United States

Discourse coherence is vital for language understanding but underexplored in low-resource languages. Multimodal cues—gestures, prosody, and visual context—can complement scarce text, yet systematic integration is lacking. We present a pilot study on multimodal discourse coherence in Wolof, introducing 45 videos (6.2 hours), 1,096 utterances, and 1,432 annotated relations across six types. Our fusion model combines textual (mBERT), auditory (Wav2Vec + prosody), and visual (ResNet + pose) features, achieving 52.4 macro F1, surpassing text-only (48.7) and audio-only (35.2) baselines. Audio aids causal relations, visuals support contrast, and we discuss annotation challenges and cross-modal alignment. This work provides a foundation for discourse-aware NLP in low-resource languages.

ACL 2026

Modeling Multimodal Discourse Coherence in Low-Resource Languages: Work-in-Progress

multimodal ai

discourse coherence

low-resource languages

### 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)

workshop paper

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.

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Discourse presentation is when speech, writing, or thought (SW&T) attributed to a discourse entity (such as a character in a narrative) is presented within a discourse. Discourse presentations can be generally broken into direct or indirect: direct presentation is when the text quotes the words or thoughts verbatim, whereas in indirect presentation the text expresses the SW&T in the narrator's or writer's own words. Automatically detecting and categorizing discourse presentations supports discourse and narrative analysis and improves attribution for downstream NLP tasks, but detecting indirect discourse presentations remains challenging due to diverse surface forms and subtle perspective shifts. We study detection and categorization of discourse presentations on a corrected version of the Semino & Short's English Narrative SW&TP corpus. We cast the task as five-way clause classification: Direct Speech & Writing, Direct Thought, Indirect Speech & Writing, Indirect Thought, and Narrative (i.e., no discourse presentation). We compare four approaches: (1) CNN; (2) generative baseline (Claude Sonnet 4.6); (3) untuned BERT, and (4) fine-tuned BERT. The CNN baseline achieves 0.43 F1 and exhibits substantial confusion with the Narrative class. Claude achieves 0.68 F1 but performs unevenly across classes and fails to recover Indirect Thought. BERT achieves 0.81 F1 overall but struggles on indirect categories. The fine-tuning BERT yields strong performance (0.88 F1), with remaining errors concentrated in Indirect Speech & Writing (F1 = 0.60). We release our code and the corrected dataset to support reproducibility. To our knowledge, this is the first time computational approaches have been evaluated across the full range of SW&TP discourse presentation types.

Baselines for Detection and Classification of Discourse Presentation in English Narrative

The relations connecting propositions in discourse such as cause (A because B) or concession (A although B) are a subject of intense interest in Computational Linguistics and Pragmatics, but challenging to study and compare across languages. Recent progress in standardizing discourse relation inventories across datasets offers the potential to facilitate such studies, but is hindered by the complexity of relevant data and the lack of easily accessible interfaces to analyze it. In this paper we present DiscoExplorer, a new open source web interface, capable of running on local computers, which we use to make datasets from the DISRPT Shared Task on discourse relation classification publicly available, covering 16 different languages. We present the query language, search and visualization facilities for relations and signaling devices such as connectives, as well as some example studies.

DiscoExplorer: An Open Interface for the Study of Multilingual Discourse Relations

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) relies predominantly on written, curated corpora, which may limit their reliability on spontaneous speech. Oral language exhibits real-time planning markers — filled pauses, repetitions, false starts, and vowel lengthenings — that modulate epistemic commitment. This pilot study investigates how such disfluencies affect the alignment between LLM confidence and a discourse-pragmatic uncertainty proxy in a Portuguese model (Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct). Using a benchmark of 344 turns from the Roda Viva corpus, we contrast faithful Conversation Analysis transcriptions with sanitized versions and combine binned divergence metrics (ECE, OE) with rank correlation and multivariate regression analyses. We find that model confidence is overwhelmingly driven by a surface feature — turn length (${\beta_{\text{std}}} = +14.47, p < 0.001$) — rather than by pragmatic markers of uncertainty (${\beta_{\text{oral}}} = -3.09, {\beta_{\text{hedges}}} = -0.97$, both non-significant; $R^2 = 0.29$). After controlling for length, residual effects of disfluency markers align in the human-expected direction but are dwarfed by length bias. We argue that this surface-feature dominance subsumes the pragmatic blindness phenomenon and explains the substantial divergence observed via ECE (41.95) and OE (4.29) between faithful and sanitized conditions.

Speech Disfluencies and LLM Confidence: Length Bias and Pragmatic Insensitivity in Brazilian Portuguese

Recent work representing discourse relations such as "cause" or "concession" in the framework of eRST has connected hierarchical discourse parsing to explicit connectives, such as 'because' or 'although', bringing the framework closer to lexicalized shallow parsing in the tradition of PDTB. However, while PDTB postulates implicit, unexpressed connectives (i.e. an implied 'although' etc.), no such devices are recognized in eRST, and consequently next to nothing is known about the relationship between PDTB-style implicit connectives and eRST-style discourse graphs. In this paper we propose and evaluate an algorithm to align eRST data, which already indicates explicit connectives, to implicit connective annotations following the PDTB guidelines. We also conduct the first evaluation of the relationship between hierarchical RST-style relations and PDTB implicit connectives.

DM Doppelgangers: Implicit Connectives as eRST Signals

In this paper, we present a descriptive corpus analysis of bridging anaphora across 16 genres of English, leveraging the multi-genre GUMBridge corpus for varieties of bridging anaphora. We begin our investigation by examining the distribution of bridging instances by sub-varieties and across genres, finding that spoken genres have less bridging instances than written ones. We then investigate the linguistic environments of bridging anaphora and their corresponding associative antecedents in the underlying data of the corpus, examining both categorical features (entity type, part of speech, syntactic dependency relations) and numeric features (mention length, cluster size, salience, and distance between the bridging anaphor and antecedent). We find bridging anaphora have a tendency to be shorter and are more often definite, and bridging antecedents show tendency to be more salient than other entities. Finally, we analyze how several of the numeric features of bridging environments vary by genre, finding consistency across genres for observed trends in the environments of bridging anaphora and antecedents.

What's in a Bridge?: A Descriptive, Multi-Genre Analysis of the GUMBridge Corpus for Varieties of Bridging Anaphora

Crowd-sourcing implicit discourse relations has been shown to yield a variety of plausible interpretations, but also to be prone to annotation errors. In this study, we apply the dataset cartography technique (Swayamdipta et al., 2020) to implicit discourse relations. We find that error identification via low confidence is infeasible for IDRR datasets; 
however, high confidence in models coincides with strong textual heuristics and with high item-wise agreement, pointing to shortcut use by models and, partly, by crowd workers. Balancing out this factor is required to ensure robust IDRR learning and evaluation.

Dataset Cartography for IDRR: Promises and Pitfalls

This paper introduces a novel 'universal' approach to discourse annotation, serving as a comprehensive synthesis of the ISO 24617-8 semantic annotation framework and a newly developed multi-layer model of coherence relations. To address the complexities of text analysis, we present a hierarchical classification and a systematic decision tree. By unifying disparate formalisms, our model provides researchers with a robust, standardised methodology for analysing complex discourse structures across various linguistic contexts.

Universal Discourse Relations: A Proposal

This abstract describes a work-in-progress study of conversation-level effects on in-context word meaning. The abstract describes a definition modeling-based metric for lexical semantic conversational contingency and presents the results of a pilot study using the Fora corpus.

Investigating discourse-level lexical semantic adaptation: A definition modeling approach

In this work, we propose a method for dialog simulation to gather high-quality open-domain, multi-turn question answering conversations. The simulation is grounded on Stack Exchange posts and motivated by computational discourse theory. We first convert forum posts into structured directed graphs; then, different traversals through the graph represent possible conversational trajectories. Our proposed graph traversal algorithm produces dialogs optimized for conversational efficiency. In addition, we propose an evaluation framework based on Gricean conversational maxims. Expert-level human annotators evaluate transcripts according to our framework; dialogs produced by our method receive ratings that are competitive with dialogs from prior work.

A First Step towards Dialog Simulation with Grounded Dialog Graphs

This extended abstract presents a Rational Speech-Act model predicting the persuasiveness ("argument strength") of explanations, as well as preliminary experimental data that validates the predictions of the model. While first-order Bayesian models developed by psychologists of reasoning generally predict that arguments become stronger when more reasons are provided, we investigate the competing intuition that excess reasons can weaken an argument ("the lady doth protest too much!"). We account for this effect by drawing upon a growing body of literature which shows that listeners make pragmatic inferences to rationalize violations of their "informativity expectations".

Next from ACL 2026

Baselines for Detection and Classification of Discourse Presentation in English Narrative

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