the text with the highest similarity to the others. Therefore, sampling is one of the key elements of MBR decoding, and previous studies reported that the performance varies by sampling methods. From a theoretical standpoint, this performance variation is likely tied to how closely the samples approximate the true distribution of references. However, this approximation has not been the subject of in-depth study. In this study, we propose using anomaly detection to measure the degree of approximation. We first closely examine the performance variation and then show that previous hypotheses about samples do not correlate well with the variation, but our introduced anomaly scores do. The results are the first to empirically support the link between the performance and the core assumption of MBR decoding.

On the True Distribution Approximation of Minimum Bayes-Risk Decoding

In machine translation, the problem of ambiguously gendered input has been pointed out, where the gender of an entity is not available in the source sentence. To address this ambiguity issue, the task of controlled translation that takes the gender of the ambiguous entity as additional input have been proposed. However, most existing works have only considered a simplified setup of one target gender for input. In this paper, we tackle controlled translation in a more realistic setting of inputs with multiple entities and propose Gender-of-Entity (GoE) prompting method for LLMs. Our proposed method instructs the model with fine-grained entity-level gender information to translate with correct gender inflections. By utilizing four evaluation benchmarks, we investigate the controlled translation capability of LLMs in multiple dimensions and find that LLMs reach state-of-the-art performance in controlled translation. Furthermore, we discover an emergence of gender interference phenomenon when controlling the gender of multiple entities. Finally, we address the limitations of existing gender accuracy evaluation metrics and propose leveraging LLMs as an evaluator for gender inflection in machine translation.

Fine-grained Gender Control in Machine Translation with Large Language Models

Despite the recent progress on scaling multilingual machine translation (MT) to several under-resourced African languages, accurately measuring this progress remains challenging, since evaluation is often performed on n-gram matching metrics such as BLEU, which typically show a weaker correlation with human judgments. Learned metrics such as COMET have higher correlation; however, the lack of evaluation data with human ratings for under-resourced languages, complexity of annotation guidelines like Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), and limited language coverage of multilingual encoders have hampered their applicability to African languages. In this paper, we address these challenges by creating high-quality human evaluation data with simplified MQM guidelines for error detection and direct assessment (DA) scoring for 13 typologically diverse African languages. Furthermore, we develop AfriCOMET: COMET evaluation metrics for African languages by leveraging DA data from well-resourced languages and an African-centric multilingual encoder (AfroXLM-R) to create the state-of-the-art MT evaluation metrics for African languages with respect to Spearman-rank correlation with human judgments (0.441).

AfriMTE and AfriCOMET: Enhancing COMET to Embrace Under-resourced African Languages

We study how to apply large language models to write grounded and organized long-form articles from scratch, with comparable breadth and depth to Wikipedia pages. This underexplored problem poses new challenges at the pre-writing stage, including how to research the topic and prepare an outline prior to writing. We propose STORM, a writing system for the Synthesis of Topic Outlines through Retrieval and Multi-perspective Question Asking. STORM models the pre-writing stage by (1) discovering diverse perspectives in researching the given topic, (2) simulating conversations where writers carrying different perspectives pose questions to a topic expert grounded on trusted Internet sources, (3) curating the collected information to create an outline. For evaluation, we curate FreshWiki, a dataset of recent high-quality Wikipedia articles, and formulate outline assessments to evaluate the pre-writing stage. We further gather feedback from experienced Wikipedia editors. Compared to articles generated by an outline-driven retrieval-augmented baseline, more of STORM’s articles are deemed to be organized (by a 25% absolute increase) and broad in coverage (by 10%). The expert feedback also helps identify new challenges for generating grounded long articles, such as source bias transfer and over-association of unrelated facts.

Assisting in Writing Wikipedia-like Articles From Scratch with Large Language Models

In this paper, we conduct a study to utilize LLMs as a solution for decision making that requires complex data analysis. We define **Decision QA** as the task of answering the best decision, $d_{best}$, for a decision-making question $Q$, business rules $R$ and a database $D$. Since there is no benchmark that can examine Decision QA, we propose Decision QA benchmark, **DQA**. It has two scenarios, Locating and Building, constructed from two video games (Europa Universalis IV and Victoria 3) that have almost the same goal as Decision QA. To address Decision QA effectively, we also propose a new RAG technique called the *iterative plan-then-retrieval augmented generation* (**PlanRAG**). Our PlanRAG-based LM generates the plan for decision making as the first step, and the retriever generates the queries for data analysis as the second step. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art iterative RAG method by 15.8\% in the Locating scenario and by 7.4\% in the Building scenario, respectively. We release our code and benchmark at https://github.com/myeon9h/PlanRAG.

PlanRAG: A Plan-then-Retrieval Augmented Generation for Generative Large Language Models as Decision Makers

Insufficient modeling of human preferences within the reward model is a major obstacle for leveraging human feedback to improve translation quality. Fortunately, quality estimation (QE), which predicts the quality of a given translation without reference, has achieved impressive alignment with human evaluations in the last two years. In this work, we investigate the potential of employing the QE model as the reward model to predict human preferences for feedback training. We first identify the overoptimization problem during QE-based feedback training, manifested as an increase in reward while translation quality declines. We examine the problem and argue that the vulnerability of the QE model might lead to high rewards for incorrect translations, resulting in overoptimization and error propagation. To address the problem, we adopt a simple yet effective method that uses heuristic rules to detect the incorrect translations and assigns a penalty term to the reward scores of them. Experimental results show that the proposed QE-based feedback training achieves consistent and significant improvements across various settings, further verified through human preference studies. Our subsequent analysis demonstrates the high data efficiency of the proposed QE-based feedback training: it outperforms systems using larger parallel corpora by a small amount of monolingual data. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zwhe99/FeedbackMT

Improving Machine Translation with Human Feedback: An Exploration of Quality Estimation as a Reward Model

Authorship obfuscation techniques hold the promise of helping people protect their privacy in online communications by automatically rewriting text to hide the identity of the original author. However, obfuscation has been evaluated in narrow settings in the NLP literature and has primarily been addressed with superficial edit operations that can lead to unnatural outputs. In this work, we introduce an automatic text privatization framework that fine-tunes a large language model via reinforcement learning to produce rewrites that balance soundness, sense, and privacy. We evaluate it extensively on a large-scale test set of English Reddit posts by 68k authors composed of short-medium length texts. We study how the performance changes among evaluative conditions including authorial profile length and authorship detection strategy. Our method maintains high text quality according to both automated metrics and human evaluation, and successfully evades several automated authorship attacks.

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Accurate Knowledge Distillation via n-best Reranking

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Directed Acyclic Transformer Pre-training for High-quality Non-autoregressive Text Generation

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