United States

We introduce methods to quantify how Large Language Models (LLMs) encode and store contextual information, revealing that tokens often seen as minor (e.g., determiners, punctuation) carry surprisingly high context. Notably, removing these tokens — especially stopwords, articles, and commas — consistently degrades performance on MMLU and BABILong-4k, even if removing only irrelevant tokens. Our analysis also shows a strong correlation between contextualization and linearity, where linearity measures how closely the transformation from one layer’s embeddings to the next can be approximated by a single linear mapping. These findings underscore the hidden importance of ``filler&#39;&#39; tokens in maintaining context. For further exploration, we present LLM-Microscope, an open-source toolkit that assesses token-level nonlinearity, evaluates contextual memory, visualizes intermediate layer contributions (via an adapted Logit Lens), and measures the intrinsic dimensionality of representations. This toolkit illuminates how seemingly trivial tokens can be critical for long-range understanding.

NAACL 2025

LLM-Microscope: Uncovering the Hidden Role of Punctuation in Context Memory of Transformers

llm-microscope

microscope

logit lens

linearity

intermediate representations

contextualization

We introduce methods to quantify how Large Language Models (LLMs) encode and store contextual information, revealing that tokens often seen as minor (e.g., determiners, punctuation) carry surprisingly high context. Notably, removing these tokens — especially stopwords, articles, and commas — consistently degrades performance on MMLU and BABILong-4k, even if removing only irrelevant tokens. Our analysis also shows a strong correlation between contextualization and linearity, where linearity measures how closely the transformation from one layer’s embeddings to the next can be approximated by a single linear mapping. These findings underscore the hidden importance of ``filler'' tokens in maintaining context. For further exploration, we present LLM-Microscope, an open-source toolkit that assesses token-level nonlinearity, evaluates contextual memory, visualizes intermediate layer contributions (via an adapted Logit Lens), and measures the intrinsic dimensionality of representations. This toolkit illuminates how seemingly trivial tokens can be critical for long-range understanding.

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

This paper introduces an LLM-based Latin-to-English translation platform designed to address the challenges of translating Latin texts. We named the model LITERA, which stands for Latin Interpretation and Translations into English for Research Assistance. Through a multi-layered translation process utilizing a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4o, LITERA offers an unprecedented level of accuracy, showcased by greatly improved BLEU scores, particularly in classical Latin, along with improved BLEURT scores. The development of LITERA involved close collaboration with Duke University’s Classical Studies Department, which was instrumental in creating a small, high-quality parallel Latin-English dataset. This paper details the architecture, fine-tuning methodology, and prompting strategies used in LITERA, emphasizing its ability to produce literal translations.

LITERA: An LLM Based Approach to Latin-to-English Translation

Effective human-machine collaboration requires machine learning models to externalize uncertainty, so users can reflect and intervene when necessary. For language models, these representations of uncertainty may be impacted by sycophancy bias: proclivity to agree with users, even if they are wrong. For instance, models may be over-confident in (incorrect) problem solutions suggested by a user. We study the relationship between sycophancy and uncertainty estimation for the first time. We propose a generalization of the definition of sycophancy bias to measure downstream impacts on uncertainty estimation, and also propose a new algorithm (SyRoUP) to account for sycophancy in the uncertainty estimation process. Unlike previous works, we study a broad array of user behaviors, varying both correctness and confidence of user suggestions to see how model answers (and their certainty) change. Our experiments across conversation forecasting and question-answering tasks show that user confidence plays a critical role in modulating the effects of sycophancy, and that SyRoUP can better predict these effects. From these results, we argue that externalizing both model \textit{and} user uncertainty can help to mitigate the impacts of sycophancy bias.

Accounting for Sycophancy in Language Model Uncertainty Estimation

Sarcasm is a linguistic phenomenon that intends to ridicule a target (e.g., entity, event, or person) in an inherent way. Multimodal Sarcasm Explanation (MuSE) aims at revealing the intended irony in a sarcastic post using a natural language explanation. Though important, existing systems overlooked the significance of the target of sarcasm in generating explanations. In this paper, we propose a \textbf{T}arget-a\textbf{U}gmented sha\textbf{R}ed fusion-\textbf{B}ased sarcasm explanati\textbf{O}n model, aka. \model. We design a novel shared-fusion mechanism to leverage the inter-modality relationships between an image and its caption. \model\ assumes the target of the sarcasm and guides the multimodal shared fusion mechanism in learning intricacies of the intended irony for explanations. We evaluate our proposed \model\ model on the \dataset\ dataset. Comparison against multiple baselines and state-of-the-art models signifies the performance improvement of \model\ by an average margin of $+3.3\%$. Moreover, we explore LLMs in zero and one-shot settings for our task and observe that LLM-generated explanation, though remarkable, often fails to capture the critical nuances of the sarcasm. Furthermore, we supplement our study with extensive human evaluation on \model's generated explanations and find them out to be comparatively better than other systems.

Target-Augmented Shared Fusion-based Multimodal Sarcasm Explanation Generation

To address the challenges associated with data processing at scale, we propose Dataverse, a unified open-source Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) pipeline for large language models (LLMs) with a user-friendly design at its core. Easy addition of custom processors with block-based interface in Dataverse allows users to readily and efficiently use Dataverse to build their own ETL pipeline. We hope that Dataverse will serve as a vital tool for LLM development and open source the entire library to welcome community contribution. Additionally, we provide a concise, two-minute video demonstration of our system, illustrating its capabilities and implementation.

Dataverse: Open-Source ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) Pipeline for Large Language Models

Effective communication is vital in emergency response scenarios where clarity and speed can save lives. Traditional systems often struggle under the chaotic conditions of real-world emergencies, leading to breakdowns in communication and task management. This paper introduces $\textbf{CLEAR}$-Command, a system that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance emergency communications. $\textbf{CLEAR}$ stands for \$textbf{C}$oordinated $\textbf{L}$istening, $\textbf{E}$xtraction, and $\textbf{A}$llocation in $\textbf{R}$esponse. CLEAR-Command automates the transcription, summarization, and task extraction from live radio communications of emergency first responders using the OpenAI Whisper API for transcription and gpt-4o for summarization and task extraction. Our system provides a dynamic overview of task allocations and their execution status, significantly improving the accuracy of task identification and the clarity of communication. We evaluated our system through an expert pre-study with 4 experts and a user study with 13 participants. The expert pre-study identified gpt-4o as providing the most accurate task extraction, while the user study showed that CLEAR-Command significantly outperforms traditional radio communication in terms of clarity, trust, and correctness of task extraction. Our demo is hosted under this $\href{https://clear-command.vercel.app/}{link}$, and all project details are presented in our $\href{https://gitlab.com/achref.d/clear-command}{Gitlab page}$.

CLEAR-Command: Coordinated Listening, Extraction, and Allocation for Emergency Response with Large Language Models

We introduce LiteWebAgent, an open-source suite for VLM-based web agent applications. Our framework addresses a critical gap in the web agent ecosystem with a production-ready solution that combines minimal serverless backend configuration, intuitive user and browser interfaces, and extensible research capabilities in agent planning, memory, and tree search. For the core LiteWebAgent agent framework, we implemented a simple yet effective baseline using recursive function calling, providing with decoupled action generation and action grounding. In addition, we integrate advanced research components such as agent planning, agent workflow memory, and tree search in a modular and extensible manner. We then integrate the LiteWebAgent agent framework with frontend and backend as deployed systems in two formats: (1) a production Vercel-based web application, which provides users with an agent-controlled remote browser, (2) a Chrome extension leveraging LiteWebAgent's API to control an existing Chrome browser via CDP (Chrome DevTools Protocol). The LiteWebAgent framework is available at https://github.com/PathOnAI/LiteWebAgent, with deployed frontend at https://lite-web-agent.vercel.app/.

LiteWebAgent: The Open-Source Suite for VLM-Based Web-Agent Applications

We present Storybranch - an automated system for generating multimedia content from long texts such as novels and fanfiction.
The Storybranch pipeline includes structured information extraction, text parsing and processing, content generation using Gen-AI models and syncronization of different streams (audio, video, background). 
Our system is highly modular and can efficiently generate three different types of multimodal content: audiobooks, simple animated videos, and visual novel text-and-image-style video games.


Storybranch successfully addresses challenges such as generating unique and consistent image and voice for each character and narrator, identifying and generating background images and sounds effects, and syncronizing character expressions and lip movement with text.


As part of the Storybranch , we develop and release BookNLP2 - a new open-source library for parsing and extracting information from books, based on the legacy library BookNLP.

Storybranch - generating multimedia content from novels

The metaphor studies community has developed numerous valuable labelled corpora in various languages over the years. Many of these resources are not only unknown to the NLP community, but are also often not easily shared among the researchers. Both in human sciences and in NLP, researchers could benefit from a centralised database of labelled resources, easily accessible and unified under an identical format. To facilitate this, we present MetaphorShare, a website to integrate metaphor datasets making them open and accessible. With this effort, our aim is to encourage researchers to share and upload more datasets in any language in order to facilitate metaphor studies and the development of future metaphor processing NLP systems. The website has four main functionalities: upload, download, search and label metaphor datasets. It is accessible at www.metaphorshare.com.

METAPHORSHARE: A Dynamic Collaborative Repository of Open Metaphor Datasets

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to be effective in guiding Large Language Models (LLMs) to decompose complex tasks into multiple intermediate steps, and constructing a rational reasoning chain for inferring answers. However, the linear nature of CoT falls short from enabling LLMs to effectively handle graph structures, which are essential for personalized recommendation tasks that rely on user-item interaction graphs. To bridge this gap, we introduce GollaRec, which leverages a Graph-of-Thought (GoT) prompting technique in a Multi-modal LLM, namely LLaVA, to effectively exploit the complex structure of the interaction graphs. GollaRec enhances the recommendation effectiveness by integrating both visual and textual ''thoughts'' into a graph-structured prompt, using both item images and descriptions to produce richer multi-modal user/item representations. In our proposed approach, GollaRec leverages text-graph alignment and graph instruction tuning to allow the Multi-modal LLM to capture complex graph structures. In addition, GollaRec leverages a graph adaptor to integrate user-item interactions into the resulting user/item embeddings, therefore effectively adapting the model to the recommendation task. Our extensive experiments on 6 benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed GollaRec model over 12 existing state-of-the-art models in various multi-modal recommendation tasks, including general and multi-domain recommendation tasks.

A Multi-modal Large Language Model with Graph-of-Thought for Effective Recommendation

The rapid proliferation of online news has posed significant challenges in tracking the continuous development of news topics. Traditional timeline summarization constructs a chronological summary of the events but often lacks the flexibility to meet the diverse granularity needs. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a new paradigm, $\textbf{D}$ynamic-granularity $\textbf{T}$im$\textbf{EL}$ine $\textbf{S}$ummarization, ($\textbf{DTELS}$), which aims to construct adaptive timelines based on user instructions or requirements. This paper establishes a comprehensive benchmark for DTLES that includes: (1) an evaluation framework grounded in journalistic standards to assess the timeline quality across four dimensions: $\textit{Informativeness}$, $\textit{Granular Consistency}$, $\textit{Factuality}$, and $\textit{Coherence}$; (2) a large-scale, multi-source dataset with multiple granularity timeline annotations based on a consensus process to facilitate authority; (3) extensive experiments and analysis with two proposed solutions based on Large Language Models (LLMs) and existing state-of-the-art TLS methods. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM-based solutions. However, even the most advanced LLMs struggle to consistently generate timelines that are both informative and granularly consistent, highlighting the challenges of the DTELS task.

LLM-Microscope: Uncovering the Hidden Role of Punctuation in Context Memory of Transformers

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LITERA: An LLM Based Approach to Latin-to-English Translation

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