United States

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.

EMNLP 2024

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

target-driven planning

large language model

dialog generation

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

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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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.

Show and Guide: Instructional-Plan Grounded Vision and Language Model

We present LLoVi, a simple yet effective **L**anguage-based **Lo**ng-range **Vi**deo question-answering (LVQA) framework. Our method decomposes the short- and long-range modeling aspects of LVQA into two stages. First, we use a short-term visual captioner to generate textual descriptions of short video clips (0.5-8 seconds in length) densely sampled from a long input video. Afterward, an LLM aggregates the densely extracted short-term captions to answer a given question. Furthermore, we propose a novel multi-round summarization prompt that asks the LLM first to summarize the noisy short-term visual captions and then answer a given input question. To analyze what makes our simple framework so effective, we thoroughly evaluate various components of our framework. Our empirical analysis reveals that the choice of the visual captioner and LLM is critical for good LVQA performance. The proposed multi-round summarization prompt also leads to a significant LVQA performance boost. Our method achieves the best-reported results on the EgoSchema dataset, best known for very long-form video question-answering. LLoVi also outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by **10.2%** and **6.2%** on NExT-QA and IntentQA for LVQA. Finally, we extend LLoVi to grounded VideoQA, which requires both QA and temporal localization, and show that it outperforms all prior methods on NExT-GQA. Code is available at https://github.com/CeeZh/LLoVi.

A Simple LLM Framework for Long-Range Video Question-Answering

The Generalized Referring Expression Comprehension (GREC) task extends classic REC by generating image bounding boxes for objects referred to in natural language expressions, which may indicate zero, one, or multiple targets. This generalization enhances the practicality of REC models for diverse real-world applications. However, the presence of varying numbers of targets in samples makes GREC a more complex task, both in terms of training supervision and final prediction selection strategy. Addressing these challenges, we introduce RECANTFormer, a one-stage method for GREC that combines a decoder-free (encoder-only) transformer architecture with DETR-like Hungarian matching. Our approach consistently outperforms baselines by significant margins in three GREC datasets.

RECANTFormer: Referring Expression Comprehension with Varying Numbers of Targets

Although large language models (LLMs) excel in various text classification tasks, regular prompting strategies (e.g., few-shot prompting) do not work well with dementia detection via picture description. The challenge lies in the language marks for dementia are unclear, and LLM may struggle with relating its internal knowledge to dementia detection. In this paper, we present an accurate and interpretable classification approach by Adversarial Text Generation (ATG), a novel decoding strategy that could relate dementia detection with other tasks. We further develop a comprehensive set of instructions corresponding to various tasks and use them to guide ATG, achieving the best accuracy of 85%, >10% improvement compared to the regular prompting strategies. In addition, we introduce feature context, a human-understandable text that reveals the underlying features of LLM used for classifying dementia. From feature contexts, we found that dementia detection can be related to tasks such as assessing attention to detail, language, and clarity with specific features of the environment, character, and other picture content or language-related features. Future work includes incorporating multi-modal LLMs to interpret speech and picture information.

Adversarial Text Generation using Large Language Models for Dementia Detection

Hate speech groups (HSGs) may negatively influence online platforms through their distinctive language, which may affect the tone and topics of other spaces if spread beyond the HSGs. We explore the linguistic style of the Manosphere, a misogynistic HSG, on Reddit. We find that Manospheric authors have a distinct linguistic style using not only uncivil language, but a greater focus on gendered topics, which are retained when posting in other communities. Thus, potentially harmful aspects of Manospheric style carry over into posts on non-Manospheric subreddits, motivating future work to explore how this stylistic spillover may negatively influence community health.

Style-Shifting Behaviour of the Manosphere on Reddit

Clinicians often rely on data engineers to retrieve complex patient information from electronic health record (EHR) systems, a process that is both inefficient and time-consuming. We propose EHRAgent, a large language model (LLM) agent empowered with accumulative domain knowledge and robust coding capability. EHRAgent enables autonomous code generation and execution to facilitate clinicians in directly interacting with EHRs using natural language. Specifically, we formulate a multi-tabular reasoning task based on EHRs as a tool-use planning process, efficiently decomposing a complex task into a sequence of manageable actions with external toolsets. We first inject relevant medical information to enable EHRAgent to effectively reason about the given query, identifying and extracting the required records from the appropriate tables. By integrating interactive coding and execution feedback, EHRAgent then effectively learns from error messages and iteratively improves its originally generated code. Experiments on three real-world EHR datasets show that EHRAgent outperforms the strongest baseline by up to 29.6% in success rate, verifying its strong capacity to tackle complex clinical tasks with minimal demonstrations.

EHRAgent: Code Empowers Large Language Models for Few-shot Complex Tabular Reasoning on Electronic Health Records

Recently, enabling pretrained language models (PLMs) to perform zero-shot crossmodal tasks such as video question answering has been extensively studied. A popular approach is to learn a projection network that projects visual features into the input text embedding space of a PLM, as well as feed-forward adaptation layers, with the weights of the PLM frozen. However, is it really necessary to learn such additional layers? In this paper, we make the first attempt to demonstrate that the PLM is able to perform zero-shot crossmodal tasks without any crossmodal pretraining, when the observed visual concepts are injected as both additional input text tokens and augmentation in the intermediate features within each feed-forward network for the PLM. Specifically, inputting observed visual concepts as text tokens helps to inject them through the self-attention layers in the PLM; to augment the intermediate features in a way that is compatible with the PLM, we propose to construct adaptation layers based on the intermediate representation of concepts (obtained by solely inputting them to the PLM). These two complementary injection mechanisms form the proposed Deep Concept Injection, which comprehensively enables the PLM to perceive instantly without crossmodal pretraining. Extensive empirical analysis on zero-shot video question answering, as well as visual question answering, shows Deep Concept Injection achieves competitive or even better results in both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings, compared to state-of-the-art methods that require crossmodal pretraining.

Training-free Deep Concept Injection Enables Language Models for Video Question Answering

Built on the power of LLMs, numerous multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently achieved remarkable performance on various vision-language tasks. However, most existing MLLMs and benchmarks primarily focus on single-image input scenarios, leaving the performance of MLLMs when handling realistic multiple images underexplored. Although a few benchmarks consider multiple images, their evaluation dimensions and samples are very limited. In this paper, we propose a new benchmark MIBench, to comprehensively evaluate fine-grained abilities of MLLMs in multi-image scenarios. Specifically, MIBench categorizes the multi-image abilities into three scenarios: multi-image instruction (MII), multimodal knowledge-seeking (MKS) and multimodal in-context learning (MIC), and constructs 13 tasks with a total of 13K annotated samples. During data construction, for MII and MKS, we extract correct options from manual annotations and create challenging distractors to obtain multiple-choice questions. For MIC, to enable an in-depth evaluation, we set four sub-tasks and transform the original datasets into in-context learning formats. We evaluate several open-source and closed-source MLLMs on the proposed MIBench. The results reveal that although current models excel in single-image tasks, they exhibit significant shortcomings when faced with multi-image inputs, such as limited fine-grained perception, multi-image reasoning and in-context learning abilities. The annotated data of MIBench is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/StarBottle/MIBench.

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Computational Meme Understanding: A Survey

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