Long-form Table Question Answering (LFTQA) requires systems to generate paragraph long and complex answers to questions over tabular data. While Large language models based systems have made significant progress, it often hallucinates, especially when the task involves complex reasoning over tables. To tackle this issue, we propose a new LLM-based framework, TaPERA, for LFTQA tasks. Our framework uses a modular approach that decomposes the whole process into three sub-modules: 1) QA-based Content Planner that iteratively decomposes the input question into sub-questions; 2) Execution-based Table Reasoner that produces executable Python program for each sub-question; and 3) Answer Generator that generates long-form answer grounded on the program output. Human evaluation results on the FeTaQA and QTSumm datasets indicate that our framework significantly improves strong baselines on both accuracy and truthfulness, as our modular framework is better at table reasoning, and the long-form answer is always consistent with the program output. Our modular design further provides transparency as users are able to interact with our framework by manually changing the content plans.

TaPERA: Enhancing Faithfulness and Interpretability in Long-Form Table QA by Content Planning and Execution-based Reasoning

While large language models (LLMs) can already achieve strong performance on standard generic summarization benchmarks, their performance on more complex summarization task settings is less studied. Therefore, we benchmark LLMs on instruction controllable text summarization, where the model input consists of both a source article and a natural language requirement for desired summary characteristics. To this end, we curate an evaluation-only dataset for this task setting and conduct human evaluations of five LLM-based systems to assess their instruction-following capabilities in controllable summarization. We then benchmark LLM-based automatic evaluation for this task with 4 different evaluation protocols and 11 LLMs, resulting in 40 evaluation methods. Our study reveals that instruction controllable text summarization remains a challenging task for LLMs, since (1) all LLMs evaluated still make factual and other types of errors in their summaries; (2) no LLM-based evaluation methods can achieve a strong alignment with human annotators when judging the quality of candidate summaries; (3) different LLMs show large performance gaps in summary generation and evaluation capabilities. We make our collected benchmark InstruSum publicly available to facilitate future research in this direction.

Benchmarking Generation and Evaluation Capabilities of Large Language Models for Instruction Controllable Summarization

Recent observations have underscored a disparity between the inflated benchmark scores and the actual performance of LLMs, raising concerns about potential contamination of evaluation benchmarks. This issue is especially critical for closed-source models and certain open-source models where training data transparency is lacking. In this paper we study data contamination by proposing two methods tailored for both open-source and proprietary LLMs. We first introduce a retrieval-based system to explore potential overlaps between evaluation benchmarks and pretraining corpora. We further present a novel investigation protocol named Testset Slot Guessing (TS-Guessing), applicable to both open and proprietary models. This approach entails masking a wrong answer in a multiple-choice question and prompting the model to fill in the gap. Additionally, it involves obscuring an unlikely word in an evaluation example and asking the model to produce it. We find that certain commercial LLMs could surprisingly guess the missing option in various test sets. Specifically, in the MMLU benchmark, ChatGPT and GPT-4 demonstrated an exact match rate of 52\% and 57\%, respectively, in guessing the missing options in benchmark test data. We hope these results underscore the need for more robust evaluation methodologies and benchmarks in the field.

Investigating Data Contamination in Modern Benchmarks for Large Language Models

Tabular data is prevalent across various industries, necessitating significant time and effort for users to understand and manipulate for their information-seeking purposes. The advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown enormous potential to improve user efficiency. However, the adoption of LLMs in real-world applications for table information seeking remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate the table-to-text capabilities of different LLMs using four datasets within two real-world information seeking scenarios. These include the LogicNLG and our newly-constructed LoTNLG datasets for data insight generation, along with the FeTaQA and our newly-constructed F2WTQ datasets for query-based generation. We structure our investigation around three research questions, evaluating the performance of LLMs in table-to-text generation, automated evaluation, and feedback generation, respectively. Experimental results indicate that the current high-performing LLM, specifically GPT-4, can effectively serve as a table-to-text generator, evaluator, and feedback generator, facilitating users' information seeking purposes in real-world scenarios. However, a significant performance gap still exists between other open-sourced LLMs (e.g., Vicuna and LLaMA-2) and GPT-4 models. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/yale-nlp/LLM-T2T.

Investigating Table-to-Text Generation Capabilities of Large Language Models in Real-World Information Seeking Scenarios

People primarily consult tables to conduct data analysis or answer specific questions. Text generation systems that can provide accurate table summaries tailored to users' information needs can facilitate more efficient access to relevant data insights. 
Motivated by this, we define a new query-focused table summarization task, where text generation models have to perform human-like reasoning and analysis over the given table to generate a tailored summary. We introduce a new benchmark named QTSumm for this task, which contains 7,111 human-annotated query-summary pairs over 2,934 tables covering diverse topics.
We investigate a set of strong baselines on QTSumm, including text generation, table-to-text generation, and large language models. 
Experimental results and manual analysis reveal that the new task presents significant challenges in table-to-text generation for future research.
Moreover, we propose a new approach named ReFactor, to retrieve and reason over query-relevant information from tabular data to generate several natural language facts. Experimental results demonstrate that ReFactor can bring effective improvements to baselines by concatenating the generated facts to the model input.
Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/yale-nlp/QTSumm.

QTSumm: Query-Focused Summarization over Tabular Data

Interpretability and efficiency are two important considerations for the adoption of neural automatic metrics. In this work, we develop strong-performing automatic metrics for reference-based summarization evaluation, based on a two-stage evaluation pipeline that first extracts basic information units from one text sequence and then checks the extracted units in another sequence. The metrics we developed include two-stage metrics that can provide high interpretability at both the fine-grained unit level and summary level, and one-stage metrics that achieve a balance between efficiency and interpretability. We make the developed tools publicly available at https://github.com/Yale-LILY/AutoACU.

Towards Interpretable and Efficient Automatic Reference-Based Summarization Evaluation

Despite significant progress having been made in question answering on tabular data (Table QA), it's unclear whether, and to what extent existing Table QA models are robust to task-specific perturbations, e.g., replacing key question entities or shuffling table columns. To systematically study the robustness of Table QA models, we propose a benchmark called RobuT, which builds upon existing Table QA datasets (WTQ, WikiSQL-Weak, and SQA) and includes human-annotated adversarial perturbations in terms of table header, table content, and question. Our results indicate that both state-of-the-art Table QA models and large language models (e.g., GPT-3) with few-shot learning falter in these adversarial sets. We propose to address this problem by using large language models to generate adversarial examples to enhance training, which significantly improves the robustness of Table QA models.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/8PaBoicsuHK7beXFunvrtr/embed/polls/ae6748f0-61af-45dd-8c07-4a68aee44a93" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

RobuT: A Systematic Study of Table QA Robustness Against Human-Annotated Adversarial Perturbations

There are a growing number of table pre-training methods proposed for reasoning over tabular data (e.g., question answering, fact checking, and faithful text generation). However, most existing methods are benchmarked solely on a limited number of datasets, varying in configuration, which leads to a lack of unified, standardized, fair, and comprehensive comparison between methods. This paper presents OpenRT, the first open-source framework for reasoning over tabular data, to reproduce existing table pre-training models for performance comparison and develop new models quickly. We implemented and compared six table pre-training models on four question answering, one fact checking, and one faithful text generation datasets. Moreover, to enable the community to easily construct new table reasoning datasets, we developed TaRAT, an annotation tool which supports multi-person collaborative annotations for various kinds of table reasoning tasks. The researchers are able to deploy the newly-constructed dataset to OpenRT and compare the performances of different baseline systems.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/qQ87ZDnDYN6cfmCQWHFaok/embed/polls/24e7f2cd-7d8a-4834-9ffd-6beb9f642d59" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

OpenRT: An Open-source Framework for Reasoning Over Tabular Data

This presentation introduces LoFT model, which applies logical forms as fact checkers and content planners to improve faithfulness and diversity of logical table-to-text generation simultaneously.

LoFT: Enhancing Faithfulness and Diversity for Table-to-Text Generation via Logic Form Control

Unfaithful text generation is a common problem for text generation systems. In the case of Data-to-Text (D2T) systems, the factuality of the generated text is particularly crucial for any real-world applications. We introduce R2D2, a training framework that addresses unfaithful Data-to-Text generation by training a system both as a generator and a faithfulness discriminator with additional replacement detection and unlikelihood learning tasks. To facilitate such training, we propose two methods for sampling unfaithful sentences. We argue that the poor entity retrieval capability of D2T systems is one of the primary sources of unfaithfulness, so in addition to the existing metrics, we further propose named entity based metrics to evaluate the fidelity of D2T generations. Our experimental results show that R2D2 systems could effectively mitigate the unfaithful text generation, and they achieve new state-of-theart results on FeTaQA, LogicNLG, and ToTTo, all with significant improvements.

R2D2: Robust Data-to-Text with Replacement Detection

Reasoning over tabular data requires both table structure understanding and a broad set of table reasoning skills. Current models with table-specific architectures and pre-training methods perform well on understanding table structures, but they still struggle with tasks that require various table reasoning skills. In this work, we develop ReasTAP to show that high-level table reasoning skills can be injected into models during pre-training without a complex table-specific architecture design. We define 7 table reasoning skills, such as numerical operation, temporal comparison, and conjunction. Each reasoning skill is associated with one example generator, which synthesizes questions over semi-structured tables according to the sampled templates. We model the table pre-training task as a sequence generation task and pre-train ReasTAP to generate precise answers of the synthetic examples. ReasTAP is evaluated on four benchmarks covering three downstream tasks including 1) WikiSQL-Weak and WikiTQ for Table Question Answering, 2) TabFact for Table Fact Verification, and 3) LogicNLG for Faithful Table-to-Text Generation. Experimental results demonstrate that ReasTAP achieves new state-of-the-art results on all of them and delivers a significant improvement under low-resource setting. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Yale-LILY/ReasTAP.

ReasTAP: Injecting Table Reasoning Skills During Pre-training via Synthetic Reasoning Examples

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

In-Person Poster Session 6

poster

### 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.

Please register!

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 Findings posters and Demos from the following areas: 
Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics • Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP • Linguistic theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics • Machine Learning for NLP • Machine Translation • Multilinguality and Language Diversity • Multimodality and Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond • Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation • Question Answering • Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining • Summarization

In-Person Poster Session 7

## 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: 
Dialogue and Interactive Systems • Efficient/Low-Resources and Evaluation Methods for NLP • Ethics, Bias, and Fairness • Information Extraction • Information Retrieval and Text Mining • Question Answering • Speech recognition, text-to-speech and spoken language understanding< • Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing

In-Person Poster Session 4

**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.

EMNLP 2023

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

PS5 (In-person) Posters, Demo, Industry, Findings

**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.

PS5 (Hybrid) Posters, Demo, Industry

Poster Session 5

### 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.

Demo Session 3

demo

Virtual Poster Session 4

### Welcome to the 17th 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 had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. 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.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

EACL 2023

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.

**Topics:** NLP Applications 
NLP Applications (CL) 
Natural Language Generation Demo: Natural Language Generation

Virtual Poster Session 10

## 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)
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/a3db7a768409f05192210d98601edb25.png)](https://emnlp2022.rocket.chat/)

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.

**Topics:** Natural Language Generation 
Question Answering 
Resources and Evaluation 
Semantics: Lexical, Sentence level, Textual Inference and Other areas 
Speech, Vision, Robotics, Multimodal Grounding 
Summarization 
Theme Track

Yilun Zhao

11

9

SHORT BIO

Presentations

TaPERA: Enhancing Faithfulness and Interpretability in Long-Form Table QA by Content Planning and Execution-based Reasoning

Benchmarking Generation and Evaluation Capabilities of Large Language Models for Instruction Controllable Summarization

Investigating Data Contamination in Modern Benchmarks for Large Language Models

Investigating Table-to-Text Generation Capabilities of Large Language Models in Real-World Information Seeking Scenarios

QTSumm: Query-Focused Summarization over Tabular Data

Towards Interpretable and Efficient Automatic Reference-Based Summarization Evaluation

RobuT: A Systematic Study of Table QA Robustness Against Human-Annotated Adversarial Perturbations

OpenRT: An Open-source Framework for Reasoning Over Tabular Data

LoFT: Enhancing Faithfulness and Diversity for Table-to-Text Generation via Logic Form Control

R2D2: Robust Data-to-Text with Replacement Detection

ReasTAP: Injecting Table Reasoning Skills During Pre-training via Synthetic Reasoning Examples

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES