Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been increasingly adopted in spoken language understanding (SLU). 
However, automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems frequently produce inaccurate transcriptions, leading to noisy inputs for SLU models, which can significantly degrade their performance. 
To address this, our objective is to train SLU models to withstand ASR errors by exposing them to noises commonly observed in ASR systems, referred to as ASR-plausible noises. 
Speech noise injection (SNI) methods have pursued this objective by introducing ASR-plausible noises, but we argue that these methods are inherently biased towards specific ASR systems, or ASR-specific noises. 
In this work, we propose a novel and less biased augmentation method of introducing the noises that are plausible to any ASR system, by cutting off the non-causal effect of noises. 
Experimental results and analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods in enhancing the robustness and generalizability of SLU models against unseen ASR systems by introducing more diverse and plausible ASR noises in advance.

Interventional Speech Noise Injection for ASR Generalizable Spoken Language Understanding

As the scale of language models (LMs) continues to grow, there is a heightened interest in reducing the inference cost associated with these models. Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) present an efficient alternative to dense models, while the existing methods to convert pretrained dense models to MoEs is limited to ReLU-based models with natural sparsity. This paper introduces G-MoEfication, applicable to arbitrary dense models, where ReLU-based activation sparsity assumptions no longer hold. For generalizations, we encounter the dilemma of needing to zero-out deactivated experts, while also avoiding excessive zeroing-out to retain dense activation information. We publicly release our code and report results conducted with mBERT, SantaCoder-1.1B, Phi-2-2.7B, and Falcon-7B demonstrating the efficacy of our approach in general scenarios: from multitask to multilingual, from fine-tuning to zero-shot evaluation.

Breaking ReLU Barrier: Generalized MoEfication for Dense Pretrained Models

Despite advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), many complex tasks are not easily solved in a single inference step, requiring the use of agentic LLMs in interactive environments. However, agentic LLMs suffer from a phenomenon known as reasoning derailment, due to the indiscriminate incorporation of observations from partially observable environments. We introduce QuBE, a method that enhances agents' focus on task-relevant contexts, by constructing a belief state via question answering. We validate QuBE through experiments in two agentic LLM scenarios with partial observability: 1) a canonical interactive decision-making scenario using text-based game engines, and 2) an interactive retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) scenario using search engines. In the AlfWorld text-based game, QuBE outperforms established baselines by substantial margins, and in the search engine scenario, it achieves marked improvements on the BeIR zero-shot retrieval benchmark. The results demonstrate that QuBE significantly mitigates reasoning derailment, refining the decision-making process of LLM agents in partially observed environments.

QuBE: Question-based Belief Enhancement for Agentic LLM

This paper studies the problem of information retrieval, to adapt to unseen tasks. Existing work generates synthetic queries from domain-specific documents to jointly train the retriever. However, the conventional query generator assumes the query as a question, thus failing to accommodate general search intents. A more lenient approach incorporates task-adaptive elements, such as few-shot learning with an 137B LLM. In this paper, we challenge a trend equating query and question, and instead conceptualize query generation task as a "compilation" of high-level intent into task-adaptive query. Specifically, we propose EGG, a query generator that better adapts to wide search intents expressed in the BeIR benchmark. Our method outperforms baselines and existing models on four tasks with underexplored intents, while utilizing a query generator 47 times smaller than the previous state-of-the-art. Our findings reveal that instructing the LM with explicit search intent is a key aspect of modeling an effective query generator.

Meta-Prompting Efficient Task-Adaptive Query Generator for Retrieval

Agents powered by large language models (LLMs) inherit important limitations, such as the restricted context length, dependency on human-engineered exemplars (e.g., for task decomposition), and insufficient generalization. To address these challenges, we propose RaDA, a novel planning method for Web agents that does not require manual exemplars, efficiently leverages the LLMs’ context, and enhances generalization. RaDA disentangles planning into two stages: for a new given task, during Retrieval-augmented Task Decomposition (RaD), it decomposes tasks into high-level subtasks; next, during Retrieval-augmented Action Generation (RaA), it traverses the trajectory obtained with RaD to iteratively synthesize actions based on dynamically retrieved exemplars. We compare RaDA with strong baselines covering a broad space of design choices, using both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 as backbones; and we find consistent improvements over previous SOTA in two challenging benchmarks, CompWoB and Mind2Web, covering settings with different complexities. We show the contributions of RaDA via ablation studies and qualitative analysis; and we discuss the structural benefits of our more compositional design.

RaDA: Retrieval-augmented Web Agent Planning with LLMs

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) exhibit promise in retrieval tasks but struggle with out-of-domain data due to distribution shifts.
Addressing this, generative domain adaptation (DA), known as GPL, tackles distribution shifts by generating pseudo queries and labels to train models for predicting query-document relationships in new domains.
However, it overlooks the domain distribution, causing the model to struggle with aligning the distribution in the target domain.
We, therefore, propose a Distribution-Aware Domain Adaptation (DADA) to guide the model to consider the domain distribution knowledge at the level of both a single document and the corpus, which is referred to as observation-level feedback and domain-level feedback, respectively.
Our method effectively adapts the model to the target domain and expands document representation to unseen gold query terms using domain and observation feedback, as demonstrated by empirical results on the BEIR benchmark.

DADA: Distribution-Aware Domain Adaptation of PLMs for Information Retrieval

Multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) have been widely adopted in cross-lingual transfer, and code-mixing has demonstrated effectiveness across various tasks in the absence of target language data. Our contribution involves an in-depth investigation into the counterproductive nature of training mPLMs on code-mixed data for information retrieval (IR). Our finding is that while code-mixing demonstrates a positive effect in aligning representations across languages, it hampers the IR-specific objective of matching representations between queries and relevant passages. To balance between positive and negative effects, we introduce ContrastiveMix, which disentangles contrastive loss between these conflicting objectives, thereby enhancing zero-shot IR performance. Specifically, we leverage both English and code-mixed data and employ two contrastive loss functions, by adding an additional contrastive loss that aligns embeddings of English data with their code-mixed counterparts in the query encoder. Our proposed ContrastiveMix exhibits statistically significant outperformance compared to mDPR, particularly in scenarios involving lower linguistic similarity, where the conflict between goals is more pronounced.

ContrastiveMix: Overcoming Code-Mixing Dilemma in Cross-Lingual Transfer for Information Retrieval

Despite the success of multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) for tasks such as dependency parsing (DEP) or part-of-speech (POS) tagging, their coverage of 100s of languages is still limited, as most of the 6500+ languages remains ``unseen''. To adapt mPLMs for including such unseen langs, existing work has considered transliteration and vocabulary augmentation. Meanwhile, the consideration of combining the two has been surprisingly lacking. To understand why, we identify both complementary strengths of the two, and the hurdles to realizing it. Based on this observation, we propose ScriptMix, combining two strengths, and overcoming the hurdle. Specifically, ScriptMix a) is trained with dual-script corpus to combine strengths, but b) with separate modules to avoid gradient conflict. In combining modules properly, we also point out the limitation of the conventional method AdapterFusion, and propose AdapterFusion+ to overcome it. We empirically show ScriptMix is effective-- ScriptMix improves the POS accuracy by up to 14%, and improves the DEP LAS score by up to 5.6%. Our code is publicly available.

ScriptMix: Mixing Scripts for Low-resource Language Parsing

Advancements in dense retrieval models have brought ColBERT to prominence in Information Retrieval (IR) with its advanced interaction techniques. However, ColBERT is reported to frequently underperform in zero-shot scenarios, where traditional techniques such as BM25 still exceed it. Addressing this, we propose to balance representation isotropy and anisotropy for zero-shot model performance, based on our observations that isotropy can enhance cosine similarity computations and anisotropy may aid in generalizing to unseen data. Striking a balance between these isotropic and anisotropic qualities stands as a critical objective to refine model efficacy. Based on this, we present ours, a Hybrid Isotropy Learning (HIL) architecture that integrates isotropic and anisotropic representations. Our experiments with the BEIR benchmark show that our model significantly outperforms the baseline ColBERT model, highlighting the importance of harmonized isotropy in improving zero-shot retrieval performance.

HIL: Hybrid Isotropy Learning for Zero-shot Performance in Dense retrieval

The long-standing goal of dense retrievers in abtractive open-domain question answering (ODQA) tasks is to learn to capture evidence passages among relevant passages for any given query, such that the reader produce factually correct outputs from evidence passages. One of the key challenge is the insufficient amount of training data with the supervision of the answerability of the passages. Recent studies rely on iterative pipelines to annotate answerability using signals from the reader, but their high computational costs hamper practical applications. In this paper, we instead focus on a data-driven approach and propose Evidentiality-Aware Dense Passage Retrieval (EADPR), which leverages synthetic distractor samples to learn to discriminate evidence passages from distractors. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method on multiple abstractive ODQA tasks.

Towards Evidentiality-Aware Retrieval for Abstractive Tasks: Overcoming Abstractiveness in Open-Domain Question Answering

Evidentiality-aware Retrieval for Overcoming Abstractiveness in Open-Domain Question Answering

Accurately understanding temporal relations between events is a critical building block of diverse tasks, such as temporal reading comprehension (TRC) and relation extraction (TRE). For example in TRC, we need to understand the temporal semantic differences between the following two questions that are lexically near-identical: “What finished right before the decision?” or “What finished right after the decision?”. To discern the two questions, existing solutions have relied on answer overlaps as a proxy label to contrast similar and dissimilar questions. However, we claim that answer overlap can lead to unreliable results, due to spurious overlaps of two dissimilar questions with coincidentally identical answers. To address the issue, we propose a novel approach that elicits proper reasoning behaviors through a module for predicting time spans of events. We introduce the Timeline Reasoning Network (TRN) operating in a two-step inductive reasoning process: In the first step model initially answers each question with semantic and syntactic information. The next step chains multiple questions on the same event to predict a timeline, which is then used to ground the answers. Results on the TORQUE and TB-dense, TRC, and TRE tasks respectively, demonstrate that TRN outperforms previous methods by effectively resolving the spurious overlaps using the predicted timeline.

Chaining Event Spans for Temporal Relation Grounding

Large language models often struggle to predict runtime behavior in code generation tasks, leading to a reliance on rejection sampling (best-of-n) to generate multiple code snippets then select the best. 
Our distinction is reducing sampling costs, without compromising generation quality. 
We introduce EFFICODE, a novel framework that prioritizes sampling on test problems that models can solve. 
We show how EFFICODE estimates solvability to optimize computational costs during multiple sampling. 
Based on empirical evidence, EFFICODE consistently demonstrates reduced sampling budgets while maintaining comparable code generation performance, especially when problems are challenging. 
In addition, utilizing EFFICODE to rank sampled code snippets also shows its effectiveness in answer code selection for reducing temporal costs, by not requiring any execution or test case generation.

On Sample-Efficient Code Generation

In this paper, we introduce CR-COPEC called Causal Rationale of Corporate Performance Changes from financial reports. This is a comprehensive large-scale domain-adaptation causal sentence dataset to detect financial performance changes of corporate. CR-COPEC contributes to two major achievements. First, it detects causal rationale from 10-K annual reports of the U.S. companies, which contain experts’ causal analysis following accounting standards in a formal manner. This dataset can be widely used by both individual investors and analysts as material information resources for investing and decision-making without tremendous effort to read through all the documents. Second, it carefully considers different characteristics which affect the financial performance of companies in twelve industries. As a result, CR-COPEC can distinguish causal sentences in various industries by taking unique narratives in each industry into consideration. We also provide an extensive analysis of how well CR-COPEC dataset is constructed and suited for classifying target sentences as causal ones with respect to industry characteristics.

CR-COPEC: Causal Rationale of Corporate Performance Changes to learn from Financial Reports

This paper studies the use of reinforcement learning for conditional text generation, which overcomes the limitation of the prevalent supervised maximum likelihood estimation approach. However, it still suffers from challenges including the large action space and the delayed reward, as the reward can be computed only after an entire sequence is generated. To address these challenges, we propose a method that provides partial rewards for intermediate actions taken on partial sequences. This enables the model to promptly prioritize actions that lead to the generation of more desirable sequences. Our method's key contribution lies in its focus on distinguishing relatively more desirable actions rather than striving to precisely estimate pointwise values for arbitrary partial sequences. Instead, our model learns to discern the relative desirability between pairs of actions, or rank actions in a pairwise manner, only when necessary and feasible. This is materialized in an efficient way by leveraging the prefix tree constructed from the sampled sequences. Experimental results on paraphrase generation and constrained machine translation tasks showcase the effectiveness of our method.

Learning to Rank Generation with Pairwise Partial Rewards

This paper studies the problem of open-domain question answering, with the aim of answering a diverse range of questions leveraging knowledge resources. Two types of sources, QA-pair and document corpora, have been actively leveraged with the following complementary strength. The former is highly precise when the paraphrase of given question q was seen and answered during training, often posed as a retrieval problem, while the latter generalizes better for unseen questions. A natural follow-up is thus leveraging both models, while a naive pipelining or integration approaches have failed to bring additional gains over either model alone. Our distinction is interpreting the problem as calibration, which estimates the confidence of predicted answers as an indicator to decide when to use a document or QA-pair corpus. The effectiveness of our method was validated on widely adopted benchmarks such as Natural Questions and TriviaQA.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/532fnPQGAZvefKDC1fZsuL/embed/polls/702d36ed-0f43-4abe-a603-edf405886455" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

When to Read Documents or QA History: On Unified and Selective Open-domain QA

Speech Processing and Spoken Language Understanding

technical paper

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPROgxjLAC96AJL7Ugy0tEnYm7dkrbHt/view?usp=sharing)

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.emnlp.org/registration/).** The EMNLP 2024 event page on Underline will be open to public one week prior to the event.

Please register!

EMNLP 2024

EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

This poster session includes Main Conference posters and Findings from the following areas:

Special Theme: Efficiency in Model Algorithms, Training, and Inference  • Summarization • Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining

In-Person Poster Session C (Jasmine)

poster

This poster session includes Main Conference posters and Findings from the following areas:

NLP Applications • Information Retrieval and Text Mining • Generation • Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics 

In-Person Poster Session A (Riverfront Hall)

Findings In-Person Poster Session 1

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.aclweb.org/registration). **

If you have already registered, please check your inbox for an email from Underline granting you access to ACL 2024 content.

ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

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Efficient/Low-Resources and Evaluation Methods for NLP

## 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)*

To access the event page you need to register [**here.**](http://acl.swoogo.com/naacl2024) 
Your access to the event page is limited based on your registration type. If you registered for workshops only, you will gain access to full workshops content on the day of the workshops program.

NAACL 2024

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

This poster session includes Main Conference posters and Demos from the following areas: 
Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP • Multilinguality and Language Diversity • Multimodality and Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond • Semantics: Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference and Other areas • Summarization

In-Person Poster Session 3

Virtual Poster Session 2

Virtual Poster Session B

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
#### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Wn38q0yev6U3RTgnf4Tn5T9GuAuZ-xW/view?usp=sharing) *downloadable*

To access the EACL 2024 event page you need to register [**here**](https://acl.swoogo.com/EACL2024). 

EACL 2024

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Information Extraction

**Are you attending this poster session virtually?** 
Connect to presenters by clicking on the link that you can find in the 'Abstracts' tab of the posters.
 
**Are you attending this poster sessions in person?** 
Hybrid posters are displayed in the East Foyer.

PS7 (Hybrid) Posters, Demo, Industry

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

**Are you attending this poster session virtually?** 
 Virtual posters are presented in Gather Town. Connect by clicking on the link that you can find in the 'Abstracts' tab of the posters.
 
**Are you attending this poster session in person?** 
Virtual posters are presented in Gather Town. Connect by clicking on the link that you can find in the 'Abstracts' tab of the posters.

PS7 (GatherTown) Posters, Demo, Industry, Findings

**Are you attending this poster session virtually?** 
In-person printed posters are available for in-person attendees only.
 
**Are you attending this poster session in person?** 
Hybrid posters are displayed in the East Foyer.

PS6 (In-person) Posters, Demo, Industry, Findings

### 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.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

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.

Seung Won Hwang

28

13

Presentations