Thailand

The proliferation of fake news poses a significant threat not only by disseminating misleading information but also by undermining the very foundations of democracy. 
The recent advance of generative artificial intelligence has further exacerbated the challenge of distinguishing genuine news from fabricated stories. 
In response to this challenge, we introduce VeraCT Scan, a novel retrieval-augmented system for fake news detection. This system operates by extracting the core facts from a given piece of news and subsequently conducting an internet-wide search to identify corroborating or conflicting reports. Then sources&#39; credibility is leveraged for information verification. 
Besides determining the veracity of news, we also provide transparent evidence and reasoning to support its conclusions, resulting in the interpretability and trust in the results. In addition to GPT-4 Turbo, Llama-2 13B is also fine-tuned for news content understanding, information verification, and reasoning. Both implementations have demonstrated state-of-the-art accuracy in the realm of fake news detection.

ACL 2024

VeraCT Scan: Retrieval-Augmented Fake News Detection with Justifiable Reasoning

fake news detection

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

The proliferation of fake news poses a significant threat not only by disseminating misleading information but also by undermining the very foundations of democracy. 
The recent advance of generative artificial intelligence has further exacerbated the challenge of distinguishing genuine news from fabricated stories. 
In response to this challenge, we introduce VeraCT Scan, a novel retrieval-augmented system for fake news detection. This system operates by extracting the core facts from a given piece of news and subsequently conducting an internet-wide search to identify corroborating or conflicting reports. Then sources' credibility is leveraged for information verification. 
Besides determining the veracity of news, we also provide transparent evidence and reasoning to support its conclusions, resulting in the interpretability and trust in the results. In addition to GPT-4 Turbo, Llama-2 13B is also fine-tuned for news content understanding, information verification, and reasoning. Both implementations have demonstrated state-of-the-art accuracy in the realm of fake news detection.

poster

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

We describe PyFoma, an open-source Python module for constructing weighted and unweighted finite-state transducers and automata from regular expressions, string rewriting rules, right-linear grammars, or low-level state/transition manipulation. A large variety of standard algorithms for working with finite-state machines is included, with a particular focus on the needs of linguistic and NLP applications. The data structures and code in the module are designed for legibility to allow for potential use in teaching the theory and algorithms associated with finite-state machines.

PyFoma: a Python finite-state compiler module

We present a synthetic data approach for instruction-tuning large language models (LLMs) for low-resource languages in a data-efficient manner, specifically focusing on Thai. We identify three key properties that contribute to the effectiveness of instruction-tuning datasets: fluency, diversity, and cultural context. We propose a seed-data-free framework for generating synthetic instruction-tuning data that incorporates these essential properties. Our framework employs an LLM to generate diverse topics, retrieve relevant contexts from Wikipedia, and create instructions for various tasks, such as question answering, summarization, and conversation. The experimental results show that our best-performing synthetic dataset, which incorporates all three key properties, achieves competitive performance using only 5,000 instructions when compared to state-of-the-art Thai LLMs trained on hundreds of thousands of instructions.

Seed-Free Synthetic Data Generation Framework for Instruction-Tuning LLMs: A Case Study in Thai

Identifying beneficial tasks to transfer from is a crucial step toward successful transfer learning in the paradigm of intermediate-task transfer learning. In this work, we experiment on 130 source-target task combinations and demonstrate that the transfer performance exhibits severe variance across different source tasks and training seeds, highlighting the crucial role of intermediate-task selection in a broader context. We compare four representative task selection methods in a unified setup, focusing on their effectiveness and consistency. Compared to embedding-free methods and text embeddings, task embeddings constructed from fine-tuned weights can better estimate task transferability by improving task prediction accuracy from 2.59\% to 3.96\%. Despite its strong performance, we observe that the task embeddings do not consistently demonstrate superiority for tasks requiring reasoning abilities. Furthermore, we introduce a novel method that measures pairwise token similarity using maximum inner product search, leading to the highest performance in task-transfer prediction. Our findings suggest that token-wise similarity is better predictive for predicting transferability compared to averaging weights.

Exploring the Effectiveness and Consistency of Task Selection in Intermediate-Task Transfer Learning

Deep semantic representations are useful for many NLU tasks (Droganova and Zeman 2019; Schuster and Manning-2016). Manual annotation to build these representations is time-consuming, and so automatic approaches are preferred (Droganova and Zeman 2019; Bender et al. 2015). This paper demonstrates how rich semantic representations can be automatically derived for Thai Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs), where the semantic relationship between component verbs is not immediately clear from the surface forms. I present the first fully-implemented HPSG analysis for Thai SVCs, deriving appropriate semantic representations (MRS; Copestake et al. 2005) from syntactic features, implemented within a DELPH-IN computational grammar (Slayden 2009). This analysis increases verified coverage of SVCs by 73% and decreases ambiguity by 46%. The final grammar can be found at: https://bit.ly/3yJRTBJ

Automatic Derivation of Semantic Representations for Thai Serial Verb Constructions: A Grammar-Based Approach

This study investigates how Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly BERT (Devlin et al., 2019) and GPT-2 (Radford et al., 2019), engage in pragmatic inference of scalar implicature, such as some. Two sets of experiments were conducted using cosine similarity and next sentence prediction as experimental methods. The results in experiment 1 showed that, in the absence of context, both models interpret some as pragmatic implicature not all, aligning with human language processing. In experiment 2, in which Question Under Discussion (QUD) was presented as a contextual cue, GPT-2 encountered processing difficulties since a certain type of QUD required pragmatic inference for implicature. Conversely, BERT exhibited consistent performance regardless of types of the QUDs. In theoretical approaches, BERT inherently incorporates pragmatic implicature not all within the term some, adhering to a Default model (Levinson, 2000). In contrast, GPT-2 seems to expend processing effort in inferring pragmatic implicature within context, consistent with a Context-driven model (Sperber and Wilson, 2002).

Pragmatic inference of scalar implicature by LLMs

As conventional topic models rely on word co-occurrence to infer latent topics, topic modeling for short texts has been a long-standing challenge. Large Language Models (LLMs) can potentially overcome this challenge by contextually learning the semantics of words via pretraining. This paper studies two approaches, parallel prompting and sequential prompting, to use LLMs for topic modeling. Due to the input length limitations, LLMs cannot process many texts at once. By splitting the texts into smaller subsets and processing them parallelly or sequentially, an arbitrary number of texts can be handled by LLMs. Experimental results demonstrated that our methods can identify more coherent topics than existing ones while maintaining the diversity of the induced topics. Furthermore, we found that the inferred topics adequately covered the input texts, while hallucinated topics were hardly generated.

Topic Modeling for Short Texts with Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) excel in various tasks but are primarily trained on text data, limiting their application scope. Expanding LLM capabilities to include vision-language understanding is vital, yet training them on multimodal data from scratch is challenging and costly. Existing instruction tuning methods, e.g., LLAVA, often connects a pretrained CLIP vision encoder and LLMs via fully fine-tuning LLMs to bridge the modality gap. However, full fine-tuning is plagued by catastrophic forgetting, i.e., forgetting previous knowledge, and high training costs particularly in the era of increasing tasks and modalities. To solve this issue, we introduce MoExtend, an effective framework designed to streamline the modality adaptation and extension of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. MoExtend seamlessly integrates new experts into pre-trained MoE models, endowing them with novel knowledge without the need to tune pretrained models such as MoE and vision encoders. This approach enables rapid adaptation and extension to new modal data or tasks, effectively addressing the challenge of accommodating new modalities within LLMs. Furthermore, MoExtend avoids tuning pretrained models, thus mitigating the risk of catastrophic forgetting. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of MoExtend in enhancing the multimodal capabilities of LLMs, contributing to advancements in multimodal AI research.

MoExtend: Tuning New Experts for Modality and Task Extension

Collaborative argumentation holds significant potential for enhancing students' learning outcomes within classroom settings. Consequently, researchers have explored the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically analyze argumentation in these contexts. Despite the remarkable performance of deep learning models in this task, their lack of interpretability poses a critical challenge, leading to teachers' skepticism and limited utilization. To cultivate trust among teachers, this PhD thesis proposal aims to leverage explainable AI techniques to provide explanations for these deep learning models. Specifically, the study develops two deep learning models for automated analysis of argument moves (claim, evidence, and warrant) and specificity levels (low, medium, and high) within collaborative argumentation. To address the interpretability issue, four explainable AI methods are proposed: gradient sensitivity, gradient input, integrated gradient, and LIME. Computational experiments demonstrate the efficacy of these methods in elucidating model predictions by computing word contributions, with LIME delivering exceptional performance. Moreover, a quasi-experiment is designed to evaluate the impact of model explanations on user trust and knowledge, serving as a future study of this PhD proposal. By tackling the challenges of interpretability and trust, this PhD thesis proposal aims to contribute to fostering user trust in AI and facilitating the practical implementation of AI in educational contexts.

On the Interpretability of Deep Learning Models for Collaborative Argumentation Analysis in Classrooms

Acquiring large-scale parallel corpora is crucial for NLP tasks such as Neural Machine Translation, and web crawling has become a popular methodology for this purpose. Previous studies have been conducted based on sentence unit division (SUD) when aligning documents in various languages which are obtained through web crawling. Among them, the TK-PERT method achieved state-of-the-art results and well addressed the boilerplate text in web crawling data through a down-weighting approach. However, there remains a problem about how to better handle long-text encoding. Thus, we introduce the strategy of Overlapping Fixed-Length Segmentation (OFLS) in place of SUD, and observe a pronounced enhancement when performing the same approach for document alignment. In this paper, we compare the SUD and OFLS using three previous methods, Mean-Pool, TK-PERT, and Optimal Transport, on the WMT16 document alignment shared task for French-English, as well as on our self-established Japanese-English dataset MnRN. As a result, for the WMT16 task, various SUD based methods showed an increase in recall by 1\% ~ 10\% after reproduction with OFLS. For MnRN data, OFLS demonstrated significant improvements in accuracy and also exhibited faster document embedding speed.

Document Alignment based on Overlapping Fixed-Length Segments

Providing example sentences that are diverse and aligned with learners' proficiency levels is essential for fostering effective language acquisition. This study examines the use of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to produce example sentences targeting L2 Japanese learners. We utilize PLMs in two ways: as quality scoring components in a retrieval system that draws from a newly curated corpus of Japanese sentences, and as direct sentence generators using zero-shot learning. We evaluate the quality of sentences by considering multiple aspects such as difficulty, diversity, and naturalness, with a panel of raters consisting of learners of Japanese, native speakers -- and GPT-4. Our findings suggest that there is inherent disagreement among participants on the ratings of sentence qualities, except for difficulty. Despite that, the retrieval approach was preferred by all evaluators, especially for beginner and advanced target proficiency, while the generative approaches received lower scores on average. Even so, our experiments highlight the potential for using PLMs to enhance the adaptability of sentence suggestion systems and therefore improve the language learning journey.

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PyFoma: a Python finite-state compiler module

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