United States

Generative large language models (LLMs) are now used extensively for text classification in computational social science (CSS).
In this work, we focus on the steps before and after LLM prompting: \emph{conceptualization} of the categories to classify and using LLM predictions in downstream statistical inference. We argue these steps have been overlooked in much of LLM-era CSS and LLMs can tempt analysts to skip conceptualization altogether. For example, a political scientist classifying &quot;protest&quot; with LLMs may never be forced to craft a definition: unlike human annotators who would ask clarifying questions, an LLM can silently accept an underspecified concept to classify and return plausible-looking labels. Using simulations, we show that conceptualization failures induce downstream inferential bias that cannot be corrected solely by a more accurate LLM or post-hoc bias correction methods. We conclude by reminding CSS analysts that conceptualization is still a first-order concern in the LLM-era and provide concrete advice for pursuing low-cost, unbiased, low-variance downstream estimates.

ACL 2026

What is a protest anyway? Codebook conceptualization is still a first-order concern in LLM-era classification

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Generative large language models (LLMs) are now used extensively for text classification in computational social science (CSS).
In this work, we focus on the steps before and after LLM prompting: \emph{conceptualization} of the categories to classify and using LLM predictions in downstream statistical inference. We argue these steps have been overlooked in much of LLM-era CSS and LLMs can tempt analysts to skip conceptualization altogether. For example, a political scientist classifying "protest" with LLMs may never be forced to craft a definition: unlike human annotators who would ask clarifying questions, an LLM can silently accept an underspecified concept to classify and return plausible-looking labels. Using simulations, we show that conceptualization failures induce downstream inferential bias that cannot be corrected solely by a more accurate LLM or post-hoc bias correction methods. We conclude by reminding CSS analysts that conceptualization is still a first-order concern in the LLM-era and provide concrete advice for pursuing low-cost, unbiased, low-variance downstream estimates.

technical 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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In-Context Learning (ICL) allows large language models to adapt to new tasks from a few demonstrations, but its reliability remains a concern: predictions are highly sensitive to both prompt design and the model's ability to understand the context, obscuring whether failures arise from data properties or model limitations. Uncertainty decomposition—separating aleatoric from epistemic sources—is particularly crucial in this setting, yet existing methods, designed for standard generation tasks, fail to capture the unique dynamics of ICL. To address this, we introduce a concept of self-function vectors, built upon Bayesian views and the mechanistic interpretability of ICL. These vectors leverage internal model representations to model the latent concept learned during in-context prompting, thereby enabling a direct estimation of aleatoric uncertainty within a Bayesian framework and circumventing the reliance on brittle input or decoding manipulations. Given the lack of established benchmarks and suitable evaluation protocols, we also propose the first and rigorous evaluation framework, initially grounded in synthetic tasks for conceptual development and subsequently extended to real-world datasets, in which aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty can be quantified separately under controlled settings. Moreover, we show it can be used as a practical tool for trustworthy-related applications, such as hallucination detection. Our findings pave a new direction for connecting the quantitative view of uncertainty with the mechanistic understanding of model behavior.

Quantifying Aleatoric Uncertainty of In-Context Learning for Robust Measure of LLM Prediction Confidence

Variation in language use, shaped by speakers' sociocultural background and specific context of use, offers a rich lens into cultural perspectives, values, and opinions. For example, Chinese students discuss *healthy eating* with words like *timing*, *regularity*, and *digestion*, whereas Americans use vocabulary like *balancing food groups* and *avoiding fat and sugar*, reflecting distinct cultural models of nutrition (Banna et al., 2016). The computational study of these Sociocultural Linguistic Phenomena (SLP) has traditionally been done in NLP via tailored analyses of specific groups or topics, requiring specialized data collection and experimental operationalization—a process not well-suited to quick hypothesis exploration and prototyping. To address this, we propose constructing a "sandbox" designed for systematic and flexible sociolinguistic research. Using our method, we construct a demographically/topically split Reddit dataset, **Splits!**, validated by self-identification and by replicating several known SLPs from existing literature. We showcase the sandbox's utility with a scalable, two-stage process that filters large collections of *potential* SLPs (PSLPs) to surface the most promising candidates for deeper, qualitative investigation.

Splits! Flexible Sociocultural Linguistic Investigation at Scale

Anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human traits to technology, is an automatic and unconscious response that occurs even in those with advanced technical expertise. In this position paper, we analyze hundreds of thousands of research articles to present empirical evidence of the prevalence and growth of anthropomorphic terminology in research on large language models (LLMs). We argue for challenging the deeper assumptions reflected in this terminology — which, though often useful, may inadvertently constrain LLM development — and broadening beyond them to open new pathways for understanding and improving LLMs. Specifically, we identify and examine five anthropomorphic assumptions that shape research across the LLM development lifecycle. For each assumption (e.g., that LLMs must use natural language for reasoning, or that they should be evaluated on benchmarks originally meant for humans), we demonstrate empirical, non-anthropomorphic alternatives that remain under-explored yet offer promising directions for LLM research and development.

Thinking beyond the anthropomorphic paradigm benefits LLM research

The critical therapist shortage demands scalable training solutions. Standardized Patients, the gold standard, are scarce and costly. Current LLM-based approaches focus on patient simulation for conversational realism but lack pedagogical rigor as Virtual Standardized Patients, lacking faithful reactions to clinical errors and explainable feedback. To bridge this gap, we propose PUPPET, the first neural-symbolic Virtual Standardized Patient governed by an OBSERVE-THINK-BEHAVE architecture. PUPPET externalizes LLM reasoning into a symbolic system where experts implant causal associations between intervention logic (propositional logic) and patient mental states (state machine). This allows PUPPET to behave coherently with controllable and explainable psychological dynamics: intervention logic (OBSERVE) → state transition (THINK) → response (BEHAVE). Our PUPPET-TRAINER further leverages this chain to educate trainees about intervention consequences, standardizing and scaling mental health training. Experiments across three clinical scenarios confirm that PUPPET outperforms baselines in clinical faithfulness and pedagogical value.

PUPPET: Neural-Symbolic Standardized Patients for Mental Health

As language models (LMs) exhibit increasingly consciousness-like behaviors, evaluating their cognitive abilities becomes essential. We introduce $\texttt{AwarenessBench}$, the first comprehensive benchmark for assessing the cognitive abilities of LMs in four dimensions: metacognition, self-awareness, social awareness, and situational awareness, covering 15 cognitive functions and 14,381 samples. Evaluating 18 state-of-the-art LMs, we find that all consistently surpass random baselines, with more advanced models performing better. We further compare LMs with human performance across three demographic groups, where the best-performing model surpasses human averages overall, but most still fall markedly short in metacognition and self-awareness. Finally, we show that awareness is a distinct capability: progress in language modeling or reasoning does not necessarily translate into improved cognition.

AwarenessBench: Assessing Cognitive Capabilities of Language Models

Open-Domain Table Question Answering (TQA) involves retrieving relevant tables from a large corpus to answer natural language queries. Traditional dense retrieval models, such as DTR and DPR, not only incur high computational costs for large-scale retrieval tasks but also require retraining or fine-tuning on new datasets, limiting their adaptability to evolving domains and knowledge. In this work, we propose **CRAFT**, a zero-shot, cascaded retrieval approach that first uses a sparse retrieval model to filter a subset of candidate tables before applying more computationally expensive dense models as re-rankers.
To improve retrieval quality, we enrich table representations with descriptive titles and summaries generated by *Gemini Flash 1.5*, enabling richer semantic matching between queries and tabular structures. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) sparse, dense, and hybrid retrievers on the NQ-Tables dataset. It also demonstrates strong zero-shot performance on the more challenging OTT-QA benchmark, achieving competitive results at higher recall thresholds, where the task requires multi-hop reasoning across both textual passages and relational tables.

This work establishes a scalable and adaptable paradigm for table retrieval, bridging the gap between fine-tuned architectures and lightweight, plug-and-play retrieval systems. Code and data are available at: [https://coral-lab-asu.github.io/CRAFT/](https://coral-lab-asu.github.io/CRAFT/)

CRAFT: Training-Free Cascaded Retrieval for Tabular QA

Advanced LLMs have achieved near-ceiling instruction-following accuracy on benchmarks such as IFEval. However, these impressive scores do not necessarily translate to reliable services in real-world use, where users often vary their phrasing, contextual framing, and task formulations. In this paper, we study \emph{nuance-oriented reliability}: whether models exhibit consistent competence across cousin prompts that convey analogous user intents but with subtle nuances. To quantify this, we introduce a new metric, reliable@k, and develop an automated pipeline that generates high-quality cousin prompts via data augmentation. Building upon this, we construct IFEval++ for systematic evaluation. Across 20 proprietary and 26 open-source LLMs, we find that current models exhibit substantial insufficiency in nuance-oriented reliability---their performance can drop by up to 61.8% with nuanced prompt modifications. What's more, we characterize it and explore three potential improvement recipes. Our findings highlight nuance-oriented reliability as a crucial yet underexplored next step toward more dependable and trustworthy LLM behavior. Our code and benchmark are accessible: https://github.com/jianshuod/IFEval-pp.

Revisiting the Reliability of Language Models in Instruction-Following

Low-resource languages challenge multilingual LLMs due to limited high-quality training data, leading to weaker performance on complex reasoning and knowledge tasks. To address this, we propose improving training data quality through data synthesis, moving beyond simple resource scaling. First, we introduce SynTrans, which translates high-quality, knowledge-rich English data into low-resource languages during pre-training to inject world knowledge, though at the cost of semantic fluency. To overcome low-quality data issues while maintaining fluency, we also propose SynRank. SynRank leverages synthetic data as positive samples to train a classifier that ranks and filters noisy real-world data, enabling the extraction of high-quality subsets without expensive human cleaning. Experiments show SynRank matches handcrafted rule-based filtering by human experts and significantly improves knowledge-intensive task performance at the same filtering rate. Remarkably, higher filtering rates even improve performance with less data, demonstrating the efficiency and effectiveness of our method, surpassing expert filtering. Lastly, we introduce DA-QwenScore, a training-free metric that evaluates corpus quality by normalizing model loss with diversity measures, further enhancing evaluation efficiency. Our insights into knowledge injection could advance low-resource multilingual LLM development.

How Can Synthetic Data Improve Multilingual Language Model Pretraining? A Data Quality Perspective

Conversational agents are required to respond to their users not only with high quality (i.e. commonsense bearing) responses, but also considering multiple plausible alternative scenarios, reflecting the diversity in their responses. Despite the growing need to train diverse commonsense generators, the progress of this line of work has been significantly hindered by the lack of large-scale high-quality diverse commonsense training datasets. Due to the high annotation costs, existing Generative Commonsense Reasoning (GCR) datasets are created using a small number of human annotators, covering only a narrow set of commonsense scenarios. To address this training resource gap, we propose a two-stage method to create the first-ever synthetic dataset CommonSyn for diversified (GCR). The model fine-tuned on our synthetic data jointly increase both generation diversity and quality compared with vanilla models and the model fine-tuned on human-crafted dataset across different size Large Language Models (LLMs)

Synthetic Data Generation for Training Diversified Commonsense Reasoning Models

Large Language Models have demonstrated strong multilingual fluency, yet fluency alone does not guarantee socially appropriate language use. In high-context languages, communicative competence requires sensitivity to social hierarchy, relational roles, and interactional norms that are encoded directly in everyday language. Bangla exemplifies this challenge through its three-tiered pronominal system, kinship-based addressing, and culturally embedded social customs. We introduce BANGLASOCIALBENCH, the first benchmark designed to evaluate sociopragmatic competence in Bangla through context-dependent language use rather than factual recall. The benchmark spans three domains: Bangla Address Terms, Kinship Reasoning, and Social Customs, and consists of 1,719 culturally grounded instances written and verified by native Bangla speakers. We evaluate twelve contemporary LLMs in a zero-shot setting and observe systematic patterns of cultural misalignment. Models frequently default to overly formal address forms, fail to recognize multiple socially acceptable address pronouns, and conflate kinship terminology across religious contexts. Our findings show that sociopragmatic failures are often structured and non-random, revealing persistent limitations in how current LLMs infer and apply culturally appropriate language use in realistic Bangladeshi social interactions.

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Quantifying Aleatoric Uncertainty of In-Context Learning for Robust Measure of LLM Prediction Confidence

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