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The rapid rise of Language Models (LMs) has expanded their use in several applications. Yet, due to constraints of model size, associated cost, or proprietary restrictions, utilizing state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs is not always feasible. With open, smaller LMs emerging, more applications can leverage their capabilities, but selecting the right LM can be challenging as smaller LMs don’t perform well universally. This work tries to bridge this gap by proposing a framework to experimentally evaluate small, open LMs in practical settings through measuring semantic correctness of outputs across three practical aspects: task types, application domains and reasoning types, using diverse prompt styles. It also conducts an in-depth comparison of 10 small, open LMs to identify best LM and prompt style depending on specific application requirement using the proposed framework. We also show that if selected appropriately, they can outperform SOTA LLMs like DeepSeek-v2, GPT-4o-mini, Gemini-1.5-Pro, and even compete with GPT-4o.

NAACL 2025

Are Small Language Models Ready to Compete with Large Language Models for Practical Applications?

application-specific benchmarking

small language models

prompt engineering

model comparison

semantic evaluation

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.

workshop paper

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation (MCTG) introduces fine-grained multiple constraints in natural language generation, i.e. control attributes in topics, sentiments, and detoxification. MCTG demonstrates application prospects for trustworthy generation of Large Language Models (LLMs) but is limited by generalization issues. Existing work exploits additional structures and strategies for solutions, requiring LLMs' modifications. To activate LLMs' MCTG ability, we propose a lightweight MCTG pipeline based on data augmentation and instruction tuning. We analyze aspect bias and correlations in traditional datasets and address these concerns with augmented control attributes and sentences. Augmented datasets are feasible for instruction tuning. We conduct experiments for various LLMs backbone and parameter sizes, demonstrating general effectiveness on MCTG performance.

A Lightweight Multi Aspect Controlled Text Generation Solution For Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly acting as autonomous agents, with function calling (FC) capabilities enabling them to invoke specific tools for tasks. While prior research has primarily focused on improving FC accuracy, little attention has been given to the robustness of these agents to perturbations in their input. We introduce a benchmark assessing FC robustness in two key areas: resilience to naturalistic query variations, and stability in function calling when the toolkit expands with semantically related tools. Evaluating best-performing FC models on a carefully expanded subset of the Berkeley function calling leaderboard (BFCL), we identify critical weaknesses in existing evaluation methodologies, and highlight areas for improvement in real-world agentic deployments.

On the Robustness of Agentic Function Calling

Machine learning models have proven to be useful in various key applications such as autonomous driving or diagnosis prediction. When a model is implemented under real-world conditions, it is thus essential to detect potential errors with a trustworthy approach. This monitoring practice will render decision-making safer by avoiding catastrophic failures. In this paper, the focus is on multimodal classification. We introduce a method that addresses error detection based on unlabeled data. It leverages fused representations and computes the probability that a model will fail based on detected fault patterns in validation data. To improve transparency, we employ a sampling-based approximation of Shapley values in multimodal settings in order to explain why a prediction is assessed as erroneous in terms of feature values. Further, as explanation methods can sometimes disagree, we suggest evaluating the consistency of explanations produced by different value functions and algorithms. To show the relevance of our method, we measure it against a selection of 9 baselines from various domains on tabular-text and text-image datasets, and 2 multimodal fusion strategies for the classification models. Lastly, we show the usefulness of our explanation algorithm on misclassified samples.

Error Detection for Multimodal Classification

When verifying a claim in real-world settings, e.g. against a large collection of candidate evidence text retrieved from the web, a model is typically expected to identify and aggregate a complete set of evidence pieces that collectively provide full support to a claim. The problem becomes particularly challenging as there might exist different sets of evidence that could be used to verify the claim from different perspectives. In this paper, we formally define and study the problem of identifying such minimal evidence groups (MEGs) for fact verification. We show that MEG identification can be reduced to a Set Cover-like problem, based on an entailment model which estimates whether a given evidence group provides full or partial support to a claim. Our proposed approach achieves 18.4% & 34.8% absolute improvements on WiCE and SciFact datasets over LLM prompting. Finally, we demonstrate the downstream benefit of MEGs in applications such as claim generation.

Minimal Evidence Group Identification for Claim Verification

Previous studies have established that language models manifest stereotyped biases. Existing debiasing strategies, such as retraining a model with counterfactual data, representation projection, and prompting often fail to efficiently eliminate bias or directly alter the models' biased internal representations. To address these issues, we propose BiasEdit, an efficient model editing method to remove stereotypical bias from language models through lightweight networks that act as editors to generate parameter updates. BiasEdit employs a *debiasing loss* guiding editor networks to conduct local edits on partial parameters of a language model for debiasing while preserving the language modeling abilities during editing through a *retention loss*. Experiments on StereoSet and Crows-Pairs demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and robustness of BiasEdit in eliminating bias compared to tangental debiasing baselines, and little to no impact on the language models' general capabilities. In addition, we conduct bias tracing to probe bias in various modules and explore bias editing impacts on different components of language models.

BiasEdit: Debiasing Stereotyped Language Models via Model Editing

The internet has become a hotspot for hate speech (HS), threatening societal harmony and individual well-being. While automatic detection methods perform well in identifying explicit hate speech (ex-HS), they struggle with more subtle forms, such as implicit hate speech (im-HS). We tackle this problem by introducing a new taxonomy for im-HS detection, defining six encoding strategies named *codetypes*. We present two methods for integrating codetypes into im-HS detection: 1) prompting large language models (LLMs) directly to classify sentences based on generated responses, and 2) using LLMs as encoders with codetypes embedded during the encoding process. Experiments show that the use of codetypes improves im-HS detection in both Chinese and English datasets, validating the effectiveness of our approach across different languages.

Cracking the Code: Enhancing Implicit Hate Speech Detection through Coding Classification

Self-correction is one of the most amazing emerging capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling LLMs to self-modify an inappropriate output given a natural language feedback which describes the problems of that output. Moral self-correction is a post-hoc approach correcting unethical generations without requiring a gradient update, making it both computationally lightweight and capable of preserving the language modeling ability. Previous works have shown that LLMs can self-debias, and it has been reported that small models, i.e., those with less than 22B parameters, are *not* capable of moral self-correction. However, there is no direct proof as to why such smaller models fall short of moral self-correction, though previous research hypothesizes that larger models are skilled in following instructions and understanding abstract social norms. In this paper, we empirically validate this hypothesis in the context of social stereotyping, through meticulous prompting. Our experimental results indicate that **(i)** surprisingly, 3.8B LLMs with proper safety alignment fine-tuning can achieve very good moral self-correction performance, highlighting the significant effects of safety alignment; and **(ii)** small LLMs are indeed weaker than larger-scale models in terms of comprehending social norms and self-explanation through CoT, but all scales of LLMs show bad self-correction performance given unethical instructions.

Smaller Large Language Models Can Do Moral Self-Correction

To leverage the full potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) it is crucial to have some information on their answers' uncertainty. This means that the model has to be able to quantify how certain it is in the correctness of a given response. Bad uncertainty estimates can lead to overconfident wrong answers undermining trust in these models. Quite a lot of research has been done on language models that work with text inputs and provide text outputs. Still, since the visual capabilities have been added to these models recently, there has not been much progress on the uncertainty of Visual Language Models (VLMs). We tested three state-of-the-art VLMs on corrupted image data. We found that the severity of the corruption negatively impacted the models' ability to estimate their uncertainty and the models also showed overconfidence in most of the experiments.

Know What You do Not Know: Verbalized Uncertainty Estimation Robustness on Corrupted Images in Vision-Language Models

As LLMs grow more powerful, their most profound achievement may be recognising when to say "I don't know". Existing studies on LLM self-knowledge have been largely constrained by human-defined notions of feasibility, often neglecting the reasons behind unanswerability by LLMs and failing to study deficient types of self-knowledge. This study aims to obtain intrinsic insights into different types of LLM self-knowledge with a novel methodology: allowing them the flexibility to set their own feasibility boundaries and then analysing the consistency of these limits. We find that even frontier models like GPT-4o and Mistral Large are not sure of their own capabilities more than 80% of the time, highlighting a significant lack of trustworthiness in responses. Our analysis of confidence balance in LLMs indicates that models swing between overconfidence and conservatism in feasibility boundaries depending on task categories and that the most significant self-knowledge weaknesses lie in temporal awareness and contextual understanding. These difficulties in contextual comprehension additionally lead models to question their operational boundaries, resulting in considerable confusion within the self-knowledge of LLMs. We make our code and results available publicly.

Line of Duty: Evaluating LLM Self-Knowledge via Consistency in Feasibility Boundaries

Adversarial factuality refers to the deliberate insertion of misinformation into input prompts by an adversary, characterized by varying levels of expressed confidence. In this study, we systematically evaluate the performance of several open-source large language models (LLMs) when exposed to such adversarial inputs. Three tiers of adversarial confidence are considered: strongly confident, moderately confident, and limited confidence. Our analysis encompasses eight LLMs: LLaMA 3.1 (8B), Phi 3 (3.8B), Qwen 2.5 (7B), Deepseek-v2 (16B), Gemma2 (9B), Falcon (7B), Mistrallite (7B), and LLaVA (7B). Empirical results indicate that LLaMA 3.1 (8B) exhibits a robust capability in detecting adversarial inputs, whereas Falcon (7B) shows comparatively lower performance. Notably, for the majority of the models, detection success improves as the adversary's confidence decreases; however, this trend is reversed for LLaMA 3.1 (8B) and Phi 3 (3.8B), where a reduction in adversarial confidence corresponds with diminished detection performance. Further analysis of the queries that elicited the highest and lowest rates of successful attacks reveals that adversarial attacks are more effective when targeting less commonly referenced or obscure information.

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