Optimizing accuracy and performance while eliminating hallucinations of open-domain conversational large language models (LLMs) is an open research challenge. A particularly promising direction is to augment and ground LLMs with information from structured sources. This paper introduces Conversational 
Tables (cTBLS), a three-step architecture to retrieve and generate dialogue responses grounded on retrieved tabular information. cTBLS uses Transformer encoder embeddings for Dense Table Retrieval and obtains up to 125% relative improvement over the retriever in the previous state-of-the-art system on the HyrbiDialogue dataset. cTBLS then uses a shared process between encoder and decoder models to perform a coarse+fine tabular knowledge (e.g., cell) ranking combined with a GPT-3.5 LLM response generator to yield a 2x relative improvement in ROUGE scores. Finally, human evaluators prefer cTBLs +80% of the time (coherency, fluency) and judge informativeness to be 4x better than the previous state-of-the-art.

cTBLS: Augmenting Large Language Models with Conversational Tables

A multimodal conversational AI system answers questions, fulfills tasks, and emulates human conversations by understanding and expressing itself via multiple modalities. This paper motivates, defines, and mathematically formulates the multimodal conversational research objective. We provide a taxonomy of research required to solve the objective: multimodal representation, fusion, alignment, translation, and co-learning. We survey state-of-the-art datasets and approaches for each research area and highlight their limiting assumptions. Finally, we identify multimodal co-learning as a promising direction for multimodal conversational AI research.

Multimodal Conversational AI: A Survey of Datasets and Approaches

Over the past decades, mathematicians, linguists, and computer scientists have dedicated their efforts towards empowering human-machine communication in natural language. While in recent years the emergence of virtual personal assistants such as Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana, and ChatGPT has pushed the field forward, they may still have numerous challenges.

Following the success of the 4th NLP for Conversational AI workshop at ACL, "The 5th NLP4ConvAI” will be a one-day workshop, co-located with ACL 2023 in Toronto, Canada. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss impactful research problems in this area, share findings from real-world applications, and generate ideas for future research directions. For more details visit our workshop website: https://sites.google.com/view/5thnlp4convai/
#### [Visit GatherTown](https://app.gather.town/app/5OscLswEEuYf2Psb/ACL2023)

W14: The 5th Workshop on NLP for Conversational AI

workshop paper

### 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.

**Organizers:** Bing Liu, Alexandros Papangelis, Stefan Ultes, Abhinav Rastogi, Yun-Nung (Vivian) Chen,
Georgios Spithourakis, Elnaz Nouri, Weiyan Shi **Description:** Over the past decades, mathematicians, linguists, and computer scientists have dedicated their efforts towards empowering
human-machine communication in natural language. While in recent years the emergence of virtual personal assistants
such as Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Cortana has pushed the field forward, the development of such conversational
agents remains difficult with numerous unanswered questions and challenges. Following the success of the 3rd NLP
for Conversational AI workshop at EMNLP, "The 4th NLP4ConvAI” will be a one-day workshop, co-located with ACL
2022 in Dublin. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss impactful research
problems in this area, share findings from real-world applications, and generate ideas for future research directions. **Please visit our [website](https://sites.google.com/view/4thnlp4convai/)**

(ConvAI) The 4th Workshop on NLP for Conversational AI

# 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). 

Anirudh Sundar

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cTBLS: Augmenting Large Language Models with Conversational Tables

Multimodal Conversational AI: A Survey of Datasets and Approaches

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