Open-domain dialogue systems have seen remarkable advancements with the development of large language models (LLMs). Nonetheless, most existing dialogue systems predominantly focus on brief single-session interactions, neglecting the real-world demands for long-term companionship and personalized interactions with chatbots. Crucial to addressing this real-world need are event summary and persona management, which enable reasoning for appropriate long-term dialogue responses. Recent progress in the human-like cognitive and reasoning capabilities of LLMs suggests that LLM-based agents could significantly enhance automated perception, decision-making, and problem-solving. In response to this potential, we introduce a model-agnostic framework, the Long-term Dialogue Agent (LD-Agent), which incorporates three independently tunable modules dedicated to event perception, persona extraction, and response generation. For the event memory module, long and short-term memory banks are employed to separately focus on historical and ongoing sessions, while a topic-based retrieval mechanism is introduced to enhance the accuracy of memory retrieval. Furthermore, the persona module conducts dynamic persona modeling for both users and agents. The integration of retrieved memories and extracted personas is subsequently fed into the generator to induce appropriate responses. The effectiveness, generality, and cross-domain capabilities of LD-Agent are empirically demonstrated across various illustrative benchmarks, models, and tasks. The code is released at https://github.com/leolee99/LD-Agent.

Hello Again! LLM-powered Personalized Agent for Long-term Dialogue

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased their potential in building generative recommendation systems through fine-tuning user behavior data. However, utilizing the user behavior data may pose significant privacy risks like in the traditional recommender models, potentially leading to ethical dilemmas and violations of data protection regulations. To address the privacy concerns, Federated Learning for Recommendation (Fed4Rec) has been identified as a promising solution. However, directly applying Fed4Rec in the LLM context introduces two challenges: 1) exacerbated client performance imbalance, which ultimately impacts the system's long-term effectiveness, and 2) substantial client resource costs, posing a high demand for clients' both computational and storage capability to locally train and infer LLMs. To tackle these challenges, we propose a federated framework for LLM-based recommendation (shorted as FELLRec). Generally, FELLRec designs two key strategies. 1) Dynamic balance strategy, which designs dynamic parameter aggregation and learning speed for different clients during training, aiming to ensure relatively balanced performance across clients. 2) Flexible storage strategy, which selectively retains certain sensitive LLM layers on the client side, while offloading other layers to the server, aiming to preserve privacy while saving resources. Specifically, FELLRec flexibly maintains those input and output layers on the client side to ensure the protection of all sensitive information. Experiment results show that FELLRec can achieve a more balanced client performance and improved overall performance in a computational and storage-efficient way while safeguarding user privacy well.

A Federated Framework for LLM-based Recommendation

The evolution of large language models (LLMs) has enhanced the planning capabilities of language agents in diverse real-world scenarios. Despite these advancements, the potential of LLM-powered agents to comprehend ambiguous user instructions for reasoning and decision-making is still under exploration. In this work, we introduce a new task, Proactive Agent Planning, which requires language agents to predict clarification needs based on user-agent conversation and agent-environment interaction, invoke external tools to collect valid information, and generate a plan to fulfill the user's demands. To study this practical problem, we establish a new benchmark dataset, Ask-before-Plan. To tackle the deficiency of LLMs in proactive planning, we propose a novel multi-agent framework, Clarification-Execution-Planning ($\texttt{CEP}$), which consists of three agents specialized in clarification, execution, and planning. We introduce the trajectory tuning scheme for the clarification agent and static execution agent, as well as the memory recollection mechanism for the dynamic execution agent. Extensive evaluations and comprehensive analyses conducted on the Ask-before-Plan dataset validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

Ask-before-Plan: Proactive Language Agents for Real-World Planning

We investigate non-collaborative dialogue agents, which are expected to engage in strategic conversations with diverse users, for securing a mutual agreement that leans favorably towards the system’s objectives. This poses two main challenges for existing dialogue agents: 1) The inability to integrate user-specific characteristics into the strategic planning, and 2) The difficulty of training strategic planners that can be generalized to diverse users. To address these challenges, we propose TRIP to enhance the capability in tailored strategic planning, incorporating a user-aware strategic planning module and a population-based training paradigm. Through experiments on benchmark non-collaborative dialogue tasks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of TRIP in catering to diverse users.

Strength Lies in Differences! Towards Effective Non-collaborative Dialogues via Tailored Strategy Planning

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated a superior ability to serve as ranking models. However, concerns have arisen as LLMs will exhibit discriminatory ranking behaviors based on users' sensitive attributes (\eg gender). Worse still, in this paper, we identify a subtler form of discrimination in LLMs, termed \textit{implicit ranking unfairness}, where LLMs exhibit discriminatory ranking patterns based solely on non-sensitive user profiles, such as user names. Such implicit unfairness is more widespread but less noticeable, threatening the ethical foundation. To comprehensively explore such unfairness, our analysis will focus on three research aspects: (1) We propose an evaluation method to investigate the severity of implicit ranking unfairness. (2) We uncover the reasons for causing such unfairness. (3) To mitigate such unfairness effectively, we utilize a pair-wise regression method to conduct fair-aware data augmentation for LLM fine-tuning. 
The experiment demonstrates that our method outperforms existing approaches in ranking fairness, achieving this with only a small reduction in accuracy. Lastly, we emphasize the need for the community to identify and mitigate the implicit unfairness, aiming to avert the potential deterioration in the reinforced human-LLMs ecosystem deterioration.

A Study of Implicit Ranking Unfairness in Large Language Models

Despite the remarkable abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to answer questions, they often display a considerable level of overconfidence even when the question does not have a definitive answer. To avoid providing hallucinated answers to these unknown questions, existing studies typically investigate approaches to refusing to answer these questions. In this work, we propose a novel and scalable self-alignment method to utilize the LLM itself to enhance its response-ability to different types of unknown questions, being capable of not just refusing to answer but further proactively providing explanations to the unanswerability of unknown questions. Specifically, the Self-Align method first employ a two-stage class-aware self-augmentation approach to generate a large amount of unknown question-response data. Then we conduct disparity-driven self-curation to select qualified data for fine-tuning the LLM itself for aligning the responses to unknown questions as desired. Experimental results on two datasets across four types of unknown questions validate the superiority of the Self-Aligned method over existing baselines in terms of three types of task formulation.

Gotcha! Don't trick me with unanswerable questions! Self-aligning Large Language Models for Proactively Responding to Unknown Questions

Language Models (LMs) excel in understanding textual descriptions of proteins, as evident in biomedical question-answering tasks. However, their capability falters with raw protein data, such as amino acid sequences, due to a deficit in pretraining on such data. Conversely, Protein Language Models (PLMs) can understand and convert protein data into high-quality representations, but struggle to process texts. To address their limitations, we introduce ProtT3, a framework for Protein-to-Text Generation for Text-based Protein Understanding. ProtT3 empowers an LM to understand protein sequences of amino acids by incorporating a PLM as its protein understanding module, enabling effective protein-to-text generation. This collaboration between PLM and LM is facilitated by a cross-modal projector (i.e., Q-Former) that bridges the modality gap between the PLM's representation space and the LM's input space. Unlike previous studies focusing on protein property prediction and protein-text retrieval, we delve into the largely unexplored field of protein-to-text generation. To facilitate comprehensive benchmarks and promote future research, we establish quantitative evaluations for protein-text modeling tasks, including protein captioning, protein question-answering, and protein-text retrieval. Our experiments show that ProtT3 substantially surpasses current baselines, with ablation studies further highlighting the efficacy of its core components. Our code is available at https://github.com/acharkq/ProtT3.

ProtT3: Protein-to-Text Generation for Text-based Protein Understanding

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to meet user information needs, but their effectiveness in dealing with user queries that contain various types of ambiguity remains unknown, ultimately risking user trust and satisfaction. 
To this end, we introduce CLAMBER, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs using a well-organized taxonomy. 
Building upon the taxonomy, we construct 12K high-quality data to assess the strengths, weaknesses, and potential risks of various off-the-shelf LLMs.
Our findings indicate the limited practical utility of current LLMs in identifying and clarifying ambiguous user queries, even enhanced by chain-of-thought (CoT) and few-shot prompting. 
These techniques may result in overconfidence in LLMs and yield only marginal enhancements in identifying ambiguity. 
Furthermore, current LLMs fall short in generating high-quality clarifying questions due to a lack of conflict resolution and inaccurate utilization of inherent knowledge.
In this paper, CLAMBER presents a guidance and promotes further research on proactive and trustworthy LLMs.

CLAMBER: A Benchmark of Identifying and Clarifying Ambiguous Information Needs in Large Language Models

Equipping a conversational search engine with strategies regarding when to ask clarification questions is becoming increasingly important across various domains. 
Attributing to the context understanding capability of LLMs and their access to domain-specific sources of knowledge, LLM-based clarification strategies feature rapid transfer to various domains in a post-hoc manner.
However, they still struggle to deliver promising performance on unseen domains, struggling to achieve effective domain transferability.
We take the first step to investigate this issue and existing methods tend to produce one-size-fits-all strategies across diverse domains, limiting their search effectiveness.
In response, we introduce a novel method, called STYLE,
to achieve effective domain transferability.
Our experimental results indicate that STYLE bears strong domain transferability, resulting in an average search performance improvement of 10% on four unseen domains.

STYLE: Improving Domain Transferability of Asking Clarification Questions in Large Language Model Powered Conversational Agents

Web agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in planning and executing multi-step interactions within complex web-based environments, fulfilling a wide range of web navigation tasks. Despite these advancements, the potential for LLM-powered agents to effectively engage with sequential user instructions in real-world scenarios has not been fully explored. In this work, we introduce a new task of Conversational Web Navigation, which necessitates sophisticated interactions that span multiple turns with both the users and the environment, supported by a specially developed dataset named Multi-Turn Mind2Web (MT-Mind2Web). To tackle the limited context length of LLMs and the context-dependency issue of the conversational tasks, we further propose a novel framework, named self-reflective memory-augmented planning (Self-MAP), which employs memory utilization and self-reflection techniques. Extensive experiments are conducted to benchmark the MT-Mind2Web dataset, and validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

On the Multi-turn Instruction Following for Conversational Web Agents

Structured Natural Language Processing (XNLP) is an important subset of NLP that entails understanding the underlying semantic or syntactic structure of texts, which serves as a foundational component for many downstream applications. Despite certain recent efforts to explore universal solutions for specific categories of XNLP tasks, a comprehensive and effective approach for unifying all XNLP tasks long remains underdeveloped. Meanwhile, while XNLP demonstration systems are vital for researchers exploring various XNLP tasks, existing platforms can be limited to, e.g., supporting few XNLP tasks, lacking interactivity and universalness. To this end, we propose an advanced XNLP demonstration system, where we leverage LLM to achieve universal XNLP, with one model for all with high generalizability. Overall, our system advances in multiple aspects, including universal XNLP modeling, high performance, interpretability, scalability, and interactivity, offering a unified platform for exploring diverse XNLP tasks in the community.

XNLP: An Interactive Demonstration System for Universal Structured NLP

The recent advancements in generative language models have demonstrated their ability to memorize knowledge from documents and recall knowledge to respond to user queries effectively. Building upon this capability, we propose to enable multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to memorize and recall images within their parameters. Given a user query for visual content, the MLLM is anticipated to "recall" the relevant image from its parameters as the response. Achieving this target presents notable challenges, including inbuilt visual memory and visual recall schemes within MLLMs. To address these challenges, we introduce a generative cross-modal retrieval framework, which assigns unique identifier strings to represent images and involves two training steps: learning to memorize and learning to retrieve. The first step focuses on training the MLLM to memorize the association between images and their respective identifiers. The latter step teaches the MLLM to generate the corresponding identifier of the target image, given the textual query input. By memorizing images in MLLMs, we introduce a new paradigm to cross-modal retrieval, distinct from previous discriminative approaches. The experiments demonstrate that the generative paradigm performs effectively and efficiently even with large-scale image candidate sets.

Generative Cross-Modal Retrieval: Memorizing Images in Multimodal Language Models for Retrieval and Beyond

Molecule-text modeling, which aims to facilitate molecule-relevant tasks with a textual interface and textual knowledge, is an emerging research direction. Beyond single molecules, studying reaction-text modeling holds promise for helping the synthesis of new materials and drugs. However, previous works mostly neglect reaction-text modeling: they primarily focus on modeling individual molecule-text pairs or learning chemical reactions without texts in context. Additionally, one key task of reaction-text modeling -- experimental procedure prediction -- is less explored due to the absence of an open-source dataset. The task is to predict step-by-step actions of conducting chemical experiments and is crucial to automating chemical synthesis. To resolve the challenges above, we propose a new pretraining method, ReactXT, for reaction-text modeling, and a new dataset, OpenExp, for experimental procedure prediction. Specifically, ReactXT features three types of input contexts to incrementally pretrain LMs. Each of the three input contexts corresponds to a pretraining task to improve the text-based understanding of either reactions or single molecules. ReactXT demonstrates consistent improvements in experimental procedure prediction and molecule captioning and offers competitive results in retrosynthesis. Our code is available at https://github.com/syr-cn/ReactXT.

ReactXT: Understanding Molecular “Reaction-ship” via Reaction-Contextualized Molecule-Text Pretraining

Generative retrieval is a promising new paradigm in text retrieval that generates identifier strings of relevant passages as the retrieval target. This paradigm leverages powerful generative language models, distinct from traditional sparse or dense retrieval methods. In this work, we identify a viable direction to further enhance generative retrieval via distillation and propose a feasible framework, named DGR. DGR utilizes sophisticated ranking models, such as the cross-encoder, in a teacher role to supply a passage rank list, which captures the varying relevance degrees of passages instead of binary hard labels; subsequently, DGR employs a specially designed distilled RankNet loss to optimize the generative retrieval model, considering the passage rank order provided by the teacher model as labels. This framework only requires an additional distillation step to enhance current generative retrieval systems and does not add any burden to the inference stage. We conduct experiments on four public datasets, and the results indicate that DGR achieves state-of-the-art performance among the generative retrieval methods. Additionally, DGR demonstrates exceptional robustness and generalizability with various teacher models and distillation losses.

Distillation Enhanced Generative Retrieval

The digital landscape is rapidly evolving with an ever-increasing volume of online news, emphasizing the need for swift and precise analysis of complex events.We refer to the complex events composed of many news articles over an extended period as Temporal Complex Event (TCE). This paper proposes a novel approach using Large Language Models (LLMs) to systematically extract and analyze the event chain within TCE, characterized by their key points and timestamps. We establish a benchmark, named TCELongBench, to evaluate the proficiency of LLMs in handling temporal dynamics and understanding extensive text. This benchmark encompasses three distinct tasks - reading comprehension, temporal sequencing, and future event forecasting. In the experiment, we leverage retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) method and LLMs with long context window to deal with lengthy news articles of TCE. Our findings indicate that models with suitable retrievers exhibit comparable performance with those utilizing long context window.

Analyzing Temporal Complex Events with Large Language Models? A Benchmark towards Temporal, Long Context Understanding

Multi-aspect controllable text generation aims to generate fluent sentences that possess multiple desired attributes simultaneously.
Traditional methods either require expensive iteration / searching within the discrete text space during the decoding stage, or train separate controllers for each aspect, resulting in a degradation of text quality due to the discrepancy between different aspects. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel approach for $\textbf{M}$ulti-$\textbf{a}$spect $\textbf{c}$ontrol, namely MacLaSa, that estimates compact $\textbf{La}$tent space for multiple aspects, and performs efficient $\textbf{Sa}$mpling with a fast sampler. To eliminate the domain discrepancies between different aspects, we first utilize a variational autoencoder (VAE) network to map text sequences from various data sources into close latent representations. The estimated latent space enables the formulation of joint energy-based models and the plugging in of arbitrary attribute discriminators to achieve multi-aspect control. Afterwards, we draw latent samples with a fast sampler based on ordinary differential equations and feed sampled examples to the VAE decoder to produce target text sequences. Experimental results demonstrate that MacLaSa outperforms strong baselines on both attribute relevance and textual quality while maintaining a high inference speed.

MacLaSa: Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation via Efficient Sampling from Compact Latent Space

Main conference posters, Findings, Industry track and Demos are being presented during this session.

Gather Session 3

poster

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

[![](https://assets.underline.io/markdown_image/1/image/b087f8a4dc5816d6e1a6514e59c59ac3.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1T96GzPqObXrMln2BMByCSXTSizjTg69P/view?usp=sharing)

You need to log in with the email address you registered with. Access credentials have been sent to your email. 

Please be sure to check your spam and other email folders if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in to explore this event.

To access NAACL 2025 event page you are required to register. Please follow [**this link**](https://2025.naacl.org/registration/registration/) to register. Access will depend on your registration type.

Please register!

NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Gather Session 1

This poster session includes Main Conference posters, Findings and Industry Track papers from the following areas:

 Information Extraction • NLP Applications • Dialogue and Interactive Systems  

In-Person Poster Session G (Riverfront Hall)

## 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.

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.

Virtual Poster Session 2

Virtual Poster Session 1

This poster session includes Main Conference posters and Findings from the following areas:

Question Answering  • Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics • Machine Translation • Resources and Evaluation

In-Person Poster Session C (Riverfront Hall)

This poster session includes Main Conference posters, TACL and CL , and Demos.

In-Person Poster Session 6

### 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.

This poster session includes Main Conference posters, TACL and Demos.

In-Person Poster Session 5

Findings In-Person Poster Session 3

In-Person Poster Session 4

This poster session includes Main Conference posters, TACL and CL , Demos and SRW papers.

In-Person Poster Session 3

In-Person Poster Session 2

Findings In-Person Poster Session 1

In-Person Poster Session 1

**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.

PS7 (In-person) Posters, Demo, Industry, Findings

**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.

Tat-Seng Chua

26

57

3

Presentations