United States

We introduce FAINA, the first dataset for fallacy detection that embraces multiple plausible answers and natural disagreement. FAINA includes over 11K span-level annotations with overlaps across 20 fallacy types on social media posts in Italian about migration, climate change, and public health given by two expert annotators. Through an extensive annotation study that allowed discussion over multiple rounds, we minimize annotation errors whilst keeping signals of human label variation. Moreover, we devise a framework that goes beyond &#39;&#39;single ground truth&#39;&#39; evaluation and simultaneously accounts for multiple (equally reliable) test sets and the peculiarities of the task, i.e., partial span matches, overlaps, and the varying severity of labeling errors. Our experiments across four fallacy detection setups show that multi-task and multi-label transformer-based approaches are strong baselines across all settings. We release our data, code, and annotation guidelines to foster research on fallacy detection and human label variation more broadly.

NAACL 2025

Fine-grained Fallacy Detection with Human Label Variation

fallacy detection

human label variation

resources and evaluation

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

We introduce FAINA, the first dataset for fallacy detection that embraces multiple plausible answers and natural disagreement. FAINA includes over 11K span-level annotations with overlaps across 20 fallacy types on social media posts in Italian about migration, climate change, and public health given by two expert annotators. Through an extensive annotation study that allowed discussion over multiple rounds, we minimize annotation errors whilst keeping signals of human label variation. Moreover, we devise a framework that goes beyond ''single ground truth'' evaluation and simultaneously accounts for multiple (equally reliable) test sets and the peculiarities of the task, i.e., partial span matches, overlaps, and the varying severity of labeling errors. Our experiments across four fallacy detection setups show that multi-task and multi-label transformer-based approaches are strong baselines across all settings. We release our data, code, and annotation guidelines to foster research on fallacy detection and human label variation more broadly.

technical paper

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
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Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing, but content repetition in open-source LLMs remains a critical challenge that adversely affects user experience. The repetition penalty parameter (RPP) aims to mitigate this issue by preventing repeated content generation, but excessive use of RPP can compromise the overall quality. In this paper, we propose Repetition-Aware Performance (RAP), a novel evaluation metric that quantifies and integrates repetition penalty into the assessment of model performance, enabling tuning of RPP. We evaluate our approach using twelve open-source LLMs, ranging from 2 billion to 70 billion parameters, tested on question answering and machine translation tasks across three datasets with varying prompting techniques. Experimental results show that RAP effectively tunes RPP, helping to identify a trade-off value that significantly reduces repetition while minimizing performance loss. Upon acceptance, we will release the code and the dataset of generated text, providing a valuable resource for further research on repetition detection and LLMs evaluation.

RAP: A Metric for Balancing Repetition and Performance in Open-Source Large Language Models

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are vital for modern enterprises, providing a foundation for managing customer interactions and data. Integrating AI agents into CRM systems can automate routine processes and enhance personalized service. However, deploying and evaluating these agents is challenging due to the lack of realistic benchmarks that reflect the complexity of real-world CRM tasks. To address this issue, we introduce CRMArena, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on realistic tasks grounded in professional work environments. Following guidance from CRM experts and industry best practices, we designed CRMArena with nine customer service tasks distributed across three personas: service agent, analyst, and manager. The benchmark includes 16 commonly used industrial objects (e.g., account, order, knowledge article, case) with high interconnectivity, along with latent variables (e.g., complaint habits, policy violations) to simulate realistic data distributions. Experimental results reveal that state-of-the-art LLM agents succeed in less than 58% of the tasks with ReAct prompting, and less than 65% even with function-calling abilities. Our findings highlight the need for enhanced agent capabilities in function-calling and rule-following to be deployed in real-world work environments.

CRMArena: Understanding the Capacity of LLM Agents to Perform Professional CRM Tasks in Realistic Environments

Domain-specific machine translation (MT) poses significant challenges due to specialized terminology, particularly when translating across multiple languages with scarce resources. In this study, we present the first impact analysis of domain-specific terminology on multilingual MT for finance, focusing on European languages within the subdomain of macroeconomics. To this end, we construct a multi-parallel corpus from the European Central Bank, aligned across 22 languages. Using this resource, we compare open-source multilingual MT systems with large language models (LLMs) that possess multilingual capabilities. Furthermore, by developing and curating an English financial glossary, we propose a methodology to analyze the relationship between translation performance (into English) and the accuracy of financial term matching, obtaining significant correlation results. Finally, using the multi-parallel corpus and the English glossary, we automatically align a multilingual financial terminology, validating the English-Spanish alignments and incorporating them into our discussion. Our findings provide valuable insights into the current state of financial MT for European languages and offer resources for future research and system improvements.

The Impact of Domain-Specific Terminology on Machine Translation for Finance in European Languages

While accurately detecting and correcting factual contradictions in language model outputs has become increasingly important as their capabilities improve, doing so is highly challenging. We propose a novel method, FactTrack, for tracking atomic facts and addressing factual contradictions. Crucially, FactTrack also maintains time-aware validity intervals for each fact, allowing for change over time. At a high level, FactTrack consists of a four-step pipeline to update a world state data structure for each new event: (1) decompose the event into directional atomic facts; (2) determine the validity interval of each atomic fact using the world state; (3) detect contradictions with existing facts in the world state; and finally (4) add new facts to the world state and update existing atomic facts. When we apply FactTrack to contradiction detection on structured story outlines, we find that FactTrack using LLaMA2-7B-Chat substantially outperforms a fair baseline using LLaMA2-7B-Chat, and achieves performance comparable to a GPT4 baseline. Moreover, when using GPT4, FactTrack significantly outperforms the GPT4 baseline.

FactTrack: Time-Aware World State Tracking in Story Outlines

The widespread popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs), partly due to their emerging in-context learning ability, has highlighted the importance of ethical and safety considerations for deployment. Motivated by corresponding data protection guidelines, we investigate machine unlearning for LLMs. In contrast to the growing literature on fine-tuning methods to achieve unlearning, we focus on a comparatively lightweight alternative called soft prompting to realize unlearning in LLMs. With losses designed to enforce forgetting as well as utility preservation, our framework Soft Prompting for Unlearning (SPUL) learns prompt tokens that are prepended to a query to induce unlearning of specific training examples at inference time without updating LLM parameters. We conduct a rigorous evaluation of the proposed method, and results indicate that SPUL can significantly improve the trade-off between utility and forgetting for text classification and question-answering. We further validate our method with LLMs of varying parameter sizes to highlight its flexibility and provide detailed insights into the choice of hyperparameters and the influence of the size of unlearning data.

Soft Prompting for Unlearning in Large Language Models

Natural Language Processing research has become increasingly concerned with understanding data quality and complexity at the instance level. Instance-level complexity scores can be used for tasks such as filtering out noisy observations and subsampling informative examples. However, there exists a diverse taxonomy of complexity metrics that can be used for a classification task, making metric selection itself a difficult task. We empirically examine the relationship between these metrics and find that simply storing training loss provides similar complexity rankings as other more computationally intensive techniques. Metric similarity allows us to subsample data with higher aggregate complexity along several metrics using a single a priori available meta-feature. Further, this choice of complexity metric does not impact demographic fairness, even in downstream predictions. Researchers should consider metric availability and similarity, as using the wrong metric or sampling strategy may hurt performance.

No Simple Answer to Data Complexity: An Examination of Instance-Level Complexity Metrics for Classification Tasks

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) achieve great performance on visual-language reasoning tasks, however, the black-box nature of LVLMs hinders in-depth research on the reasoning mechanism. As all images need to be converted into image tokens to fit the input format of large language models (LLMs) along with natural language prompts, sequential visual representation is essential to the performance of LVLMs, and the information flow analysis approach can be an effective tool for determining interactions between these representations. In this paper, we propose integrating attention analysis with LLaVA-CAM, concretely, attention scores highlight relevant regions during forward propagation, while LLaVA-CAM captures gradient changes through backward propagation, revealing key image features. By exploring the information flow from the perspective of visual representation contribution, we observe that it tends to converge in shallow layers but diversify in deeper layers. To validate our analysis, we conduct comprehensive experiments with truncation strategies across various LVLMs for visual question answering and image captioning tasks, and experimental results not only verify our hypothesis but also reveal a consistent pattern of information flow convergence in the corresponding layers, and the information flow cliff layer will be different due to different contexts.

From Redundancy to Relevance: Information Flow in LVLMs Across Reasoning Tasks

Motivated by in-context learning (ICL) capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), multimodal LLMs with additional visual modality are also exhibited with similar ICL abilities when multiple image-text pairs are provided as demonstrations. However, relatively less work has been done to investigate the principles behind how and why multimodal ICL works. We conduct a systematic and principled evaluation of multimodal ICL for models of different scales on a broad spectrum of new yet critical tasks. Through perturbations over different modality information, we show that modalities matter differently across tasks in multimodal ICL. Guided by task-specific modality impact, we recommend modality-driven demonstration strategies to boost ICL performance. We also find that models may follow inductive biases from multimodal ICL even if they are rarely seen in or contradict semantic priors from pretraining data. Our principled analysis provides a comprehensive way of understanding the role of demonstrations in multimodal in-context learning, and sheds light on effectively improving multimodal ICL on a wide range of tasks.

From Introspection to Best Practices: Principled Analysis of Demonstrations in Multimodal In-Context Learning

Word similarity has many applications to social science and cultural analytics tasks like measuring meaning change over time and making sense of contested terms. Yet traditional similarity methods based on cosine similarity between word embeddings cannot capture the context-dependent, asymmetrical, polysemous nature of semantic similarity. We propose a new measure of similarity, Word Confusion, that reframes semantic similarity in terms of feature-based classification confusion. Word Confusion is inspired by Tversky (1977)’s suggestion that similarity features be chosen dynamically. Here we train a classifier to map contextual embeddings to word identities and use the classifier confusion (the probability of choosing a confounding word c instead of the correct target word t) as a measure of the similarity of c and t. The set of potential confounding words acts as the chosen features. Our method is comparable to cosine similarity in matching human similarity judgments across several datasets (MEN, WirdSim353, and SimLex), and can measure similarity using predetermined features of interest. We demonstrate our model’s ability to make use of dynamic features by applying it to test a hypothesis about changes in the 18th C. meaning of the French word “révolution” from popular to state action during the French Revolution. We hope this reimagining of semantic similarity will inspire the development of new tools that better capture the multi-faceted and dynamic nature of language, advancing the fields of computational social science and cultural analytics and beyond.

Rethinking Word Similarity: Semantic Similarity through Classification Confusion

We introduce a new method to identify emerging concepts in large text corpora. By analyzing changes in the heatmaps of the underlying embedding space, we are able to detect these concepts with high accuracy shortly after they originate, in turn outperforming common alternatives. We further demonstrate the utility of our approach by analyzing speeches in the U.S. Senate from 1941 to 2015. Our results suggest that the minority party is more active in introducing new concepts into the Senate discourse. We also identify specific concepts that closely correlate with the Senators' racial, ethnic, and gender identities. An implementation of our method is publicly available.

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