Tagged corruption models provide precise control over the introduction of grammatical errors into clean text. This capability has made them a powerful tool for generating pre-training data for grammatical error correction (GEC) in English. In this work, we demonstrate their application to four languages with substantially fewer GEC resources than English: German, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish. We release a new tagged-corruption dataset consisting of 2.5M examples per language that was generated by a fine-tuned PaLM 2 foundation model. Pre-training on tagged corruptions yields consistent gains across all four languages, especially for small model sizes and languages with limited human-labelled data.

Synthetic Data Generation for Low-resource Grammatical Error Correction with Tagged Corruption Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities for text rewriting. However creating a smaller yet potent language model for text rewriting presents two formidable challenges: costly data collection and absence of emergent capabilities.In this paper we present solutions to address the above challenges.We propose an new instruction tuning method to develop a mo-bile text rewriting model that leverages LLM-generated data and heuristic reinforcement learning, eliminating the need for human data collection. Moreover, to bridge the performance gap from the constraint size, we pro-pose a cascading approach based on the confidence levels which are distilled from the large server model’s critiques. To evaluate the text rewriting tasks for mobile scenarios, we introduce MessageRewriteEval, a human-labeled benchmark that focuses on text rewriting of messages through natural language instructions. Through empirical experiments, we demonstrate that our on-device model surpasses the current state-of-the-art LLMs in text rewriting while maintaining a significantly reduced model size using public benchmark EditEval and our new benchmark. We also demonstrate that our proposed cascading approach improves model performance further.

Towards an On-device Agent for Text Rewriting

We report on novel investigations into training models that make sentences concise. We define the task and show that it is different from related tasks such as summarization and simplification. For evaluation, we release two test sets, consisting of 2000 sentences each, that were annotated by two and five human annotators, respectively. We demonstrate that conciseness is a difficult task for which zero-shot setups with large neural language models often do not perform well. Given the limitations of these approaches, we propose a synthetic data generation method based on round-trip translations. Using this data to either train Transformers from scratch or fine-tune T5 models yields our strongest baselines that can be further improved by fine-tuning on an artificial conciseness dataset that we derived from multi-annotator machine translation test sets.

Conciseness: An Overlooked Language Task

Introduction

Controllable Generation

The softmax layer in neural machine translation is designed to model the distribution over mutually exclusive tokens. Machine translation, however, is intrinsically uncertain: the same source sentence can have multiple semantically equivalent translations. Therefore, we propose to replace the softmax activation with a multi-label classification layer that can model ambiguity more effectively. We call our loss function Single-label Contrastive Objective for Non-Exclusive Sequences (SCONES). We show that the multi-label output layer can still be trained on single reference training data using the SCONES loss function. SCONES yields consistent BLEU score gains across six translation directions, particularly for medium-resource language pairs and small beam sizes. By using smaller beam sizes we can speed up inference by a factor of 3.9x and still match or improve the BLEU score obtained using softmax. Furthermore, we demonstrate that SCONES can be used to train NMT models that assign the highest probability to adequate translations, thus mitigating the ``beam search curse''. Additional experiments on synthetic language pairs with varying levels of uncertainty suggest that the improvements from SCONES can be attributed to better handling of ambiguity.

Jam or Cream First? Modeling Ambiguity in Neural Machine Translation with SCONES

Text-editing models have recently become a prominent alternative to seq2seq models for monolingual text-generation tasks such as grammatical error correction, simplification, and style transfer. These tasks share a common trait - they exhibit a large amount of textual overlap between the source and target texts. Text-editing models take advantage of this observation and learn to generate the output by predicting edit operations applied to the source sequence. In contrast, seq2seq models generate outputs word-by-word from scratch thus making them slow at inference time. Text-editing models provide several benefits over seq2seq models including faster inference speed, higher sample efficiency, and better control and interpretability of the outputs. This tutorial provides a comprehensive overview of text-editing models and current state-of-the-art approaches, and analyzes their pros and cons. We discuss challenges related to productionization and how these models can be used to mitigate hallucination and bias, both pressing challenges in the field of text generation.

Text Generation and Text-Editing Models

In many natural language processing (NLP) tasks the same input (e.g. source sentence) can have multiple possible outputs (e.g. translations). To analyze how this ambiguity (also known as intrinsic uncertainty) shapes the distribution learned by neural sequence models we measure sentence-level uncertainty by computing the degree of overlap between references in multi-reference test sets from two different NLP tasks: machine translation (MT) and grammatical error correction (GEC). At both the sentence- and the task-level, intrinsic uncertainty has major implications for various aspects of search such as the inductive biases in beam search and the complexity of exact search. In particular, we show that well-known
pathologies such as a high number of beam search errors, the inadequacy of the mode, and the drop in system performance with large beam sizes apply to tasks with high level of ambiguity such as MT but not to less uncertain tasks such as GEC. Furthermore, we propose a novel exact n-best search algorithm for neural sequence models, and show that intrinsic uncertainty affects model uncertainty as the model tends to overly spread out the probability mass for uncertain tasks and sentences.

Uncertainty Determines the Adequacy of the Mode and the Tractability of Decoding in Sequence-to-Sequence Models

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**This workshop is sponsored by:** 
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**About this workshop:** The BEA Workshop is a leading venue for NLP innovation in the context of educational applications. It is one of the largest one-day workshops in the ACL community with over 100 registered attendees in the past several years. The growing interest in educational applications and a diverse community of researchers involved resulted in the creation of the Special Interest Group in Educational Applications (SIGEDU) in 2017, which currently has over 300 members.

The workshop’s continuing growth reflects how technology is increasingly fulfilling societal demands. For instance, the BEA16 workshop in 2021 hosted a panel discussion on “New Challenges for Educational Technology in the Time of the Pandemic” addressing the pressing issues around COVID-19. Additionally, NLP has evolved to aid diverse learning domains, including writing, speaking, reading, science, and mathematics, as well as the related intra-personal (e.g., self-confidence) and inter-personal (e.g., peer collaboration) skills. Within these areas, the community continues to develop and deploy innovative NLP approaches for use in educational settings. [**Read more**](https://sig-edu.org/bea/2024) [**Schedule**](https://sig-edu.org/bea/2024#workshop-program)

W3: The 19th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2024) (BEA)

workshop paper

## 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.

Please register!

NAACL 2024

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

This poster session includes Findings posters and Demos from the following areas: 
Dialogue and Interactive Systems • Efficient/Low-Resources and Evaluation Methods for NLP • Ethics, Bias, and Fairness • Generation • Information Extraction • Information Retrieval and Text Mining • NLP Applications • Semantics: Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference and Other areas • Speech recognition, text-to-speech and spoken language understanding

In-Person Poster Session 6

poster

**Chair:** Sanja Štajner **Organizers:** Sanja Štajner, Horacio Saggion, Wei Xu, Marcos Zampieri, Matthew Shardlow, Daniel Ferrés, Kai North and Kim Cheng Sheang 
**Invited speakers**: [Matt Huenerfauth](https://underline.io/speakers/154911-matt-huenerfauth) and [Sowmya Vajjala](https://underline.io/speakers/212907-sowmya-vajjala) Please visit our [**website**](https://www.taln.upf.edu/pages/tsar2022-ws/) for more information and detailed schedule.


**RocketChat channel for this workshop:** https://emnlp2022.rocket.chat/channel/workshop-23-tsar
 
Sponsored by: 
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W23 (TSAR) Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/9eec7d4a287ee18c278b08229290aa83.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OlPv6QBeo62VVTughj2jkiLeyHd1WnUt/view)
 
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To access this site you need to register. Please register [here](https://2022.emnlp.org/registration/).

Register here

EMNLP 2022

Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

**Category:** Cutting-edge **Speakers:** Eric Malmi, Yue Dong, Jonathan Mallinson, Aleksandr Chuklin, Jakub Adamek, Daniil Mirylenka, Felix Stahlberg, Sebastian Krause, Shankar Kumar, Aliaksei Severyn **[Speaker Bios](https://2022.naacl.org/program/tutorials/bios-t1/)** **Description:** Text-editing models have recently become a prominent alternative to seq2seq models for monolingual text-generation tasks such as grammatical error correction, text simplification, and style transfer. These tasks share a common trait – they exhibit a large amount of textual overlap between the source and target texts. Text-editing models take advantage of this observation and learn to generate the output by predicting edit operations applied to the source sequence. In contrast, seq2seq models generate outputs word-by-word from scratch thus making them slow at inference time. Text-editing models provide several benefits over seq2seq models including faster inference speed, higher sample efficiency, and better control and interpretability of the outputs. This tutorial provides a comprehensive overview of the text-edit based models and current state-of-the-art approaches analyzing their pros and cons. We discuss challenges related to deployment and how these models help to mitigate hallucination and bias, both pressing challenges in the field of text generation. **[Please visit our website (with captioned video)](https://text-editing.github.io/)**

T1: Text Generation with Text-Editing Models

tutorial

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

8D: Machine Translation 3

technical paper

Posters: Machine Learning for NLP

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

ACL 2022

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 (NLP). 

Shankar Kumar

8

18

SHORT BIO

Presentations

Synthetic Data Generation for Low-resource Grammatical Error Correction with Tagged Corruption Models

Towards an On-device Agent for Text Rewriting

Conciseness: An Overlooked Language Task

Introduction

Controllable Generation

Jam or Cream First? Modeling Ambiguity in Neural Machine Translation with SCONES

Text Generation and Text-Editing Models

Uncertainty Determines the Adequacy of the Mode and the Tractability of Decoding in Sequence-to-Sequence Models

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PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES