It was an amazing week in Mexico city at NAACL 2024! I am happy I met so many brilliant researchers and had so many meaningful conversations. I am grateful to be a part of such a community. It’s a shame I was unable to join all the talks and posters I wanted to attend (sadly cannot be in two places at the same time, I need a time-turner ha-ha). Also, special thanks to Amsterdam folks for keeping me company 😊 In this post I want to share my experience and paper highlights.
Before you start, you are more than welcome to read our paper so you get more context. Share your ideas and question via e dot tokarchuk at uva dot nl
I’ve presented my work during the first oral session (machine translation track). I was SUPER nervous. When I started I realised they haven’t used my recent slides (even though I uploaded them a night before as organizers asked.) I recovered quickly cause honestly I have only changed some visuals, content was exactly the same. My hands and legs were shaking. It was ok at the end, however I think I could have done better. My friends told me I looked super calm and nailed it though ❤️ I got a few questions and they were interesting, I even had a chance to make a teaser for my next paper.
And then I was done and could enjoy the conference at the fullest!
Before we start, some interesting statistics and photos from the conference social event:
Aaand back to research stuff!
Here is my paper’s and talks highlights. Note that my highlights are aligned with my specific research interests. It doesn’t mean they are better than any other papers/talks, I just found them interesting/relevant for my work! Some just had an amazing presentations and I would love to remember some tips for the future.
NAACL keynote Very nice view on studying indigenous languages from the perspective of the person outside the indigenous community. “Nothing about us without us”. It gave a lot of food for thoughts.
Interesting analysis of the usage of analysis paper’s results on NLP works + call for actions
Talk on how LLMs can be used for clinical data. Main question: can we use one foundation model for every country and every language?
For some reasons I haven’t heard about DPO until recent. Interesting approach to overcome plateau in NMT performance while adding fine-tuning data to LLMs.
Combination of DPO and MBR in training. Interesting approach to improve translation quality.
Analysis work on the true distribution approximation of MBR decoding.
How to achieve stable human evaluation results by using different assignments procedures.
Using the robustness term based on distance between the original and adversarial examples in the training objective.
Application of rl for Levenshtein Transformer. Investigation on episodic and sentence level rewards.
Amazing talk. Even though I am not that much into visual grounding, it was interesting to see how it affects the learning of word meanings. It got best paper award (and I believe it was well-deserved).
Study on how Euclidean space can be effective for knowledge graph embeddings (comparison with hyperbolic space).
Interesting approach to detect not only machine-generated text, but also identify the model itself.
Explore various text-based retrieval metrics (string matching) for retrieval augmented NMT.
Exploring the performance of various multilingual LLMs for multilingual NMT.
For dessert, some photos from Mexico City. I had a chance to visit the city for the first time, and it was amazing!