Fully end-to-end task-oriented dialogue (EToD) systems have shown excellent performance, which requires the ability to retrieve entities accurately for generation. Existing methods improve the accuracy of entity retrieval and construct data flows between retrieval results and response generator, achieving promising results. However, most of them suffer from the following issues: (1) The entity is retrieved by directly interacting with the context at a coarse-grained level, so the similarity score may be disturbed by irrelevant attributes; (2) The generator pays equal attention to retrieved entities and the context and does not learn the generation preferences for the current turn. In this paper, we propose a framework called Regulating Preferences of Generator (RPG) based on retrieval results, which includes a generator preference extractor, an entity retriever, and a generator with the gate-controlled preference regulator. The generator preference extractor not only improves the entity retriever by filtering the interference of irrelevant attributes but also provides more focused guidance to the generator by performing inter-turn attribute prediction. Experiments and analyses on three standard benchmarks show that our framework outperforms existing methods and improves the quality of the dialogue.

What are the Generator Preferences for End-to-end Task-Oriented Dialog System?

Retrieving accurate domain knowledge and providing helpful information are crucial in developing an effective end-to-end task-oriented dialogue system (E2ETOD). The field has witnessed numerous methods following the retrieve-then-generate paradigm and training their systems on one specific domain. However, existing approaches still suffer from the Distractive Attributes Problem (DAP): struggling to deal with false but similar knowledge (hard negative entities), which is even more intractable when countless pieces of knowledge from different domains are blended in a real-world scenario. To alleviate DAP, we propose the Relevance-aware Adaptive Learning (ReAL) method, a two-stage training framework that eliminates hard negatives step-by-step and aligns retrieval with generation. In the first stage, we introduce a top-k adaptive contrastive loss and utilize the divergence-driven feedback from the frozen generator to pre-train the retriever. In the second stage, we propose using the metric score distribution as an anchor to align retrieval with generation. Thorough experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate ReAL's superiority over existing methods, with extensive analysis validating its strong capabilities of overcoming in- and cross-domain distractions.

Relevance Is a Guiding Light: Relevance-aware Adaptive Learning for End-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue System

Multimodal intent detection is designed to leverage diverse modalities for a comprehensive understanding of user intentions in real-world scenarios, thus playing a critical role in modern task-oriented dialogue systems. Existing methods have made great progress in modal alignment and fusion, however, two vital limitations are neglected: (I) close entanglement of multimodal semantics with modal structures; (II) insufficient learning of the causal effects of semantic and modality-specific information on the final predictions under the end-to-end training fashion. To alleviate the above limitations, we introduce the Dual-oriented Disentangled Network with Counterfactual Intervention (DuoDN). DuoDN addresses key limitations in current systems by effectively disentangling and utilizing modality-specific and multimodal semantic information. The model consists of a Dual-oriented Disentangled Encoder that decouples semantics-oriented and modality-oriented representations, alongside a Counterfactual Intervention Module that applies causal inference to understand causal effects by injecting confounders. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate DuoDN's superiority over existing methods, with extensive analysis validating its advantages.

Dual-oriented Disentangled Network with Counterfactual Intervention for Multimodal Intent Detection

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) may produce outputs that are unfaithful to reality, also known as visual hallucinations (VH), which hinders their application in multimodal understanding and decision-making. In this work, we introduce a novel plug-and-play train-free decoding algorithm named Game and Tree based Hallucination Mitigation (GTHM), designed for mitigating VH. GTHM is inspired by empirical observations that the fuzziness of multi-granularity view perception exacerbates VH. Based on this, GTHM leverages visual information to construct a coarse-to-fine visual view tree (CFTree) that organizes visual objects, attributes, and relationships in a hierarchical manner. Additionally, we innovatively model the optimal visual-token matching process on the CFTree as the cooperative game. Specifically, we define the Tree-based Shapley Value (TSV) for each visual view on the CFTree to assess its significant contribution to the overall visual understanding, thereby determining the optimal visual granularity. Subsequently, we utilize the TSV as guidance to implement adaptive weight contrastive decoding to achieve vision-aware decoding. Extensive experiments on four popular benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of our GTHM in alleviating VH across different LVLM families without additional training or post-processing. Our code is published at https://github.com/mengchuang123/GTHM.

Game on Tree: Visual Hallucination Mitigation via Coarse-to-Fine View Tree and Game Theory

Zero-shot cross-lingual spoken language understanding (SLU) can promote the globalization application of dialog systems, which has attracted increasing attention. While current code-switching based cross-lingual SLU frameworks have shown promising results, they (i) predominantly utilize contrastive objectives to model hard alignment, which may disrupt the inherent structure within sentences of each language; and (ii) focus optimization objectives solely on the original sentences, neglecting the relation between original sentences and code-switched sentences, which may hinder contextualized embeddings from further alignment. In this paper, we propose a novel framework dubbed REPE (short for Representation-Level and Prediction-Level Alignment), which leverages both code-switched and original sentences to achieve multi-level alignment. Specifically, REPE introduces optimal transport to facilitate soft alignment between the representations of code-switched and original sentences, thereby preserving structural integrity as much as possible. Moreover, REPE adopts multi-view learning to enforce consistency regularization between the prediction of the two sentences, aligning them into a more refined language-invariant space. Based on this, we further incorporate a self-distillation layer to boost the robustness of REPE. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks across ten languages demonstrate the superiority of the proposed REPE framework.

Code-Switching Can be Better Aligners: Advancing Cross-Lingual SLU through Representation-Level and Prediction-Level Alignment

Spoken language understanding (SLU) inevitably suffers from error propagation from automatic speech recognition (ASR) in actual scenarios. Some recent works attempt to alleviate this issue through contrastive learning. However, they (1) sample negative pairs incorrectly in pre-training; (2) only focus on implicit metric learning while neglecting explicit erroneous predictions; (3) treat manual and ASR transcripts indiscriminately. In this paper, we propose a novel framework termed $\textbf{PCAD}$, which can calibrate bias and errors and achieve adaptive-balanced decoupling training. Specifically, PCAD utilizes a prototype-based loss to aggregate label and prediction priors and calibrate bias and error-prone semantics for better inter-class discrimination and intra-class consistency. We theoretically analyze the effect of this loss on robustness enhancement. Further, we leverage a teacher-student model for asymmetric decoupling training between different transcripts and formulate a novel gradient-sensitive exponential moving averaging (GS-EMA) algorithm for adaptive balance of accuracy and robustness. Experiments on three datasets show that PCAD significantly outperforms existing approaches and achieves new state-of-the-art performance.

PCAD: Towards ASR-Robust Spoken Language Understanding via Prototype Calibration and Asymmetric Decoupling

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) that rely solely on textual data may exhibit limitations in multimodal semantics comprehension. Existing solutions attempt to alleviate this issue by incorporating explicit image retrieval or generation techniques. However, these methods: (1) focus exclusively on the static image modality; (2) inevitably encounter modality gaps and noise; (3) indiscriminately treat all modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal-augmented framework termed MaCSC, which can infuse multimodal semantics into PLMs and facilitate a self-balancing calibration of information allocation. Specifically, MaCSC obtains modal-specific conceptual prototypes from contrastive pre-training models (e.g., CLIP), and aggregates the intra- and inter-modal semantics of the conceptual prototype to enhance PLMs. In addition, we utilize a novel self-balancing contrastive loss to achieve multi-scale self-balancing calibration of multimodal information during fine-tuning PLMs. Experimental results show that MaCSC consistently improves the performance of PLMs across various architectures and scales, and outperforms competitive baselines on multiple NLP tasks.

MaCSC: Towards Multimodal-augmented Pre-trained Language Models via Conceptual Prototypes and Self-balancing Calibration

Multi-Intent spoken language understanding (SLU) can handle complicated utterances expressing multiple intents, which has attracted increasing attention from researchers. Although existing models have obtained promising performance, most of them still suffer from two main problems: (1) each intent has its specific scope and the semantic information outside the scope might potentially hinder accurate predictions, i.e. scope barrier; (2) only the guidance from intent to slot is modeled but the guidance from slot to intent is often neglected, i.e. unidirectional guidance. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Intent SLU framework termed HAOT, which utilizes hierarchical attention to divide the scopes of each intent and applies optimal transport to model the mutual guidance between slot and intent. Experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two public Multi-Intent SLU datasets, obtaining the 3.4 improvement on MixATIS dataset compared to the previous best models in overall accuracy.

Towards Multi-Intent Spoken Language Understanding via Hierarchical Attention and Optimal Transport

Recent joint models for multi-intent detection and slot filling have obtained promising results through modeling the unidirectional or bidirectional guidance between intent and slot. However, existing works design joint models heuristically and lack some theoretical exploration, including (1) theoretical measurement of the joint-interaction quality; (2) explainability of design and optimization methods of joint models, which may limit the performance and efficiency of designs. In this paper, we mathematically define the cross-task information gain (CIG) to measure the quality of joint processes from an information-theoretic perspective and discover an implicit optimization of CIG in previous models. Based on this, we propose a novel multi-stage iterative framework with theoretical effectiveness, explainability, and convergence, which can explicitly optimize information for cross-task interactions. Further, we devise an information-based joint model (InfoJoint) that conforms to this theoretical framework to gradually reduce the cross-task propagation of erroneous semantics through CIG iterative maximization. Extensive experiment results on two public datasets show that InfoJoint outperforms the state-of-the-art models by a large margin.

Towards Explainable Joint Models via Information Theory for Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling

This poster session includes Main Conference posters, Findings and Industry Track papers from the following areas:

 Information Extraction • NLP Applications • Dialogue and Interactive Systems  

In-Person Poster Session G (Riverfront Hall)

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.

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

Virtual Poster Session 2

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

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.

Virtual 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. 

Xianwei Zhuang

9

7

SHORT BIO

Presentations

What are the Generator Preferences for End-to-end Task-Oriented Dialog System?

Relevance Is a Guiding Light: Relevance-aware Adaptive Learning for End-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue System

Dual-oriented Disentangled Network with Counterfactual Intervention for Multimodal Intent Detection

Game on Tree: Visual Hallucination Mitigation via Coarse-to-Fine View Tree and Game Theory

Code-Switching Can be Better Aligners: Advancing Cross-Lingual SLU through Representation-Level and Prediction-Level Alignment

PCAD: Towards ASR-Robust Spoken Language Understanding via Prototype Calibration and Asymmetric Decoupling

MaCSC: Towards Multimodal-augmented Pre-trained Language Models via Conceptual Prototypes and Self-balancing Calibration

Towards Multi-Intent Spoken Language Understanding via Hierarchical Attention and Optimal Transport

Towards Explainable Joint Models via Information Theory for Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES