This study presents a novel evaluation framework for the Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) task. It aims to diagnose current models for various instruction categories at a finer-grained level. The framework is structured around the context-free grammar (CFG) of the task. The CFG serves as the basis for the problem decomposition and the core premise of the instruction categories design. We propose a semi-automatic method for CFG construction with the help of Large-Language Models (LLMs). Then, we induct and generate data spanning five principal instruction categories (i.e. direction change, landmark recognition, region recognition, vertical movement, and numerical comprehension). Our analysis of different models reveals notable performance discrepancies and recurrent issues. The stagnation of numerical comprehension, heavy selective biases over directional concepts, and other interesting findings contribute to the development of future language-guided navigation systems. The project is now available at https://zehao-wang.github.io/navnuances.

Navigating the Nuances: A Fine-grained Evaluation of Vision-Language Navigation

Causal reasoning is fundamental to human intelligence and crucial for effective decision-making in real-world environments. Despite recent advancements in large vision-language models (LVLMs), their ability to comprehend causality remains unclear. Previous work typically focuses on commonsense causality between events and/or actions, which is insufficient for applications like embodied agents and lacks the explicitly defined causal graphs required for formal causal reasoning. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a fine-grained and unified definition of causality involving interactions between humans and/or objects. Building on the definition, we construct a novel dataset, CELLO, consisting of 14,094 causal questions across all four levels of causality: discovery, association, intervention, and counterfactual. This dataset surpasses traditional commonsense causality by including explicit causal graphs that detail the interactions between humans and objects. Extensive experiments on CELLO reveal that current LVLMs still struggle with causal reasoning tasks, but they can benefit significantly from our proposed CELLO-CoT, a causally inspired chain-of-thought prompting strategy. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses from this study provide valuable insights for future research. Our project page is at https://github.com/OpenCausaLab/CELLO.

CELLO: Causal Evaluation of Large Vision-Language Models

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have facilitated the development of Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs). Despite their impressive capabilities, MLLMs often suffer from over-reliance on unimodal biases (e.g., language bias and vision bias), leading to incorrect answers in complex multimodal tasks. To investigate this issue, we propose a causal framework to interpret the biases in Visual Question Answering (VQA) problems. Within this framework, we conduct an in-depth causal analysis to assess the causal effect of these biases on MLLM predictions. Based on the analysis, we introduce 1) a novel MORE dataset with 12,000 challenging VQA instances requiring multi-hop reasoning and overcoming unimodal biases. 2) a causality-enhanced agent framework CAVE that guides models to comprehensively integrate information from different modalities and mitigate biases. Our experiments show that MLLMs perform poorly on MORE, indicating strong unimodal biases and limited semantic understanding. However, when integrated with our CAVE, promising improvements in reasoning and bias mitigation can be seen. These findings provide important insights for the development of more robust MLLMs and contribute to the broader goal of advancing multimodal AI systems capable of deeper understanding and reasoning. Our project page is at https://github.com/OpenCausaLab/MORE.

MORE: Evaluating and Quantifying Unimodal Biases in Multimodal Large Language Models through a Causal Lens

Document-level Event Causality Identification (DECI) aims to recognize causal relations between events within a document. Recent studies focus on building an event graph for cross-sentence reasoning, but ignore important causal structures --- there are one or two "central" events that prevail throughout the document, with most other events serving as either their cause or consequence. In this paper, we manually annotate central events for a systematical investigation and propose a novel DECI model, CHEER, which performs high-order reasoning while considering event centrality. First, we summarize a general GNN-based DECI model and provide a unified view for better understanding. Second, we design an Event Interaction Graph (EIG) involving the interactions among events (e.g., coreference) and event pairs, e.g., causal transitivity, cause(A, B) cause(B, C) cause(A, C). Finally, we incorporate event centrality information into the EIG reasoning network via well-designed features and multi-task learning. We have conducted extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets. The results present great improvements (5.9% F1 gains on average) and demonstrate the effectiveness of each main component.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/aL2QM8dUtT8fzBuK3envdP/embed/polls/abb39bf9-36ef-447e-be90-57d8e961ea57" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

CHEER: Centrality-aware High-order Event Reasoning Network for Document-level Event Causality Identification

Document-level Event Causality Identification (DECI) aims to identify event-event causal relations in a document. Existing works usually build an event graph for global reasoning across multiple sentences. However, the edges between events have to be carefully designed through heuristic rules or external tools. In this paper, we propose a novel Event Relational Graph TransfOrmer (ERGO) framework for DECI, to ease the graph construction and im- prove it over the noisy edge issue. Different from conventional event graphs, we define a pair of events as a node and build a complete event relational graph without any prior knowledge or tools. This naturally formulates DECI as a node classification problem, and thus we capture the causation transitivity among event pairs via a graph transformer. Furthermore, we design a criss-cross constraint and an adaptive focal loss for the imbalanced classification, to alleviate the issues of false positives and false negatives. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that ERGO greatly outperforms previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods (12.8% F1 gains on average).

ERGO: Event Relational Graph Transformer for Document-level Event Causality Identification

This poster session includes Main Conference posters and Findings from the following areas:

Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics • Multimodality and Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond  

In-Person Poster Session G (Jasmine)

poster

## 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.
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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:

Resources and Evaluation • Special Theme: Efficiency in Model Algorithms, Training, and Inference • Generation • Machine Learning for NLP 

In-Person Poster Session F (Riverfront Hall)

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)

Virtual Poster Session 2

### 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
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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.

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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.

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VOS25 - Information Extraction, Knowledge Extraction, and Text Mining & Dialogue and Conversational Interaction

technical paper

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/81a3c0317d24f663b49b996875024d45.png)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2022.coling-1/)



### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes but also in industrial research departments including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

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COLING 2022

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Meiqi Chen

5

22

4

SHORT BIO

Presentations

Navigating the Nuances: A Fine-grained Evaluation of Vision-Language Navigation

CELLO: Causal Evaluation of Large Vision-Language Models

MORE: Evaluating and Quantifying Unimodal Biases in Multimodal Large Language Models through a Causal Lens

CHEER: Centrality-aware High-order Event Reasoning Network for Document-level Event Causality Identification

ERGO: Event Relational Graph Transformer for Document-level Event Causality Identification

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