Austria

Sarcasm is a complex form of sentiment expression widely used in human daily life. Previous work primarily defines sarcasm as a form of verbal irony, which covers only a subset of real-world sarcastic expressions. However, sarcasm serves multifaceted functions and manifests itself through various rhetorical devices, such as echoic mention, rhetorical question and hyperbole. To fully capture its complexity, this paper investigates fine-grained sarcasm classification through the lens of rhetorical devices, and introduces RedSD, a RhEtorical Device-Aware Sarcasm Dataset with counterfactually augmented data.To construct the dataset, we extract sarcastic dialogues from situation comedies (i.e., sitcoms), and summarize nine rhetorical devices commonly employed in sarcasm. We then propose a rhetorical device-aware counterfactual data generation pipeline facilitated by both Large Language Models (LLMs) and human revision. Additionally, we propose duplex counterfactual augmentation that generates counterfactuals for both sarcastic and non-sarcastic dialogues, to further enhance the scale and diversity of the dataset.Experimental results on the dataset demonstrate that fine-tuned models exhibit a more balanced performance compared to zero-shot models, including GPT-3.5 and LLaMA 3.1, underscoring the importance of integrating various rhetorical devices in sarcasm detection. Our dataset is avaliable at https://github.com/qqHong73/RedSD.

ACL 2025

Rhetorical Device-Aware Sarcasm Detection with Counterfactual Data Augmentation

counterfactual data augmentation

sentiment analysis

sarcasm 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). 

poster

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*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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Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Despite advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP), models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, such as synonym substitutions. While prior work has focused on improving robustness for feed-forward and convolutional architectures, the robustness of recurrent networks and modern state space models (SSMs), such as S4, remains understudied. These architectures pose unique challenges due to their sequential processing and complex parameter dynamics. In this paper, we introduce a novel regularization technique based on Growth Bound Matrices (GBM) to improve NLP model robustness by reducing the impact of input perturbations on model outputs. We focus on computing the GBM for three architectures: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), State Space models (S4), and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Our method aims to (1) enhance resilience against word substitution attacks, (2) improve generalization on clean text, and (3) providing the first systematic analysis of SSM (S4) robustness. Extensive experiments across multiple architectures and benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method improves adversarial robustness by up to (8.8%) over existing baselines. These results highlight the effectiveness of our approach, outperforming several state-of-the-art methods in adversarial defense.

Bridging Robustness and Generalization Against Word Substitution Attacks in NLP via the Growth Bound Matrix Approach

In-context learning (ICL) relies heavily on high-quality demonstrations drawn from large annotated corpora. Existing methods often detect noisy annotations by ranking local perplexities, presuming that noisy samples yield higher perplexities than their clean counterparts. However, this assumption breaks down when the noise ratio is high and many demonstrations are flawed. We re-examine the perplexity-based paradigm for text generation under noisy annotations, highlighting two sources of bias in perplexity: the annotation itself and the domain-specific knowledge inherent in large language models (LLMs). To overcome these biases, we introduce a dual-debiasing framework that uses synthesized neighbors to explicitly correct perplexity estimates, yielding a robust \emph{Sample Cleanliness Score}. This metric uncovers absolute sample cleanliness regardless of the corpus’s noise level. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method’s superior noise-detection capabilities and show that its final ICL performance is comparable to that of a fully clean demonstration corpus. Moreover, our approach remains robust even when noise ratios are extremely high.

Dual Debiasing for Noisy In-Context Learning for Text Generation

Recent advancements in deep learning have significantly enhanced the efficiency and accuracy of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, these models often require substantial computational resources, which remains a major drawback. Reducing the complexity of deep learning architectures, and exploring simpler yet effective approaches can lead to cost-efficient NLP solutions. This is also a step towards explainable AI, i.e., uncovering how a particular task is carried out. For this analysis, we chose the task of hate speech detection. We address hate speech detection by introducing a model that employs a weighted sum of valence, arousal, and dominance (VAD) scores for classification. To determine the optimal weights and classification strategies, we analyze hate speech and non-hate speech words based on both their individual and summed VAD-values. Our experimental results demonstrate that this straightforward approach can compete with state-of-the-art neural network methods, including GPT-based models, in detecting hate speech.

A Step Towards Explainable Hate Speech Detection

Knowledge Graphs represent real-world entities and the relationships between them. Multilingual Knowledge Graph Construction (mKGC) refers to the task of automatically constructing or predicting missing entities and links for knowledge graphs in a multilingual setting. In this work, we reformulate the mKGC task as a Question Answering (QA) task and introduce mRAKL: a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) based system to perform mKGC. We achieve this by using the head entity and linking relation in a question, and having our model predict the tail entity as an answer. Our experiments focus primarily on two low-resourced languages: Tigrinya and Amharic. We experiment with using higher-resourced languages, Arabic and English, to utilize cross-lingual transfer for mKGC. With a BM25 retriever, we find that the RAG-based approach improves performance over a no-context setting. Further, our ablation studies show that with an idealized retrieval system, mRAKL improves accuracy by up to 4.92 and 8.79 percentage points for Tigrinya and Amharic, respectively.

mRAKL: Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Knowledge Graph Construction for Low-Resourced Languages

Recent success of large language models (LLMs) in diverse domains showcases their potential to revolutionize scientific fields, including drug editing. Traditional drug editing relies on iterative conversations with domain experts, refining the drug until the desired property is achieved. This interactive and iterative process mirrors the strengths of LLMs, making them well-suited for drug editing. *In existing works, LLMs edit each molecule independently without leveraging knowledge from past edits.* However, human experts develop intuition about effective modifications over time through historical experience; accumulating past knowledge is pivotal for human experts, and so it is for LLMs. *In this work, we propose RL-Guider---a reinforcement-learning-agent to provide suggestions to LLMs; it uses the rich information provided from evaluating editing results made by the LLM based on the recommendations to improve itself over time.* RL-Guider is the first work that leverages both the comprehensive "world-level" knowledge of LLMs and the knowledge accumulated from historical feedback. As a result, RL-Guider mitigates several shortcomings of existing approaches and demonstrates superior performance.

RL-Guider: Leveraging Historical Decisions and Feedback for Drug Editing with Large Language Models

While large language models (LLMs) have been thoroughly evaluated for deductive and inductive reasoning, their proficiency in holistic rule learning in interactive environments remains less explored. We introduce RULEARN, a novel benchmark to assess the rule-learning abilities of LLM agents in interactive settings. In RULEARN, agents strategically interact with simulated environments to gather observations, discern patterns, and solve complex problems. To enhance the rule-learning capabilities for LLM agents, we propose IDEA, a novel reasoning framework that integrates the process of **I**nduction, **De**duction, and **A**bduction. The IDEA agent generates initial hypotheses from limited observations through abduction, devises plans to validate these hypotheses or leverages them to solve problems via deduction, and refines previous hypotheses through induction, dynamically establishing and applying rules that mimic human rule-learning behaviors. Our evaluation of the IDEA framework, which involves five representative LLMs, demonstrates significant improvements over the baseline. Furthermore, our study with human participants reveals notable discrepancies in rule-learning behaviors between humans and LLMs. We believe our benchmark will serve as a valuable and challenging resource, and IDEA will provide crucial insights for the development of LLM agents capable of human-like rule learning in real-world scenarios. Our code and data have been released at: https://github.com/KaiyuHe998/RULEARN_IDEA.

IDEA: Enhancing the Rule Learning Ability of Large Language Model Agent through Induction, Deduction, and Abduction

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit emergent in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, allowing them to adapt to unseen tasks based on example demonstrations. Traditional ICL embeds examples within the prompt, while activation steering, uses a vector derived from examples to guide the latent states of LLMs toward desired behaviors. However, traditional ICL is difficult to control quantitatively and consumes valuable context space. Existing activation steering methods apply a single sentence-level steering vector uniformly across all tokens, ignoring LLMs' token-wise, auto-regressive nature. This coarse control can lead to inconsistencies and suboptimal adjustments during generation. To address this problem, we introduce Dynamic Steering with Episodic Memory (DSEM), a novel training-free framework that aligns LLMs to given demonstrations by steering at the token level conditioned on the input query. DSEM employs a key-value memory to store associations between generated tokens and steering vectors. During inference, it uses a nearest-neighbor mechanism to dynamically compute steering vectors for each token chunk, enabling more precise and adaptive guidance. Our method surpasses strong baselines across diverse alignment tasks - including safety, style transfer, and role-playing - demonstrating improved alignment as demonstration size scales.

Dynamic Steering With Episodic Memory For Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) excel in generating unstructured text. However, they struggle with producing structured output while maintaining accuracy in zero-shot information extraction (IE), such as named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction (RE). To address these challenges, we propose CROSSAGENTIE, a multi-agent framework that enhances zero-shot IE through multi-agent LLM collaboration. CROSSAGENTIE refines LLM predictions iteratively through two mechanisms: intra-group cross-type debate, which resolves entity-label conflicts through context-based evidence and confidence aggregation, and inter-group cross-task debate, where NER and RE mutually refine outputs via bidirectional feedback. Furthermore, we introduce template fine-tuning, distilling high-confidence multi-agent outputs into a single model, significantly reducing inference cost while preserving accuracy. Experiments across five NER and five RE datasets show that CROSSAGENTIE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot baselines by a large margin. CROSSAGENTIE effectively addresses LLMs limitations in structured prediction with an effective and efficient approach for zero-shot information extraction.

CROSSAGENTIE: Cross-Type and Cross-Task Multi-Agent LLM Collaboration for Zero-Shot Information Extraction

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit knowledge disparities across languages. Encouraging LLMs to abstain when faced with knowledge gaps is a promising strategy to reduce hallucinations in multilingual settings. Current abstention strategies for multilingual scenarios primarily rely on generating feedback in various languages using LLMs and performing self-reflection. However, these methods can be adversely impacted by inaccuracies and biases in the generated feedback. To address this, from a causal perspective, we introduce CausalAbstain, a method that helps LLMs determine whether to utilize multiple generated feedback responses and how to identify the most useful ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CausalAbstain effectively selects helpful feedback and enhances abstention decisions with interpretability in both native language (Casual-native) and multilingual (Causal-multi) settings, outperforming strong baselines on two benchmark datasets covering encyclopedic and commonsense knowledge QA tasks.

CausalAbstain: Enhancing Multilingual LLMs with Causal Reasoning for Trustworthy Abstention

With the widespread of Large Language Models (LLMs), there has been an increasing need to detect LLM-generated texts, prompting extensive research in this area. However, existing detection methods mainly evaluate on static benchmarks, which neglect the evolving nature of LLMs. Relying on existing static benchmarks could create a misleading sense of security, overestimating the real-world effectiveness of detection methods. To bridge this gap, we introduce EvoBench, a dynamic benchmark considering a new dimension of generalization across continuously evolving LLMs. EvoBench categorizes the evolving LLMs into (1) updates over time and (2) developments like finetuning and pruning, covering 7 LLM families and their 29 evolving versions. To measure the generalization across evolving LLMs, we introduce a new EMG (Evolving Model Generalization) metric. Our evaluation of 14 detection methods on EvoBench reveals that they all struggle to maintain generalization when confronted with evolving LLMs. To mitigate the generalization problems, we further propose improvement strategies. For zero-shot detectors, we propose pruning the scoring model to extract shared features. For supervised detectors, we also propose a practical training strategy. Our research sheds light on critical challenges in real-world LLM-generated text detection and represents a significant step toward practical applications.

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Bridging Robustness and Generalization Against Word Substitution Attacks in NLP via the Growth Bound Matrix Approach

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