United States

Hate speech (HS) erodes the inclusiveness of online users and propagates negativity and division. Counterspeech has been recognized as a way to mitigate the harmful consequences. While some research has investigated the impact of user-generated counterspeech on social media platforms, few have examined and modeled haters&#39; reactions toward counterspeech, despite the immediate alteration of haters&#39; attitudes being an important aspect of counterspeech. This study fills the gap by analyzing the impact of counterspeech from the hater&#39;s perspective, focusing on whether the counterspeech leads the hater to reenter the conversation and if the reentry is hateful. We compile the Reddit Echoes of Hate dataset (ReEco), which consists of triple-turn conversations featuring haters&#39; reactions, to assess the impact of counterspeech. To predict haters&#39; behaviors, we employ two strategies: a two-stage reaction predictor and a three-way classifier. The linguistic analysis sheds insights on the language of counterspeech to hate eliciting different haters&#39; reactions. Experimental results demonstrate that the 3-way classification model outperforms the two-stage reaction predictor, which first predicts reentry and then determines the reentry type. We conclude the study with an assessment showing the most common errors identified by the best-performing model.

NAACL 2025

Echoes of Discord: Forecasting Hater Reactions to Counterspeech

hater reactions

counter speech

hate speech

Hate speech (HS) erodes the inclusiveness of online users and propagates negativity and division. Counterspeech has been recognized as a way to mitigate the harmful consequences. While some research has investigated the impact of user-generated counterspeech on social media platforms, few have examined and modeled haters' reactions toward counterspeech, despite the immediate alteration of haters' attitudes being an important aspect of counterspeech. This study fills the gap by analyzing the impact of counterspeech from the hater's perspective, focusing on whether the counterspeech leads the hater to reenter the conversation and if the reentry is hateful. We compile the Reddit Echoes of Hate dataset (ReEco), which consists of triple-turn conversations featuring haters' reactions, to assess the impact of counterspeech. To predict haters' behaviors, we employ two strategies: a two-stage reaction predictor and a three-way classifier. The linguistic analysis sheds insights on the language of counterspeech to hate eliciting different haters' reactions. Experimental results demonstrate that the 3-way classification model outperforms the two-stage reaction predictor, which first predicts reentry and then determines the reentry type. We conclude the study with an assessment showing the most common errors identified by the best-performing model.

poster

### 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

While affective expressions on social media have been extensively studied, most research has focused on the Western context. This paper explores cultural differences in affective expressions by comparing valence and arousal on Twitter/X (geolocated to the US) and Sina Weibo (in Mainland China). Using the NRC-VAD lexicon to measure valence and arousal, we identify distinct patterns of emotional expression across both platforms. Our analysis reveals a functional representation between valence and arousal, showing a negative offset in contrast to traditional lab-based findings which suggest a positive offset. Furthermore, we uncover significant cross-cultural differences in arousal, with US users displaying higher emotional intensity than Chinese users, regardless of the valence of the content. Finally, we conduct a comprehensive language analysis correlating n-grams and LDA topics with affective dimensions to deepen our understanding of how language and culture shape emotional expression. These findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of affective communication across cultural and linguistic contexts on social media.

Language-based Valence and Arousal Expressions between the United States and China: a Cross-Cultural Examination

Citation practices are crucial in shaping the structure of scientific knowledge, yet they are often influenced by contemporary norms and biases. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) introduces a new dynamic to these practices. Interestingly, the characteristics and potential biases of references recommended by LLMs that entirely rely on their parametric knowledge, and not on search or retrieval-augmented generation, remain unexplored. Here, we analyze these characteristics in an experiment using a dataset from AAAI, NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR, published after GPT-4's knowledge cut-off date. In our experiment, LLMs are tasked with suggesting scholarly references for the anonymized in-text citations within these papers. Our findings reveal a remarkable similarity between human and LLM citation patterns, but with a more pronounced high citation bias, which persists even after controlling for publication year, title length, number of authors, and venue. The results hold for both GPT-4, and the more capable models GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 where the papers are part of the training data. Additionally, we observe a large consistency between the characteristics of LLM's existing and non-existent generated references, indicating the model's internalization of citation patterns. By analyzing citation graphs, we show that the references recommended are embedded in the relevant citation context, suggesting an even deeper conceptual internalization of the citation networks. While LLMs can aid in citation generation, they may also amplify existing biases, such as the Matthew effect, and introduce new ones, potentially skewing scientific knowledge dissemination.

Large Language Models Reflect Human Citation Patterns with a Heightened Citation Bias

Eradicating poverty is the first goal in the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. However, aporophobia -- the societal bias against people living in poverty -- constitutes a major obstacle to designing, approving and implementing poverty-mitigation policies. This work presents an initial step towards operationalizing the concept of aporophobia to identify and track harmful beliefs and discriminative actions against poor people on social media. In close collaboration with non-profits and governmental organizations, we conduct data collection and exploration. Then we manually annotate a corpus of English tweets from five world regions for the presence of (1) direct expressions of aporophobia, and (2) statements referring to or criticizing aporophobic views or actions of others, to comprehensively characterize the social media discourse related to bias and discrimination against the poor. Based on the annotated data, we devise a taxonomy of categories of aporophobic attitudes and actions expressed through speech on social media. Finally, we train several classifiers and identify the main challenges for automatic detection of aporophobia in social networks. This work paves the way towards identifying, tracking, and mitigating aporophobic views on social media at scale.

Tackling Social Bias against the Poor: a Dataset and a Taxonomy on Aporophobia

Entrainment, the responsive communication between interacting individuals, is a crucial process in building a strong relationship between a mental health therapist and their client, leading to positive therapeutic outcomes. However, so far entrainment has not been investigated as a measure of efficacy of large language models (LLMs) delivering mental health therapy. In this work, we evaluate the linguistic entrainment of an LLM (ChatGPT 3.5-turbo) in a mental health dialog setting. We first validate computational measures of linguistic entrainment with two measures of the quality of client self-disclosures: intimacy and engagement (p < 0.05). We then compare the linguistic entrainment of the LLM to trained therapists and non-expert online peer supporters in a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) setting. We show that the LLM is outperformed by humans with respect to linguistic entrainment (p < 0.001). These results support the need to be cautious in using LLMs out-of-the-box for mental health applications.

Using Linguistic Entrainment to Evaluate Large Language Models for use in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Video Question Answering (VideoQA) is a challenging task that requires understanding complex visual and temporal relationships within videos to answer questions accurately. In this work, we introduce $\textbf{ReasVQA}$ (Reasoning-enhanced Video Question Answering), a novel approach that leverages reasoning processes generated by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to improve the performance of VideoQA models. Our approach consists of three phases: reasoning generation, reasoning refinement, and learning from reasoning. First, we generate detailed reasoning processes using additional MLLMs, and second refine them via a filtering step to ensure data quality. Finally, we use the reasoning data, which might be in an imperfect form, to guide the VideoQA model via multi-task learning, on how to interpret and answer questions based on a given video. We evaluate ReasVQA on three popular benchmarks, and our results establish new state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements of +2.9 on NExT-QA, +7.3 on STAR, and +5.9 on IntentQA. Our findings demonstrate the supervising benefits of integrating reasoning processes into VideoQA. Further studies validate each component of our method, also with different backbones and MLLMs, and again highlight the advantages of this simple but effective method. We offer a new perspective on enhancing VideoQA performance by utilizing advanced reasoning techniques, setting a new benchmark in this research field.

ReasVQA: Advancing VideoQA with Imperfect Reasoning Process

Recent work has demonstrated that the unequal representation of cultures and socioeconomic groups in training data leads to biased Large Multi-modal (LMM) models. To improve LMM model performance on underrepresented data, we propose and evaluate several prompting strategies using non-English, geographic, and socioeconomic attributes. We show that these geographic and socioeconomic integrated prompts favor retrieving topic appearances commonly found in data from low-income households across different countries leading to improved LMM model performance on lower-income data. Our analyses identify and highlight contexts where these strategies yield the most improvements.

Uplifting Lower-Income Data: Strategies for Socioeconomic Perspective Shifts in Large Multi-modal Models

Previous research on multimodal entity linking (MEL) has primarily employed contrastive learning as the primary objective. However, using the rest of the batch as negative samples without careful consideration, these studies risk leveraging easy features and potentially overlook essential details that make entities unique. In this work, we propose JD-CCL (Jaccard Distance-based Conditional Contrastive Learning), a novel approach designed to enhance the ability to match multimodal entity linking models. JD-CCL leverages meta-information to select negative samples with similar attributes, making the linking task more challenging and robust. Additionally, to address the limitations caused by the variations within the visual modality among mentions and entities, we introduce a novel method, CVaCPT (Contextual Visual-aid Controllable Patch Transform). It enhances visual representations by incorporating multi-view synthetic images and contextual textual representations to scale and shift patch representations. Experimental results on benchmark MEL datasets demonstrate the strong effectiveness of our approach.

Enhancing Multimodal Entity Linking with Jaccard Distance-based Conditional Contrastive Learning and Contextual Visual Augmentation

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has become the standard for cross- modal image-text representation learning. Improving CLIP typically requires additional data and retraining with new loss functions, but these demands raise resource and time costs, limiting practical use. In this work, we introduce HELIP, a cost-effective strategy that improves CLIP models by exploiting challenging text-image pairs within existing datasets in continuous training. This eliminates the need for additional data or extensive retraining. Moreover, HELIP integrates effortlessly into current training pipelines with minimal code modifications, allowing for quick and seamless implementation. On comprehensive benchmarks, HELIP consistently boosts existing models. In particular, within just two epochs of training, it improves zero-shot classification accuracy on ImageNet for SLIP models pre-trained on CC3M, CC12M, and YFCC15M datasets by 3.05%, 4.47%, and 10.1% , respectively. In addition, on fine-grained classification datasets, HELIP improves the zero-shot performance of CLIP and SLIP by an average of 8.4% and 18.6%, and their linear probe performance by an average of 9.5% and 3.0%.

Getting More Juice Out of Your Data: Hard Pair Refinement Enhances Visual-Language Models Without Extra Data

Vision and language navigation (VLN) is a challenging task towards the creation of embodied agents that requires spatial and temporal reasoning over the instructions provided in natural language and aligning them with the visual perception of an environment. Although a number of methods and approaches have been developed, none achieves human level performance in outdoor settings (by up to 75 percent). The contributions of visual and language modalities to the success of VLN have been studied, however here we focus on an overlooked property of routes and show that navigational instructions can be represented as patterns of actions that also describe trajectory shapes. Through carefully crafted experiments, we show that agents generalization to unseen environments depends not only on visual and linguistic features, but also on the shape of trajectories presented to the model during the fine-tuning. Our experiments show that the diversity of patterns of actions during training is a key contributor to high success rates for agents. Last, we propose a solution based on data augmentation that fills the gap in missing patterns of training data. Our findings will guide researchers towards improved practices in the development and evaluation of VLN datasets and agents.

Follow the Beaten Path: The Role of Route Patterns on Vision-Language Navigation Agents Generalization Abilities

Symbolic planners can discover a sequence of actions from initial to goal states given expert-defined, domain-specific logical action semantics. Large Language Models (LLMs) can directly generate such sequences, but limitations in reasoning and state-tracking often result in plans that are insufficient or unexecutable. We propose Predicting Semantics of Actions with Language Models (PSALM), which automatically learns action semantics by leveraging the strengths of both symbolic planners and LLMs. PSALM repeatedly proposes and executes plans, using the LLM to partially generate plans and to infer domain-specific action semantics based on execution outcomes. PSALM maintains a belief over possible action semantics that is iteratively updated until a goal state is reached. Experiments on~7 environments show that when learning just from one goal, PSALM boosts plan success rate from 36.4% (on Claude-3.5) to 100%, and explores the environment more efficiently than prior work to infer ground truth domain action semantics.

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Language-based Valence and Arousal Expressions between the United States and China: a Cross-Cultural Examination

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