Austria

Neural topic modeling is a scalable automated technique for text data mining. In various downstream tasks of topic modeling, it is prefered that the discovered topics well align with labels. However, due to the lack of guidance from labels, unsupervised neural topic models are less powerful in this situation. Existing supervised neural topic models often adopt a label-free prior to generate the latent document-topic distributions and use them to predict the labels and thus achieve label-topic alignment indirectly. Such a mechanism faces the following issues: 1) The label-free prior leads to topics blending the latent patterns of multiple labels; 2) One is unable to intuitively identify the explicit relationships between labels and the discovered topics. To tackle these problems, we develop a novel supervised neural topic model which utilizes a chain-structured graphical model that emphasizes direct constraints of labels on topics. Soft indicators are introduced to explicitly construct the label-topic relationships. To obtain well-organized label-topic relationships, we formalize an entropy-regularized optimal transport problem on the embedding space and model them as the transport plan. Moreover, our proposed method can be seamlessly integrated with most existing unsupervised neural topic models in a flexible manner. Experiment results on multiple datasets demonstrate that our model can greatly enhance the alignment between labels and topics while maintaining good topic quality.

ACL 2025

Supervised Neural Topic Modeling with Label Alignment

label-topic alignment

topic model

supervised learning

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

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

technical paper

Amidst the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, research on large vision-language models (LVLMs) has emerged as a pivotal area. However, understanding their internal mechanisms remains challenging due to the limitations of existing interpretability methods, especially regarding faithfulness and plausibility. To address this, we first construct a human response interpretability dataset that evaluates the plausibility of model explanations by comparing the attention regions between the model and humans when answering the same questions. We then propose a patchwise cooperative game-based interpretability method for LVLMs, which employs Shapley values to quantify the impact of individual image patches on generation likelihood and enhances computational efficiency through a single input approximation approach. Experimental results demonstrate our method's faithfulness, plausibility, and robustness. Our method provides researchers with deeper insights into model behavior, allowing for an examination of the specific image regions each layer relies on during response generation, ultimately enhancing model reliability. Our codes are available at https://github.com/ZY123-GOOD/Patchwise_Cooperative.

Patchwise Cooperative Game-based Interpretability Method for Large Vision-Language Models

We propose the Data Contamination Quiz (DCQ), a simple and effective approach to detect data contamination in large language models (LLMs) and estimate the amount of it. Specifically, we frame data contamination detection as a series of multiple-choice questions, devising a quiz format wherein three perturbed versions of each instance, subsampled from a specific dataset partition, are created. These changes only include word-level perturbations. The generated perturbations, along with the original dataset instance, form the options in the DCQ, with an extra option accommodating the selection of none of the provided options. Given that the only distinguishing signal among the options is the exact wording with respect to the original dataset instance, an LLM, when tasked with identifying the original dataset instance, gravitates towards selecting the original one if it has been exposed to it. While accounting for positional biases in LLMs, the quiz performance reveals the contamination level for the tested model with the dataset partition to which the quiz pertains. Applied to various datasets and LLMs, under controlled and uncontrolled contamination, our findings—while fully lacking access to training data and model parameters—suggest that DCQ achieves state-of-the-art results and uncovers greater contamination/memorization levels compared to existing methods. Also, it proficiently bypasses more safety filters, especially those set to avoid generating copyrighted content.

Data Contamination Quiz: A Tool to Detect and Estimate Contamination in Large Language Models

Adversarial examples pose a significant challenge to deep neural networks across both image and text domains, with the intent to degrade model performance through carefully altered inputs. Adversarial texts, however, are distinct from adversarial images due to their requirement for semantic similarity and the discrete nature of the textual contents. This study delves into the concept of human suspiciousness, a quality distinct from the traditional focus on imperceptibility found in image-based adversarial examples, where adversarial changes are often desired to be indistinguishable to the human eye even when placed side by side with originals. Although this is generally not possible with text, textual adversarial content must still often remain undetected or non-suspicious to human readers. Even when the text’s purpose is to deceive NLP systems or bypass filters, the text is often expected to be natural to read. In this research, we expand the study of human suspiciousness by analyzing how individuals perceive adversarial texts. We gather and publish a novel dataset of Likert-scale human evaluations on the suspiciousness of adversarial sentences, crafted by four widely used adversarial attack methods and assess their correlation with the human ability to detect machine-generated alterations. Additionally, we develop a regression-based model to predict levels of suspiciousness and establish a baseline for future research in reducing the suspiciousness in adversarial text generation. We also demonstrate how the regressor-generated suspicious scores can be incorporated into adversarial generation methods to produce texts that are less likely to be perceived as computer-generated.

Graded Suspiciousness of Adversarial Texts to Humans

We present a corpus of 8400 Dutch sentence pairs, intended primarily for the grammatical evaluation of language models. Each pair consists of a grammatical sentence and a minimally different ungrammatical sentence. The corpus covers 84 paradigms, classified into 22 syntactic phenomena. Ten sentence pairs of each paradigm were created by hand, while the remaining ninety were generated semi-automatically and manually validated afterwards. Nine of the ten hand-crafted sentences of each paradigm are rated for acceptability by at least 30 participants each, and for the same 9 sentences reading times are recorded per word, through self-paced reading.Â  Here, we report on the construction of the dataset, the measured acceptability ratings and reading times, as well as the extent to which a variety of language models can be used to predict both the ground-truth grammaticality and human acceptability ratings.

BLiMP-NL: A Corpus of Dutch Minimal Pairs and Acceptability Judgments for Language Model Evaluation

We present Local Graph-based Dictionary Expansion (LGDE), a method for data-driven discovery of the semantic neighbourhood of words using tools from manifold learning and network science. At the heart of LGDE lies the creation of a word similarity graph from the geometry of word embeddings followed by local community detection based on graph diffusion. The diffusion in the local graph manifold allows the exploration of the complex nonlinear geometry of word embeddings to capture word similarities based on paths of semantic association, over and above direct pairwise similarities. Exploiting such semantic neighbourhoods enables the expansion of dictionaries of pre-selected keywords, an important step for tasks in information retrieval, such as database queries and online data collection.  We validate LGDE on two user-generated English-language corpora and show that LGDE enriches the list of keywords with improved performance relative to methods based on direct word similarities or co-occurrences. We further demonstrate our method through a real-world use case from communication science, where LGDE is evaluated quantitatively on the expansion of a conspiracy-related dictionary from online data collected and analysed by domain experts. Our empirical results and expert user assessment indicate that LGDE expands the seed dictionary with more useful keywords due to the manifold-learning-based similarity network.

LGDE: Local Graph-based Dictionary Expansion

Accurate temporal expression normalization, the process of assigning a numerical value to a temporal expression, is essential for tasks such as timeline creation and temporal reasoning. While rule-based normalization systems are limited in adaptability across different domains and languages, deep-learning solutions in this area have not been extensively explored. An additional challenge is the scarcity of manually annotated corpora with temporal annotations. To address the adaptability limitations of current systems, we propose a highly adaptable methodology that can be applied to multiple domains and languages. This can be achieved by leveraging a multilingual Pre-trained Language Model (PTLM) with a fill-mask architecture, using a Value Intermediate Representation (VIR) where the temporal expression value format is adjusted to the fill-mask representation. Our approach involves a two-phase training process. Initially, the model is trained with a novel masking policy on a large English biomedical corpus that is automatically annotated with normalized temporal expressions, along with a complementary hand-crafted temporal expressions corpus. This addresses the lack of manually annotated data and helps to achieve sufficient capacity for adaptation to diverse domains or languages. In the second phase, we show how the model can be tailored to different domains and languages employing various techniques, showcasing the versatility of the proposed methodology. This approach significantly outperforms existing systems.

A Novel Methodology for Enhancing Cross-Language and Domain Adaptability in Temporal Expression Normalization

In many fields, such as language acquisition, neuropsychology of language, the study of aging, and historical linguistics, corpora are used for estimating the diversity of grammatical structures that are produced during a period by an individual, community, or type of speakers. In these cases, treebanks are taken as representative samples of the syntactic structures that might be encountered. Generalizing the potential syntactic diversity from the structures documented in a small corpus requires careful extrapolation whose accuracy is constrained by the limited size of representative sub-corpora. In this article, I demonstrate --theoretically, and empirically-- that a grammar's derivational entropy and the mean length of the utterances (MLU) it generates are fundamentally linked, giving rise to a new measure, the derivational entropy rate. The mean length of utterances becomes the most practical index of syntactic complexity; I demonstrate that MLU is not a mere proxy, but a fundamental measure of syntactic diversity. In combination with the new derivational entropy rate measure, it provides a theory-free assessment of grammatical complexity. The derivational entropy rate indexes the rate at which different grammatical annotation frameworks determine the grammatical complexity of treebanks. I evaluate the Smoothed Induced Treebank Entropy (SITE) as a tool for estimating these measures accurately, even from very small treebanks. I conclude by discussing important implications of these results for both NLP and human language processing

Measuring Grammatical Diversity from Small Corpora: Derivational Entropy Rates, Mean Length of Utterances, and Annotation Invariance

The rise of general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) systems, particularly large language models (LLMs), has raised pressing moral questions about how to reduce bias and ensure fairness at scale. Researchers have documented a sort of “bias” in the significant correlations between demographics (e.g., race, gender) in LLM prompts and responses, but it remains unclear how LLM fairness could be evaluated with more rigorous definitions, such as group fairness or fair representations. We analyze a variety of technical fairness frameworks and find inherent challenges in each that make the development of a fair LLM intractable. We show that each framework either does not logically extend to the general-purpose AI context or is infeasible in practice, primarily due to the large amounts of unstructured training data and the many potential combinations of human populations, use cases, and sensitive attributes. These inherent challenges would persist for general-purpose AI, including LLMs, even if empirical challenges, such as limited participatory input and limited measurement methods, were overcome. Nonetheless, fairness will remain an important type of model evaluation, and there are still promising research directions, particularly the development of standards for the responsibility of LLM developers, context-specific evaluations, and methods of iterative, participatory, and AI-assisted evaluation that could scale fairness across the diverse contexts of modern human-AI interaction.

The Impossibility of Fair LLMs

This study investigates the integration of diverse patient data sources into multimodal language models for automated chest X-ray (CXR) report generation. Traditionally, CXR report generation relies solely on data from a patient's CXR exam, overlooking valuable information from patient electronic health records. Utilising the MIMIC-CXR and MIMIC-IV-ED datasets, we investigate the use of patient data from emergency department (ED) records — such as vital signs measured and medicines reconciled during an ED stay — for CXR report generation, with the aim of enhancing diagnostic accuracy. We also investigate conditioning CXR report generation on the clinical history section of radiology reports, which has been overlooked in the literature. We introduce a novel approach to transform these heterogeneous data sources into patient data embeddings that prompt a multimodal language model (CXRMate-ED). Our comprehensive evaluation indicates that using a broader set of patient data significantly enhances diagnostic accuracy. The model, training code, and dataset are publicly available.

The Impact of Auxiliary Patient Data on Automated Chest X-Ray Report Generation and How to Incorporate It

Despite the recent strides in large language models, studies have underscored the existence of social biases within these systems. In this paper, we delve into the validation and comparison of the ethical biases of LLMs concerning globally discussed and potentially sensitive topics, hypothesizing that these biases may arise from language-specific distinctions. Introducing the Multilingual Sensitive Questions & Answers Dataset (**MSQAD**), we collected news articles from Human Rights Watch covering 17 topics, and generated socially sensitive questions along with corresponding responses in multiple languages. We scrutinized the biases of these responses across languages and topics, employing two statistical hypothesis tests. The results showed that the null hypotheses were rejected in most cases, indicating biases arising from cross-language differences. It demonstrates that ethical biases in responses are widespread across various languages, and notably, these biases were prevalent even among different LLMs. By making the proposed MSQAD openly available, we aim to facilitate future research endeavors focused on examining cross-language biases in LLMs and their variant models.

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