United States

Knowledge probing evaluates to which extent a language model (LM) has acquired relational knowledge during its pre-training phase. It provides a cost-effective means of comparing LMs of different sizes and training setups and is useful for monitoring knowledge gained or lost during continual learning (CL). In prior work, we presented an improved knowledge probe called BEAR (Wiland et al., 2024), which enables the comparison of LMs trained with different pre-training objectives (causal and masked LMs) and addresses issues of skewed distributions in previous probes to deliver a more unbiased reading of LM knowledge. With this paper, we present LM-Pub-Quiz, a Python framework and leaderboard built around the BEAR probing mechanism that enables researchers and practitioners to apply it in their work. It provides options for standalone evaluation and direct integration into the widely-used training pipeline of the Hugging Face transformers library. Further, it provides a fine-grained analysis of different knowledge types to assist users in better understanding the knowledge in each evaluated LM. We publicly release LM-Pub-Quiz as an open-source project.


https://lm-pub-quiz.github.io/

NAACL 2025

LM-Pub-Quiz: A Comprehensive Framework for Zero-Shot Evaluation of Relational Knowledge in Language Models

bear probe

software library

knowledge probe

zero-shot evaluation

language model evaluation

relational knowledge

leaderboard

open source

benchmark

## 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.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
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Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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NAACL 2024

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

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### 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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*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The increasing demand for mental health services has led to the rise of AI-driven mental health chatbots, though challenges related to privacy, data collection, and expertise persist. Motivational Interviewing (MI) is gaining attention as a theoretical basis for boosting expertise in the development of these chatbots. However, existing datasets are showing limitations for training chatbots, leading to a substantial demand for publicly available resources in the field of MI and psychotherapy. These challenges are even more pronounced in non-English languages, where they receive less attention. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that simulates MI sessions enriched with the expertise of professional therapists. We train an MI forecaster model that mimics the behavioral choices of professional therapists and employ Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate utterances through prompt engineering. Then, we present KMI, the first synthetic dataset theoretically grounded in MI, containing 1,000 high-quality Korean Motivational Interviewing dialogues. Through an extensive expert evaluation of the generated dataset and the dialogue model trained on it, we demonstrate the quality, expertise, and practicality of KMI. We also introduce novel metrics derived from MI theory in order to evaluate dialogues from the perspective of MI.

KMI: A Dataset of Korean Motivational Interviewing Dialogues for Psychotherapy

Cross-Document Event Coreference (CDEC) annotation is challenging and difficult to scale, resulting in existing datasets being small and lacking diversity. We introduce a new approach leveraging large language models (LLMs) to decontextualize event mentions, by simplifying the document-level annotation task to sentence pairs with enriched context, enabling the creation of Richer EventCorefBank (RECB), a denser and more expressive dataset annotated at faster speed. Decontextualization has been shown to improve annotation speed without compromising quality and to enhance model performance. Our baseline experiment indicates that systems trained on RECB achieve comparable results on the EventCorefBank(ECB+) test set, showing the high quality of our dataset and its generalizability on other CDEC datasets. In addition, our evaluation shows that the strong baseline models are still struggling with RECB comparing to other CDEC datasets, suggesting that the richness and diversity of RECB present significant challenges to current CDEC systems.

Beyond Benchmarks: Building a Richer Cross-Document Event Coreference Dataset with Decontextualization

Fact-checking the truthfulness of claims usually requires reasoning over multiple evidence sentences. Oftentimes, evidence sentences may not be always self-contained, and may require additional contexts and references from elsewhere to understand coreferential expressions, acronyms, and the scope of a reported finding. For example, evidence sentences from an academic paper may need contextual sentences in the paper and descriptions in its cited papers to determine the scope of a research discovery. However, most fact-checking models mainly focus on the reasoning within evidence sentences, and ignore the auxiliary contexts and references. To address this problem, we propose a novel method, Context- and Reference-augmented Reasoning and Prompting. For evidence reasoning, we construct a three-layer evidence graph with evidence, context, and reference layers. We design intra- and cross-layer reasoning to integrate three graph layers into a unified evidence embedding. For verdict prediction, we design evidence-conditioned prompt encoder, which produces unique prompt embeddings for each claim. These evidence-conditioned prompt embeddings and claims are unified for fact-checking. Experiments verify the strength of our model.

CORRECT: Context- and Reference-Augmented Reasoning and Prompting for Fact-Checking

The pace of scientific research, vital for improving human life, is complex, slow, and needs specialized expertise. Meanwhile, novel, impactful research often stems from both a deep understanding of prior work, and a cross-pollination of ideas across domains and fields. To enhance the productivity of researchers, we propose ResearchAgent, which leverages the encyclopedic knowledge and linguistic reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to assist them in their work. This system automatically defines novel problems, proposes methods and designs experiments, while iteratively refining them based on the feedback from collaborative LLM-powered reviewing agents. Specifically, starting with a core scientific paper, ResearchAgent is augmented not only with relevant publications by connecting information over an academic graph but also entities retrieved from a knowledge store derived from shared underlying concepts mined across numerous papers. Then, mimicking a scientific approach to improving ideas with peer discussions, we leverage multiple LLM-based ReviewingAgents that provide reviews and feedback via iterative revision processes. These reviewing agents are instantiated with human preference-aligned LLMs whose criteria for evaluation are elicited from actual human judgments via LLM prompting. We experimentally validate our ResearchAgent on scientific publications across multiple disciplines, showing its effectiveness in generating novel, clear, and valid ideas based on both human and model-based evaluation results. Our initial foray into AI-mediated scientific research has important implications for the development of future systems aimed at supporting researchers in their ideation and operationalization of novel work.

ResearchAgent: Iterative Research Idea Generation over Scientific Literature with Large Language Models

Topic models allow researchers to extract latent factors from text data and use those variables in downstream statistical analyses. However, these methodologies can vary significantly due to initialization differences, randomness in sampling procedures, or noisy data. Reliability of these methods is of particular concern as many researchers treat learned topic models as ground truth for subsequent analyses. In this work, we show that the standard practice for quantifying topic model reliability fails to capture essential aspects of the variation in two widely-used topic models. Drawing from a extensive literature on measurement theory, we provide empirical and theoretical analyses of three other metrics for evaluating the reliability of topic models. On synthetic and real-world data, we show that McDonald’s 𝜔 provides the best encapsulation of reliability. This metric provides an essential tool for validation of topic model methodologies that should be a standard component of any topic model-based research.

Reliability of Topic Modeling

The recent introduction of the Assistants API highlights its potential for large language models (LLMs) in role-playing applications. However, maintaining consistent character personas remains a significant challenge due to variability in information extraction, which frequently omits critical elements such as backstories or interpersonal relationships. To address this limitation, we introduce CharacterGPT, a framework designed to dynamically reconstruct character personas via Character Persona Training (CPT). This approach incrementally updates personas by extracting traits from chapter-wise novel summaries, reflecting the progression of the narrative. The framework is assessed through Big Five personality evaluations and creative tasks, wherein characters generate original narratives, demonstrating the efficacy of CharacterGPT in preserving persona consistency. The code and results have been made publicly available.

CharacterGPT: A Persona Reconstruction Framework for Role-Playing Agents

In direct preference alignment in LLMs, most existing methods seek to retrieve the reward function directly from preference data. However, real-world preference data often contains diversity in preference annotations reflective of true human preferences. Existing algorithms, including KTO, do not directly utilize such nuances in the annotations which limits their applicability. In this work, we propose Diverse Preference Learning (DPL), a reference model-free method that simultaneously learns a baseline desirability in LLM responses while being robust to the diversity of preference annotations. Our experiments for instruction-following on Ultrafeedback and AlpacaEval 2.0 and for text-summarization on Reddit TL;DR suggest that DPL is consistently better at learning the diversity of preferences compared to existing methods, including those that require a reference model in memory. Apart from overall quality, we find that DPL's completions, on average, are more honest, helpful, truthful and safe compared to existing methods.

DPL: Diverse Preference Learning Without A Reference Model

The common practice of preprocessing text before feeding it into NLP models introduces many decision points which have unintended consequences on model performance. In this opinion piece, we focus on the handling of diacritics in texts originating in many languages and scripts. We demonstrate, through several case studies, the adverse effects of inconsistent encoding of diacritized characters and of removing diacritics altogether. We call on the community to adopt simple but necessary steps across all models and toolkits in order to improve handling of diacritized text and, by extension, increase equity in multilingual NLP.

Don't Touch My Diacritics

As large language models (LLMs) continue to evolve, leaderboards play a significant role in steering their development. Existing leaderboards often prioritize model capabilities while overlooking safety concerns, leaving a significant gap in responsible AI development. To address this gap, we introduce Libra-Leaderboard, a comprehensive framework designed to rank LLMs through a balanced evaluation of performance and safety. Combining a dynamic leaderboard with an interactive LLM arena, Libra-Leaderboard encourages the joint optimization of capability and safety. Unlike traditional approaches that average performance and safety metrics, Libra-Leaderboard uses a distance-to-optimal-score method to calculate the overall rankings. This approach incentivizes models to achieve a balance rather than excelling in one dimension at the expense of some other ones. In the first release, Libra-Leaderboard evaluates 26 mainstream LLMs from 14 leading organizations, identifying critical safety challenges even in state-of-the-art models.

Libra-Leaderboard: Towards Responsible AI through a Balanced Leaderboard of Safety and Capability

Previous research has shown that fine-tuning language models on general tasks enhance their underlying mechanisms. However, the impact of fine-tuning on poisoned data and the resulting changes in these mechanisms are poorly understood. This study investigates the changes in a model's mechanisms during toxic fine-tuning and identifies the primary corruption mechanisms. We also analyze the changes after retraining a corrupted model on the original dataset and observe neuroplasticity behaviors, where the model relearns original mechanisms after fine-tuning the corrupted model. Our findings indicate that; (i) Underlying mechanisms are amplified across task-specific fine-tuning which can be generalized to longer epochs, (ii) Model corruption via toxic fine-tuning is localized to specific circuit components, (iii) Models exhibit neuroplasticity when retraining corrupted models on clean dataset, reforming the original model mechanisms.

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KMI: A Dataset of Korean Motivational Interviewing Dialogues for Psychotherapy

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BEAR: A Unified Framework for Evaluating Relational Knowledge in Causal and Masked Language Models