United States

Stance detection seeks to determine whether a text expresses a position in favor of, against, or neutral toward a target. Despite advances in neural architectures, performance remains inconsistent across datasets. To better understand these disparities, we analyze over 75K samples from four benchmark datasets using six neural models, focusing on stylistic and 
pragmatic language features rather than architectures or external knowledge. We extract 43 features spanning lexical 
richness, syntactic complexity, affective tone, and hedging, and assess their impact through both Logistic Regression and 
SHAP analyses. Our findings reveal distinct stylistic profiles for each stance: favor is best detected when expressed 
concisely with minimal hedging; against when paired with strong negative emotions and greater lexical variety; and none 
when texts are lexically simple and emotionally neutral. Across classes, errors arise from excessive complexity, mixed 
emotional signals, and overuse of hedging. These results advance understanding of what drives success and failure in 
stance detection.

ACL 2026

Understanding the Linguistic Cues Behind Stance Detection

affective tone

linguistic analysis

shap

interpretability

stance detection

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
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ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

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.

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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The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

A large body of research has examined the linguistic abilities of language models (LMs) across various languages. However, conclusive evidence regarding their semantic competence and world knowledge remains limited, especially for low-resource languages. In this study, we explore the semantic competence of Italian BabyLMs, focusing on their sensitivity to semantic violations. To this end, we adapt a minimal pair benchmark targeting semantic violations to evaluate the semantic abilities of BAMBI, a family of small-scale models trained on progressively larger and more complex datasets. We further compare their performance, assessed through accuracy, mean log-likelihood offset, and expected calibration error, with that of three larger Italian LMs. Our findings shed light on this aspect of semantic competence in small-scale models and how this is affected by data scale and training strategies.

Can a Remedy Find a Researcher? Exploring the Development of Semantic Knowledge in Italian BabyLMs

Long-context language models face efficiency challenges as context lengths expand. Traditional tokenization methods like BPE operate on frequency statistics, ignoring semantic structure and over-tokenizing redundant spans. We propose \textbf{SemToken}, a semantic-aware tokenization framework that adaptively compresses token sequences based on semantic density. SemToken uses lightweight encoders to identify and merge semantically equivalent spans, allocates variable granularity based on local semantic density, and dynamically adjusts token budgets during generation. Evaluations on WikiText-103, LongBench, and BookSum demonstrate 2.4$\times$ token reduction, 1.9$\times$ inference speedup, and 67\% memory reduction while preserving or improving model quality. SemToken integrates seamlessly with existing models and achieves multiplicative benefits when combined with FlashAttention (up to 2.7$\times$ total speedup).

SemToken: Semantic-Aware Tokenization for Efficient Long-Context Language Models

Hallucinations are a persistent challenge in natural language generation, including data-to-text. van Deemter (2024) introduced a framework based on the relation of logical consequence ("follows from"), which divides all data-to-text hallucinations into seven disjoint categories. We examine whether human annotators and large language models are able to apply the framework, in two data-to-text domains. Results suggest that the framework is applicable, although there are significant domain-dependent variations, as well as discrepancies between human and model judgments. We also uncover several issues that should inform future work on hallucination.

A Logic-Based Approach to Hallucinations in Data-to-Text NLG: Experiments with Human and LLM Annotators

Metaphors are part of everyday language and shape the way in which we conceptualize the world. Moreover, they play a multifaceted role in communication, making their understanding and generation a challenging task for language models (LMs). While there has been extensive work in the literature linking metaphor to the fulfilment of individual intentions, no comprehensive taxonomy of such intentions, suitable for natural language processing (NLP) applications, is available to present day. In this paper, we propose a novel taxonomy of intentions commonly attributed to metaphor, which comprises 9 categories. We also release the first dataset annotated for intentions behind metaphor use. Finally, we use this dataset to test the capability of large language models (LLMs) in inferring the intentions behind metaphor use, in zero- and in-context few-shot settings. Our experiments show that this is still a challenge for LLMs.

A framework for annotating and modelling intentions behind metaphor use

The majority of contemporary computational methods for lexical semantic change (LSC) detection are based on neural embedding distributional representations. Although these models perform well on LSC benchmarks, their results are often difficult to interpret. We explore an alternative approach that relies solely on frame semantics. We show that this method is effective for detecting semantic change and can even outperform many distributional semantic models. Finally, we present a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of its predictions, demonstrating that they are both plausible and highly interpretable.

ReFRAME or Remain: Unsupervised Lexical Semantic Change Detection with Frame Semantics

This paper studies the impact of retrieved ideologically framed texts on the outputs of large language models (LLMs). While interest in understanding ideological framing in LLMs has recently increased, little attention has been given to this issue in the context of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). To fill this gap, we design an external knowledge source based on ideologically framed texts about COVID-19 treatments. Our corpus is based on 1,117 academic articles representing discourses about controversial and endorsed treatments for the disease. We propose a corpus linguistics framework, based on Lexical Multidimensional Analysis (LMDA), to identify discourse dimensions within the corpus. LLMs are tasked to answer questions derived from three identified discourse dimensions, and two types of contextual prompts are adopted: the first comprises the user question and ideologically framed texts; and the second contains the question, ideologically framed texts, and LMDA descriptions. Alignment between reference ideologically framed texts and LLMs' responses is assessed using cosine similarity for lexical and semantic representations. Results demonstrate that retrieved ideologically framed texts influence LLM responses toward the discourse framing represented in the external knowledge, with enhanced prompts further amplifying this effect. Our findings highlight the importance of identifying ideological framings within the RAG framework in order to mitigate not just unintended ideological bias, but also the risks of intentional discourse steering of such models.

Uncovering Ideological Bias in RAG with Lexical Multidimensional Analysis: A Case Study on COVID-19

Compositionality is considered central to language abilities. As performant language systems, how do large language models (LLMs) do on compositional tasks? We evaluate adjective–noun compositionality in LLMs using two complementary setups: prompt-based functional assessment and a representational analysis of internal model states. Our results reveal a striking divergence between task performance and internal states. While LLMs reliably develop compositional representations, they fail to translate consistently into functional task success across model variants. Consequently, we highlight the importance of contrastive evaluation for obtaining a more complete understanding of model capabilities.

Evaluating Adjective-Noun Compositionality in LLMs: Functional vs Representational Perspectives

We evaluate GPT-4o's color naming across nine languages using both synthetic and human-derived stimuli. Using hue wheels, fixed basic categories, low-chroma hue lines, and dense binned CIELAB grids, we separate lexical availability of color terms from distributional agreement with human color naming. GPT-4o reliably names vivid, high-chroma colors and reproduces several known language-specific distinctions under constrained settings. However, its performance degrades sharply for low-chroma colors and for stimuli near human category boundaries. In these regions, model-human divergence remains high. 
Overall, GPT-4o shows strong cross-linguistic lexical knowledge but does not reliably match human color-naming distributions, especially in low-chroma and boundary regions.

Lexical Availability and Human Distributional Agreement in GPT-4o's Color Naming

Zero-shot Named Entity Recognition is critical for low-resource domains, yet existing approaches rely on opaque prompting of large language models or dense representations that suffer from polysemanticity. We propose an alternative approach that leverages monosemantic features of Sparse Autoencoders. We introduce $\textbf{SAE-NER}$, a training-free framework that maps monosemantic SAE feature activations to entity types through direct precision estimation, requiring no supervision or prompting. Experiments across general and biomedical domains show that SAE-NER consistently outperforms trained probing classifiers, with especially a large margin in the biomedical domain (up to +20 F1). Finally, we evaluate the utility of SAE-NER predictions as silver training data for downstream NER models. Using controlled perturbations of gold annotations to simulate realistic annotation noise, we show that false negatives are the primary bottleneck for silver-data quality, outweighing the impact of boundary imprecision and false positives.

From Latents to Labels: Zero-Shot Named Entity Recognition using Sparse Autoencoder Features

Large language models (LLMs) appear successful in emulating compositional language, yet it remains unclear what these results entail about their underlying compositional semantic representations. The probing classifier paradigm has emerged as a tool to remedy this. This paper proposes to critically review the findings of 24 probing studies targeting a wide range of linguistic and semantic phenomena. It proposes a taxonomy of probing tasks based on the linguistic primitives they presuppose, distinguishing four tiers: lexical semantics, the syntax–semantics interface, propositional semantics, and discourse and pragmatics. A gradient in representational evidence emerges: LLMs robustly encode lexical information, display less consistent sensitivity to structural relations within sentences, and obtain unsatisfactory results on tasks requiring propositional content, speech acts, or pragmatic inference. The review underscores the need for a clearer theoretical grounding of what probing tasks measure and reflects on how probing can illuminate the compositional pathways available within current language models.

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Can a Remedy Find a Researcher? Exploring the Development of Semantic Knowledge in Italian BabyLMs

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