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Multilingual language models now cover more languages than ever, yet script-sharing low-resource languages remain vulnerable to failures driven by script and dominant-language priors. This dissertation studies one such failure mode, $semantic$ $interference$, in Square Bai Script, where many forms resemble Chinese characters but often differ in meaning. We argue that current adaptation pipelines underperform not only because Bai is low-resource, but because they treat visible overlap as safe transfer by default. Building on an expert-validated corpus of 28,382 Bai-Chinese sentence pairs, an out-of-domain epigraphic set and a reproducible encoding pipeline, the dissertation will (1) diagnose semantic interference, (2) compare adaptation strategies under realistic compute constraints, and (3) estimate when shared-script transfer helps or harms adaptation. The long-term goal is Bai-capable understanding and generation. The dissertation addresses the prerequisite problem of safe and effective adaptation in a script-sharing low-resource setting.

ACL 2026

Thesis Proposal: Diagnosing and Mitigating Semantic Interference in Script-Sharing Low-Resource Language Models: A Case Study on Square Bai Script

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
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Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
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The University of Texas at Austin 
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields 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.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
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The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

Fringe platforms like Gab harbor high volumes of hate speech due to minimal moderation and insular communities. Our study examines the factors that determine how hate speech amplifies on these platforms. We scraped a novel dataset of 5K+ threads and 50K+ responses from four fringe platforms (Gab, 4chan, Stormfront, and Vanguard), where hate speech amplification was measured using platform-specific engagement metrics. We trained both Generalized Linear Models and Gradient Boosted Tree models to estimate how several features influence the amplification of hate speech on fringe platforms, and used Shapley value estimates to identify the relative importance of the features. Our analysis shows that research insights from social network analysis (SNA) of mainstream sites like X do not directly generalize to fringe platforms. For instance, our experiments show that using features like thread structure and disagreements in early response windows can give up to 74% RMSE lift in predicting reply counts for hateful posts on fringe platforms, on top of a baseline model with features like hate intensity and thread age that would be considered predictive by regular SNA methods.

Analyzing Hate Speech Amplification on Fringe Platforms

As large language models (LLM) trained on massive corpora scraped from the web exhibit the capability to reproduce sensitive and copyright-protected data, the field of machine unlearning has emerged to address the arising ethical and legal concerns. While previous research has provided a unified evaluation of LLM unlearning methods, this unification remains constrained to English-only models and datasets. We aim to address the prevailing fragmentation in recent cross-lingual unlearning research by extending existing unified benchmarks with multilingual data. To that end, we plan to compile a dataset of parallel translations of question-answer pairs consisting of real-world facts and synthetic personally identifiable information. Moreover, we will focus on mitigating model degradation during unlearning by selectively editing only those layers that contain the given knowledge.

Thesis Proposal: Targeted and Unified Cross-Lingual Unlearning from Multilingual Language Models

AI agents that interact with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) require effective observation representations for reliable grounding. The accessibility tree is a commonly used text-based format that encodes UI element attributes, but it suffers from redundancy and lacks structural information such as spatial relationships among elements. We propose A11y-Compressor, a framework that transforms linearized accessibility trees into compact and structured representations. Our implementation, Compressed-a11y, applies a lightweight and structured transformation pipeline with modal detection, redundancy reduction, and semantic structuring. Experiments on the OSWorld benchmark show that Compressed-a11y reduces input tokens to 22\% of the original while improving task success rates by 5.1 percentage points on average.

A11y-Compressor: A framework for Enhancing the Efficiency of GUI Agent Observations through Visual Context Reconstruction and Redundancy Reduction

Large Language Models specialized for the medical domain achieve high performance on static benchmarks, but remain vulnerable to sycophantic confabulation, where the models generate medically spurious rationales to justify incorrect user hints. This robustness gap poses severe risks in clinical environments, as models may prioritize contextual faithfulness to a biased prompt over their internal parametric medical knowledge. This study introduces a mechanistic approach to identify and mitigate these failures in MedGemma-27B, isolating hint integration circuits using Sparse Autoencoders and geometric manifold analysis. Our findings reveal that sycophantic bias is a highly distributed and polymorphic concept, with biased reasoning routed through shifting dimensions across transformer layers. We identify a specific causal bottleneck for bias formation and demonstrate that cluster-conditioned dynamic steering tailored to the geometric subspace of the prompt outperforms static global interventions, though it reveals a fundamental tension between bias resilience and the retention of internal parametric knowledge.This work proposes a principled framework toward clinical AI systems that are more robust and aligned with expert medical logic, demonstrating the potential of cluster-conditioned geometric interventions while characterizing the inherent trade-offs in clinical knowledge retention.

Probing Bias Formation in Medical LLMs through Activation Steering

Sycophancy, the response pattern of language models to flatter and agree with users statements rather than correcting them, is widely studied but benchmarked inconsistently. To enable better interpretations of the contested concept of model sycophancy, we evaluate eight models on eight popular sycophancy benchmarks across five random seeds (32,000 evaluations). Cross-benchmark correlations average near zero, benchmarks fail to agree on which models are most sycophantic, and combining them yields negative internal consistency. Only 2 of 28 model-level benchmark pairs correlate significantly, one of which is negative. Yet, individual benchmarks show high test-retest reliability, confirming they measure their specific operational definition consistently, just not the same construct. We recommend multi-benchmark evaluation designs spanning at least three benchmark families before global interpretations about model sycophancy.

Identifying the Convergent Sycophancy Gap in Model Evaluations

Patient health literacy is a critical determinant of health outcomes, yet medical discharge summaries remain inaccessible to many patients due to jargon and complex language. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising means of bridging this gap, but their deployment in resource-constrained hospital environments demands lightweight, privacy-preserving solutions. We evaluate a range of open- and closed-source LLMs on the MeDiSumQA dataset, comprising real patient discharge summaries paired with lay questions and clinician-verified answers, and demonstrate that open-source models achieve performance comparable to GPT-5. We then introduce LAMP-MedQA, a lightweight multi-agent framework for patient-oriented medical question answering. LAMP-MedQA decomposes the task into an information extraction stage and a text simplification stage, each governed by an automated metric-driven feedback loop that enables iterative self-correction without human-in-the-loop supervision. Implemented using two small open-source models (Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and Phi-3.5-mini-instruct), the system achieves significantly improved readability (FKGL) and simplification quality (SARI) compared to zero-shot GPT-5, whilst maintaining competitive semantic similarity and clinical accuracy, suggesting that collaborative lightweight agents represent a viable approach to improving health literacy in clinical settings.

LAMP-MedQA: A Lightweight Multi-Agent System for Patient-Oriented Medical Question Answering

Scientific NLP systems often require outputs that satisfy strict, machine-checkable constraints. In this work, we study structured-generation controllability along three axes: structural control, iterative correction, and decoding dynamics. Diffusion decoding is of particular interest because its iterative refinement may improve global structure and revision behavior, but may also introduce distinct failure modes such as termination instability and repetition. To quantify controllability, we evaluate compliance with five machine-checkable constraints: (i) required headings and (ii) correct ordering, which reflect global structural control; (iii) explicit end markers and (iv) per-section bullet constraints, which probe local constraint adherence; and (v) repetition avoidance, which captures generation stability under different decoding dynamics. We use these metrics to assess both single-pass generation and changes under iterative correction. Our goal is to isolate structural reliability under parser-facing requirements rather than to directly measure scientific correctness. Across our benchmark, diffusion models tend to better preserve global structure, while iterative improvement substantially improves explicit termination and other local control constraints. Hybrid systems show mixed behavior depending on decoding order. These results suggest that machine-checkable controllability can be usefully decomposed into global structure versus local control, and that the two may benefit from different inference-time strategies.

Inference-Time Feedback for Reasoning Controllability in Diffusion Language Models

Thinking Mode Fusion (TMF) enables large language models to support both concise responses and long-form reasoning by unifying a non-thinking mode and a thinking mode within a single model. However, its training dynamics, including the \emph{data ratio} and \emph{training schedule} between the two modes, remain underexplored. In this work, we present a systematic study of TMF by analyzing the effects of the training schedule and data ratio between thinking and non-thinking modes. Focusing on mathematical problem solving, we construct a benchmark with multiple thinking-to-non-thinking data ratios and three training schedules. Our results reveal an asymmetric interaction between the two modes: increasing the ratio of non-thinking supervision reduces the accuracy of the thinking mode. We further show that different training schedules modulate this trade-off and that the optimal schedule depends on the data ratio. Finally, we quantify a negative correlation between non-thinking and thinking mode supervision, highlighting an inherent tension between these two modes. These findings provide practical guidance for designing effective TMF training settings. All code and data are released to support further research at: \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Fusion-Bench-2D62}{\textbf{Fusion Bench}}.

Fusion Training for Mathematical Generalization in Large Language Models

We ask whether topic sentiment has a causal effect on perceived political ideology, and whether the answer depends on who assigns the ideology label. Using the AllSidesV2 test dataset (N=11,516 articles), we hold sentiment annotations constant and compare ideology labels from expert human annotators, GPT-4o-mini (baseline and finetuned), and Llama-3.3-70B. We apply Double Machine Learning (DML) and community-level mediation analysis across all four annotation paradigms. Human annotations yield no significant causal effects at the community level. Fine-tuned GPT-4o-mini achieves the highest classification accuracy (F1=72.48) and is the only annotator paradigm that produces significant community-level treatment effects and significant natural direct effects (NDEs) in mediation. We interpret this as evidence of shortcut learning: fine-tuning on ideology-labeled data causes the model to internalise a spurious sentiment--ideology coupling not operative in human judgment. This coupling is structurally invisible to F1-based evaluation, with implications for the use of LLM annotations as silver labels and as proxies for human judgment in downstream causal analyses.

Does Topic Sentiment Cause Perceived Ideology? Comparing Human and LLM Annotations in Political News Articles

In conversational implicatures, speakers convey hidden intended meanings beyond the literal content of their utterances, and hearers are expected to infer what is implied. This study examines how Large Language Models (LLMs) interpret conversational implicatures, using human interpretation as a baseline and gold standard for comparison. The same experiments were conducted with two types of participants: humans and LLMs. Two metrics were adopted: a surprisal-based metric and a response-based metric. The results suggest that the response-based metric demonstrates higher accuracy, comparable to human responses, than the surprisal-based metric. In particular, humans and LLMs using the response-based metric performed better in the literal condition than in the implied condition. Additionally, they were more sensitive to capturing implied meanings for some-all trigger than for the other triggers. Overall, LLMs employing the response-based metric tend to exhibit human-like behavior, but still diverge from humans in their understanding of conversational implicatures.

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Analyzing Hate Speech Amplification on Fringe Platforms

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Next from ACL 2026

Analyzing Hate Speech Amplification on Fringe Platforms

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Unknown Script: Impact of Script on Cross-Lingual Transfer

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

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