Canada

Social biases and stereotypes are embedded in our culture in part through their presence in our stories, as evidenced by the rich history of humanities and social science literature analyzing such biases in children stories. Because these analyses are often conducted manually and at a small scale, such investigations can benefit from the use of more recent natural language processing (NLP) methods that examine social bias in models and data corpora. Our work joins this interdisciplinary effort and makes a unique contribution by taking into account the event narrative structures when analyzing the social bias of stories. We propose a computational pipeline that automatically extracts a story&#39;s temporal narrative verb-based event chain for each of its characters as well as character attributes such as gender. We also present a verb-based event annotation scheme that can facilitate bias analysis by including categories such as those that align with traditional stereotypes. Through a case study analyzing gender bias in fairy tales, we demonstrate that our framework can reveal bias in not only the unigram verb-based events in which female and male characters participate but also in the temporal narrative order of such event participation.

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ACL 2023

Are Fairy Tales Fair? Analyzing Gender Bias in Temporal Narrative Event Chains of Children&#39;s Fairy Tales

verb type annotations

temporal event chains

gender bias in fiction

gender bias

natural language processing

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair:<br>
*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.*<br>
[Read more](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GI_hvOpjswAuYdUTromfeDiPpCcqidwg/view?usp=sharing)<br><br><br>



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ACL 2025

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

Social biases and stereotypes are embedded in our culture in part through their presence in our stories, as evidenced by the rich history of humanities and social science literature analyzing such biases in children stories. Because these analyses are often conducted manually and at a small scale, such investigations can benefit from the use of more recent natural language processing (NLP) methods that examine social bias in models and data corpora. Our work joins this interdisciplinary effort and makes a unique contribution by taking into account the event narrative structures when analyzing the social bias of stories. We propose a computational pipeline that automatically extracts a story's temporal narrative verb-based event chain for each of its characters as well as character attributes such as gender. We also present a verb-based event annotation scheme that can facilitate bias analysis by including categories such as those that align with traditional stereotypes. Through a case study analyzing gender bias in fairy tales, we demonstrate that our framework can reveal bias in not only the unigram verb-based events in which female and male characters participate but also in the temporal narrative order of such event participation.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/pk54NpNnxuhWHUa3vSMXH2/embed/polls/70c2e652-302f-43ba-beb9-64738cb1fa4d" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Are Fairy Tales Fair? Analyzing Gender Bias in Temporal Narrative Event Chains of Children's Fairy Tales

poster

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
<br>The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023.<br><br>
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience.<br>
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**
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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.

Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Multiparty Conversations (MERMC) has recently attracted considerable attention. Due to the complexity of visual scenes in multi-party conversations, most previous MERMC studies mainly focus on text and audio modalities while ignoring visual information. Recently, several works proposed to extract face sequences as visual features and have shown the importance of visual information in MERMC. However, given an utterance, the face sequence extracted by previous methods may contain multiple people's faces, which will inevitably introduce noise to the emotion prediction of the real speaker. To tackle this issue, we propose a two-stage framework named Facial expressionaware Multimodal Multi-Task learning (FacialMMT). Specifically, a pipeline method is first designed to extract the face sequence of the real speaker of each utterance, which consists of multimodal face recognition, unsupervised face clustering, and face matching. With the extracted face sequences, we propose a multimodal facial expression-aware emotion recognition model, which leverages the frame-level facial emotion distributions to help improve utterance-level emotion recognition based on multi-task learning. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed FacialMMT framework on the benchmark MELD dataset. The source code is publicly released at https://github.com/NUSTM/FacialMMT.

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A Facial Expression-Aware Multimodal Multi-task Learning Framework for Emotion Recognition in Multi-party Conversations

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to perform new tasks by prompting them with a sequence of training examples. However, it is known that ICL is very sensitive to the choice of training examples: randomly sampling examples from a training set leads to high variance in performance. In this paper, we show that carefully curating a subset of training data greatly stabilizes ICL performance without any other changes to the ICL algorithm (e.g., prompt retrieval or calibration). We introduce two methods to choose training subsets---both score training examples individually, then select the highest-scoring ones. CondAcc scores a training example by its average dev-set ICL accuracy when combined with random training examples, while Datamodels learns linear regressors that estimate how the presence of each training example influences LLM outputs. Across five tasks and two LLMs, sampling from stable subsets selected by CondAcc and Datamodels improves average accuracy over sampling from the entire training set by 7.7% and 6.3%, respectively.Surprisingly, the stable subset examples are not especially diverse in content or low in perplexity, in contrast with other work suggesting that diversity and perplexity are important when prompting LLMs.

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Data Curation Alone Can Stabilize In-context Learning

Transfer learning has been shown to be an effective technique for enhancing the performance of low-resource neural machine translation (NMT). This is typically achieved through either fine-tuning a child model with a pre-trained parent model, or by utilizing the out- put of the parent model during the training of the child model. However, these methods do not make use of the parent knowledge during the child inference, which may limit the translation performance. In this paper, we propose a k-Nearest-Neighbor Transfer Learning (kNN-TL) approach for low-resource NMT, which leverages the parent knowledge throughout the entire developing process of the child model. Our approach includes a parent-child representation alignment method, which ensures consistency in the output representations between the two models, and a child-aware datastore construction method that improves inference efficiency by selectively distilling the parent datastore based on relevance to the child model. Experimental results on four low-resource translation tasks show that kNN-TL outperforms strong baselines. Extensive analyses further demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Code and scripts are freely available at https://github.com/NLP2CT/kNN-TL.

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kNN-TL: k-Nearest-Neighbor Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation

Content Warning: This paper contains examples of misgendering and erasure that could be offensive and potentially triggering.Gender bias in language technologies has been widely studied, but research has mostly been restricted to a binary paradigm of gender. It is essential also to consider non-binary gender identities, as excluding them can cause further harm to an already marginalized group. In this paper, we comprehensively evaluate popular language models for their ability to correctly use English gender-neutral pronouns (e.g., singular they, them) and neo-pronouns (e.g., ze, xe, thon) that are used by individuals whose gender identity is not represented by binary pronouns. We introduce Misgendered, a framework for evaluating large language models' ability to correctly use preferred pronouns, consisting of (i) instances declaring an individual's pronoun, followed by a sentence with a missing pronoun, and (ii) an experimental setup for evaluating masked and auto-regressive language models using a unified method. When prompted out-of-the-box, language models perform poorly at correctly predicting neo-pronouns (averaging 7.6% accuracy) and gender-neutral pronouns (averaging 31.0% accuracy). This inability to generalize results from a lack of representation of non-binary pronouns in training data and memorized associations. Few-shot adaptation with explicit examples in the prompt improves the performance but plateaus at only 45.4% for neo-pronouns. We release the full dataset, code, and demo at https://tamannahossainkay.github.io/misgendered/.

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MISGENDERED: Limits of Large Language Models in Understanding Pronouns

Estimating the log-likelihood of a given sentence under an autoregressive language model is straightforward: one can simply apply the chain rule and sum the log-likelihood values for each successive token. However, for masked language models (MLMs), there is no direct way to estimate the log-likelihood of a sentence. To address this issue, Salazar et al. (2020) propose to estimate sentence pseudo-log-likelihood (PLL) scores, computed by successively masking each sentence token, retrieving its score using the rest of the sentence as context, and summing the resulting values. Here, we demonstrate that the original PLL method yields inflated scores for out-of-vocabulary words and propose an adapted metric, in which we mask not only the target token, but also all within-word tokens to the right of the target. We show that our adapted metric (PLL-word-l2r) outperforms both the original PLL metric and a PLL metric in which all within-word tokens are masked. In particular, it better satisfies theoretical desiderata and better correlates with scores from autoregressive models. Finally, we show that the choice of metric affects even tightly controlled, minimal pair evaluation benchmarks (such as BLiMP), underscoring the importance of selecting an appropriate scoring metric for evaluating MLM properties.

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A Better Way to Do Masked Language Model Scoring

Explainable question answering (XQA) aims to answer a given question and provide an explanation why the answer is selected. Existing XQA methods focus on reasoning on a single knowledge source, e.g., structured knowledge bases, unstructured corpora, etc. However, integrating information from heterogeneous knowledge sources is essential to answer complex questions. In this paper, we propose to leverage question decomposing for heterogeneous knowledge integration, by breaking down a complex question into simpler ones, and selecting the appropriate knowledge source for each sub-question. To facilitate reasoning, we propose a novel two-stage XQA framework, Reasoning over Hierarchical Question Decomposition Tree (RoHT). First, we build the Hierarchical Question Decomposition Tree (HQDT) to understand the semantics of a complex question; then, we conduct probabilistic reasoning over HQDT from root to leaves recursively, to aggregate heterogeneous knowledge at different tree levels and search for a best solution considering the decomposing and answering probabilities. The experiments on complex QA datasets KQA Pro and Musique show that our framework outperforms SOTA methods significantly, demonstrating the effectiveness of leveraging question decomposing for knowledge integration and our RoHT framework.

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Reasoning over Hierarchical Question Decomposition Tree for Explainable Question Answering

We present a new task setting for attribute mining on e-commerce products, serving as a practical solution to extract open-world attributes without extensive human intervention. Our supervision comes from a high-quality seed attribute set bootstrapped from existing resources, and we aim to expand the attribute vocabulary of existing seed types, and also to discover any new attribute types automatically. A new dataset is created to support our setting, and our approach Amacer is proposed specifically to tackle the limited supervision. Especially, given that no direct supervision is available for those unseen new attributes, our novel formulation exploits self-supervised heuristic and unsupervised latent attributes, which attains implicit semantic signals as additional supervision by leveraging product context. Experiments suggest that our approach surpasses various baselines by 12 F1, expanding attributes of existing types significantly by up to 12 times, and discovering values from 39% new types.

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Towards Open-World Product Attribute Mining: A Lightly-Supervised Approach

Despite advances in large pre-trained neural language models, they are prone to generating toxic language, which brings security risks to their applications.We introduce MIL-Decoding, which detoxifies language models at token-level by interpolating it with a trained multiple instance learning (MIL) network.MIL model is trained on a corpus with a toxicity label for each text to predict the overall toxicity and the toxicity of each token in its context.Intuitively, the MIL network computes a toxicity distribution over next tokens according to the generated context which supplements the original language model to avoid toxicity.We evaluate MIL-Decoding with automatic metrics and human evaluation, where MIL-Decoding outperforms other baselines in detoxification while it only hurts generation fluency a little bit.

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MIL-Decoding: Detoxifying Language Models at Token-Level via Multiple Instance Learning

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to timely trace the dynamic interests of users through dialogues and generate relevant responses for item recommendations. Recently, various external knowledge bases (especially knowledge graphs) are incorporated into CRS to enhance the understanding of conversation contexts. However, recent reasoning-based models heavily rely on simplified structures such as linear structures or fixed-hierarchical structures for causality reasoning, hence they cannot fully figure out sophisticated relationships among utterances with external knowledge. To address this, we propose a novel Tree structure Reasoning schEmA named TREA. TREA constructs a multi-hierarchical scalable tree as the reasoning structure to clarify the causal relationships between mentioned entities, and fully utilizes historical conversations to generate more reasonable and suitable responses for recommended results. Extensive experiments on two public CRS datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.

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TREA: Tree-Structure Reasoning Schema for Conversational Recommendation

Event detection (ED) seeks to discover and classify event instances in plain texts.Previous methods for ED typically adopt supervised learning, requiring fully labeled and high-quality training data.However, in a real-world application, we may not obtain clean training data but only partially labeled one, which could substantially impede the learning process.In this work, we conduct a seminal study for learning with partial annotations for ED.We propose a new trigger localization formulation using contrastive learning to distinguish ground-truth triggers from contexts, showing a decent robustness for addressing partial annotation noise.Impressively, in an extreme scenario where more than 90\% of events are unlabeled, our approach achieves an F1 score of over 60\%.In addition, we re-annotate and make available two fully annotated subsets of ACE 2005 to serve as an unbiased benchmark for event detection.We hope our approach and data will inspire future studies on this vital yet understudied problem.

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A Facial Expression-Aware Multimodal Multi-task Learning Framework for Emotion Recognition in Multi-party Conversations

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Leveraging Large Language Models to Measure Gender Representation Bias in Gendered Language Corpora

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