Mexico

Previous unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods for question answering (QA) require access to source domain data while fine-tuning the model for the target domain. Source domain data may, however, contain sensitive information and should be protected. In this study, we investigate a more challenging setting, source-free UDA, in which we have only the pretrained source model and target domain data, without access to source domain data. We propose a novel self-training approach to QA models that integrates a specially designed mask module for domain adaptation. The mask is auto-adjusted to extract key domain knowledge when trained on the source domain. To maintain previously learned domain knowledge, certain mask weights are frozen during adaptation, while other weights are adjusted to mitigate domain shifts with pseudo-labeled samples generated in the target domain. Our empirical results on four benchmark datasets suggest that our approach significantly enhances the performance of pretrained QA models on the target domain, and even outperforms models that have access to the source data during adaptation.

NAACL 2024

Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Question Answering with Masked Self-training

masked self-training

source-free domain adaptation

question answering

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2021

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. 
 
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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

While large language models (LLMs) excel in various natural language processing tasks, their huge size and the inaccessibility of parameters present challenges for practical deployment. Previous studies try to distill task-specific ability from LLMs to smaller models, using data synthesis and chain-of-thought (CoT) fine-tuning. However, synthetic CoT data often contains faulty reasoning, which deteriorates the quality of distillation, especially in reasoning capabilities. In this work, we propose Program-aided Distillation (PaD), which introduces reasoning programs to suppress the errors in distilled data, and thus achieves better distillation quality for reasoning tasks. In PaD, we utilize the reasoning program to substitute the CoT, allowing automated error checking of synthetic data. Further, through error injecting and further training, the small distilling model could iteratively self-refine the reasoning. Moreover, we conduct a step-wise beam search by step-by-step verifying to acquire more exact reasoning chains. We evaluate PaD on arithmetic reasoning, symbolic reasoning, and general ability. Experimental results demonstrate that smaller models using PaD can not only outperform certain LLMs~(e.g., LLaMA-1 13B) but also achieve strong improvement over baselines with a significantly smaller scale of parameters and data. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Xuekai-Zhu/pad.

PaD: Program-aided Distillation Can Teach Small Models Reasoning Better than Chain-of-thought Fine-tuning

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable success in various natural language processing tasks, but open-source LLMs have yet to attain state-of-the-art performance in Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Nevertheless, their significant performance in tasks demanding a broad understanding and contextual processing shows their potential for translation. To exploit these abilities, we investigate using LLMs for MT and explore recent parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques. Surprisingly, our initial experiments found that fine-tuning with Q-LoRA for translation purposes led to performance improvements in terms of BLEU but degradation in COMET compared to in-context learning. To overcome this, we propose an alternative approach: adapting LLMs as Automatic Post-Editors (APE) rather than direct translators. Building on the ability of the LLM to handle long sequences, we also propose extending our approach to document-level translation. We show that leveraging Low-Rank-Adapter fine-tuning for APE can yield significant improvements across both sentence and document-level metrics while generalizing to out-of-domain data. Most notably, we achieve a state-of-the-art accuracy rate of 88.7\% on the ContraPro test set, which assesses the model's ability to resolve pronoun ambiguities when translating from English to German. Lastly, during manual post-editing for document-level translation, the source sentences are iteratively annotated, which can be used to refine further translations in the document. Here, we demonstrate that leveraging human corrections can significantly reduce the number of edits required for subsequent translations.

Contextual Refinement of Translations: Large Language Models for Sentence and Document-Level Post-Editing

A majority of language technologies are tailored for a small number of high-resource languages, while relatively many low-resource languages are neglected. One such group, Creole languages, have long been marginalized in academic study, though their speakers could benefit from machine translation (MT). These languages are predominantly used in much of Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean. We present the largest cumulative dataset to date for Creole language MT, including 14.5M unique Creole sentences with parallel translations---11.6M of which we release publicly, and the largest bitexts gathered to date for 41 languages---the first ever for 21. In addition, we provide MT models supporting all 41 Creole languages in 172 translation directions. Given our diverse dataset, we produce a model for Creole language MT exposed to more genre diversity then ever before, which outperforms a genre-specific Creole MT model on its own benchmark for 23 of 34 translation directions.

Kreyòl-MT: Building MT for Latin American, Caribbean and Colonial African Creole Languages

Current end-to-end coreference resolution models combine detection of singleton mentions and antecedent linking into a single step. In contrast, singleton detection was often treated as a separate step in the pre-neural era. In this work, we show that separately parameterizing these two sub-tasks also benefits end-to-end neural coreference systems. Specifically, we add a singleton detector to the coarse-to-fine (C2F) coreference model, and design an anaphoricity-aware span embedding and singleton detection loss. Our method significantly improves model performance on OntoNotes and four additional datasets.

Separately Parameterizing Singleton Detection Improves End-to-end Neural Coreference Resolution

Recent research has shown that large language models (LLMs) can achieve remarkable translation performance through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using only a small amount of parallel data. However, SFT simply instructs the model to imitate the reference translations at the token level, making it vulnerable to the noise present in the references. Hence, the assistance from SFT often reaches a plateau once the LLMs have achieved a certain level of translation capability, and further increasing the size of parallel data does not provide additional benefits. To overcome this plateau associated with imitation-based SFT, we propose a preference-based approach built upon the Plackett-Luce model. The objective is to steer LLMs towards a more nuanced understanding of translation preferences from a holistic view, while also being more resilient in the absence of gold translations. We further build a dataset named MAPLE to verify the effectiveness of our approach, which includes multiple translations of varying quality for each source sentence. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach in "breaking the plateau" across diverse LLMs and test settings. Our in-depth analysis underscores the pivotal role of diverse translations and accurate preference scores in the success of our approach.

A Preference-driven Paradigm for Enhanced Translation with Large Language Models

Active learning for imbalanced classification tasks is challenging as the minority classes naturally occur rarely. Gathering a large pool of unlabelled data is thus essential to capture minority instances. Standard pool-based active learning is computationally expensive on large pools and often reaches low accuracy by overfitting the initial decision boundary, thus failing to explore the input space and find minority instances. To address these issues we propose AnchorAL. At each iteration, AnchorAL chooses class-specific instances from the labelled set, or *anchors*, and retrieves the most similar unlabelled instances from the pool. This resulting *subpool* is then used for active learning. Using a small, fixed-sized subpool AnchorAL allows scaling any active learning strategy to large pools. By dynamically selecting different anchors at each iteration it promotes class balance and prevents overfitting the initial decision boundary, thus promoting the discovery of new clusters of minority instances. Experiments across different classification tasks, active learning strategies, and model architectures AnchorAL is *(i)* faster, often reducing runtime from hours to minutes, *(ii)* trains more performant models, *(iii)* and returns more balanced datasets than competing methods.

AnchorAL: Computationally Efficient Active Learning for Large and Imbalanced Datasets

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in general scenarios, exhibiting a level of aptitude that approaches, in some aspects even surpasses, human-level intelligence. Among their numerous skills, the translation abilities of LLMs have received considerable attention. Compared to typical machine translation that focuses solely on source-to-target mapping, LLM-based translation can potentially mimic the human translation process which might take preparatory steps to ensure high-quality translation. This work explores this possibility by proposing the MAPS framework, which stands for Multi-Aspect Prompting and Selection. Specifically, we enable LLMs first to analyze the given source sentence and induce three aspects of translation-related knowledge: keywords, topics, and relevant demonstrations to guide the final translation process. Moreover, we employ a selection mechanism based on quality estimation to filter out noisy and unhelpful knowledge. Both automatic (3 LLMs × 11 directions × 2 automatic metrics) and human evaluation (preference study and MQM) demonstrate the effectiveness of MAPS. Further analysis shows that by mimicking the human translation process, MAPS reduces various translation errors such as hallucination, ambiguity, mistranslation, awkward style, untranslated text, and omission. Source code is available at https://github.com/zwhe99/MAPS-mt.

Exploring Human-Like Translation Strategy with Large Language Models

Modern language models capture a large body of factual knowledge. However, some facts can be incorrectly induced or become obsolete over time, resulting in factually incorrect generations. This has led to the development of various editing methods that allow updating facts encoded by the model. Evaluation of these methods has primarily focused on testing whether an individual fact has been successfully injected, and if similar predictions for other subjects have not changed. Here we argue that such evaluation is limited, since injecting one fact (e.g. ``Jack Depp is the son of Johnny Depp'') introduces a ``ripple effect'' in the form of additional facts that the model needs to update (e.g.``Jack Depp is the sibling of Lily-Rose Depp''). To address this issue, we propose a novel set of evaluation criteria that consider the implications of an edit on related facts. Using these criteria, we then construct RippleEdits, a diagnostic benchmark of 5K factual edits, capturing a variety of types of ripple effects. We evaluate prominent editing methods on RippleEdits, showing that current methods fail to introduce consistent changes in the model's knowledge. In addition, we find that a simple in-context editing baseline obtains the best scores on our benchmark, suggesting a promising research direction for model editing.

Evaluating the Ripple Effects of Knowledge Editing in Language Models

We conduct a large-scale fine-grained comparative analysis of machine translations (MT) against human translations (HT) through the lens of morphosyntactic divergence. Across three language pairs and two types of divergence defined as the structural difference between the source and the target, MT is consistently more conservative than HT, with less morphosyntactic diversity, more convergent patterns, and more one-to-one alignments. Through analysis on different decoding algorithms, we attribute this discrepancy to the use of beam search that biases MT towards more convergent patterns. This bias is most amplified when the convergent pattern appears around 50% of the time in training data. Lastly, we show that for a majority of morphosyntactic divergences, their presence in HT is correlated with decreased MT performance, presenting a greater challenge for MT systems.

To Diverge or Not to Diverge: A Morphosyntactic Perspective on Machine Translation vs Human Translation

We introduce Edu-ConvoKit, an open-source library designed to handle pre-processing, annotation and analysis of conversation data in education. Resources for analyzing education conversation data are scarce, making the research challenging to perform and therefore hard to access. We address these challenges with Edu-ConvoKit. Edu-ConvoKit is open-source [1], pip-installable [2], with comprehensive documentation [3]. Our demo video is available at: https://youtu.be/zdcI839vAko?si=h9qlnl76ucSuXb8-. We include additional resources, such as Colab applications of Edu-ConvoKit to three diverse education datasets [4] and a repository of Edu-ConvoKit-related papers [5].


[1] https://github.com/stanfordnlp/edu-convokit


[2] https://pypi.org/project/edu-convokit/


[3] https://edu-convokit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/


[4] https://github.com/stanfordnlp/edu-convokit?tab=readme-ov-file#datasets-with-edu-convokit


[5] https://github.com/stanfordnlp/edu-convokit/blob/main/papers.md

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