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Do LLMs fall prey to Harnad&#39;s symbol grounding problem (SGP), as it has recently been claimed? We argue that this is not the case. Starting out with countering the arguments of Bender and Koller (2020), we trace the origins of the SGP to the computational theory of mind (CTM), and we show that it only arises with natural language when questionable theories of meaning are presupposed. We conclude by showing that it would apply to LLMs only if they were interpreted in the manner of how the CTM conceives the mind, i.e., by postulating that LLMs rely on a version of a language of thought, or by adopting said questionable theories of meaning; since neither option is rational, we conclude that the SGP does not apply to LLMs.

EMNLP 2024

Don&#39;t Underestimate the Octopus - Why The Symbol Grounding Problem Does Not Apply to LLMs

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It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields 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.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

Do LLMs fall prey to Harnad's symbol grounding problem (SGP), as it has recently been claimed? We argue that this is not the case. Starting out with countering the arguments of Bender and Koller (2020), we trace the origins of the SGP to the computational theory of mind (CTM), and we show that it only arises with natural language when questionable theories of meaning are presupposed. We conclude by showing that it would apply to LLMs only if they were interpreted in the manner of how the CTM conceives the mind, i.e., by postulating that LLMs rely on a version of a language of thought, or by adopting said questionable theories of meaning; since neither option is rational, we conclude that the SGP does not apply to LLMs.

Don't Underestimate the Octopus - Why The Symbol Grounding Problem Does Not Apply to LLMs

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## 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.
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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.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated prominent reasoning capabilities in recommendation tasks by transforming them into text-generation tasks. However, existing approaches either disregard or ineffectively model the user-item high-order interactions. To this end, this paper presents an enhanced LLM-based recommender (ELMRec). We enhance whole-word embeddings to substantially enhance LLMs' interpretation of graph-constructed interactions for recommendations, without requiring graph pre-training. This finding may inspire endeavors to incorporate rich knowledge graphs into LLM-based recommenders via whole-word embedding. We also found that LLMs often recommend items based on users' earlier interactions rather than recent ones, and present a reranking solution. Our ELMRec outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, especially achieving a 124.3% to 293.7% improvement over SOTA LLM-based methods in direct recommendations. Our code is available online.

Enhancing High-order Interaction Awareness in LLM-based Recommender Model

Natural Language Feedback (NLF) is an increasingly popular mechanism for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to human preferences. Despite the diversity of the information it can convey, NLF methods are often hand-designed and arbitrary, with little systematic grounding. At the same time, research in learning sciences has long established several effective feedback models. In this opinion piece, we compile ideas from pedagogy to introduce FELT, a feedback framework for LLMs that outlines various characteristics of the feedback space, and a feedback content taxonomy based on these variables, providing a general mapping of the feedback space. In addition to streamlining NLF designs, FELT also brings out new, unexplored directions for research in NLF. We make our taxonomy available to the community, providing guides and examples for mapping our categorizations to future research.

Let Me Teach You: Pedagogical Foundations of Feedback for Language Models

Computational fact-checking (FC) relies on supervised models to verify claims based on given evidence, requiring a resource-intensive process to annotate large volumes of training data. We introduce Unown, a novel framework that generates training instances for FC systems automatically using both textual and tabular content. Unown selects relevant evidence and generates supporting and refuting claims with advanced negation artifacts. Designed to be flexible, Unown accommodates various strategies for evidence selection and claim generation, offering unparalleled adaptability. We comprehensively evaluate Unown on both text-only and table+text benchmarks, including Feverous, SciFact, and MMFC, a new multi-modal FC dataset. Our results prove that Unown examples are of comparable quality to expert-labeled data, even enabling models to achieve up to 5% higher accuracy. The code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/disi-unibo-nlp/unown

Unknown Claims: Generation of Fact-Checking Training Examples from Unstructured and Structured Data

Recent work has aimed to improve LLM generations by filtering out hallucinations, thereby improving the precision of the information in responses. Correctness of a long-form response, however, also depends on the recall of multiple pieces of information relevant to the question. In this paper, we introduce Atomic Self-Consistency (ASC), a technique for improving the recall of relevant information in an LLM response. ASC follows recent work, Universal Self-Consistency (USC) in using multiple stochastic samples from an LLM to improve the long-form response. Unlike USC which only focuses on selecting the best single generation, ASC picks authentic subparts from the samples and merges them into a superior composite answer. Through extensive experiments and ablations, we show that merging relevant subparts of multiple samples performs significantly better than picking a single sample. ASC demonstrates significant gains over USC on multiple factoids and open-ended QA datasets - ASQA, QAMPARI, QUEST, ELI5 with ChatGPT and Llama3. Our analysis also reveals untapped potential for enhancing long-form generations using the approach of merging multiple samples.

Atomic Self-Consistency for Better Long Form Generations

Mental illness remains one of the most critical public health issues. Despite its importance, many mental health professionals highlight a disconnect between their training and actual real-world patient practice. To help bridge this gap, we propose PATIENT-Ψ, a novel patient simulation framework for cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) training. To build PATIENT-Ψ, we construct diverse patient cognitive models based on CBT principles and use large language models (LLMs) programmed with these cognitive models to act as a simulated therapy patient. We propose an interactive training scheme, PATIENT-Ψ-TRAINER, for mental health trainees to practice a key skill in CBT -- formulating the cognitive model of the patient -- through role-playing a therapy session with PATIENT-Ψ. To evaluate PATIENT-Ψ, we conducted a comprehensive user study of 13 mental health trainees and 20 experts. The results demonstrate that practice using PATIENT-Ψ-TRAINER enhances the perceived skill acquisition and confidence of the trainees beyond existing forms of training such as textbooks, videos, and role-play with non-patients. Based on the experts' perceptions, PATIENT-Ψ is perceived to be closer to real patient interactions than GPT-4, and PATIENT-Ψ-TRAINER holds strong promise to improve trainee competencies. Our code and data are released at \url{https://github.com/ruiyiw/patient-psi}.

PATIENT-Ψ: Using Large Language Models to Simulate Patients for Training Mental Health Professionals

Multi-label text classification (MLTC) tasks in the medical domain often face the long-tail label distribution problem. Prior works have explored hierarchical label structures to find relevant information for few-shot classes, but mostly neglected to incorporate external knowledge from medical guidelines. This paper presents DKEC, Domain Knowledge Enhanced Classification for diagnosis prediction with two innovations: (1) automated construction of heterogeneous knowledge graphs from external sources to capture semantic relations among diverse medical entities, (2) incorporating the heterogeneous knowledge graphs in few-shot classification using a label-wise attention mechanism. We construct DKEC using three online medical knowledge sources and evaluate it on a real-world Emergency Medical Services (EMS) dataset and a public electronic health record (EHR) dataset. Results show that DKEC outperforms the state-of-the-art label-wise attention networks and transformer models of different sizes, particularly for the few-shot classes. More importantly, it helps the smaller language models achieve comparable performance to large language models.

DKEC: Domain Knowledge Enhanced Multi-Label Classification for Diagnosis Prediction

People tend to distribute information evenly in language production for better and clearer communication. In this study, we compared essays written by second language (L2) learners with various native language (L1) backgrounds to investigate how they distribute information in their non-native L2 production. Analyses of surprisal and constancy of entropy rate indicated that writers with higher L2 proficiency can reduce the expected uncertainty of language production while still conveying informative content. However, the uniformity of information distribution showed less variability among different groups of L2 speakers, suggesting that this feature may be universal in L2 essay writing and less affected by L2 writers’ variability in L1 background and L2 proficiency.

Learning to Write Rationally: How Information Is Distributed in Non-native Speakers’ Essays

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) poses challenges in detecting and mitigating digital deception, as these models can emulate human conversational patterns and facilitate chat-based social engineering (CSE) attacks. This study investigates the dual capabilities of LLMs as both facilitators and defenders against CSE threats. We develop a novel dataset, $\textbf{SEConvo}$, simulating CSE scenarios in academic and recruitment contexts, and designed to examine how LLMs can be exploited in these situations. Our findings reveal that, while off-the-shelf LLMs generate high-quality CSE content, their detection capabilities are suboptimal, leading to increased operational costs for defense. In response, we propose $\textbf{ConvoSentinel}$, a modular defense pipeline that improves detection at both the message and the conversation levels, offering enhanced adaptability and cost-effectiveness. The retrieval-augmented module in $\textbf{ConvoSentinel}$ identifies malicious intent by comparing messages to a database of similar conversations, enhancing CSE detection at all stages. Our study highlights the need for advanced strategies to leverage LLMs in cybersecurity. Our code and data are available at this GitHub repository: https://github.com/lynneeai/ConvoSentinel.git.

Defending Against Social Engineering Attacks in the Age of LLMs

Systems with both language comprehension and generation capabilities can benefit from the tight connection between the two. This work studies coupling comprehension and generation with focus on continually learning from interaction with users. We propose techniques to tightly integrate the two capabilities for both learning and inference. We situate our studies in two-player reference games, and deploy various models for thousands of interactions with human users, while learning from interaction feedback signals. We show dramatic improvements in performance over time, with comprehension-generation coupling leading to performance improvements up to 26% in absolute terms and up to 17% higher accuracies compared to a non-coupled system. Our analysis also shows coupling has substantial qualitative impact on the system's language, making it significantly more human-like.

Learning from Feedback with Coupled Comprehension and Generation

In text generation, hallucinations refer to the generation of seemingly coherent text that contradicts established knowledge. One compelling hypothesis is that hallucinations occur when a language model is given a generation task outside its parametric knowledge (due to rarity, recency, domain, etc.). A common strategy to address this limitation is to infuse the language models with retrieval mechanisms, providing the model with relevant knowledge for the task. In this paper, we leverage the planning capabilities of instruction-tuned LLMs and analyze how planning can be used to guide retrieval to further reduce the frequency of hallucinations. We empirically evaluate several variations of our proposed approach on long-form text generation tasks. By improving the coverage of relevant facts, plan-guided retrieval and generation can produce more informative responses while providing a higher rate of attribution to source documents.

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Enhancing High-order Interaction Awareness in LLM-based Recommender Model

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