United States

In the video-language domain, recent works in leveraging zero-shot Large Language Model-based reasoning for video understanding have become competitive challengers to previous end-to-end models. However, long video understanding presents unique challenges due to the complexity of reasoning over extended timespans, even for zero-shot LLM-based approaches. The challenge of information redundancy in long videos prompts the question of what specific information is essential for large language models (LLMs) and how to leverage them for complex spatial-temporal reasoning in long-form video analysis. We propose a framework VideoINSTA , i.e. INformative Spatial-TemporAl Reasoning for zero-shot long-form video understanding.
VideoINSTA contributes 
(1) a zero-shot framework for long video understanding using LLMs; 
(2) an event-based temporal
reasoning and content-based spatial reasoning approach for LLMs to reason over spatial-temporal information in videos; 
(3) a self-reflective information reasoning scheme based on information sufficiency and prediction confidence while balancing temporal factors.
Our model significantly improves the state-of-the-art on three long video question-answering benchmarks: EgoSchema, NextQA, and IntentQA, and the open question answering dataset ActivityNetQA. Code is released: https://github.com/mayhugotong/VideoINSTA.

EMNLP 2024

VideoINSTA: Zero-shot Long-Form Video Understanding via Informative Spatial-Temporal Reasoning

prompting

interpretability

language models

### 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.* 
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ACL 2025

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

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
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EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

Over the years, memes have evolved into multifaceted narratives on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit, blending text, images and audio to amplify humor and engagement. The objective of the task described in this article is to bridge the gap for individuals who may struggle to understand memes due to cultural, geographical, ancillary insights, or relevant exposure constraints, aiming to enhance meme comprehension across diverse audiences. The lack of large datasets for supervised learning and alternatives to resource-intensive vision language models have historically hindered the development of such technology. In this work, we have made strides to overcome these challenges. We introduce "MMD" a $\textbf{M}$ultimodal $\textbf{M}$eme $\textbf{D}$ataset comprising $\textbf{13,494}$ instances, including 3,134 with audio, rendering it the largest of its kind, with $\textbf{2.1}$ times as many samples and $\textbf{9.5}$ times as many words in the human annotated meme summary compared to the largest available meme captioning dataset, MemeCap. Our framework, MeSum ($\textbf{Me}$me $\textbf{Sum}$mariser), employs a fusion of Vision Transformer and Large Language Model technologies, providing an efficient alternative to resource-intensive Vision Language Models pioneering the integration of all three modalities, we attain a ROUGE-L score of 0.439, outperforming existing approaches such as zero-shot Gemini, GPT4 Vision, LLaVA and QwenVL which yield scores of 0.259, 0.213, 0.177 and 0.198. We have made our codes and datasets publicly available.

Hope `The Paragraph Guy' explains the rest : Introducing MeSum, the Meme Summarizer

We present an approach for generating differentially private synthetic text using large language models (LLMs), via private prediction. In the private prediction framework, we only require the output synthetic data to satisfy differential privacy guarantees. This is in contrast to approaches that train a generative model on potentially sensitive user-supplied source data and seek to ensure the model itself is safe to release.

We prompt a pretrained LLM with source data, but ensure that next-token predictions are made with differential privacy guarantees. Previous work in this paradigm reported generating a small number of examples ($<$10) at reasonable privacy levels, an amount of data that is useful only for downstream in-context learning or prompting. In contrast, we make changes that allow us to generate thousands of high-quality synthetic data points, greatly expanding the set of potential applications. Our improvements come from an improved privacy analysis and a better private selection mechanism, which makes use of the equivalence between the softmax layer for sampling tokens in LLMs and the exponential mechanism. Furthermore, we introduce a novel use of public predictions via the sparse vector technique, in which we do not pay privacy costs for tokens that are predictable without sensitive data; we find this to be particularly effective for structured data.

Private prediction for large-scale synthetic text generation

In the fact verification domain, the accuracy and efficiency of evidence retrieval are paramount. This paper presents a novel approach to enhance the fact verification process through a Multi-stage ReRanking (M-ReRank) paradigm, which addresses the inherent limitations of single-stage evidence extraction. Our methodology leverages the strengths of advanced reranking techniques, including dense retrieval models and list-aware rerankers, to optimise the retrieval and ranking of evidence of both structured and unstructured types. We demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art models, achieving a recall rate of 93.63% for Wikipedia pages. The proposed system not only improves the retrieval of relevant sentences and table cells but also enhances the overall verification accuracy. Through extensive experimentation on the FEVEROUS dataset, we show that our M-ReRank pipeline achieves substantial improvements in evidence extraction, particularly increasing the recall of sentences by 7.85%, tables by 8.29% and cells by 3% compared to the current state-of-the-art on the development set.

Evidence Retrieval for Fact Verification using Multi-stage Reranking

Sentence embeddings play a pivotal role in a wide range of NLP tasks, yet evaluating and interpreting these real-valued vectors remains an open challenge to date, especially in a task-free setting. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel task-free test bed for evaluating and interpreting sentence embeddings. Our test bed consists of five semantic similarity alignment criteria, namely, *semantic distinction, synonym replacement, antonym replacement, paraphrasing without negation, and sentence jumbling*. Using these criteria, we examined five classical (e.g., Sentence-BERT, Universal Sentence Encoder (USE), etc.) and eight LLM-induced sentence embedding techniques (e.g., LLaMA2, GPT-3, OLMo, etc.) to test whether their semantic similarity spaces align with what a human mind would naturally expect. Our extensive experiments with 13 different sentence encoders revealed that none of the studied embeddings aligned with all the five semantic similarity alignment criteria. Yet, most encoders performed highly on the SentEval dataset, a popular task-specific benchmark. This finding demonstrates a significant limitation of the current practice in sentence embedding evaluation and associated popular benchmarks, a critical issue that needs careful attention and reassessment by the NLP community. Finally, we conclude the paper by highlighting the utility of the proposed alignment-based test bed for analyzing sentence embeddings in a novel way, especially in a task-free setting.

The Daunting Dilemma with Sentence Encoders: Glowing on Standard Benchmarks, Struggling with Capturing Basic Semantic Properties

Retrieval-Augmented Generation allows to enhance Large Language Models with external knowledge. In response to the recent popularity of generative LLMs, many RAG approaches have been proposed, which involve an intricate number of different configurations such as evaluation datasets, collections, metrics, retrievers, and LLMs. Inconsistent benchmarking poses a major challenge in comparing approaches and understanding the impact of each component in the pipeline. In this work, we study best practices that lay the groundwork for a systematic evaluation of RAG and present BERGEN, an end-to-end library for reproducible research standardizing RAG experiments. In an extensive study focusing on QA, we benchmark different state-of-the-art retrievers, rerankers, and LLMs. Additionally, we analyze existing RAG metrics and datasets.

BERGEN: A Benchmarking Library for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

To ensure large language models contain up-to-date knowledge, they need to be updated regularly. However, model editing is challenging as it might also affect knowledge that is unrelated to the new data. State-of-the-art methods identify parameters associated with specific knowledge and then modify them via direct weight updates. However, these locate-and-edit methods suffer from heavy computational overhead and lack theoretical validation. In contrast, directly fine-tuning the model on requested edits affects the model's behavior on unrelated knowledge, and significantly damages the model's generation fluency and consistency. To address these challenges, we propose SAUL, a streamlined model editing method that uses sentence concatenation with augmented random facts for generation regularization. Evaluations on three model editing benchmarks show that \saul is a practical and reliable solution for model editing outperforming state-of-the-art methods while maintaining generation quality and reducing computational overhead.

Better Call SAUL: Fluent and Consistent Language Model Editing with Generation Regularization

We consider the problem of finding plausible rules that are missing from a given ontology. A number of strategies for this problem have already been considered in the literature. Little is known about the relative performance of these strategies, however, as they have thus far been evaluated on different ontologies. Moreover, existing evaluations have focused on distinguishing held-out ontology rules from randomly corrupted ones, which often makes the task unrealistically easy and leads to the presence of incorrectly labelled negative examples. To address these concerns, we introduce a benchmark with manually annotated hard negatives and use this benchmark to evaluate ontology completion models. In addition to previously proposed models, we test the effectiveness of several approaches that have not yet been considered for this task, including LLMs and simple but effective hybrid strategies.

CONTOR: Benchmarking Strategies for Completing Ontologies with Plausible Missing Rules

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) are prone to hallucinations, where certain contextual cues in an image can trigger the language module to produce overconfident and incorrect reasoning about abnormal or hypothetical objects. While some benchmarks have been developed to investigate LVLM hallucinations, they often rely on hand-crafted corner cases whose failure patterns may not generalize well. Additionally, fine-tuning on these examples could undermine their validity. To address this, we aim to scale up the number of cases through an automated approach, reducing human bias in crafting such corner cases. This motivates the development of AutoHallusion, the first automated benchmark generation approach that employs several key strategies to create a diverse range of hallucination examples. Our generated visual-question pairs pose significant challenges to LVLMs, requiring them to overcome contextual biases and distractions to arrive at correct answers. AutoHallusion enables us to create new benchmarks at the minimum cost and thus overcomes the fragility of hand-crafted benchmarks. It also reveals common failure patterns and reasons, providing key insights to detect, avoid, or control hallucinations. Comprehensive evaluations of top-tier LVLMs, e.g., GPT-4V(ision), Gemini Pro Vision, Claude 3, and LLaVA-1.5, show a 97.7% and 98.7% success rate of hallucination induction on synthetic and real-world datasets of AutoHallusion, paving the way for a long battle against hallucinations. The codebase and data can be accessed at https://github.com/wuxiyang1996/AutoHallusion

AUTOHALLUSION: Automatic Generation of Hallucination Benchmarks for Vision-Language Models

Grammatical error correction (GEC) system is a practical task used in the real world, showing high achievements alongside the development of large language models (LLMs). However, these achievements have been primarily obtained in English, and there is a relative lack of performance for non-English data, such as Korean. We hypothesize that this insufficiency occurs because relying solely on the parametric knowledge of LLMs makes it difficult to thoroughly understand the given context in the Korean GEC. Therefore, we propose a Knowledge-Augmented GEC (KAGEC) framework that incorporates evidential information from external sources into the prompt for the GEC task. KAGEC first extracts salient phrases from the given source and retrieves non-parametric knowledge based on these phrases, aiming to enhance the context-aware generation capabilities of LLMs. Furthermore, we conduct validations for fine-grained error types to identify those requiring a retrieval-augmented manner when LLMs perform Korean GEC. According to experimental results, most LLMs, including ChatGPT, demonstrate significant performance improvements when applying KAGEC.

Search if you don't know! Knowledge-Augmented Korean Grammatical Error Correction with Large Language Models

While BERT produces high-quality sentence embeddings, its pre-training computational cost is a significant drawback. In contrast, ELECTRA provides a cost-effective pre-training objective and downstream task performance improvements, but worse sentence embeddings. The community tacitly stopped utilizing ELECTRA's sentence embeddings for semantic textual similarity (STS). We notice a significant drop in performance for the ELECTRA discriminator's last layer in comparison to prior layers. We explore this drop and propose a way to repair the embeddings using a novel truncated model fine-tuning (TMFT) method. TMFT improves the Spearman correlation coefficient by over $8$ points while increasing parameter efficiency on the STS Benchmark. We extend our analysis to various model sizes, languages, and two other tasks. Further, we discover the surprising efficacy of ELECTRA's generator model, which performs on par with BERT, using significantly fewer parameters and a substantially smaller embedding size. Finally, we observe boosts by combining TMFT with word similarity or domain adaptive pre-training.

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Hope `The Paragraph Guy' explains the rest : Introducing MeSum, the Meme Summarizer

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