Austria

This study evaluates Large Language Models&#39; (LLMs) ability to simulate non-native-like English use observed in human second language (L2) learners interfered with by their native first language (L1). In dialogue-based interviews, we prompt LLMs to mimic L2 English learners with specific L1s (e.g., Japanese, Thai, Urdu) across seven languages, comparing their outputs to real L2 learner data. Our analysis examines L1-driven linguistic biases, such as reference word usage and avoidance behaviors, using information-theoretic and distributional density measures. Results show that modern LLMs (e.g., Qwen2.5, LLAMA3, DeepseekV3, GPT 4o) replicate L1-dependent patterns observed in human L2 data, with distinct influences from various languages (e.g., Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin significantly affect tense agreement, and Urdu influences noun-verb collocations). Our results reveal LLMs’ potential for L2 dialogue generation and evaluation for future educational applications.

ACL 2025

Can LLMs Simulate L2-English Dialogue? An Information-Theoretic Analysis of L1-Dependent Biases

multilingual evaluation; english second language evaluation; automatic creation and evaluation of language resources; evaluation methodologies; evaluation of non-native languages; statistical testing for evaluation

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**Dear Colleagues,**

Welcome to the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society! 

This year’s conference brings together the latest research from all Cognitive Science and also highlights this year’s theme **Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds.** 

The program features four plenary speakers: Friederike Range (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), Onur Güntürkün (Ruhr University Bochum), Julia Fischer (University of Göttingen), and Erich Jarvis (The Rockefeller University). The keynotes and invited symposia showcase the broad spectrum of ideas that encompass the conference theme of comparative cognition. 

Further, the program includes the Rumelhart Prize keynote presentation by Susan Goldin-Meadow (University of Chicago), and symposia to celebrate the winner of the Elman Prize: Wei Ji Ma (New York University), the Heineken Award winner Robert Zatorre (McGill University), and the Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prizes session.

The program committee for CogSci 2021 received 1,025 submissions, including 710 full papers, 275 member abstracts, 8 publication-based talks, as well as 15 proposals for symposia, and 17 for workshops and tutorials. After a rigorous review process, the committee selected 152 papers for oral presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings (14.8%), 332 papers for poster presentation and inclusion in the proceedings (32.4%), and 175 papers for poster presentation with inclusion of abstracts in the proceedings (17.1%) We also selected 275 submitted member abstracts. In addition, we accepted 6 publication-based talks, 12 symposia, and 9 workshops and tutorials to make for an exciting and inclusive program.

We hope that you enjoy the conference this year!<br><br>

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**Learn more about the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub at the University of Vienna, hosts of CogSci 2021**

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CogSci 2021

The Cognitive Science Society brings together researchers from around the world who hold a common goal: understanding the nature of the human mind. The mission of the Society is to promote Cognitive Science as a discipline, and to foster scientific interchange among researchers in various areas of study, including Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Education. The Society is a non-profit professional organization and its activities include sponsoring an annual conference and publishing the journals Cognitive Science and TopiCS.

This study evaluates Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to simulate non-native-like English use observed in human second language (L2) learners interfered with by their native first language (L1). In dialogue-based interviews, we prompt LLMs to mimic L2 English learners with specific L1s (e.g., Japanese, Thai, Urdu) across seven languages, comparing their outputs to real L2 learner data. Our analysis examines L1-driven linguistic biases, such as reference word usage and avoidance behaviors, using information-theoretic and distributional density measures. Results show that modern LLMs (e.g., Qwen2.5, LLAMA3, DeepseekV3, GPT 4o) replicate L1-dependent patterns observed in human L2 data, with distinct influences from various languages (e.g., Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin significantly affect tense agreement, and Urdu influences noun-verb collocations). Our results reveal LLMs’ potential for L2 dialogue generation and evaluation for future educational applications.

poster

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair:<br>
*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.*<br>
[Read more](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GI_hvOpjswAuYdUTromfeDiPpCcqidwg/view?usp=sharing)<br><br><br>



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Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

As LLMs continuously evolve, there is an urgent need for a reliable evaluation method that delivers trustworthy results promptly. Currently, static benchmarks suffer from inflexibility and unreliability, leading users to prefer human voting platforms like Chatbot Arena. However, human evaluations require significant manual effort. Therefore, we propose Auto-Arena, an innovative framework that automates the entire evaluation process using LLM-powered agents. Firstly, an LLM examiner generates questions. Then, two LLM candidates engage in a multi-round peer battle based on the questions, aiming at revealing their true performance differences. Finally, a committee of LLM judges collaboratively discusses and decides the winner, reducing bias and enhancing fairness. During the peer battles, we observe intriguing scenarios where the LLM candidates display competitive behaviors and learn from the opponents. In our extensive experiments involving 15 recent LLMs, Auto-Arena shows a 92.14% correlation with human preferences, surpassing all previous expert-annotated benchmarks without any manual efforts. Auto-Arena offers a promising alternative to current human evaluation platforms for evaluating LLMs automatically.

Auto-Arena: Automating LLM Evaluations with Agent Peer Battles and Committee Discussions

People can categorize the same entity at multiple taxonomic levels, such as basic (bear), superordinate (animal), and subordinate (grizzly bear). While prior research has focused on basic-level categories, this study is the first attempt to examine the organization of categories by analyzing exemplars produced at the subordinate level. We present a new Italian psycholinguistic dataset of human-generated exemplars for 187 concrete words. We then leverage these data to evaluate whether textual and vision LLMs produce meaningful exemplars that align with human category organization across three key tasks: exemplar generation, category induction, and typicality judgment. Our findings show a low alignment between humans and LLMs, consistent with previous studies. However, their performance varies notably across different semantic domains. Ultimately, this study highlights both the promises and the constraints of using AI-generated exemplars to support psychological and linguistic research.

How Humans and LLMs Organize Conceptual Knowledge: Exploring Subordinate Categories in Italian

Social event detection (SED) is the task of identifying, categorizing, and tracking events from social data sources such as social media posts, news articles, and online discussions. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) SED models predominantly rely on graph neural networks (GNNs), which involve complex graph construction and time-consuming training processes, limiting their practicality in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we rethink the key challenge in SED: the informal and noisy nature of short texts on social media platforms, which impacts clustering accuracy. We propose a novel framework, LLM-enhanced Social Event Detection (LSED), which leverages the rich background knowledge of large language models (LLMs) to address this challenge. Specifically, LSED utilizes LLMs to formalize and disambiguate short texts by completing abbreviations and summarizing informal expressions. Furthermore, we introduce hyperbolic space embeddings, which are more suitable for natural language sentence representations, to enhance clustering performance. Extensive experiments on two challenging real-world datasets demonstrate that LSED outperforms existing SOTA models, achieving improvements in effectiveness, efficiency, and stability. Our work highlights the potential of LLMs in SED and provides a practical solution for real-world applications.

Text is All You Need: LLM-enhanced Incremental Social Event Detection

Current studies have exposed the risk of Large Language Models (LLMs) generating harmful content by jailbreak attacks. 
However, they overlook that the direct generation of harmful content from scratch is more difficult than inducing LLM to calibrate benign content into harmful forms.
In our study, we introduce a novel attack framework that exploits \textbf{\underline{A}}d\textbf{\underline{V}}ers\textbf{\underline{A}}rial me\textbf{\underline{TA}}pho\textbf{\underline{R}} (\textbf{AVATAR}) to induce the LLM to calibrate malicious metaphors for jailbreaking.
Specifically, to answer harmful queries, AVATAR adaptively identifies a set of benign but logically related metaphors as the initial seed.
Then, driven by these metaphors, the target LLM is induced to reason and calibrate about the metaphorical content, thus jailbroken by either directly outputting harmful responses or calibrating residuals between metaphorical and professional harmful content.
Experimental results demonstrate that AVATAR can effectively and transferably jailbreak LLMs and achieve a state-of-the-art attack success rate across multiple advanced LLMs.

from Benign import Toxic: Jailbreaking the Language Model via Adversarial Metaphors

Watermarking by altering token sampling probabilities based on red-green list is a promising method for tracing the origin of text generated by large language models (LLMs). However, existing watermark methods often struggle with a fundamental dilemma: improving watermark effectiveness (the detectability of the watermark) often comes at the cost of reduced text quality. This trade-off limits their practical application. To address this challenge, we first formalize the problem within a multi-objective trade-off analysis framework. Within this framework, we identify a key factor that influences the dilemma. Unlike existing methods, where watermark strength is typically treated as a fixed hyperparameter, our theoretical insights lead to the development of MorphMark—a method that adaptively adjusts the watermark strength in response to changes in the identified factor, thereby achieving an effective resolution of the dilemma. In addition, MorphMark also prioritizes flexibility since it is an model-agnostic and model-free watermark method, thereby offering a practical solution for real-world deployment, particularly in light of the rapid evolution of AI models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MorphMark achieves a superior resolution of the effectiveness-quality dilemma, while also offering greater flexibility and time and space efficiency.

MorphMark: Flexible Adaptive Watermarking for Large Language Models

Large Language Models have been found to create plans that are neither executable nor verifiable in grounded environments. An emerging line of work demonstrates success in using the LLM as a formalizer to generate a formal representation of the planning domain in some language, such as Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL). This formal representation can be deterministically solved to find a plan. We systematically evaluate this methodology while bridging some major gaps. While previous work only generates a partial PDDL representation, given templated, and therefore unrealistic environment descriptions, we generate the complete representation given descriptions of various naturalness levels. Among an array of observations critical to improve LLMs' formal planning abilities, we note that most large enough models can effectively formalize descriptions as PDDL, outperforming those directly generating plans, while being robust to lexical perturbation. As the descriptions become more natural-sounding, we observe a decrease in performance and provide detailed error analysis.

On the Limit of Language Models as Planning Formalizers

This study investigates the structured generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs), focusing on producing valid JSON outputs against a given schema. Despite the widespread use of JSON in integrating language models with programs, there is a lack of comprehensive analysis and benchmarking of these capabilities. We explore various aspects of JSON generation, such as structure understanding, escaping, and natural language description, to determine how to assess and enable LLMs to generate valid responses. Building upon this, we propose SchemaBench features around 40K different JSON schemas to obtain and assess models' abilities in generating valid JSON. We find that the latest LLMs are still struggling to generate a valid JSON string. Moreover, we demonstrate that incorporating reinforcement learning with a Fine-grained Schema Validator can further enhance models' understanding of JSON schema, leading to improved performance. Our models demonstrate significant improvement in both generating JSON outputs and downstream tasks.

Learning to Generate Structured Output with Schema Reinforcement Learning

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems show remarkable potential as question answering tools in the K-12 Education domain, where knowledge is typically queried within the restricted scope of authoritative textbooks. However, discrepancies between these textbooks and the parametric knowledge inherent in Large Language Models (LLMs) can undermine the effectiveness of RAG systems. To systematically investigate RAG system robustness against such knowledge discrepancies, we introduce KnowShiftQA. This novel question answering dataset simulates these discrepancies by applying deliberate hypothetical knowledge updates to both answers and source documents, reflecting how textbook knowledge can shift. KnowShiftQA comprises 3,005 questions across five subjects, designed with a comprehensive question typology focusing on context utilization and knowledge integration. Our extensive experiments on retrieval and question answering performance reveal that most RAG systems suffer a substantial performance drop when faced with these knowledge discrepancies. Furthermore, questions requiring the integration of contextual (textbook) knowledge with parametric (LLM) knowledge pose a significant challenge to current LLMs.

On the Robustness of RAG Systems in Educational Question Answering under Knowledge Discrepancies

Despite recent progress achieved by code large language models (LLMs), their remarkable abilities are largely dependent on fine-tuning on the high-quality data, posing challenges for data collection and annotation. To address this, current methods often design various data flywheels to collect complex code instructions, enabling models to handle more intricate tasks. However, these approaches typically rely on off-the-shelf datasets and data augmentation from a limited set of proprietary LLMs (e.g., Claude, GPT4, and so on), which restricts the diversity of the constructed data and makes it prone to systemic biases. In this paper, we propose **WarriorCoder**, a novel paradigm learns from expert battles to address these limitations. Specifically, we create an arena where leading expert code LLMs challenge each other, with evaluations conducted by impartial judges. This competitive framework generates novel training data from scratch, leveraging the strengths of all participants. Experimental results show that **WarriorCoder** achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to previous models of the same size, even without relying on proprietary LLMs.

WarriorCoder: Learning from Expert Battles to Augment Code Large Language Models

In this paper, we study how well humans can detect text generated by commercial LLMs (GPT-4o, Claude, o1). We hire annotators to read 300 non-fiction English articles, label them as either human-written or AI-generated, and provide paragraph-length explanations for their decisions. Our experiments show that annotators who frequently use LLMs for writing tasks excel at detecting AI-generated text, even without any specialized training or feedback. In fact, the majority vote among five such "expert" annotators misclassifies only 1 of 300 articles, significantly outperforming most commercial and open-source detectors we evaluated even in the presence of evasion tactics like paraphrasing and humanization. Qualitative analysis of the experts' free-form explanations shows that while they rely heavily on specific lexical clues ('AI vocabulary'), they also pick up on more complex phenomena within the text (e.g., formality, originality, clarity) that are challenging to assess for automatic detectors. We release our annotated dataset and code to spur future research into both human and automated detection of AI-generated text.

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Auto-Arena: Automating LLM Evaluations with Agent Peer Battles and Committee Discussions

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