We conduct a large-scale fine-grained comparative analysis of machine translations (MT) against human translations (HT) through the lens of morphosyntactic divergence. Across three language pairs and two types of divergence defined as the structural difference between the source and the target, MT is consistently more conservative than HT, with less morphosyntactic diversity, more convergent patterns, and more one-to-one alignments. Through analysis on different decoding algorithms, we attribute this discrepancy to the use of beam search that biases MT towards more convergent patterns. This bias is most amplified when the convergent pattern appears around 50% of the time in training data. Lastly, we show that for a majority of morphosyntactic divergences, their presence in HT is correlated with decreased MT performance, presenting a greater challenge for MT systems.

To Diverge or Not to Diverge: A Morphosyntactic Perspective on Machine Translation vs Human Translation

Large language models (LLMs) that have been trained on multilingual but not parallel text exhibit a remarkable ability to translate between languages. We probe this ability in an in-depth study of the pathways language model (PaLM), which has demonstrated the strongest machine translation (MT) performance among similarly-trained LLMs to date. We investigate various strategies for choosing translation examples for few-shot prompting, concluding that example quality is the most important factor. Using optimized prompts, we revisit previous assessments of PaLM's MT capabilities with more recent test sets, modern MT metrics, and human evaluation, and find that its performance, while impressive, still lags that of state-of-the-art supervised systems. We conclude by providing an analysis of PaLM's MT output which reveals some interesting properties and prospects for future work.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/t38CPUax2NoHBQcXN6okdA/embed/polls/838c799e-2935-4d74-8dd7-0e12d01f6e49" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Prompting PaLM for Translation: Assessing Strategies and Performance

This poster session includes Main Conference posters, TACL, CL and Demos from the following areas: 
Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics • Machine Learning for NLP • NLP Applications • Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation • Semantics: Lexical • Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining • Social Science • Syntax • Question Answering • Resources and Evaluation • Generation • Semantics • Machine Translation

In-Person Poster Session 1

poster

## 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)*

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NAACL 2024

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

Large Language Models 1

technical 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.

Jiaming Luo

2

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To Diverge or Not to Diverge: A Morphosyntactic Perspective on Machine Translation vs Human Translation

Prompting PaLM for Translation: Assessing Strategies and Performance

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