Singapore

In this study, we focus on automatic humor detection, a highly relevant task for conversational AI. To date, there are several English datasets for this task, but little research on how models trained on them generalize and behave in the wild. To fill this gap, we carefully analyze existing datasets, train RoBERTa-based and Naïve Bayes classifiers on each of them, and test on the rest. Training and testing on the same dataset yields good results, but the transferability of the models varies widely. Models trained on datasets with jokes from different sources show better transferability, while the amount of training data has a smaller impact. The behavior of the models on out-of-domain data is unstable, suggesting that some of the models overfit, while others learn non-specific humor characteristics. An adversarial attack shows that models trained on pun datasets are less robust. We also evaluate the sense of humor of the chatGPT and Flan-UL2 models in a zero-shot scenario. The LLMs demonstrate competitive results on humor datasets and a more stable behavior on out-of-domain data. We believe that the obtained results will facilitate the development of new datasets and evaluation methodologies in the field of computational humor. We&#39;ve made all the data from the study and the trained models publicly available at https://github.com/Humor-Research/Humor-detection.

EMNLP 2023

You Told Me That Joke Twice: A Systematic Investigation of Transferability and Robustness of Humor Detection Models

transferability

humor detection

robustness

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. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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ACL 2026

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

In this study, we focus on automatic humor detection, a highly relevant task for conversational AI. To date, there are several English datasets for this task, but little research on how models trained on them generalize and behave in the wild. To fill this gap, we carefully analyze existing datasets, train RoBERTa-based and Naïve Bayes classifiers on each of them, and test on the rest. Training and testing on the same dataset yields good results, but the transferability of the models varies widely. Models trained on datasets with jokes from different sources show better transferability, while the amount of training data has a smaller impact. The behavior of the models on out-of-domain data is unstable, suggesting that some of the models overfit, while others learn non-specific humor characteristics. An adversarial attack shows that models trained on pun datasets are less robust. We also evaluate the sense of humor of the chatGPT and Flan-UL2 models in a zero-shot scenario. The LLMs demonstrate competitive results on humor datasets and a more stable behavior on out-of-domain data. We believe that the obtained results will facilitate the development of new datasets and evaluation methodologies in the field of computational humor. We've made all the data from the study and the trained models publicly available at https://github.com/Humor-Research/Humor-detection.

technical paper

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

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EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

This paper focuses on using natural language descriptions to enhance predictive models in the chemistry field. Conventionally, chemoinformatics models are trained with extensive structured data manually extracted from the literature. In this paper, we introduce TextReact, a novel method that directly augments predictive chemistry with texts retrieved from the literature. TextReact retrieves text descriptions relevant for a given chemical reaction, and then aligns them with the molecular representation of the reaction. This alignment is enhanced via an auxiliary masked LM objective incorporated in the predictor training. We empirically validate the framework on two chemistry tasks: reaction condition recommendation and one-step retrosynthesis. By leveraging text retrieval, TextReact significantly outperforms state-of-the-art chemoinformatics models trained solely on molecular data.

Predictive Chemistry Augmented with Text Retrieval

Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) has become an increasingly crucial task in Legal AI, i.e., predicting the judgment of the case in terms of case fact description. Precedents are the previous legal cases with similar facts, which are the basis for the judgment of the subsequent case in national legal systems. Thus, it is worthwhile to explore the utilization of precedents in the LJP. Recent advances in deep learning have enabled a variety of techniques to be used to solve the LJP task. These can be broken down into two categories: large language models (LLMs) and domain-specific models. LLMs are capable of interpreting and generating complex natural language, while domain models are efficient in learning task-specific information. In this paper, we propose the precedent-enhanced LJP framework (PLJP) – a system that leverages the strength of both LLM and domain models in the context of precedents. Specifically, the domain models are designed to provide candidate labels and find the proper precedents efficiently, and the large models will make the final prediction with an in-context precedents comprehension. Experiments on the real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our PLJP. Moreover, our work shows a promising direction for LLM and domain-model collaboration that can be generalized to other vertical domains.

Precedent-Enhanced Legal Judgment Prediction with LLM and Domain-Model Collaboration | VIDEO

The math word problem (MWP) is a complex task that requires natural language understanding and logical reasoning to extract key knowledge from natural language narratives. Previous studies have provided various MWP datasets but lack diversity in problem types, lexical usage patterns, languages, and annotations for intermediate solutions. To address these limitations, we introduce a new MWP dataset, named DMath (Diverse Math Word Problems), offering a wide range of diversity in problem types, lexical usage patterns, languages, and intermediate solutions. The problems are available in English and Korean and include an expression tree and Python code as intermediate solutions. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the DMath dataset provides a new opportunity to evaluate the capability of large language models, i.e., GPT-4 only achieves about 75\% accuracy on the DMath dataset.

It Ain’t Over: A Multi-aspect Diverse Math Word Problem Dataset

Representation Learning on Knowledge Graphs (KGs) is essential for downstream tasks. 
The dominant approach, KG Embedding (KGE), represents entities with independent vectors and faces the scalability challenge. 
Recent studies propose an alternative way for parameter efficiency, which represents entities by composing entity-corresponding codewords matched from predefined small-scale codebooks. 
We refer to the process of obtaining corresponding codewords of each entity as entity quantization, for which previous works have designed complicated strategies. 
Surprisingly, this paper shows that simple random entity quantization can achieve similar results to current strategies.
We analyze this phenomenon and reveal that entity codes, the quantization outcomes for expressing entities, have higher entropy at the code level and Jaccard distance at the codeword level under random entity quantization.
Therefore, different entities become more easily distinguished, facilitating effective KG representation.
The above results show that current quantization strategies are not critical for KG representation, and there is still room for improvement in entity distinguishability beyond current strategies.

Random Entity Quantization for Parameter-Efficient Compositional Knowledge Graph Representation | VIDEO

The meaning of polysemous words often varies in a highly productive yet predictable way. Generalizing the regularity between conventional senses to derive novel word meaning is crucial for automated processing of non-literal language uses such as figurative expressions. We introduce a novel task called systematic word meta-sense extension (SWORME) to test and improve language models' ability to extend word meaning to denote new semantic domains (also called meta-senses) that bear regular semantic relations with existing senses. We found that language models prefer incremental lexical semantic change toward conceptually similar meta-senses such as logical metonymy, and are much worse at predicting highly non-literal meaning extensions such as metaphors. We propose a novel analogy-based method of word meaning extension, and show that it effectively improves language model systematicity in making both gradual and radical types of meta-sense extension. We further demonstrate that learning systematic meta-sense extensions benefits language models on multiple benchmarks of figurative language understanding.

Systematic word meta-sense extension

Sounding source localization is a challenging cross-modal task due to the difficulty of cross-modal alignment. 
Although supervised cross-modal methods achieve encouraging performance, heavy manual annotations are expensive and inefficient. Thus it is valuable and meaningful to develop unsupervised solutions. 
In this paper, we propose an **U**nsupervised **S**ounding **P**ixel **L**earning (USPL) approach which enables a pixel-level sounding source localization in unsupervised paradigm. 
We first design a mask augmentation based multi-instance contrastive learning to realize unsupervised cross-modal coarse localization, which aligns audio-visual features to obtain coarse sounding maps. 
Secondly, we present an *Unsupervised Sounding Map Refinement (SMR)* module which employs the visual semantic affinity learning to explore inter-pixel relations of adjacent coordinate features. It contributes to recovering the boundary of coarse sounding maps and obtaining fine sounding maps. 
Finally, a *Sounding Pixel Segmentation (SPS)* module is presented to realize audio-supervised semantic segmentation. 
Extensive experiments are performed on the AVSBench-S4 and VGGSound datasets, exhibiting encouraging results compared with previous SOTA methods.

Unsupervised Sounding Pixel Learning

Transformers have become a key architecture in speech processing, but our understanding of how they build up representations of acoustic and linguistic structure is limited. In this study, we address this gap by investigating how measures of 'context-mixing' developed for text models can be adapted and applied to models of spoken language. We identify a linguistic phenomenon that is ideal for such a case study: homophony in French (e.g. livre vs livres), where a speech recognition model has to attend to syntactic cues such as determiners and pronouns in order to disambiguate spoken words with identical pronunciations and transcribe them while respecting grammatical agreement. We perform a series of controlled experiments and probing analyses on Transformer-based speech models. Our findings reveal that representations in encoder-only models effectively incorporate these cues to identify the correct transcription, whereas encoders in encoder-decoder models mainly relegate the task of capturing contextual dependencies to decoder modules.

Homophone Disambiguation Reveals Patterns of Context Mixing in Speech Transformers

In the age of artificial intelligence, the role of large language models (LLMs) is becoming increasingly central. Despite their growing prevalence, their capacity to consolidate knowledge from different training documents—a crucial ability in numerous applications—remains unexplored. This paper presents the first study examining the capability of LLMs to effectively combine such information within their parameter space. We introduce EpiK-Eval, a novel question-answering benchmark tailored to evaluate LLMs' proficiency in formulating a coherent and consistent knowledge representation from segmented narratives. Evaluations across various LLMs reveal significant weaknesses in this domain. We contend that these shortcomings stem from the intrinsic nature of prevailing training objectives. Consequently, we advocate for refining the approach towards knowledge consolidation, as it harbors the potential to dramatically improve their overall effectiveness and performance. The findings from this study offer insights for developing more robust and reliable LLMs. Our code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/chandar-lab/EpiK-Eval

EpiK-Eval: Evaluation for Language Models as Epistemic Models

NLP is in a period of disruptive change that is impacting our methodologies, funding sources, and public perception.
In this work, we seek to understand how to shape our future by better understanding our past. 
We study factors that shape NLP as a field, including culture, incentives, and infrastructure by conducting long-form interviews with 26 NLP researchers of varying seniority, research area, institution, and social identity.
Our interviewees identify cyclical patterns in the field, as well as new shifts without historical parallel, including changes in benchmark culture and software infrastructure.
We complement this discussion with quantitative analysis of citation, authorship, and language use in the ACL Anthology over time.
We conclude by discussing shared visions, concerns, and hopes for the future of NLP.
We hope that this study of our field's past and present can prompt informed discussion of our community's implicit norms and more deliberate action to consciously shape the future.

To Build Our Future, We Must Know Our Past: Contextualizing Paradigm Shifts in Natural Language Processing | VIDEO

Instruction fine-tuning has conventionally been employed to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) to a variety of diverse tasks. Nonetheless, this technique often necessitates substantial computational resources, making it impractical for deployment by individuals or small-scale entities. Recently, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become a promising alternative, offering tuning capabilities with reduced resource overhead. However, attaining satisfactory performance through the fine-tuning of LoRA is a non-trivial challenge. In this paper, we propose PILLOW, which aims to improve LoRA's performance by leveraging LLM's in-context learning capability through prompt matching via reinforcement learning in resource-constrained environments. Specifically, PILLOW incorporates a matching network that selects prompts from a user-defined pool, concatenates the optimal prompts given the user instruction, and performs inference using the LoRA-fine-tuned LLMs. Compared with typical instruction fine-tuning methods, PILLOW exhibits commensurate performance on various evaluation metrics, utilizing only consumer-grade GPU resources and exhibiting a large increase in training efficiency.

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