In the rapidly evolving field of conversational AI, Ontology Expansion (OnExp) is crucial for enhancing the adaptability and robustness of conversational agents. Traditional models rely on static, predefined ontologies, limiting their ability to handle new and unforeseen user needs. This survey paper provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art techniques in OnExp for conversational understanding. It categorizes the existing literature into three main areas: (1) New Intent Discovery, (2) New Slot-Value Discovery, and (3) Joint OnExp. By examining the methodologies, benchmarks, and challenges associated with these areas, we highlight several emerging frontiers in OnExp to improve agent performance in real-world scenarios and discuss their corresponding challenges. This survey aspires to be a foundational reference for researchers and practitioners, promoting further exploration and innovation in this crucial domain.

A Survey of Ontology Expansion for Conversational Understanding

The Criminal Court View Generation task aims to produce explanations that inform judicial decisions. This necessitates a nuanced understanding of diverse legal concepts, such as \texttt{Recidivism}, \texttt{Confess}, and \texttt{Robbery}, which often coexist within cases, complicating holistic analysis. 
However, existing methods mainly rely on the generation capability of language models, without paying enough attention to the important legal concepts.
To enhance the precision and depth of such explanations, we introduce \underline{Le}gal Concept-guided Criminal Court Views \underline{Gen}eration (LeGen), a three-stage approach designed for iterative reasoning tailored to individual legal constructs.
Specifically, in the first stage, we design a decomposer to divide the court views into focused sub-views, each anchored around a distinct legal concept. 
Next, a concept reasoning module generates targeted rationales by intertwining the deconstructed facts with their corresponding legal frameworks, ensuring contextually relevant interpretations.
Finally, a verifier and a generator are employed to align the rationale with the case fact and obtain synthesized comprehensive and legally sound final court views, respectively.
We evaluate LeGen by conducting extensive experiments on a real-world dataset and experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed model. Our codes are available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LeGen-5625}.

Divide and Conquer: Legal Concept-guided Criminal Court View Generation

In the field of information extraction (IE), tasks across a wide range of modalities and their combinations have been traditionally studied in isolation, leaving a gap in deeply recognizing and analyzing cross-modal information. To address this, this work for the first time introduces the concept of grounded Multimodal Universal Information Extraction (MUIE), providing a unified task framework to analyze any IE tasks over various modalities, along with their fine-grained groundings. To tackle MUIE, we tailor a multimodal large language model (MLLM), Reamo, capable of extracting and grounding information from all modalities, i.e., recognizing everything from all modalities at once. Reamo is updated via varied tuning strategies, equipping it with powerful capabilities for information recognition and fine-grained multimodal grounding. To address the absence of a suitable benchmark for grounded MUIE, we curate a high-quality, diverse, and challenging test set, which encompasses IE tasks across 9 common modality combinations with the corresponding multimodal groundings. The extensive comparison of Reamo with existing MLLMs integrated into pipeline approaches demonstrates its advantages across all evaluation dimensions, establishing a strong benchmark for the follow-up research. Our resources are publicly released at https://haofei.vip/MUIE.

Recognizing Everything from All Modalities at Once: Grounded Multimodal Universal Information Extraction

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

This paper introduces EmpathyEar, a pioneering open-source, avatar-based multimodal empathetic chatbot, to fill the gap in traditional text-only empathetic response generation (ERG) systems. Leveraging the advancements of a large language model, combined with multimodal encoders and generators, EmpathyEar supports user inputs in any combination of text, sound, and vision, and produces multimodal empathetic responses, offering users, not just textual responses but also digital avatars with talking faces and synchronized speeches. A series of emotion-aware instruction-tuning is performed for comprehensive emotional understanding and generation capabilities. In this way, EmpathyEar provides users with responses that achieve a deeper emotional resonance, closely emulating human-like empathy. The system paves the way for the next emotional intelligence, for which we open-source the code for public access.

EmpathyEar: An Open-source Avatar Multimodal Empathetic Chatbot

In Conversational Intent Discovery (CID), Small Language Models (SLMs) struggle with overfitting to familiar intents and fail to label newly discovered ones. This issue stems from their limited grasp of semantic nuances and their intrinsically discriminative framework. Therefore, we propose Synergizing Large Language Models (LLMs) with pre-trained SLMs for CID (SynCID). It harnesses the profound semantic comprehension of LLMs alongside the operational agility of SLMs. By utilizing LLMs to refine both utterances and existing intent labels, SynCID significantly enhances the semantic depth, subsequently realigning these enriched descriptors within the SLMs' feature space to correct cluster distortion and promote robust learning of representations. A key advantage is its capacity for the early identification of new intents, a critical aspect for deploying conversational agents successfully. Additionally, SynCID leverages the in-context learning strengths of LLMs to generate labels for new intents. Thorough evaluations across a wide array of datasets have demonstrated its superior performance over traditional CID methods.

Synergizing Large Language Models and Pre-Trained Smaller Models for Conversational Intent Discovery

Structured Sentiment Analysis (SSA) was cast as a problem of bi-lexical dependency graph parsing by prior studies.
Multiple formulations have been proposed to construct the graph, which share several intrinsic drawbacks:
(1) The internal structures of spans are neglected, thus only the boundary tokens of spans are used for relation prediction and span recognition, thus hindering the model's expressiveness;
(2) Long spans occupy a significant proportion in the SSA datasets, which further exacerbates the problem of internal structure neglect.
In this paper, we treat the SSA task as a dependency parsing task on partially-observed dependency trees, regarding flat spans without determined tree annotations as latent subtrees to consider internal structures of spans.
We propose a two-stage parsing method and leverage TreeCRFs with a novel constrained inside algorithm to model latent structures explicitly, which also takes advantages of joint scoring graph arcs and headed spans for global optimization and inference. 
Results of extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets reveal that our method performs significantly better than all previous bi-lexical methods, achieving new state-of-the-art.

Revisiting Structured Sentiment Analysis as Latent Dependency Graph Parsing

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

While the recent Chain-of-Thought (CoT) technique enhances the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) with the theory of mind, it might still struggle in handling logical reasoning that relies much on symbolic expressions and rigid deducing rules. To strengthen the logical reasoning capability of LLMs, we propose a novel Symbolic Chain-of-Thought, namely SymbCoT, a fully LLM-based framework that integrates symbolic expressions and logic rules with CoT prompting. Technically, building upon an LLM, SymbCoT 1) first translates the natural language context into the symbolic format, and then 2) derives a step-by-step plan to solve the problem with symbolic logical rules, 3) followed by a verifier to check the translation and reasoning chain. Via thorough evaluations on 5 standard datasets with both First-Order Logic and Constraint Optimization symbolic expressions, SymbCoT shows striking improvements over the CoT method consistently, meanwhile refreshing the current state-of-the-art performances. We further demonstrate that our system advances in more faithful, flexible, and explainable logical reasoning. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt at combining symbolic expressions and rules into CoT for logical reasoning with LLMs. Code is open at https://github.com/Aiden0526/SymbCoT.

Faithful Logical Reasoning via Symbolic Chain-of-Thought

Generalized category discovery faces a key issue: the lack of supervision for new and unseen data categories. Traditional methods typically combine supervised pretraining with self-supervised learning to create models, and then employ clustering for category identification. However, these approaches tend to become overly tailored to known categories, failing to fully resolve the core issue. Hence, we propose to integrate the feedback from LLMs into an active learning paradigm. Specifically, our method innovatively employs uncertainty propagation to select data samples from high-uncertainty regions, which are then labeled using LLMs through a comparison-based prompting scheme. This not only eases the labeling task but also enhances accuracy in identifying new categories. Additionally, a soft feedback propagation mechanism is introduced to minimize the spread of inaccurate feedback. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate our framework's efficacy and generalizability, significantly improving baseline models at a nominal average cost.

Actively Learn from LLMs with Uncertainty Propagation for Generalized Category Discovery

Dialogue Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple (DiaASQ) is a newly-emergent task aiming to extract the sentiment quadruple (i.e., targets, aspects, opinions, and sentiments) from conversations. While showing promising performance, the prior DiaASQ approach unfortunately falls prey to the key crux of DiaASQ, including insufficient modeling of discourse features, and lacking quadruple extraction, which hinders further task improvement. To this end, we introduce a novel framework that not only capitalizes on comprehensive discourse feature modeling, but also captures the intrinsic interaction for optimal quadruple extraction. On the one hand, drawing upon multiple discourse features, our approach constructs a token-level heterogeneous graph and enhances token interactions through a heterogeneous attention network. We further propose a novel triadic scorer, strengthening weak token relations within a quadruple, thereby enhancing the cohesion of the quadruple extraction. Experimental results on the DiaASQ benchmark showcase that our model significantly outperforms existing baselines across both English and Chinese datasets.

Harnessing Holistic Discourse Features and Triadic Interaction for Sentiment Quadruple Extraction in Dialogues

With the proliferation of dialogic data across the Internet, the Dialogue Commonsense Multi-choice Question Answering (DC-MCQ) task has emerged as a response to the challenge of comprehending user queries and intentions.
Although prevailing methodologies exhibit effectiveness in addressing single-choice questions, they encounter difficulties in handling multi-choice queries due to the heightened intricacy and informational density. 
In this paper, inspired by the human cognitive process of progressively excluding options, we propose a three-step Reverse Exclusion Graph-of-Thought (ReX-GoT) framework, including Option Exclusion, Error Analysis, and Combine Information.
Specifically, our ReX-GoT mimics human reasoning by gradually excluding irrelevant options and learning the reasons for option errors to choose the optimal path of the GoT and ultimately infer the correct answer.
By progressively integrating intricate clues, our method effectively reduces the difficulty of multi-choice reasoning and provides a novel solution for DC-MCQ.
Extensive experiments on the CICERO and CICERO_v2 datasets validate the significant improvement of our approach on DC-MCQ task.
On zero-shot setting, our model outperform the best baseline by 17.67% in terms of F1 score for the multi-choice task.
Most strikingly, our GPT3.5-based ReX-GoT framework achieves a remarkable 39.44% increase in F1 score.

Reverse Multi-Choice Dialogue Commonsense Inference with Graph-of-Thought

In this work, we investigate a more realistic unsupervised multimodal machine translation (UMMT) setup, inference-time image-free UMMT, where the model is trained with source-text image pairs, and tested with only source-text inputs. First, we represent the input images and texts with the visual and language scene graphs (SG), where such fine-grained vision-language features ensure a holistic understanding of the semantics. To enable pure-text input during inference, we devise a visual scene hallucination mechanism that dynamically generates pseudo visual SG from the given textual SG. Several SG-pivoting based learning objectives are introduced for unsupervised translation training. On the benchmark Multi30K data, our SG-based method outperforms the best-performing baseline by significant BLEU scores on the task and setup, helping yield translations with better completeness, relevance and fluency without relying on paired images. Further in-depth analyses reveal how our model advances in the task setting.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/oApzFnCrRo86e5qieE2QHQ/embed/polls/a97782d4-6513-4d25-ab09-d00379e30820" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Scene Graph as Pivoting: Inference-time Image-free Unsupervised Multimodal Machine Translation with Visual Scene Hallucination

While sentiment analysis systems try to determine the sentiment polarities of given targets based on the key opinion expressions in input texts, in implicit sentiment analysis (ISA) the opinion cues come in an implicit and obscure manner. Thus detecting implicit sentiment requires the common-sense and multi-hop reasoning ability to infer the latent intent of opinion. Inspired by the recent chain-of-thought (CoT) idea, in this work we introduce a Three-hop Reasoning (THOR) CoT framework to mimic the human-like reasoning process for ISA. We design a three-step prompting principle for THOR to step-by-step induce the implicit aspect, opinion, and finally the sentiment polarity. Our THOR+Flan-T5 (11B) pushes the state-of-the-art (SoTA) by over 6% F1 on supervised setup. More strikingly, THOR+GPT3 (175B) boosts the SoTA by over 50% F1 on zero-shot setting.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/8PaBoicsuHK7beXFunvrtr/embed/polls/57b1c94a-6423-433c-b96a-0448d623307d" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Reasoning Implicit Sentiment with Chain-of-Thought Prompting

In recent years, spectral graph neural networks, characterized by polynomial filters, have garnered increasing attention and have achieved remarkable performance in tasks such as node classification. These models typically assume that eigenvalues for the normalized Laplacian matrix are distinct from each other, thus expecting a polynomial filter to have a high fitting ability. However, this paper empirically observes that normalized Laplacian matrices frequently possess repeated eigenvalues. Moreover, we theoretically establish that the number of distinguishable eigenvalues plays a pivotal role in determining the expressive power of spectral graph neural networks. In light of this observation, we propose an eigenvalue correction strategy that can free polynomial filters from the constraints of repeated eigenvalue inputs. Concretely, the proposed eigenvalue correction strategy enhances the uniform distribution of eigenvalues, thus mitigating repeated eigenvalues, and improving the fitting capacity and expressive power of polynomial filters. Extensive experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method.

Improving Expressive Power of Spectral Graph Neural Networks with Eigenvalue Correction

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

Virtual Poster Session 3

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.
### [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.

Please register!

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

Findings In-Person Poster Session 4

### 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 CL , and Demos.

In-Person Poster Session 6

Findings In-Person Poster Session 3

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

In-Person Poster Session 3

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

In-Person Poster Session 1

## 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

Main Track - Natural Language Processing

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

AAAI 2024

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

### 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.

Hao Fei

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SHORT BIO

Presentations