Mexico

Large language models (LLMs) are great at processing multiple natural language processing tasks, but their abilities are constrained by inferior performance with long context, slow inference speed, and the high cost of computing the results. Deploying LLMs with precise and informative context helps users process large-scale datasets more effectively and cost-efficiently. Existing works rely on compressing long prompt contexts into soft prompts. However, soft prompt compression encounters limitations in transferability across different LLMs, especially API-based LLMs. To this end, this work aims to compress lengthy prompts in the form of natural language with LLM transferability. This poses two challenges: (i) Natural Language (NL) prompts are incompatible with back-propagation, and (ii) NL prompts lack flexibility in imposing length constraints. In this work, we propose a Natural Language Prompt Encapsulation (Nano-Capsulator) framework compressing original prompts into NL formatted Capsule Prompt while maintaining prompt utility and transferability. Specifically, to tackle the first challenge, the Nano-Capsulator is optimized by a reward function that interacts with the proposed semantics preserving loss. To address the second question, the Nano-Capsulator is optimized by a reward function featuring length constraints. Experimental results demonstrate that the Capsule Prompt can reduce 81.4\% of the original length, decrease inference latency up to 4.5x, and save 80.1\% of budget overheads while providing transferability across diverse LLMs and different datasets.

NAACL 2024

Learning to Compress Prompt in Natural Language Formats

efficient llms

prompt compression

large language models

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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.
 
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Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Large language models (LLMs) can achieve impressive performance on various reasoning tasks by incorporating chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, where step-by-step reasoning is provided to guide LLMs to generate answers to questions, and the question-rationale-answer triplets are utilized as demonstration exemplars. However, the reasoning chains of demonstrations generated by LLMs are observed to be prone to errors, which can subsequently lead to incorrect reasoning during inference. Furthermore, inappropriate exemplars, e.g., overly simplistic or complex exemplars depending on the question's difficulty level, can affect the LLM's performance. To address these issues, we introduce Iter-CoT (Iterative bootstrapping in Chain-of-Thoughts prompting). Iter-CoT has two advantages: (1) it adopts iterative bootstrapping that enables LLMs to rectify errors autonomously, resulting in more precise and comprehensive reasoning chains. (2) it selects exemplars of challenging yet answerable (i.e., the LLM has the potential to answer correctly) questions, enhancing the LLMs' generalizability to answer questions with varying difficulty levels. Experimental results exhibit Iter-CoT superior performance on three distinct reasoning tasks on ten datasets.

Enhancing Chain-of-Thoughts Prompting with Iterative Bootstrapping in Large Language Models

Comparative knowledge (e.g., steel is stronger and heavier than styrofoam) is an essential component of our world knowledge, yet understudied in prior literature. In this paper, we harvest the dramatic improvements in knowledge capabilities of language models into a large-scale comparative knowledge base. While the ease of acquisition of such comparative knowledge is much higher from extreme-scale models like GPT-4, compared to their considerably smaller and weaker counterparts such as GPT-2, not even the most powerful models are exempt from making errors. We thus ask: to what extent are models at different scales able to generate valid and diverse comparative knowledge? We introduce NeuroComparatives, a novel framework for comparative knowledge distillation overgenerated from language models such as GPT-variants and LLaMA, followed by stringent filtering of the generated knowledge. Our framework acquires comparative knowledge between everyday objects, producing a corpus of up to 8.8M comparisons over 1.74M entity pairs - 10X larger and 30% more diverse than existing resources. Moreover, human evaluations show that NeuroComparatives outperform existing resources in terms of validity (up to 32% absolute improvement). Our acquired NeuroComparatives leads to performance improvements on five downstream tasks. We find that neuro-symbolic manipulation of smaller models offers complementary benefits to the currently dominant practice of prompting extreme-scale language models for knowledge distillation.

NeuroComparatives: Neuro-Symbolic Distillation of Comparative Knowledge

Parameter-efficient (PE) methods (like Prompts or Adapters) for adapting pre-trained language models (PLM) to downstream tasks have been popular recently. However, hindrances still prevent these methods from reaching their full potential. For example, two significant challenges are few-shot adaptation and cross-task generalization. To tackle these issues, we propose a general PE priming framework to enhance and explore the few-shot adaptation and generalization ability of PE methods. In this framework, PLMs are primed with PE methods for rapidly adapting to various target tasks. To evaluate the generalization ability of these PE methods, we conduct experiments on a few-shot cross-domain benchmark containing 160 diverse NLP tasks. Our experiment not only reveals the best priming strategy but also verifies that priming facilitates the adaptation to target tasks.

Systematic Analysis for Pretrained Language Model Priming for Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning

Misunderstandings occur all the time in human conversation but deciding on when to ask for clarification is a challenging task for conversational systems that requires a balance between asking too many unnecessary questions and running the risk of providing incorrect information. This work investigates clarification identification based on the task and data from (Xu et al., 2019), reproducing their Transformer baseline and extending it by comparing pre-trained language model fine-tuning, prompt tuning and manual prompt engineering on the task of clarification identification. Our experiments show strong performance with LM and a prompt tuning approach with BERT and RoBERTa, outperforming standard LM fine-tuning, while manual prompt engineering with GPT-3.5 proved to be less effective, although informative prompt instructions have the potential of steering the model towards generating more accurate explanations for why clarification is needed.

To Clarify or not to Clarify: A Comparative Analysis of Clarification Classification with Fine-Tuning, Prompt Tuning, and Prompt Engineering

Amidst the flourishing era of Large Language Models (LLMs), there has been a surge in proposing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) that integrate LLM with vision capabilities. 
However, it has been observed that LVLMs, after visual instruction tuning, often fail to exhibit the instruction-following ability inherent to the LLM before integration, leading to results where they do not follow task instructions as expected. 
This study quantitatively demonstrates that the instruction-following ability of LVLMs declines after visual instruction tuning for the first time. 
We further investigate factors contributing to the deterioration of this instruction-following ability. 
Our evaluation reveals that specifying the output format in instructions during (visual) instruction tuning could significantly impact the instruction-following ability of models.

Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Vision-Language Models

Cross-lingual transfer has become an effective way of transferring knowledge between languages. In this paper, we explore an often overlooked aspect in this domain: the influence of the source language of a language model on language transfer performance. We consider a case where the target language and its script are not part of the pre-trained model. We conduct a series of experiments on monolingual and multilingual models that are pre-trained on different tokenization methods to determine factors that affect cross-lingual transfer to a new language with a unique script. Our findings reveal the importance of the tokenizer as a stronger factor than the shared script, language similarity, and model size.

Unknown Script: Impact of Script on Cross-Lingual Transfer

Making decent multi-lingual sentence representations is critical to achieve high performances in cross-lingual downstream tasks. In this work, we propose a novel method to align multi-lingual embeddings based on the similarity of sentences measured by a pre-trained mono-lingual embedding model. Given translation sentence pairs, we train a multi-lingual model in a way that the similarity between cross-lingual embeddings follows the similarity of sentences measured at the mono-lingual teacher model. Our method can be considered as contrastive learning with soft labels defined as the similarity between sentences. Our experimental results on five languages show that our contrastive loss with soft labels far outperforms conventional constrastive loss with hard labels in various benchmarks for bitext mining tasks and STS tasks. In addition, our method outperforms existing multi-lingual embeddings including LaBSE, for Tatoeba dataset.

Improving Multi-lingual Alignment Through Soft Contrastive Learning

Text Style Transfer (TST) seeks to alter the style of text while retaining its core content. Given the constraints of limited parallel datasets for TST, we propose CoTeX, a framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) alongside chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to facilitate TST. CoTeX distills the complex rewriting and reasoning capabilities of LLMs into more streamlined models capable of working with both non-parallel and parallel data. Through experimentation across four TST datasets, CoTeX is shown to surpass traditional supervised fine-tuning and knowledge distillation methods, particularly in low-resource settings. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation, comparing CoTeX against current unsupervised, supervised, in-context learning (ICL) techniques, and instruction-tuned LLMs. Furthermore, CoTeX distinguishes itself by offering transparent explanations for its style transfer process.

Distilling Text Style Transfer With Self-Explanation From LLMs

Enabling autonomous language agents to drive application user interfaces (UIs) as humans do can significantly expand the capability of today's API-based agents. Essential to this vision is the ability of agents to ground natural language commands to on-screen UI elements. Prior UI grounding approaches work by relaying on developer-provided UI metadata (UI trees, such as web DOM, and accessibility labels) to detect on-screen elements. However, such metadata is often unavailable or incomplete. Object detection techniques applied to UI screens remove this dependency, by inferring location and types of UI elements directly from the UI's visual appearance. The extracted semantics, however, are too limited to directly enable grounding. We overcome the limitations of both approaches by introducing the task of visual UI grounding, which unifies detection and grounding. A model takes as input a UI screenshot and a free-form language expression, and must identify the referenced UI element. We propose a solution to this problem, LVG, which learns UI element detection and grounding using a new technique called layout-guided contrastive learning, where the semantics of individual UI objects are learned also from their visual organization. Due to the scarcity of UI datasets, LVG integrates synthetic data in its training using multi-context learning. LVG outperforms baselines pre-trained on much larger datasets by over 4.9 points in top-1 accuracy, thus demonstrating its effectiveness.

Visual Grounding for User Interfaces

Conversational Task Assistants (CTAs) guide users in performing a multitude of activities, such as making recipes. However, ensuring that interactions remain engaging, interesting, and enjoyable for CTA users is not trivial, especially for time-consuming or challenging tasks. Grounded in psychological theories of human interest, we propose to engage users with contextual and interesting statements or facts during interactions with a multi-modal CTA, to reduce fatigue and task abandonment before a task is complete. To operationalize this idea, we train a high-performing classifier (82% F1-score) to automatically identify relevant and interesting facts for users. We use it to create an annotated dataset of task-specific interesting facts for the domain of cooking. Finally, we design and validate a dialogue policy to incorporate the identified relevant and interesting facts into a conversation, to improve user engagement and task completion. Live testing on a leading multi-modal voice assistant shows that 66% of the presented facts were received positively, leading to a 40% gain in the user satisfaction rating, and a 37% increase in conversation length. These findings emphasize that strategically incorporating interesting facts into the CTA experience can promote real-world user participation for guided task interactions.

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Enhancing Chain-of-Thoughts Prompting with Iterative Bootstrapping in Large Language Models

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