Austria

Training large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions has significantly enhanced their ability to tackle unseen tasks. However, despite their strong generalization capabilities, instruction-following LLMs encounter difficulties when dealing with tasks that require domain knowledge. This work introduces a specialized instruction fine-tuning for the domain of computational argumentation (CA). The goal is to enable an LLM to effectively tackle any unseen CA tasks while preserving its generalization capabilities. Reviewing existing CA research, we crafted natural language instructions for 105 CA tasks to this end. On this basis, we developed a CA-specific benchmark for LLMs that allows for a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs&#39; capabilities in solving various CA tasks. We synthesized 52k CA-related instructions, adapting the self-instruct process to train a CA-specialized instruction-following LLM. Our experiments suggest that CA-specialized instruction fine-tuning significantly enhances the LLM on both seen and unseen CA tasks. At the same time, performance on the general NLP tasks of the SuperNI benchmark remains stable.

ACL 2025

ArgInstruct: Specialized Instruction Fine-Tuning for Computational Argumentation

argument schemes and reasoning

argument quality assessment

stance detection

argument mining

argument generation

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CAP Virtual Congress 2021

Training large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions has significantly enhanced their ability to tackle unseen tasks. However, despite their strong generalization capabilities, instruction-following LLMs encounter difficulties when dealing with tasks that require domain knowledge. This work introduces a specialized instruction fine-tuning for the domain of computational argumentation (CA). The goal is to enable an LLM to effectively tackle any unseen CA tasks while preserving its generalization capabilities. Reviewing existing CA research, we crafted natural language instructions for 105 CA tasks to this end. On this basis, we developed a CA-specific benchmark for LLMs that allows for a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs' capabilities in solving various CA tasks. We synthesized 52k CA-related instructions, adapting the self-instruct process to train a CA-specialized instruction-following LLM. Our experiments suggest that CA-specialized instruction fine-tuning significantly enhances the LLM on both seen and unseen CA tasks. At the same time, performance on the general NLP tasks of the SuperNI benchmark remains stable.

poster

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive moral reasoning abilities. Yet they often diverge when confronted with complex, multi-factor moral dilemmas. To address these discrepancies, we propose a framework that synthesizes multiple LLMs' moral judgments into a collectively formulated moral judgment, realigning models that deviate significantly from this consensus. Our aggregation mechanism fuses continuous moral acceptability scores (beyond binary labels) into a collective probability, weighting contributions by model reliability. For misaligned models, a targeted embedding-optimization procedure fine-tunes token embeddings for moral concepts, minimizing JS divergence to the consensus while preserving semantic integrity. Experiments on a large-scale social moral dilemma dataset show our approach builds robust consensus and improves individual model fidelity. These findings highlight the value of data-driven moral alignment across multiple models and its potential for safer, more consistent AI systems.

Probabilistic Aggregation and Targeted Embedding Optimization for Collective Moral Reasoning in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable versatility and adaptability, while their widespread adoption across various applications also raises critical safety concerns. This paper focuses on the impact of backdoored LLMs. Traditional backdoor injection methods are primarily limited to yes-or-no discriminative tasks, leading users to underestimate the potential risks of backdoored LLMs. Given the inherently generative nature of LLMs, this paper reveals that a generative backdoor injected into LLMs can expose the true safety risks in their application. We propose an editing-based generative backdoor, named MEGen, aiming to expand the backdoor to generative tasks in a unified format of any text-to any text, leading to natural generations with a specific intention. Experiments show that MEGen achieves a high attack success rate by adjusting only a small set of local parameters with few-shot samples. Notably, we show that the backdoored model, when triggered, can freely output pre-set dangerous information while completing downstream tasks. Our work highlights that MEGen enables backdoors in LLMs to exhibit generative capabilities, causing potential safety risks by altering the generative style.

MEGen: Generative Backdoor into Large Language Models via Model Editing

Complex multi-hop question answering requires large language models (LLMs) not only to retrieve external knowledge but also to reason over the retrieved information in order to arrive at the final solution. This involves two key challenges: (i) how to effectively explore the solution space and generate more potentially correct solution candidates, and (ii) how to select the optimal solution from multiple solution candidates, both of which require a training-free approach without introducing a more powerful teacher model. To address these challenges, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Monte Carlo Tree Self-Play with Reasoning Consistency (RASPberry), which introduces a more flexible action-level sampling granularity compared to existing methods, leverages Monte Carlo Tree Search for efficient solution space exploration, and utilizes an enhanced version of reasoning consistency to guide the selection of the optimal solution. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed RASPberry effectively tackles the two challenges outlined above, achieving more efficient RAG inference-time scaling. Our code is available at https://github.com/BaixuanLi/RASPberry.

RASPberry: Retrieval-Augmented Monte Carlo Tree Self-Play with Reasoning Consistency for Multi-Hop Question Answering

Correctly identifying characters and substrings of words should be a basic but essential ability of any Language Model that aims to proficiently understand and produce language. Despite so, the majority of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) are "character-blind" and struggle in spelling tasks, although they still seem to acquire some character knowledge during pre-training, a phenomenon dubbed Spelling Miracle. To shed light on this phenomenon, we systematically evaluate a range of PLMs with different parameter sizes using a controlled binary substring identification task. Through a series of experiments, we propose the first comprehensive investigation on where, when, and how a PLMs develop awareness of characters and substrings, with a particular linguistic focus on morphemic units such as prefixes, suffixes, and roots.

Beyond the Spelling Miracle: Investigating Substring Awareness in Character-Blind Language Models

Emotion Cause Triplet Extraction in Multimodal Conversations (MECTEC) has recently gained significant attention in social media analysis, aiming to extract emotion utterances, cause utterances, and emotion categories simultaneously. However, the scarcity of related datasets, with only one published dataset featuring highly uniform dialogue scenarios, hinders model development in this field. To address this, we introduce MECAD, the first multimodal, multi-scenario MECTEC dataset, comprising 989 conversations from 56 TV series spanning a wide range of dialogue contexts. In addition, existing MECTEC methods fail to explicitly model emotional and causal contexts and neglect the fusion of semantic information at different levels, leading to performance degradation. In this paper, we propose M3HG, a novel model that explicitly captures emotional and causal contexts and effectively fuses contextual information at both inter- and intra-utterance levels via a multimodal heterogeneous graph. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of M3HG compared with existing state-of-the-art methods. Codes are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/M3HG-6B34.

M3HG: Multimodal, Multi-scale, and Multi-type Node Heterogeneous Graph for Emotion Cause Triplet Extraction in Conversations

Predicting video popularity is often framed as a supervised learning task, relying heavily on meta-information and aggregated engagement data. However, video popularity is shaped by complex cultural and social factors that such approaches often overlook. We argue that Large Language Models (LLMs), with their deep contextual awareness, can better capture these nuances. To bridge the gap between pixel-based video data and token-based LLMs, we convert frame-level visuals into sequential text representations using Vision-Language Models. This enables LLMs to process multimodal content—titles, frame-based descriptions, and captions—capturing both engagement intensity (view count) and geographic spread (number of countries where a video trends). On 13,639 popular videos, a supervised neural network using content embeddings achieves 80\% accuracy, while our LLM-based approach reaches 82\% without fine-tuning. Combining the neural network's predictions with the LLM further improves accuracy to 85.5\%. Moreover, the LLM generates interpretable, attribute-based explanations for its predictions. Manual validations confirm the quality of these hypotheses and address concerns about hallucinations in the video-to-text conversion process. Overall, our findings suggest that LLMs, equipped with text-based multimodal representations, offer a powerful, interpretable, and data-efficient solution for tasks requiring rich contextual insight, such as video popularity prediction.

Large Language Models Are Natural Video Popularity Predictors

Meeting summarization suffers from limited high-quality data, mainly due to privacy restrictions and expensive collection processes. We address this gap with FAME, a dataset of 500 meetings in English and 300 in German produced by MIMIC, our new multi-agent meeting synthesis framework that generates meeting transcripts on a given knowledge source by defining psychologically grounded participant profiles, outlining the conversation, and orchestrating a large language model (LLM) debate. A modular post-processing step refines these outputs, mitigating potential repetitiveness and overly formal tones, ensuring coherent, credible dialogues at scale. We also propose a psychologically grounded evaluation framework assessing naturalness, social behavior authenticity, and transcript difficulties. Human assessments show that FAME approximates real-meeting spontaneity (4.5/5 in naturalness), preserves speaker-centric challenges (3/5 in spoken language), and introduces richer information-oriented difficulty (4/5 points in difficulty). These findings show FAME is a good and scalable proxy for real-world meeting conditions. It enables new test scenarios for meeting summarization research and other conversation-centric applications in tasks requiring conversation data or simulating social scenarios under behavioral constraints.

You need to MIMIC to get FAME: Solving Meeting Transcript Scarcity with a Multi-Agent Conversations

The theoretical code-switching (CS) literature provides numerous pointwise investigations that aim to explain patterns in CS, i.e. why bilinguals switch language in certain positions in a sentence more often than in others. A resulting consensus is that CS acceptability can be explained by the syntax of the contributing languages. There is however no large-scale, multi-language, cross-phenomena experiment that tests this claim. When designing such an experiment, we need to make sure that the system that is predicting where bilinguals tend to switch has access only to syntactic information. We provide such an experiment here. Results show that syntax alone is sufficient for an automatic system to distinguish between sentences in minimal pairs of CS, to the same degree as bilingual humans. Furthermore, the learnt syntactic patterns generalise well to unseen language pairs.

Code-Switching and Syntax: A Large-Scale Experiment

Knowledge graphs (KGs) have been a cornerstone of search and recommendation due to their ability to store factual knowledge about any domain in a structured form enabling easy search and retrieval. Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive world knowledge across different benchmarks and domains but their knowledge is inconveniently scattered across their billions of parameters. In this paper, we propose a prompt-based method to construct domain-specific KGs by extracting knowledge solely from LLMs' parameters. First, we use an LLM to create a schema for a specific domain, which contains a set of domain-representative entities and relations. After that, we use the schema to guide the LLM through an iterative data generation process equipped with Chain-of-Verification (CoVe) for increased data quality. Using this method, we construct KGs for two domains: books and landmarks, which we then evaluate against Wikidata, an open-source human-created KG. Our results show that LLMs can generate large domain-specific KGs containing tens of thousands of entities and relations. However, due to the increased hallucination rates as the procedure evolves, the practical utility of obtained KGs could remain limited.

Generating Domain-Specific Knowledge Graphs from Large Language Models

When adapting ICL with or without fine-tuning, we are curious about whether the instruction-tuned language model is able to achieve well-calibrated results without suffering from the problem of overconfidence (i.e., miscalibration) considering its strong instruction following ability, especially in such limited data setups. In this work, we deliver an in-depth analysis of the behavior across different choices of learning methods from the perspective of both performance and calibration. Through extensive controlled experiments, we observe that the miscalibration problem exists across all learning methods in low-resource setups. To achieve simultaneous gain for both in-task performance and calibration, we then study the potential of self-ensembling applied at different modeling stages (e.g., variations of in-context examples or variations in prompts or different ensembling strategies) to make the predictions more calibrated and have comparable or even better performance. We find that self-ensembling with max probability produces robust and calibrated predictions. Our work reveals the potential calibration problem of using ICL despite the improvements in task performance and sheds light on which learning paradigm to choose. We also provide practical guidelines for choosing learning paradigms depending on whether the data has been seen by the model before and a worthwhile solution via self-ensembling on how to enhance both task performance and calibration of LMs, which we hope could encourage further study.

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Probabilistic Aggregation and Targeted Embedding Optimization for Collective Moral Reasoning in Large Language Models

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