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Languages change over time. Computational models can be trained to recognize such changes enabling them to estimate the publication date of texts. Despite recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), their performance on automatic dating of texts, also known as Temporal Text Classification (TTC), has not been explored. This study provides the first systematic evaluation of leading proprietary (Claude 3.5, GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5) and open-source (LLaMA 3.2, Gemma 2, Mistral, Nemotron 4) LLMs on TTC using three historical corpora, two in English and one in Portuguese. We test zero-shot and few-shot prompting, and fine-tuning settings. Our results indicate that proprietary models perform well, especially with few-shot prompting. They also indicate that fine-tuning substantially improves open-source models but that they still fail to match the performance delivered by proprietary LLMs.

ACL 2026

Temporal Text Classification with Large Language Models

workshop paper

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. <br>
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Cross-lingual detection of intertextuality and translation in Latin and Ancient Greek through computational approaches is of great interest for classical studies.
While several systems exist for parallel sentence detection, based on general multilingual or specific models for Latin-Ancient Greek, they have not been compared against each other. 
Therefore, we present a synthetic benchmark to evaluate the performance of language models regarding cross-lingual Ancient Greek and Latin parallel sentence mining. 
We first compare six language models to encode sentences and then further improve the cross-lingual alignment through post-processing, fine-tuning, and knowledge distillation. 
We find that the whitening transformation in combination with knowledge distillation provides excellent results. 
Specifically, SPhilBERTa, a trilingual language model for Ancient Greek and Latin, benefits the most from the improvements and achieves an almost perfect retrieval score of 97.6 on our benchmark.

Evaluating Latin and Ancient Greek Sentence Alignment through Parallel Sentence Mining

The Aramaic proclitic *dalet*, widely used in historical Hebrew texts, serves two distinct grammatical functions: as a subordinating conjunction and as a possessive preposition. Because these functions are orthographically identical and no annotated resources exist for this task, large-scale computational analysis of their usage has previously been infeasible. In this paper we introduce a new BERT model for historical Hebrew in which all prefixes are segmented and encoded as independent tokens. This representation allows the model to evaluate proclitics directly and enables a zero-shot method for determining the grammatical role of the *dalet* clitic using masked language modeling predictions. We evaluate the approach on a manually annotated dataset drawn from historical Hebrew literature spanning multiple regions and historical periods, achieving over 94% accuracy. Applying the method to a corpus of more than 300 million words of historical Hebrew texts, we conduct large-scale stylistic analyses of the choice between the Aramaic *dalet* and available Hebrew alternatives. The results reveal geographic and diachronic trends and identify distinct sociolectal patterns within the corpus. The prefix-segmented model and annotated dataset are released for public use.

Modeling the "Dalet" Clitic in Historical Hebrew Texts: A New Prefix-Segmented BERT Model and Stylistic Analysis

Prior research on cultural markets has relied on genre labels to distinguish products, overlooking the specific content features that differentiate films within the same genre. We address this gap using tropes as building blocks of narrative structure. From a dataset of 30k tropes across 18k films (TVTropes.org), we identify 29 narrative patterns via community detection and characterize each film by two measures: coherence (how concentrated its tropes are within a few patterns) and spanning distance (how far apart the patterns it combines are). Regression analyses show that coherence improves both audience evaluations and attention, while spanning distance increases evaluations but reduces attention. These findings extend category-spanning theory from genre labels to the internal narrative composition of films, demonstrating how stories are constructed and shape audience responses.

Beyond Genre Categories: How Narrative Pattern Coherence and Spanning Distance Shape Film Success

Nearly all studies on web registers – online text varieties associated with distinct social contexts and linguistic features – use full documents as the unit of analysis. However, web documents often contain sections in different registers. A cooking blog post, for instance, may combine personal storytelling, recipe instructions, user comments, and promotional text within a single URL. This internal variation raises doubts about the validity of document-level register labeling. In this paper, we propose an LLM-based segmentation approach that identifies register-homogeneous segments within documents and apply it to a 10,000-document English sample from HPLT 3.0. We show that segmentation addresses persistent problems in register analysis, including low inter-annotator agreement and category fuzziness. Strikingly, it also reveals that most web documents contain more than one register, making register mixing the norm rather than the exception on the web.

Register Mixing Is the Norm on the Web

Identifying intertextual parallels is central to philology, traditionally requiring labor-intensive manual analysis. While digitized historical corpora enable automated approaches using semantic sentence embeddings, training such models requires large annotated datasets, which are scarce for low-resource languages. We address this challenge by introducing a scalable automatic annotation pipeline for training semantic embedding models for Classical Tibetan. Our method combines unsupervised contrastive bootstrapping with iterative pair mining, generating silver-standard similarity labels through two complementary annotation strategies: (1) an ensemble of embedding models and rerankers, and (2) an LLM-as-a-judge committee using best–worst scaling. 
When combined with a domain‑specific, gold‑standard annotated dataset for sequential fine‑tuning, the resulting text-similarity model achieves a state‑of‑the‑art Spearman correlation of 0.864 on the STS task. This enables effective semantic search in Classical Tibetan and provides a framework for automatic supervision in low-resource languages used in digital humanities. We will make our code, dataset, and trained model publicly available upon publication.

Scaling Sentence Similarity for Classical Tibetan with Automatic Annotations

Historical corpora for Tagalog remain limited, particularly texts produced during the Martial Law period under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. (1972–1986). Much of this material remains undigitized, restricting computational analysis of a significant period in Philippine political history. To support research on historical Tagalog texts, we introduce PHMartialLawNER, a gold-standard named entity recognition corpus constructed from newspapers and underground publications of the Martial Law era. The corpus includes approximately 13k extracted sentence segments (362,000 tokens), consolidated into 8k annotated text spans through a semi-automatic pipeline with manual validation. The reliability of the annotation is measured using Cohen’s $\kappa$, reaching 0.86 on all tokens and 0.72 on annotated tokens, with a pairwise F1-score of 0.74. The schema defines historically relevant entity categories including Person (Individual, Collective), Organization (Political, Government, Other), Event (Local, International), Production (Media, Government, Doctrine), as well as Time, Numerical Statistics, Location, and Object entities, specifically identifying weapon artifacts. We establish baseline performance using GLiNER variants, calamanCy models, and transformer-based architectures under zero-shot and few-shot settings. The PHMartialLawNER corpus will be publicly released to support Tagalog NLP, historical text processing, and digital humanities research.

PHMartialLawNER: A Tagalog Named Entity Recognition Corpus for the Philippine Martial Law Era

Literary translation requires balancing target-language fluency with faithfulness to the source. Recent large language models (LLMs) often produce fluent translations, but it remains unclear whether fluency corresponds to semantic preservation in literary text. We examine this relationship using 130,486 translated paragraphs from 106 novels in 16 source languages, including human, Google Translate, and TranslateGemma translations. Fluency is measured as original-likeness with a translationese classifier trained on paragraph part-of-speech n-grams, and faithfulness with the automatic translation evaluation metric COMET-KIWI. We control for paragraph length and find a consistent negative correlation between fluency and faithfulness. The pattern appears for both human and Google Translate, but is weaker and often non-significant for TranslateGemma. These results show that segment length matters for automatic evaluation and suggest a tradeoff between fluency and faithfulness in literary translation.

Fluency and Faithfulness in Human and Machine Literary Translation

We investigate narrative agency in hu-
man–LLM creative co-writing, asking who
drives story development in turn-based collabo-
ration. Using a new corpus of human–LLM co-
written stories, we apply sentiment and seman-
tic modeling to quantify affective alignment
and semantic novelty in turn-taking, and direc-
tional measures to assess which agent shapes
narrative progression. Our results show asym-
metric influence: human turns introduce greater
semantic novelty and are more likely to shape
subsequent developments, whereas LLM con-
tributions predominantly elaborate on human-
introduced elements. At the sentiment level,
alignment is also asymmetric, but more bidirec-
tional: LLMs exhibit stronger turn-level emo-
tional adaptation than humans, but both agents
track each other’s emotional valence and LLMs
show an independent tendency to more pos-
itive emotional baselines. These findings in-
dicate a complementary division of labor in
human–LLM co-writing, where humans drive
narrative innovation and direction, while LLMs
act as adaptive amplifiers that sustain coherence
and elaborate emerging narratives.

Directional Alignment and Narrative Agency in Human–LLM Co-Writing

AI-driven language technologies are increasingly used in hiring, but they may encode and reproduce harmful social stereotypes. Prior work often studies bias mitigation methods in isolation and outside realistic application settings. We examine the combined effects of data-level and model-level debiasing in a hiring-related context, using Norwegian-language academic bios and a proxy STEM/non-STEM classification task. Specifically, we study masking sensitive information, GenWriter-based rewrites \citep{soundararajan2025genwriter}, and adversarial debiasing \citep{han2021diverse,han2022towards}. We evaluate these interventions using downstream task performance, group fairness metrics, intrinsic bias tests based on WEAT \citep{caliskan2017semantics}, and measures of gender leakage from hidden representations. We find that combining masking, GenWriter rewrites, and adversarial debiasing substantially reduces gender leakage while maintaining or improving downstream performance. However, effects on fairness gaps and intrinsic bias are mixed, underscoring the need for downstream, context-sensitive evaluation of bias mitigation methods in hiring-related NLP.

Bias Mitigation in Hiring-Related NLP: Interactions Between Masking, Rewriting, and Adversarial Debiasing

While digitized corpora have transformed the study of intellectual transmission, current methods rely heavily on lexical text reuse detection, capturing verbatim quotations but fundamentally missing paraphrases and complex implicit engagement. This paper evaluates semantic search in 18th-century intellectual history through the reception of John Locke’s foundational work. Using expert annotation grounded in a semantic taxonomy, we examine whether an off-the-shelf semantic search pipeline can surface meaning-level correspondences overlooked by lexical methods. Our results demonstrate that semantic search retrieves substantially more implicit receptions than lexical baselines. However, linguistic diagnostics also reveal a "lexical gatekeeping" effect, where retrieval remains partially constrained by surface vocabulary overlap. These findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of semantic retrieval for analyzing the circulation of ideas in large historical corpora.

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Evaluating Latin and Ancient Greek Sentence Alignment through Parallel Sentence Mining

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Evaluating Latin and Ancient Greek Sentence Alignment through Parallel Sentence Mining

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RESOURCES

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