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A common assumption in Computational Linguistics is that text representations learnt by multimodal models are richer and more human-like than those by language-only models, as they are grounded in images or audio—similar to how human language is grounded in real-world experiences. However, empirical studies checking whether this is true are largely lacking. We address this gap by comparing word representations from contrastive multimodal models vs. language only ones in the extent to which they capture experiential information—as defined by an existing norm-based &#39;experiential model&#39;—and align with human fMRI responses. Our results indicate that, surprisingly, language-only models are superior to multimodal ones in both respects. Additionally, they learn more unique brain-relevant semantic information beyond that shared with the experiential model. Overall, our study highlights the need to develop computational models that better integrate the complementary semantic information provided by multimodal data sources.

ACL 2025

Experiential Semantic Information and Brain Alignment: Are Multimodal Models Better than Language Models?

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

A common assumption in Computational Linguistics is that text representations learnt by multimodal models are richer and more human-like than those by language-only models, as they are grounded in images or audio—similar to how human language is grounded in real-world experiences. However, empirical studies checking whether this is true are largely lacking. We address this gap by comparing word representations from contrastive multimodal models vs. language only ones in the extent to which they capture experiential information—as defined by an existing norm-based 'experiential model'—and align with human fMRI responses. Our results indicate that, surprisingly, language-only models are superior to multimodal ones in both respects. Additionally, they learn more unique brain-relevant semantic information beyond that shared with the experiential model. Overall, our study highlights the need to develop computational models that better integrate the complementary semantic information provided by multimodal data sources.

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)

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

Recent work has argued that large language models (LLMs) are not "abstract reasoners", citing their poor zero-shot performance on a variety of challenging tasks as evidence. We revisit these experiments in order to add nuance to the claim. First, we show that while LLMs indeed perform poorly in a zero-shot setting, even tuning a small subset of parameters for input encoding can enable near-perfect performance. However, we also show that this finetuning does not necessarily transfer across datasets. We take this collection of empirical results as an invitation to (re-)open the discussion of what it means to be an "abstract reasoner", and why it matters whether LLMs fit the bill.

What is an "Abstract Reasoner"? Revisiting Experiments and Arguments about Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have been deployed in a wide spectrum of domains and applications due to their strong language understanding capabilities obtained through pretraining. However, their performance on specific domain is usually suboptimal due to limited exposure to domain-specific tasks. Adapting LLM to the cinematic domain post unique challenges as it consists of complicated stories with limited textual information accessible from the subtitle or script alone. 

In this paper, we decompose the movie understanding capability into a suite of narrative understanding tasks based on narrative theory. We construct a dataset for these tasks based on resources in the movie domain, and use it to examine the effect of different domain adaptation strategies. Both the dataset and the models are made publicly available.
Our experiment results show the effectiveness of our approach in improving the narrative understanding of LLMs and highlight the trade-offs between domain-specific and general instruction capabilities.

Narrative understanding for Cinema domain large language model

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant contributions to cognitive science research. One area of application is narrative understanding. Sap et al. (2022) introduced $\textit{sequentiality}$, an LLM-derived measure that assesses the coherence of a story based on word probability distributions. They reported that recalled stories flowed less sequentially than imagined stories. However, the robustness and generalizability of this narrative flow measure remain unverified. To assess generalizability, we apply $\textit{sequentiality}$ derived from three different LLMs to a new dataset of matched autobiographical and biographical paragraphs. Contrary to previous results, we fail to find a significant difference in narrative flow between autobiographies and biographies. Further investigation reveals biases in the original data collection process, where topic selection systematically influences sequentiality scores. Adjusting for these biases substantially reduces the originally reported effect size. A validation exercise using LLM-generated stories with "good'' and "poor'' flow further highlights the flaws in the original formulation of sequentiality. Our findings suggest that LLM-based narrative flow quantification is susceptible to methodological artifacts. Finally, we provide some suggestions for modifying the $\textit{sequentiality}$ formula to accurately capture narrative flow.

From Stories to Statistics: Methodological Biases in LLM-Based Narrative Flow Quantification

Verbal fluency is a well-established experimental paradigm, used to examine various aspects of human knowledge retrieval, linguistic processing, and cognitive performance as well as, more recently, human creative abilities. In this work, we investigate the predictive capacities of recent large language models, known for their ability to store knowledge and retrieve it with high accuracy and efficiency from their latent space. We focus on switching and clustering patterns and seek evidence to substantiate them as two distinct and separable processes in creative semantic search. We prompt different transformer-based language models with verbal fluency items and ask whether metrics derived from the language models' prediction probabilities or internal attention distributions offer reliable predictors of switching/clustering behaviors in verbal fluency. We find that token probabilities, but especially attention-based metrics have strong statistical power when separating between cases of switching and clustering, in line with prior research on human cognition.

Components of Creativity: Language Model-based Predictors for Clustering and Switching in Verbal Fluency

Despite being ubiquitous in natural language, collocations (e.g., kick+habit) incur a unique processing cost, compared to compositional phrases (kick+door) and idioms (kick+bucket). We confirm this processing cost with behavioural data as well as MINERVA2, a memory model, suggesting that collocations constitute a distinct linguistic category. While the model fails to fully capture the observed human processing patterns, we find that below a specific item frequency threshold, the model’s retrieval failures align with human reaction times across conditions. This suggests an alternative processing mechanism that activates when memory retrieval fails, consistent with an analogical account of language processing.

What does memory retrieval leave on the table? Exploring Semi-compositionality in Language Processing with MINERVA2 and sBERT

Students' academic performance is influenced by various demographic factors, with socioeconomic class being a prominently researched and debated factor. Computer Science research traditionally prioritizes computationally definable problems, yet challenges such as the scarcity of high-quality labeled data and ethical concerns surrounding the mining of personal information can pose barriers to exploring topics like the impact of SES on students' education. Overcoming these barriers may involve automating the collection and annotation of high-quality language data from diverse social groups through human collaboration. Therefore, our focus is on gathering unstructured narratives from Internet forums written by students with low socioeconomic status (SES) using machine learning models and human insights. We developed a hybrid data collection model that semi-automatically retrieved narratives from the Reddit website and created a dataset five times larger than the seed dataset. Additionally, we compared the performance of traditional ML models with recent large language models (LLMs) in classifying narratives written by low-SES students, and analyzed the collected data to extract valuable insights into the socioeconomic challenges these students encounter and the solutions they pursue.

Bridging the Socioeconomic Gap in Education: A Hybrid AI and Human Annotation Approach

The syntactic probing literature has been largely limited to shallow structures like dependency trees, which are unable to capture the subtle differences in sub-surface syntactic structures that yield semantic nuances. These structures are captured by theories of syntax like generative syntax, but have not been researched in the LLM literature due to the difficulties in probing these complex structures with many silent, covert nodes. Our work presents a method for overcoming this limitation by deploying Hewitt and Manning's (2019) dependency-trained probe on sentence constructions whose structural representation is identical in a dependency parse, but differs in theoretical syntax. If a pretrained language model has captured the theoretical syntax structure, then the probe's predicted distances should vary in syntactically-predicted ways. Using this methodology and a novel dataset, we find evidence that LLMs have captured syntactic structures far richer than previously realized, indicating LLMs are able to capture the nuanced meanings that result from sub-surface differences in structural form.

Evidence of Generative Syntax in LLMs

In recent computational psycholinguistics, Merkx and Frank (2021) showed that surprisals from Transformers demonstrate a closer fit to measures of human reading effort than those from Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), suggesting that Transformers may capture the cue-based retrieval-like operations in human sentence processing. On the other hand, explicit incorporation of syntactic structures has been shown to improve LMs' predictive power for human cognitive load---for example, Hale et al. (2018) demonstrated that Recurrent Neural Network Grammars (RNNGs), which integrate RNNs with explicit syntactic structures, account for aspects of human brain activity that vanilla RNNs cannot. In this paper, we test the psychometric predictive power of Composition Attention Grammars (CAGs), the integration of Transformers with explicit syntactic structures, to investigate whether they can provide better fit to human gaze durations than vanilla Transformers and RNNGs by capturing cue-based retrieval-like operations on syntactic structures, which could potentially be involved in human sentence processing. The results of our controlled experiment demonstrate that surprisals from CAGs outperformed those from Transformers and RNNGs, suggesting that syntactic attention in CAGs may serve as a mechanistic implementation of human retrieval from syntactically-constructed memory representations.

Investigating Psychometric Predictive Power of Syntactic Attention

While natural language is processed incrementally, it is unclear whether the syntactic structure prediction process is universal across languages or language-specific. This study investigates this question by revisiting parsing strategies of syntactic language models that incrementally predict both the next token and the associated syntactic structure. Unlike previous studies that have focused on a few strategies, we examine a wide range of strategies by introducing different parameterizations of speculation, which quantifies the degree to which a model predicts syntactic structure before encountering the corresponding tokens. The experiments with 10 typologically diverse languages reveal that the optimal strategy differs depending on the language and the beam size.

Is Incremental Structure Prediction Process Universal across Languages?:Revisiting Parsing Strategy through Speculation

In this paper, we evaluate the capacity of current language technologies to understand Basque and Spanish language varieties. We use NLI as a pivot task and introduce a novel, manually-curated parallel dataset in Basque and Spanish and their corresponding variants. Empirical analysis of comprehensive crosslingual and in-context learning experiments with respectively, encoder-only and decoder-based Large Language Models (LLMs), reveals a performance drop when processing linguistic variations, with more pronounced effects observed in Basque. Error analysis indicates that lexical overlap plays no role, suggesting that linguistic variation represents the primary reason for the lower results. All data and code are publicly available under Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.

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