Perfect machine translation (MT) would render cross-lingual transfer (XLT) by means of multilingual language models (mLMs) superfluous. Given, on the one hand, the large body of work on improving XLT with mLMs and, on the other hand, recent advances in massively multilingual MT, in this work, we systematically evaluate existing and propose new translation-based XLT approaches for transfer to low-resource languages. We show that all translation-based approaches dramatically outperform zero-shot XLT with mLMs---with the combination of round-trip translation of the source-language training data and the translation of the target-language test instances at inference---being generally the most effective. We next show that one can obtain further empirical gains by adding reliable translations to other high-resource languages to the training data. Moreover, we propose an effective translation-based XLT strategy even for languages not supported by the MT system. Finally, we show that model selection for XLT based on target-language validation data obtained with MT outperforms model selection based on the source-language data. We believe our findings warrant a broader inclusion of more robust translation-based baselines in XLT research.

To Translate or Not to Translate: A Systematic Investigation of Translation-Based Cross-Lingual Transfer to Low-Resource Languages

Cross-lingual transfer (XLT) driven by massively multilingual language models (mmLMs) has been shown largely ineffective for low-resource (LR) target languages with little (or no) representation in mmLM's pretraining, especially if they are linguistically distant from the high-resource (HR) source language. Much of the recent focus in XLT research has been dedicated to \textit{LR language families}, i.e., families without any HR languages (e.g., families of African languages or indigenous languages of the Americas). In this work, in contrast, we investigate a configuration that is arguably of practical relevance for more of the world's languages: XLT to LR languages that do have a close HR relative. To explore the extent to which a HR language can facilitate transfer to its LR relatives, we (1) introduce Karde\c{s}-NLU, an evaluation benchmark with language understanding datasets in five LR Turkic languages: Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Uyghur; and (2) investigate (a) intermediate training and (b) fine-tuning strategies that leverage Turkish in XLT to these target languages. Our experimental results show that both - integrating Turkish in intermediate training and in downstream fine-tuning - yield substantial improvements in XLT to LR Turkic languages. Finally, we benchmark cutting-edge instruction-tuned large language models on Karde\c{s}-NLU, showing that their performance is highly task- and language-dependent.

Kardeş-NLU: Transfer to Low-Resource Languages with the Help of a High-Resource Cousin – A Benchmark and Evaluation for Turkic Languages

This poster session includes Main Conference posters and Demos from the following areas: 
Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP • Multilinguality and Language Diversity • Multimodality and Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond • Semantics: Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference and Other areas • Summarization

In-Person Poster Session 3

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

Multilinguality and Language Diversity 1

Welcome to the 18th 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 has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. 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. 
#### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Wn38q0yev6U3RTgnf4Tn5T9GuAuZ-xW/view?usp=sharing) *downloadable*

To access the EACL 2024 event page you need to register [**here**](https://acl.swoogo.com/EACL2024). 

EACL 2024

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.

Benedikt Ebing

2

Presentations

To Translate or Not to Translate: A Systematic Investigation of Translation-Based Cross-Lingual Transfer to Low-Resource Languages

Kardeş-NLU: Transfer to Low-Resource Languages with the Help of a High-Resource Cousin – A Benchmark and Evaluation for Turkic Languages

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