Recognizing visual entities in a natural language sentence and arranging them in a 2D spatial layout require a compositional understanding of language and space. This task of layout prediction is valuable in text-to-image synthesis as it allows localized and controlled in-painting of the image. In this comparative study it is shown that we can predict layouts from language representations that implicitly or explicitly encode sentence syntax, if the sentences mention similar entity-relationships to the ones seen during training. To test compositional understanding, we collect a test set of grammatically correct sentences and layouts describing compositions of entities and relations that unlikely have been seen during training. Performance on this test set substantially drops, showing that current models rely on correlations in the training data and have difficulties in understanding the structure of the input sentences. We propose a novel structural loss function that better enforces the syntactic structure of the input sentence and show large performance gains in the task of 2D spatial layout prediction conditioned on text. The loss has the potential to be used in other generation tasks where a tree-like structure underlies the conditioning modality. Code, trained models and the USCOCO evaluation set are available via https://github.com/rubencart/USCOCO.

Explicitly Representing Syntax Improves Sentence-to-layout Prediction of Unexpected Situations

Leveraging contextual knowledge has become standard practice in automated claim verification, yet the impact of temporal reasoning has been largely overlooked. Our study demonstrates that time positively influences the claim verification process of evidence-based factchecking. The temporal aspects and relations between claims and evidence are first established through grounding on shared timelines, which are constructed using publication dates and time expressions extracted from their
text. Temporal information is then provided to RNN-based and Transformer-based classifiers before or after claim and evidence encoding. Our time-aware fact-checking models surpass base models by up to 9% Micro F1 (64.17%) and 15% Macro F1 (47.43%) on the MultiFC dataset. They also outperform prior methods that explicitly model temporal relations between evidence. Our findings show that the presence of temporal information and the manner in which timelines are constructed greatly influence how fact-checking models determine the relevance and supporting or refuting character of evidence documents.

Implicit Temporal Reasoning for Evidence-Based Fact-Checking

Leveraging contextual knowledge has become standard practice in automated claim verification, yet the impact of temporal reasoning has been largely overlooked. Our study demonstrates that time positively influences the claim verification process of evidence-based fact-checking. The temporal aspects and relations between claims and evidence are first established through grounding on shared timelines, which are constructed using publication dates and time expressions extracted from their text. Temporal information is then provided to RNN-based and Transformer-based classifiers before or after claim and evidence encoding. Our time-aware fact-checking models surpass base models by up to 9% Micro F1 (64.17%) and 15% Macro F1 (47.43%) on the MultiFC dataset. They also outperform prior methods that explicitly model temporal relations between evidence. Our findings show that the presence of temporal information and the manner in which timelines are constructed greatly influence how fact-checking models determine the relevance and supporting or refuting character of evidence documents.

This paper proposes an iterative inference algorithm for multi-hop explanation regeneration, that retrieves relevant factual evidence in the form of text snippets, given a natural language question and its answer. Combining multiple sources of evidence or facts for multi-hop reasoning becomes increasingly hard when the number of sources needed to make an inference grows. Our algorithm copes with this by decomposing the selection of facts from a corpus autoregressively, conditioning the next iteration on previously selected facts. This allows us to use a pairwise learning-to-rank loss. We validate our method on datasets of the TextGraphs 2019 and 2020 Shared Tasks for explanation regeneration. Existing work on this task either evaluates facts in isolation or artificially limits the possible chains of facts, thus limiting multi-hop inference. We demonstrate that our algorithm, when used with a pre-trained transformer model, outperforms the previous state-of-the-art in terms of precision, training time and inference efficiency.

Autoregressive Reasoning over Chains of Facts with Transformers

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)*

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.

Please register!

NAACL 2024

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

**Organizers:** Mubashara Akhtar -King's College London; Rami Aly - University of Cambridge; Christos Christodoulopoulos -Amazon; Oana Cocarascu - King's College London; Zhijiang Guo - University of Cambridge; Arpit Mittal - Meta; Michael Schlichtkrull - University of Cambridge; James Thorne - KAIST AI; Andreas Vlachos - University of Cambridge For more details, please visit our [workshop website](https://fever.ai/workshop.html))

Sixth Workshop on Fact Extraction and VERification

workshop paper

### 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.

Please feel free to view the Findings papers at your convenience. You are welcome to leave your comment or a question in the Chat box.

Findings

findings / work in progress

POSTER25: Machine Learning and Language Modelling

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

Ruben C

4

3

SHORT BIO

Presentations

Explicitly Representing Syntax Improves Sentence-to-layout Prediction of Unexpected Situations

Implicit Temporal Reasoning for Evidence-Based Fact-Checking

Implicit Temporal Reasoning for Evidence-Based Fact-Checking

Autoregressive Reasoning over Chains of Facts with Transformers

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES