Austria

Drawing on pragmatic theories of implicature by Grice (1975) and Levinson (1983), according to which speakers often convey more than it is explicitly said, the paper argues that interpreting texts with implicit meaning correctly is essential for precise sentiment analysis. To illustrate the challenges in computational interpretation of implicatures, the study introduces a series of illustrative micro-experiments with the use of four transformer models fine-tuned for sentiment analysis. In these micro-experiments, the models classified sentences specifically designed to expose difficulties in handling implicit meaning. The study demonstrates that contrasting qualitative pragmatic analysis with the models&#39; tendency to focus on formal linguistic markers can reveal the limitations of supervised machine learning methods in detecting implicit sentiments.

ACL 2025

Pragmatic Perspective on Assessing Implicit Meaning Interpretation in Sentiment Analysis Models

implicit meaning

sentiment analysis

pragmatics

transformers

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

<iframe style="width:700px;height:400px" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/ceby/"  seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe>

Please Note: The EMNLP registration system is not currently connected to the underline site as we are still in the process of building out EMNLP 2021. You will receive access instructions from underline the week of November 1st. 

Access is given only to EMNLP upon registration, if you have not registered please do so [here](https://2021.emnlp.org/registration).

Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

Drawing on pragmatic theories of implicature by Grice (1975) and Levinson (1983), according to which speakers often convey more than it is explicitly said, the paper argues that interpreting texts with implicit meaning correctly is essential for precise sentiment analysis. To illustrate the challenges in computational interpretation of implicatures, the study introduces a series of illustrative micro-experiments with the use of four transformer models fine-tuned for sentiment analysis. In these micro-experiments, the models classified sentences specifically designed to expose difficulties in handling implicit meaning. The study demonstrates that contrasting qualitative pragmatic analysis with the models' tendency to focus on formal linguistic markers can reveal the limitations of supervised machine learning methods in detecting implicit sentiments.

poster

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair:<br>
*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.*<br>
[Read more](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GI_hvOpjswAuYdUTromfeDiPpCcqidwg/view?usp=sharing)<br><br><br>



To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. <br>Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline -  subject line "Welcome to ACL 2025". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. 

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

In education, peer instruction (PI) is widely recognized as an effective active learning strategy. However, real-world evaluations of PI are often limited by logistical constraints and variability in classroom settings. This paper introduces PEERS (Peer Enhanced Educational Realistic Simulation), a simulation framework that integrates Agent-Based Modeling (ABM), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) to emulate student learning dynamics. As an initial step, this study focuses on evaluating whether LLM-powered agents can effectively assume the roles of teachers and students within the simulation. Human evaluations and topic-based metrics show that LLMs can generate role-consistent and contextually appropriate classroom dialogues. These results serve as a foundational milestone toward building realistic, AI-driven educational simulations. Future work will include simulating the complete PEERS framework and validating its accuracy through actual classroom-based PI sessions. This research aims to contribute a scalable, cost-effective methodology for studying instructional strategies in controlled yet realistic environments.

Foundations of PEERS: Assessing LLM Role Performance in Educational Simulations

Integrating knowledge graphs (KGs) into the reasoning processes of large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising approach to mitigate hallucination. However, existing work in this area often relies on proprietary or extremely large models, limiting accessibility and scalability. In this study, we investigate the capabilities of existing integration methods for small language models (SLMs) in KG-based question answering and observe that their performance is often constrained by their limited ability to traverse and reason over knowledge graphs. To address this limitation, we propose leveraging simple and efficient exploration modules to handle knowledge graph traversal in place of the language model itself. Experiment results demonstrate that these lightweight modules effectively improve the performance of small language models on knowledge graph question answering tasks. Our code will be available on Github.

The Role of Exploration Modules in Small Language Models for Knowledge Graph Question Answering

To evaluate the creativity of large language models (LLMs) in Japanese, we construct three benchmarks: Japanese Creativity Questions (JCQ), Divergent Association Task (DAT), and Story Alteration Task (SAT). JCQ comprehensively evaluates creativity using LLMs. Meanwhile, DAT and SAT measure specific aspects of creative ability using embeddings. We also analyze correlations between JCQ and DAT, JCQ and SAT, and DAT and SAT. While JCQ provides comprehensive evaluation, it is relatively time and resource intensive. In contrast, DAT and SAT offer lower comprehensiveness but enable quick, low-cost assessment. Additionally, we investigate whether training with DAT contributes to enhancing LLM creativity.

Building Japanese Creativity Benchmarks and Applying them to Enhance LLM Creativity

Sentiment analysis in policy-related studies typically involves annotating a subset of data to fine-tune a pre-trained model, which is subsequently used to classify sentiments in the remaining unlabeled texts, enabling policy researchers to analyze sentiments in novel policy contexts under resource constraints. We argue that existing methods fail to adequately capture the temporal volatility inherent in policy-related sentiments, which are subject to external shocks and evolving discourse of opinions. We propose methods accounting for the temporal dynamics of policy-related texts. Specifically, we propose leveraging continuous time-series clustering to select data points for annotation based on temporal trends and subsequently apply model merging techniques -- each fine-tuned separately on data from distinct time intervals. Our results indicate that continuous time-series clustering followed by fine-tuning a single unified model achieves superior performance, outperforming existing methods by an average F1-score of 2.71\%. This suggests that language models can generalize to temporally sensitive texts when provided with temporally representative samples. Nevertheless, merging multiple time-specific models - particularly via greedy soup and TIES - achieves competitive performance, suggesting practical applications in dynamically evolving policy scenarios.

Towards Robust Sentiment Analysis of Temporally-Sensitive Policy-Related Online Text

Discourse relations are sometimes explicitly conveyed by specific connectives.
However, some connectives can signal multiple discourse relations; in such cases, disambiguation is necessary to determine which relation is intended.
This task is known as *discourse connective disambiguation* (Pitler and Nenkova, 2009), and particular attention is often given to connectives that can convey both *concession* and other relations (e.g., *synchronous*).
In this study, we conducted experiments to analyze which linguistic features play an important role in the disambiguation of polysemous connectives in Japanese.
A neural language model (BERT) was fine-tuned using inputs from which specific linguistic features (e.g., word order, specific lexicon, etc.) had been removed.
We analyzed which linguistic features affect disambiguation by comparing the model's performance.
Our results show that even after performing drastic removal, such as deleting one of the two arguments that constitute the discourse relation, the model's performance remained relatively robust.
However, the removal of certain lexical items or words belonging to specific lexical categories significantly degraded disambiguation performance, highlighting their importance in identifying the intended discourse relation.

Is Partial Linguistic Information Sufficient for Discourse Connective Disambiguation? A Case Study of Concession

Recent studies on semantic frame induction have demonstrated that the emergence of pre-trained language models (PLMs) has led to more accurate results.
However, most existing studies evaluate the performance using frame resources such as FrameNet, which may not accurately reflect real-world language usage.
In this study, we conduct semantic frame induction using the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (C4) and assess the applicability of existing frame induction methods to real-world data.
Our experimental results demonstrate that existing frame induction methods are effective on real-world data and that frames corresponding to novel concepts can be induced.

Semantic Frame Induction from a Real-World Corpus

Morphological defectivity is an intriguing and understudied phenomenon in linguistics. Addressing defectivity, where expected inflectional forms are absent, is essential for improving the accuracy of NLP tools in morphologically rich languages. However, traditional linguistic resources often lack coverage of morphological gaps as such knowledge requires significant human expertise and effort to document and verify. For scarce linguistic phenomena in under-explored languages, Wikipedia and Wiktionary often serve as among the few accessible resources. Despite their extensive reach, their reliability has been a subject of controversy. This study customizes a novel neural morphological analyzer to annotate Latin and Italian corpora. Using the massive annotated data, crowd-sourced lists of defective verbs compiled from Wiktionary are validated computationally. Our results indicate that while Wiktionary provides a highly reliable account of Italian morphological gaps, 7% of Latin lemmata listed as defective show strong corpus evidence of being non-defective. This discrepancy highlights potential limitations of crowd-sourced wikis as definitive sources of linguistic knowledge, particularly for less-studied phenomena and languages, despite their value as resources for rare linguistic features. By providing scalable tools and methods for quality assurance of crowd-sourced data, this work advances computational morphology and expands linguistic knowledge of defectivity in non-English, morphologically rich languages.

Lost and Found: Computational Quality Assurance of Crowdsourced Knowledge on Morphological Defectivity in Wiktionary

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong conversational abilities but often generate falsehoods. Prior work suggests that the truthfulness of simple propositions can be represented as a single linear direction in a model's internal activations, but this may not fully capture its underlying geometry. In this work, we extend the concept cone framework—recently introduced for modeling refusal—to the domain of truth. We identify multi-dimensional cones that causally mediate truth-related behavior across multiple LLM families. Our results are supported by three lines of evidence: (i) causal interventions reliably flip model responses to factual statements; (ii) learned cones generalize across model architectures; and (iii) cone-based interventions preserve unrelated model behavior. These findings reveal the richer, multidirectional structure governing simple true/false propositions in LLMs and highlight concept cones as a promising tool for probing abstract behaviors.

From Directions to Cones: Multidimensional Representations of Propositional Facts in LLMs

Congenital heart disease (CHD) presents complex, lifelong challenges often underrepresented in traditional clinical metrics. While unstructured narratives offer rich insights into patient and caregiver experiences, manual thematic analysis (TA) remains labor-intensive and unscalable. We propose a fully automated large language model (LLM) pipeline that performs end-to-end TA on clinical narratives which eliminates the need for manual coding or full transcript review. Our system employs a novel multi-agent framework, where specialized LLM agents assume roles to enhance theme quality and alignment with human analysis. To further improve thematic relevance, we optionally integrate reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). This supports scalable, patient-centered analysis of large qualitative datasets and allows LLMs to be fine-tuned for specific clinical contexts.

Auto-TA: Towards Scalable Automated Thematic Analysis (TA) via Multi-Agent Large Language Models with Reinforcement Learning

Deterministically controlling the target generation language of large multilingual language models (LLMs) remains a fundamental challenge, particularly in zero-shot settings where neither explicit language prompts nor fine-tuning are available. In this work, we investigate whether sparse autoencoder (SAE) features, previously shown to correlate with interpretable model behaviors, can be leveraged to steer the generated language of LLMs during inference. Leveraging pretrained SAEs on the residual streams of Gemma-2B and Gemma-9B, we identify features whose activations differ most significantly between English and four target languages: Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and French. By modifying just a single SAE feature at one transformer layer, we achieve controlled language shifts with up to 90% success, as measured by FastText language classification, while preserving semantic fidelity according to LaBSE (Language-Agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding) similarity. Our analysis reveals that language steering is most effective in mid-to-late transformer layers and is amplified by specific attention heads disproportionately associated with language-sensitive SAE features. These results demonstrate the promise of sparse feature steering as a lightweight and interpretable mechanism for controllable multilingual generation.

Downloads

Next from ACL 2025

Foundations of PEERS: Assessing LLM Role Performance in Educational Simulations

Similar lecture

Learning Implicit Sentiment in Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Supervised Contrastive Pre-Training