United States

Document logical structuring aims to extract the underlying hierarchical structure of documents, which is crucial for document intelligence. Traditional approaches often fall short in handling the complexity and the variability of lengthy documents. To address these issues, we introduce Seg2Act, an end-to-end, generation-based method for document logical structuring, revisiting logical structure extraction as an action generation task. Specifically, given the text segments of a document, Seg2Act iteratively generates the action sequence via a global context-aware generative model, and simultaneously updates its global context and current logical structure based on the generated actions. Experiments on ChCatExt and HierDoc datasets demonstrate the superior performance of Seg2Act in both supervised and transfer learning settings.

EMNLP 2024

Seg2Act: Global Context-aware Action Generation for Document Logical Structuring

llm efficiency

sparsity

pruning

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.

poster

## 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.

In the rapidly evolving field of conversational AI, Ontology Expansion (OnExp) is crucial for enhancing the adaptability and robustness of conversational agents. Traditional models rely on static, predefined ontologies, limiting their ability to handle new and unforeseen user needs. This survey paper provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art techniques in OnExp for conversational understanding. It categorizes the existing literature into three main areas: (1) New Intent Discovery, (2) New Slot-Value Discovery, and (3) Joint OnExp. By examining the methodologies, benchmarks, and challenges associated with these areas, we highlight several emerging frontiers in OnExp to improve agent performance in real-world scenarios and discuss their corresponding challenges. This survey aspires to be a foundational reference for researchers and practitioners, promoting further exploration and innovation in this crucial domain.

A Survey of Ontology Expansion for Conversational Understanding

Argumentative essay generation (AEG) aims to generate complete texts on specific controversial topics or debates. Although current AEG methods can generate individual opinions, they often overlook the high-level connections between these opinions. This often leads to the generated results being mired in logical confusion, unable to proof their own arguments effectively. The generated essay may present evidence that contradicts the claims or they may fail to assemble the claims into logical flow. In this paper, we present a unified two-stage framework: Proof-Enhancement and Self-Annotation (PESA) for AEG with a focus on logical enhancement. Specifically, we first construct pseudo-labels for logical information,claims and grounds, using a large language model. We then propose a tree planning approach that introduces proof principles and ensures logical consistency. Extensive experimental results show that, benefiting from proof principle guidance, PESA generates argumentative essays with better logical validity and persuasiveness than strong baseline models.

Prove Your Point!: Bringing Proof-Enhancement Principles to Argumentative Essay Generation

Image-text contrastive models such as CLIP learn transferable and robust representations for zero-shot transfer to a variety of downstream tasks. However, to obtain strong downstream performances, prompts need to be carefully curated, which can be a tedious engineering task. To address the issue of manual prompt engineering, prompt-tuning is used where a set of contextual vectors are learned by leveraging information from the training data. Despite their effectiveness, existing prompt-tuning frameworks often lack interpretability, thus limiting their ability to understand the compositional nature of images. In this work, we first identify that incorporating compositional attributes (e.g., a "green" tree frog) in the design of manual prompts can significantly enhance image-text alignment scores. Building upon this observation, we propose a novel and interpretable prompt-tuning method named IntCoOp, which learns to jointly align attribute-level inductive biases and class embeddings during prompt-tuning. To assess the effectiveness of our approach, we evaluate IntCoOp across two representative tasks in a few-shot learning setup: generalization to novel classes, and unseen domain shifts. Through extensive experiments across 10 downstream datasets on CLIP, we find that introducing attribute-level inductive biases leads to superior performance against state-of-art prompt tuning frameworks. Notably, in a 16-shot setup, IntCoOp improves CoOp by 7.35% in average performance across 10 diverse datasets.

IntCoOp: Interpretability-Aware Vision-Language Prompt Tuning

While humans naturally develop theory of mind (ToM), the capability to understand other people's mental states and beliefs, state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) underperform on simple ToM benchmarks. 
We posit that we can extend our understanding of LLMs' ToM abilities by evaluating key human ToM precursors$-$perception inference and perception-to-belief inference$-$in LLMs. 
We introduce two datasets, Percept-ToMi and Percept-FANToM, to evaluate these precursory inferences for ToM in LLMs by annotating characters' perceptions on ToMi and FANToM, respectively.
Our evaluation of eight state-of-the-art LLMs reveals that the models generally perform well in perception inference while exhibiting limited capability in perception-to-belief inference (e.g., lack of inhibitory control).
Based on these results, we present PercepToM, a novel ToM method leveraging LLMs' strong perception inference capability while supplementing their limited perception-to-belief inference. 
Experimental results demonstrate that PercepToM significantly enhances LLM's performance, especially in false belief scenarios.

Perceptions to Beliefs: Exploring Precursory Inferences for Theory of Mind in Large Language Models

Existing popular video captioning benchmarks and models often produce generic captions for videos that lack specific identification of individuals, locations, or organizations (named entities). However, in the case of news videos, the setting is more demanding, requiring the inclusion of such named entities for meaningful summarization. Therefore, we introduce the task of directly summarizing news videos into captions that are entity-aware. To facilitate research in this area, we have collected a large-scale dataset named VIEWS (VIdeo NEWS). Within this task, we face challenges inherent to recognizing named entities and navigating diverse, dynamic contexts, all while relying solely on visual cues. To address these challenges, we propose a model-agnostic approach that enriches visual information extracted from videos with context sourced from external knowledge, enabling the generation of entity-aware captions. We validate the effectiveness of our approach across three video captioning models. Additionally, we conduct a critical analysis of our methodology to gain insights into the complexity of the task, the challenges it presents, and potential avenues for future research.

VIEWS: Entity-Aware News Video Captioning

A major reason behind the recent success of large language models (LLMs) is their $\textit{in-context learning}$ capability, which makes it possible to rapidly adapt them to downstream text-based tasks by prompting them with a small number of relevant demonstrations. While large vision-language models (VLMs) have recently been developed for tasks requiring both text and images, they largely lack in-context learning over visual information, especially in understanding and generating text about videos. In this work, we implement $\textbf{E}$mergent $\textbf{I}$n-context $\textbf{Le}$arning on $\textbf{V}$ideos ($\textbf{EILeV}$), a novel training paradigm that induces in-context learning over video and text by capturing key properties of pre-training data found by prior work to be essential for in-context learning in transformers. In our experiments, we show that $\textbf{EILeV}$-trained models outperform other off-the-shelf VLMs in few-shot video narration for novel, rare actions. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these key properties of bursty distributions, skewed marginal distributions, and dynamic meaning each contribute to varying degrees to VLMs' in-context learning capability in narrating procedural videos. Our results, analysis, and $\textbf{EILeV}$-trained models yield numerous insights about the emergence of in-context learning over video and text, creating a foundation for future work to optimize and scale VLMs for open-domain video understanding and reasoning.

Eliciting In-Context Learning in Vision-Language Models for Videos Through Curated Data Distributional Properties

We propose misogyny detection as an Argumentative Reasoning task and we investigate the capacity of large language models (LLMs) to understand the implicit reasoning used to convey misogyny in both Italian and English. The central aim is to generate the missing reasoning link between a message and the implied meanings encoding the misogyny. Our study uses argumentation theory as a foundation to form a collection of prompts in both zero-shot and few-shot settings. These prompts integrate different techniques, including chain-of-thought reasoning and augmented knowledge. Our findings show that LLMs fall short on reasoning capabilities about misogynistic comments and that they mostly rely on their implicit knowledge derived from internalized common stereotypes about women to generate implied assumptions, rather than on inductive reasoning.

Language is Scary when Over-Analyzed: Unpacking Implied Misogynistic Reasoning with Argumentation Theory-Driven Prompts

Computational Meme Understanding, which concerns the automated comprehension of memes, has garnered interest over the last four years and is facing both substantial opportunities and challenges. We survey this emerging area of research by first introducing a comprehensive taxonomy for memes along three dimensions -- forms, functions, and topics. Next, we present three key tasks in Computational Meme Understanding, namely, classification, interpretation, and explanation, and conduct a comprehensive review of existing datasets and models, discussing their limitations. Finally, we highlight the key challenges and recommend avenues for future work.

Computational Meme Understanding: A Survey

Low-resource domains, characterized by scarce data and annotations, present significant challenges for language and visual understanding tasks, with the latter much under-explored in the literature. Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLM) have shown promising results in high-resource domains but fall short in low-resource concepts that are under-represented (e.g. only a handful of images per category) in the pre-training set. We tackle the challenging task of zero-shot low-resource image classification from a novel perspective. By leveraging a retrieval-based strategy, we achieve this in a training-free fashion. Specifically, our method, named CoRE (Combination of Retrieval Enrichment), enriches the representation of both query images and class prototypes by retrieving relevant textual information from large web-crawled databases. This retrieval-based enrichment significantly boosts classification performance by incorporating the broader contextual information relevant to the specific class. We validate our method on a newly established benchmark covering diverse low-resource domains, including medical imaging, rare plants, and circuits. Our experiments demonstrate that CoRE outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods that rely on synthetic data generation and model fine-tuning.

Retrieval-enriched zero-shot image classification in low-resource domains

Guiding users through complex procedural plans is an inherently multimodal task in which having visually illustrated plan steps is crucial to deliver an effective plan guidance. However, existing works on plan-following language models (LMs) often are not capable of multimodal input and output. In this work, we present MM-PlanLLM, the first multimodal LLM designed to assist users in executing instructional tasks by leveraging both textual plans and visual information. Specifically, we bring cross-modality through two key tasks: Conversational Video Moment Retrieval, where the model retrieves relevant step-video segments based on user queries, and Visually-Informed Step Generation, where the model generates the next step in a plan, conditioned on an image of the user's current progress. MM-PlanLLM is trained using a novel multitask-multistage approach, designed to gradually expose the model to multimodal instructional-plans semantic layers, achieving strong performance on both multimodal and textual dialogue in a plan-grounded setting. Furthermore, we show that the model delivers cross-modal temporal and plan-structure representations aligned between textual plan steps and instructional video moments.

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A Survey of Ontology Expansion for Conversational Understanding

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