Tokenizers are crucial for encoding information in Large Language Models, but their development has recently stagnated, and they contain inherent weaknesses. Major limitations include computational overhead, ineffective vocabulary use, and unnecessarily large embedding and head layers. Additionally, their performance is biased towards a reference corpus, leading to reduced effectiveness for underrepresented languages.

To remedy these issues, we propose T-Free, which directly embeds words through sparse activation patterns over character triplets and does not require a reference corpus. T-Free inherently exploits morphological similarities and allows for strong compression of embedding layers. In our exhaustive experimental evaluation, we achieve competitive downstream performance with a parameter reduction of more than 85% on these layers. Further, T-Free shows significant improvements in cross-lingual transfer learning.

T-FREE: Tokenizer-Free Generative LLMs via Sparse Representations for Memory-Efficient Embeddings

Large Language Models (LLMs) have reshaped natural language processing with their impressive capabilities. However, their ever-increasing size has raised concerns about their effective deployment and the need for LLM compression. This study introduces the Divergent Token Metrics (DTMs), a novel approach to assessing compressed LLMs, addressing the limitations of traditional perplexity or accuracy measures that fail to accurately reflect text generation quality. DTMs measure token divergences that allow deeper insights into the subtleties of model compression, in particular, when evaluating components' impacts individually. Utilizing the First Divergent Token Metric (FDTM) in model sparsification reveals that 25\% of all attention components can be pruned beyond 90\% on the Llama-2 model family, still keeping SOTA performance. For quantization, FDTM suggests that more than 80\% of parameters can be naively transformed to int8 without special outlier management. These evaluations indicate the necessity of choosing appropriate compressions for parameters individually---and that FDTM can identify those---while standard metrics result in deteriorated outcomes.

Divergent Token Metrics: Measuring degradation to prune away LLM components – and optimize quantization

This poster session includes Main Conference posters and Findings from the following areas:

Language Modeling • Ethics, Bias, and Fairness • Discourse and Pragmatics • Multilinguality and Language Diversity • Phonology, Morphology, and Word Segmentation • Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing

In-Person Poster Session B (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.

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

Björn Deiseroth

2

Presentations

T-FREE: Tokenizer-Free Generative LLMs via Sparse Representations for Memory-Efficient Embeddings

Divergent Token Metrics: Measuring degradation to prune away LLM components – and optimize quantization

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