India

In-context learning (ICL) has become a prominent paradigm to rapidly customize LLMs to new tasks without fine-tuning. However, despite the empirical evidence of its usefulness, we still do not truly understand how ICL works. In this paper, we compare the behavior of in-context learning with supervised classifiers trained on ICL demonstrations to investigate three research questions: (1) Do LLMs with ICL behave similarly to classifiers trained on the same examples? (2) If so, which classifiers are closer, those based on gradient descent (GD) or those based on k-nearest neighbors (kNN)? (3) When they do not behave similarly, what conditions are associated with differences in behavior? Using text classification as a use case, with six datasets and three LLMs, we observe that LLMs behave similarly to these classifiers when the relevance of demonstrations is high. On average, ICL is closer to kNN than logistic regression, giving empirical evidence that the attention mechanism behaves more similarly to kNN than GD. However, when demonstration relevance is low, LLMs perform better than these classifiers, likely because LLMs can back off to their parametric memory, a luxury these classifiers do not have.

IJCNLP-AACL 2025

The Alchemy of Thought: Understanding In-Context Learning Through Supervised Classification

in-context learning

relevance

### 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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ACL 2025

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

poster

### Welcome to IJCNLP-AACL 2025! 
 It is a great honor to host this joint conference in Mumbai, India, from December 20 to 24, 2025. The joint conferences of IJCNLP and AACL are organized with alternating leadership in the Asia-Pacific region. The event is run by the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP) in odd years, and by AACL in even years, while it is organized solely by ACL when the annual ACL meeting is held in the region. This year, the conference is primarily organized by AFNLP. 
*Kentaro Inui
MBZUAI, UAE
General Chair, IJCNLP-AACL 2025* 
Read full message and download the Conference Handbook [**here**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UTwxkAqSqI-GAoJC3wE1zZt5VP1Y8GX0/view?usp=sharing).

The 14th IJCNLP & 4th AACL will be held in Mumbai, India from December 20th to December 24th, 2025.

Transformer-based models have revolutionized the field of natural language processing. To understand why they perform so well and to assess their reliability, several studies have focused on questions such as: Which linguistic properties are encoded by these models, and to what extent? How robust are these models in encoding linguistic properties when faced with perturbations in the input text? However, these studies have mainly focused on BERT and the English language. In this paper, we investigate similar questions regarding encoding capability and robustness for 8 linguistic properties across 13 different perturbations in 6 Indic languages, using 9 multilingual Transformer models (7 universal and 2 Indic-specific). To conduct this study, we introduce a novel multilingual benchmark dataset, IndicSentEval, containing approximately ~47K sentences. Our probing analysis of surface, syntactic, and semantic properties reveals that, while almost all multilingual models demonstrate consistent encoding performance for English, surprisingly, they show mixed results for Indic languages. As expected, Indic-specific multilingual models capture linguistic properties in Indic languages better than universal models. Intriguingly, universal models broadly exhibit better robustness compared to Indic-specific models, particularly under perturbations such as dropping both nouns and verbs, dropping only verbs, or keeping only nouns. Overall, this study provides valuable insights into probing and perturbation-specific strengths and weaknesses of popular multilingual Transformer-based models for different Indic languages.

IndicSentEval: How Effectively do Multilingual Transformer Models encode Linguistic Properties for Indic Languages?

Coreference resolution is a fundamental task in natural language processing that involves linking different references to the same entity within a text. However, existing models often struggle to reliably identify referential relationships in contexts with extensive length or complex modifiers. This study proposes a data augmentation technique adding adjective phrases and employing a prompt-based adversarial filtering pipeline to address these challenges. Specifically, we generated and inserted contextually appropriate adjective phrases through the interaction between GPT-4o-mini based Few-shot Prompting and a Discriminative Language Model. The grammatical and semantic consistency of these phrases was validated via human evaluation and inter-annotator agreement (IAA) procedures. The generated synthetic dataset was integrated with existing data, leading to enhanced model performance. On the LitBank dataset, the CoNLL-F1 score increased by up to 1.7%, while the synthetic dataset improved linguistic diversity and the complexity of referential structures. The proposed pipeline represents a significant step towards developing coreference resolution models capable of better capturing linguistic variety and demonstrating robustness under challenging conditions.

Enhancing Coreference Resolution with LLM-driven Data Augmentation and Adversarial Filtering

Difficult and unfamiliar concepts often hinder comprehension for lay audiences, especially in technical and educational domains. This motivates the usage of large language models (LLMs) for the process of text simplification (TS). In this work, we propose an iterative refinement framework that aims to simplify definitions by carefully handling complex terminology and domain-specific expressions. The obtained definition is reprocessed based on the critique, making refinements in successive iterations. We emphasize the use of small language models (SLMs) due to their faster response times and cost-efficient deployment. Human evaluations of the definitions produced at each refinement stage indicate consistent improvements in our specified evaluation criteria. We evaluate both LLM-as-a-judge score and human assessments along with automated metrics like BERTScore, BLEU-4, which provided supporting evidence for the effectiveness of our approach. Our work highlights the use of LLMs mimicking human-like feedback system in a TS task catering to a reader's specific cognitive needs. Thus, we find that an iterative, critique-driven method can be an effective strategy for the simplification of dense or technical texts, particularly in domains where jargon impedes understanding.

Iterative Critique-Driven Simplification: Targeted Enhancement of Complex Definitions with Small Language Models

Fine-tuning Large Language Models(LLMs) on multi-turn reasoning datasets requires N (number of turns) separate forward passes per conversation due to reasoning token visibility constraints, as reasoning tokens for a turn are discarded in subsequent turns. We propose duplicating response tokens along with a custom attention mask to enable single-pass processing of entire conversations. We prove our method produces identical losses to the N-pass approach while reducing time complexity from $O\bigl(N^{3}\bigl)$ to $O\bigl(N^{2}\bigl)$ and maintaining the same memory complexity for a transformer based model. Our approach achieves significant training speedup while preserving accuracy. Our implementation is available online(https://github.com/devrev/One-Pass-to-Reason).

One-Pass to Reason: Token Duplication and Block-Sparse Mask for Efficient Fine-Tuning on Multi-Turn Reasoning

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a popular method of transferring knowledge from a large "teacher" model to a small "student" model.  Previous work has explored various layer-selection strategies (e.g., forward matching and in-order random matching) for intermediate-layer matching in KD, where a student layer is forced to resemble a certain teacher layer. In this work, we revisit such layer-selection strategies and observe an intriguing phenomenon that layer-selection strategy does not matter (much) in intermediate-layer matching---even seemingly nonsensical matching strategies such as *reverse matching* still result in surprisingly good student performance. We provide an interpretation for this phenomenon by examining the angles between teacher layers viewed from the student's perspective. Our work sheds light on KD practice, as layer-selection strategies may not be the main focus of KD system design and vanilla forward matching works well in most setups.

Revisiting Intermediate-Layer Matching in Knowledge Distillation: Layer-Selection Strategy Doesn’t Matter (Much)

The vast majority of the world's languages, particularly low-resource and indigenous ones like Bhili, remain critically underserved by modern language technologies. The primary bottleneck is the lack of large-scale corpora required for standard pre-training. To address this gap, we introduce cross-lingual contrastive distillation, a novel and data-efficient, compute-efficient paradigm for creating powerful language models without a massive monolingual corpus. Our method adapts a pre-existing multilingual model (MuRIL) by using a fixed, expert teacher model (HindBERT) to distill semantic knowledge from a related high-resource language (Hindi) via a contrastive objective on a modest parallel corpus. Through comprehensive experiments, we show that our resulting model, GARuD-Bhili, significantly outperforms strong zero-shot and MLM-only baselines on a suite of evaluations, including intrinsic language modeling, downstream sentiment analysis, and cross-lingual benchmarks (Tatoeba, XNLI). Our work presents a generalizable and scalable blueprint for linguistic empowerment, offering a practical pathway to develop robust language technologies for other underserved languages globally.

GARuD: Guided Alignment of Representations using Distillation for Ultra-Low-Resource Languages

Quantifying the effects of textual interventions in social systems, such as reducing anger in social media posts to see its impact on engagement, is challenging. Real-world interventions are often infeasible, necessitating reliance on observational data. Traditional causal inference methods, typically designed for binary or discrete treatments, are inadequate for handling the complex, high-dimensional textual data. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing CausalDANN, a novel approach to estimate causal effects using text transformations facilitated by large language models (LLMs). Unlike existing methods, our approach accommodates arbitrary textual interventions and leverages text-level classifiers with domain adaptation ability to produce robust effect estimates against domain shifts, even when only the control group is observed. This flexibility in handling various text interventions is a key advancement in causal estimation for textual data, offering opportunities to better understand human behaviors and develop effective interventions within social systems.

Estimating Causal Effects of Text Interventions Leveraging LLMs

The rapid growth of social media platforms has led to concerns about radicalization, filter bubbles, and content bias. Existing approaches to classifying ideology are limited in that they require extensive human effort, the labeling of large datasets, and are not able to adapt to evolving ideological contexts. This paper explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for classifying the political ideology of online content through in-context learning (ICL). Our extensive experiments involving demonstration selection in label-balanced fashion, conducted on three datasets comprising news articles and YouTube videos, reveal that our approach significantly outperforms zero-shot and traditional supervised methods. Additionally, we evaluate the influence of metadata (e.g., content source and descriptions) on ideological classification and discuss its implications. Finally, we show how providing the source for political and non-political content influences the LLM's classification.

"Whose Side Are You On?" Estimating Ideology of Political and News Content Using Large Language Models and Few-shot Demonstration Selection

Emotion recognition methods typically assign labels at the sentence level, obscuring the specific linguistic cues that signal emotion. This limits their utility in applications requiring targeted responses, such as empathetic dialogue and clinical support, which depend on knowing which language expresses emotion. The task of identifying \textit{emotion evidence} -- text spans conveying emotion -- remains underexplored due to a lack of labeled data. Without span-level annotations, we cannot evaluate whether models truly localize emotion expression, nor can we diagnose the sources of emotion misclassification. We introduce the SEER (Span-based Emotion Evidence Retrieval) Benchmark to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) on this task. SEER evaluates single and multi-sentence span identification with new annotations on 1200 real-world sentences. We evaluate 14 LLMs and find that, on single-sentence inputs, the strongest models match the performance of average human annotators, but performance declines in multi-sentence contexts. Key failure modes include fixation on emotion keywords and false positives in neutral text.

SEER: The Span-based Emotion Evidence Retrieval Benchmark

Shaping inclusive representations that embrace diversity and ensure fair participation and reflections of values is at the core of many conversation-based models. However, many existing methods rely on surface inclusion using mention of user demographics or behavioral attributes of social groups. Such methods overlook the nuanced, implicit expression of opinion embedded in conversations. Furthermore, the over-reliance on overt cues can exacerbate misalignment and reinforce harmful or stereotypical representations in model outputs. Thus, we took a step back and recognized that equitable inclusion needs to account for the implicit expression of opinion and use the stance of responses to validate the normative alignment. This study aims to evaluate how opinions are represented in NLP or computational models by introducing an alignment evaluation framework that foregrounds implicit, often overlooked conversations and evaluates the normative social views and discourse. Our approach models the stance of responses as a proxy for the underlying opinion, enabling a considerate and reflective representation of diverse social viewpoints. We evaluate the framework using both (i) positive-unlabeled (PU) online learning with base classifiers, and (ii) instruction-tuned language models to assess post-training alignment. Through this, we provide a basis for understanding how implicit opinions are (mis)represented and offer a pathway toward more inclusive model behavior.

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Next from IJCNLP-AACL 2025

IndicSentEval: How Effectively do Multilingual Transformer Models encode Linguistic Properties for Indic Languages?

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