Austria

This paper presents the annotation guidelines of the Balanced Arabic Readability Evaluation Corpus (BAREC), a large-scale resource for fine-grained sentence-level readability assessment in Arabic. BAREC includes 69,441 sentences (1M+ words) labeled across 19 levels, from kindergarten to postgraduate. Based on the Taha/Arabi21 framework, the guidelines were refined through iterative training with native Arabic-speaking educators. We highlight key linguistic, pedagogical, and cognitive factors in determining readability and report high inter-annotator agreement: Quadratic Weighted Kappa 81.8\% (substantial/excellent agreement) in the last annotation phase. We also benchmark automatic readability models across multiple classification granularities (19-, 7-, 5-, and 3-level). The corpus and guidelines are publicly available: http://barec.camel-lab.com.

ACL 2025

Guidelines for Fine-grained Sentence-level Arabic Readability Annotation

workshop paper

### 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)

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline - subject line "Welcome to ACL 2025". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. 

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

Wind energy project assessments present significant challenges for decision-makers, who must navigate and synthesize hundreds of pages of environmental and scientific documentation. These documents often span different regions and project scales, covering multiple domains of expertise. This process traditionally demands immense time and specialized knowledge from decision-makers. The advent of Large Language Models (LLM) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approaches offer a transformative solution, enabling rapid, accurate cross-document information retrieval and synthesis. As the landscape of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and text generation continues to evolve, benchmarking becomes essential to evaluate and compare the performance of different RAG-based LLMs. In this paper, we present a comprehensive framework to generate a domain relevant RAG benchmark. Our framework is based on automatic question-answer generation with Human (domain experts)-AI (LLM) teaming. As a case study, we demonstrate the framework by introducing WeQA, a first-of-its-kind benchmark on the wind energy domain which comprises of multiple scientific documents/reports related to environmental aspects of wind energy projects. Our framework systematically evaluates RAG performance using diverse metrics and multiple question types with varying complexity level, providing a foundation for rigorous assessment of RAG-based systems in complex scientific domains and enabling researchers to identify areas for improvement in domain-specific applications.

WeQA: A Benchmark for Retrieval Augmented Generation in Wind Energy Domain

The first priority of action in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 advocates the understanding of disaster risk by collecting and processing practical information related to disasters. A smart collection may be the compilation of relevant and summarized news articles focused on some key pieces of information such as disaster event type, geographic location(s), and impacts. In this article, a Multi-Task Learning (MTL) based end-to-end model has been developed to perform three related tasks: sentence classification depending on the presence of (1) relevant locations and (2) impact information to generate a summary,and (3) identification of the causes or event types in disaster news. Each of the three tasks is formulated as a multilabel binary classification problem. The results of the proposed MTL model have been compared with three popular transformer models: BERT, RoBERTa, and ALBERT. It is observed that the proposed model showed better performance scores than the other models in most cases.

Multi-Task Learning approach to identify sentences with impact and affected location in a disaster news report

Propaganda detection on social media remains challenging due to task complexity and limited high-quality labeled data. This paper introduces a novel framework that combines human expertise with Large Language Model (LLM) assistance to improve both annotation consistency and scalability. We propose a hierarchical taxonomy that organizes 14 fine-grained propaganda techniques \cite{martino2020semeval} into three broader categories, conduct a human annotation study on the HQP dataset \cite{maarouf2023hqp} that reveals low inter-annotator agreement for fine-grained labels, and implement an LLM-assisted pre-annotation pipeline that extracts propagandistic spans, generates concise explanations, and assigns local labels as well as a global label. A secondary human verification study shows significant improvements in both agreement and time-efficiency. Building on this, we fine-tune smaller language models (SLMs) to perform structured annotation. Instead of fine-tuning on human annotations, we train on high-quality LLM-generated data, allowing a large model to produce these annotations and a smaller model to learn to generate them via knowledge distillation. Our work contributes towards the development of scalable and robust propaganda detection systems, supporting the idea of transparent and accountable media ecosystems in line with SDG 16. The code is publicly available at our GitHub repository\footnote{\url{https://github.com/XplaiNLP/NLP4PI_2025_submission}}.

Hybrid Annotation for Propaganda Detection: Integrating LLM Pre-Annotations with Human Intelligence

The ability of Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to categorize text into multiple classes has motivated their use in online content moderation tasks, such as hate speech and fake news detection. However, there is limited understanding of how or why these methods make such decisions, or why certain content is moderated in the first place. To investigate the hidden mechanisms behind content moderation, we explore multiple directions: 1) training classifiers to reverse-engineer content moderation decisions across countries; 2) explaining content moderation decisions by analyzing Shapley values and LLM-guided explanations. Our primary focus is on content moderation decisions made across countries, using pre-existing corpora sampled from the Twitter Stream Grab. Our experiments reveal interesting patterns in censored posts, both across countries and over time. Through human evaluations of LLM-generated explanations across three LLMs, we assess the effectiveness of using LLMs in content moderation. Finally, we discuss potential future directions, as well as the limitations and ethical considerations of this work.

Revealing Hidden Mechanisms of Cross-Country Content Moderation with Natural Language Processing

Publications in the AI for Good space have tended to focus on the research and model development that can support high-impact applications. However, very few AI for Good papers discuss the process of deploying and collaborating with the partner organization, and the resulting real-world impact. In this work, we share details about the close collaboration with a humanitarian-to-humanitarian (H2H) organization and how to not only deploy the AI model in a resource-constrained environment, but also how to maintain it for continuous performance updates, and share key takeaways for practitioners.

Operationalizing AI for Good: Spotlight on Deployment and Integration of AI Models in Humanitarian Work

Multilingual large language models have gained prominence for their proficiency in processing and generating text across languages. Like their monolingual counterparts, multilingual models are likely to pick up on stereotypes and other social biases during training. In this paper, we study a phenomenon we term "stereotype leakage", which refers to how training a model multilingually may lead to stereotypes expressed in one language showing up in the models' behavior in another. We propose a measurement framework for stereotype leakage and investigate its effect in English, Russian, Chinese, and Hindi and with GPT-3.5, mT5, and mBERT. Our findings show a noticeable leakage of positive, negative, and nonpolar associations across all languages. We find that GPT-3.5 exhibits the most stereotype leakage of these models, and Hindi is the most susceptible to leakage effects.

Multilingual Large Language Models Leak Human Stereotypes across Language Boundaries

While the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change (CC) is undisputed now for a long time, public discourse is still divided. Considering the case of Europe, in the majority of countries, an influential right-wing party propagates climate scepticism or outright denial. Our work addresses the German party, which represents the second-largest faction in the federal parliament. In order to make the partys discourse on CC accessible to NLP-based analyses, we are compiling the, a collection of parliamentary speeches and other material from various sources. We report on first analyses of this new dataset using sentiment and emotion analysis as well as classification of populist language, which demonstrate clear differences to the language use of the two largest competing parties (social democrats and conservatives). We make the corpus available to enable further studies of the party's rhetoric on CC topics.

AfD-CCC: Analyzing the Climate Change Discourse of a German Right-wing Political Party

Sustainability reports are key instruments for communicating corporate impact, but their unstructured format and varied content pose challenges for large-scale analysis. This paper presents an unsupervised method to annotate paragraphs from sustainability reports against both the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) standards. The approach combines structured metadata from GRI content indexes, official GRI–SDG mappings, and text semantic similarity models to produce weakly supervised annotations at scale. To evaluate the quality of these annotations, we train a multi-label classifier on the automatically labeled data and evaluate it on the trusted OSDG Community Dataset. The results show that our method yields meaningful labels and improves classification performance when combined with human-annotated data. Although preliminary, this work offers a foundation for scalable sustainability analysis and opens future directions toward assessing the credibility and depth of corporate sustainability claims.

Unsupervised Sustainability Report Labeling based on the integration of the GRI and SDG standards

Moral judgments in LLMs increasingly capture the attention of researchers in AI ethics domain. This study explores moral judgments of three open-source large language models (LLMs)—Qwen-1.5-14B, Llama3-8B, and DeepSeek-R1 in plausible moral dilemmas, examining their sensitivity to social exposure and collaborative decision-making. Using a dual-process framework grounded in deontology and utilitarianism, we evaluate LLMs' responses to moral dilemmas under varying social contexts. Results reveal that all models are significantly influenced by moral norms rather than consequences, with DeepSeek-R1 exhibiting a stronger action tendency compared to Qwen-1.5-14B and Llama3-8B, which show higher inaction preferences. Social exposure and collaboration impact LLMs differently: Qwen-1.5-14B becomes less aligned with moral norms under observation, while DeepSeek-R1's action tendency is moderated by social collaboration. These findings highlight the nuanced moral reasoning capabilities of LLMs and their varying sensitivity to social cues, providing insights into the ethical alignment of AI systems in socially embedded contexts.

What Counts Underlying LLMs' Moral Dilemma Judgments?

TikTok has emerged as a key platform for discussing polarizing topics, including climate change. Despite its growing influence, there is limited research exploring how content features shape emotional alignment between video creators and audience comments, as well as their impact on user engagement. Using a combination of pretrained and fine-tuned textual and visual models, we analyzed 7,110 TikTok videos related to climate change, focusing on content features such as semantic clustering of video transcriptions, visual elements, tonal shifts, and detected emotions. (1) Our findings reveal that positive emotions and videos featuring factual content or vivid environmental visuals exhibit stronger emotional alignment. Furthermore, emotional intensity and tonal coherence in video speech are significant predictors of higher engagement levels, offering new insights into the dynamics of climate change communication on social media. (2) Our preference learning analysis reveals that comment emotions play a dominant role in predicting video shareability, with both positive and negative emotional responses acting as key drivers of content diffusion. We conclude that user engagement—particularly emotional discourse in comments—significantly shapes climate change content shareability.

Premium content

Downloads

Next from ACL 2025

WeQA: A Benchmark for Retrieval Augmented Generation in Wind Energy Domain

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES