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Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great performance across various benchmarks, showing potential as general-purpose task solvers. However, as LLMs are typically trained on vast amounts of data, a significant concern in their evaluation is data contamination, where overlap between training data and evaluation datasets inflates performance assessments. Multiple approaches have been developed to identify data contamination. These approaches rely on specific assumptions that may not hold universally across different settings. To bridge this gap, we systematically review 50 papers on data contamination detection, categorize the underlying assumptions, and assess whether they have been rigorously validated. We identify and analyze eight categories of assumptions and test three of them as case studies. Our case studies focus on detecting direct, instance-level data contamination, which is also referred to as Membership Inference Attacks (MIA). Our analysis reveals that MIA approaches based on these three assumptions can have similar performance to random guessing, on datasets used in LLM pretraining, suggesting that current LLMs might learn data distributions rather than memorizing individual instances. Meanwhile, MIA can easily fail when there are data distribution shifts between the seen and unseen instances.

NAACL 2025

Does Data Contamination Detection Work (Well) for LLMs? A Survey and Evaluation on Detection Assumptions

membership inference attack

data contamination

survey

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

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### 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. 
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*- 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

Generating emotionally appropriate responses in conversations with large language models presents a significant challenge due to the complexities of human emotions and cognitive processes, which remain largely underexplored in their critical role in social interactions. In this study, we introduce a two-stage automatic data generation framework to create CAPE, a Chinese dataset named Cognitive Appraisal theory-based Emotional corpus. This corpus facilitates the generation of dialogues with contextually appropriate emotional responses by accounting for diverse personal and situational factors. We propose two tasks utilizing this dataset: emotion prediction and next utterance prediction. Both automated and human evaluations demonstrate that agents trained on our dataset can deliver responses that are more aligned with human emotional expressions. Our study shows the potential for advancing emotional expression in conversational agents, paving the way for more nuanced and meaningful human-computer interactions.

CAPE: A Chinese Dataset for Appraisal-based Emotional Generation in Large Language Models

Long-context language models (LCLMs) have the potential to revolutionize our approach to tasks traditionally reliant on external tools like retrieval systems or databases. Leveraging LCLMs' ability to natively ingest and process entire corpora of information offers numerous advantages. It enhances user-friendliness by eliminating the need for specialized knowledge of tools, provides robust end-to-end modeling that minimizes cascading errors in complex pipelines, and allows for the application of sophisticated prompting techniques across the entire system. To assess this paradigm shift, we introduce LOFT, a benchmark of real-world tasks requiring context up to millions of tokens designed to evaluate LCLMs' performance on in-context retrieval and reasoning. Our findings reveal LCLMs' surprising ability to rival state-of-the-art retrieval and RAG systems, despite never having been explicitly trained for these tasks. However, LCLMs still face challenges in areas like compositional reasoning that are required in SQL-like tasks. Notably, prompting strategies significantly influence performance, emphasizing the need for continued research. Overall, LOFT provides a rigorous testing ground for LCLMs, showcasing their capabilities to tackle existing paradigms.

LOFT: Scalable and More Realistic Long-Context Evaluation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various tasks. However, they are prone to contextual hallucination, generating information that is either unsubstantiated or contradictory to the given context. Although many studies have investigated contextual hallucinations in LLMs, addressing them in long-context inputs remains an open problem. In this work, we take an initial step toward solving this problem by constructing a dataset specifically designed for long-context hallucination detection. Furthermore, we propose a novel architecture that enables pre-trained encoder models, such as BERT, to process long contexts and effectively detect contextual hallucinations through a decomposition and aggregation mechanism. Our experimental results show that the proposed architecture significantly outperforms previous models of similar size as well as LLM-based models across various metrics, while providing substantially faster inference. We publicly release our dataset and code to promote research along the same line.

Towards Long Context Hallucination Detection

Legal professionals need to write analyses that rely on citations to relevant precedents, i.e., previous case decisions. Intelligence systems assisting legal professionals in writing such documents provide great benefits but are challenging to design. Such systems need to help locate, summarize, and reason over salient precedents in order to be useful. To enable systems for such tasks, we work with legal professionals to create a colossal dataset. supporting two important backbone tasks: information retrieval (IR) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). This dataset **CLERC** (Case Law Evaluation and Retrieval Corpus), is constructed for training and evaluating models on their ability to (1) find corresponding citations for a given piece of legal analysis and to (2) compile the text of these citations (as well as previous context) into a cogent analysis that supports a reasoning goal. We benchmark state-of-the-art models on CLERC, showing that current approaches still struggle: GPT-4o generates analyses with the highest ROUGE F-scores but hallucinates the most, while zero-shot IR models only achieve 48.3% recall@1000.

CLERC: A Dataset for U. S. Legal Case Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Analysis Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly serving as evaluators in Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks; this is often referred to as ''LLM-as-a-judge'' paradigm. However, the capabilities of LLMs in evaluating NLG quality remain underexplored. Current studies depend on human assessments and simple metrics that fail to capture the discernment of LLMs across diverse NLG tasks. To address this gap, we propose the Discernment of Hierarchical Perturbation (DHP) benchmarking framework, which provides quantitative discernment scores for LLMs. This framework leverages hierarchically perturbed text data and statistical tests to systematically measure the NLG evaluation capabilities of LLMs. We re-established six evaluation datasets for this benchmark, covering four NLG tasks: Summarization, Story Completion, Question Answering, and Translation. Our comprehensive benchmarking of five major LLM families provides critical insight into their strengths and limitations as NLG evaluators. Our dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/YCWANGVINCE/DHP_Benchmark.

DHP Benchmark: Are LLMs Good NLG Evaluators?

We present the first systematic evaluation examining format bias in performance of large language models (LLMs). Our approach distinguishes between two categories of an evaluation metric under format constraints to reliably and accurately assess performance: one measures performance when format constraints are adhered to, while the other evaluates performance regardless of constraint adherence. We then define a metric for measuring the format bias of LLMs and establish effective strategies to reduce it. Subsequently, we present our empirical format bias evaluation spanning four commonly used categories---multiple-choice question-answer, wrapping, list, and mapping---covering 15 widely-used formats. Our evaluation on eight generation tasks uncovers significant format bias across state-of-the-art LLMs. We further discover that improving the format-instruction following capabilities of LLMs across formats potentially reduces format bias. Based on our evaluation findings, we study prompting and fine-tuning with synthesized format data techniques to mitigate format bias. Our methods successfully reduce the variance in ChatGPT's performance among wrapping formats from 235.33 to 0.71 (%^2)

LLMs Are Biased Towards Output Formats! Systematically Evaluating and Mitigating Output Format Bias of LLMs

Text toxicity detection systems exhibit significant biases, producing disproportionate rates of false positives on samples mentioning demographic groups. But what about toxicity detection in speech? To investigate the extent to which text-based biases are mitigated by speech-based systems, we produce a set of high-quality group annotations for the multilingual MuTOX dataset, and then leverage these annotations to systematically compare speech- and text-based toxicity classifiers. Our findings indicate that access to speech data during inference supports reduced bias against group mentions, particularly for ambiguous and disagreement-inducing samples. Our results also suggest that improving classifiers, rather than transcription pipelines, is more helpful for reducing group bias. We publicly release our annotations and provide recommendations for future toxicity dataset construction.

On the Role of Speech Data in Reducing Toxicity Detection Bias

In typical multimodal tasks, such as Visual Question Answering (VQA), adversarial attacks targeting a specific image and question can lead large vision-language models (LVLMs) to provide incorrect answers. However, it is common for a single image to be associated with multiple questions, and LVLMs may still answer other questions correctly even for an adversarial image attacked by a specific question. To address this, we introduce the query-agnostic visual attack (QAVA), which aims to create robust adversarial examples that generate incorrect responses to unspecified and unknown questions. Compared to traditional adversarial attacks focused on specific images and questions, QAVA significantly enhances the effectiveness and efficiency of attacks on images when the question is unknown, achieving performance comparable to attacks on known target questions. Our research broadens the scope of visual adversarial attacks on LVLMs in practical settings, uncovering previously overlooked vulnerabilities, particularly in the context of visual adversarial threats. The code is available at https://github.com/btzyd/qava.

QAVA: Query-Agnostic Visual Attack to Large Vision-Language Models

What ethical concerns, if any, do LLM researchers have? We introduce EthiCon, a corpus of 1,580 ethical concern statements extracted from scientific papers published in the ACL Anthology. We extract ethical concern keywords from the statements and show promising results in automating the concern identification process. Through a survey (N=200), we compare the ethical concerns of the corpus to the concerns listed by the general public and professionals in the field. Finally, we compare our retrieved ethical concerns with existing taxonomies and guidelines pointing to gaps and actionable insights.

Ethical Concern Identification in NLP: A Corpus of ACL Anthology Ethics Statements

Studies of human psychology have demonstrated that people are more motivated to extend empathy to in-group members than out-group members (Cikara et al., 2011). In this study, we investigate how this aspect of intergroup relations in humans is replicated by LLMs in an emotion intensity prediction task. In this task, the LLM is given a short description of an experience a person had that caused them to feel a particular emotion; the LLM is then prompted to predict the intensity of the emotion the person experienced on a numerical scale. By manipulating the group identities assigned to the LLM's persona (the ''perceiver'') and the person in the narrative (the ''experiencer''), we measure how predicted emotion intensities differ between in-group and out-group settings. We observe that LLMs assign higher emotion intensity scores to in-group members than out-group members. This pattern holds across all three types of social groupings we tested: race/ethnicity, nationality, and religion. We perform an in-depth analysis on Llama-3.1-8B, the model which exhibited strongest intergroup bias among those tested.

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CAPE: A Chinese Dataset for Appraisal-based Emotional Generation in Large Language Models

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