United States

Violence descriptions in literature offer valuable insights for a wide range of research in the humanities. For historians, depictions of violence are of special interest for analyzing the societal dynamics surrounding large wars and individual conflicts of influential people. Harvesting data for violence research manually is laborious and time-consuming. This study is the first one to evaluate the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in identifying violence in ancient texts and categorizing it across multiple dimensions. Our experiments identify LLMs as a valuable tool to scale up the accurate analysis of historical texts and show the effect of fine-tuning and data augmentation, yielding an F1-score of up to 0.93 for violence detection and 0.86 for fine-grained violence categorization.

NAACL 2025

Automating Violence Detection and Categorization from Ancient Texts

computational linguistics

digital humanities

knowledge extraction

Truth and Responsibility
“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

Many consider anthropology to be a holistic social science dedicated to cross-cultural understanding as a way to reduce bigotry and more fully comprehend “what it means to be human.” Others push against this readily circulated origin story, arguing that “human” remains a highly contested, political category—evident as the presumed set of rights and protections associated with the “human” continue to be stripped away violently in the communities in which some of us live and work. Which violent histories and epistemologies must anthropologists take responsibility for in telling truth(s) about the discipline’s development? How do the dual histories of settler colonialism and slavery continue to influence anthropological thought and practices? In these political times, how can anthropologists throughout the globe work to secure a capacious, progressive vision of the human? How might movements for anti-racism, decoloniality, queer liberation, and healing such as #BlackLivesMatter, #ProtectMaunaKea, and #MeToo push a future anthropology out of the ashes of the anthropological past? Finally, what are the limits and possibilities of the anthropological imagination?

Across subfields, we find truths in patterns of human behavior, language, evolution, and cultural worlds. Industry-positioned anthropologists do this by extending the boundaries of the discipline not as an administrative solution to job shortages but as a source of intervention and knowledge production. Increasingly, anthropologists who make use of the scientific method question how status and identity help to decide which facts come to represent truth. How might quantitative researchers use our methods to identify patterned truths, and what responsibility do we hold in challenging conventional wisdom about these patterns? What responsibility do we have to both our colleagues and larger publics, to push toward increased transparency and ethical grounding in our data collection, analysis, and presentation?

Pedagogy is a key medium for the communication of anthropological truths. Which (and whose) truths are foregrounded in our curricula? What are the possibilities for a liberatory pedagogy in a precarious, “post-truth” era? Conferences, museums, organizing spaces, and classrooms are sites where pedagogy and various forms of communication can help us interrogate the performativity of truth. How might anthropologists conceive of truth performances? Might visual, aural, and choreographic performances during AAA sessions offer anthropologists alternative genres for truth-telling and truth-making that provoke discussions about responsibility?

In accordance with the urgency of the year’s theme, the questions posed in this call for papers do not have easy answers. The hope is that those who submit proposals will take up these questions and engage in collective thinking and imagining about the truths we hold, the truths we challenge, and the responsibilities we bear in co-creating a free and more equitable world. All panel proposals should have a statement about how the panel has incorporated the goals of equity, diversity, and inclusion, and/or analysis of power.

Executive Session proposals have already been selected and speak directly to the theme “Truth and Responsibility.” To practice the critical reflexivity this call for papers invites, we asked that Executive Session submissions explicitly address the diversity of session participants, such as organizational/institutional affiliation, career stage, race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, class, religion, national identity, and gender. Proposals for Executive Sessions that demonstrated a commitment to equity and inclusion and/or a clear analysis of power (i.e. anti-imperialist, anti-white supremacist, decolonial, anti-ableist, feminist, anti-transphobic, anti-xenophobic, etc) were given priority. We are excited to be in conversation with residents of the Baltimore region and look forward to the discussions, performances, and actions generated by the dynamic group of anthropologists attending the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

workshop 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. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- 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 application of text mining methods is becoming increasingly prevalent, particularly within Humanities and Computational Social Sciences, as well as in a broader range of disciplines. This paper presents an analysis of gender bias in English song lyrics using topic modeling and bias measurement techniques. Leveraging BERTopic, we cluster a dataset of 537,553 English songs into distinct topics and analyze their temporal evolution. Our results reveal a significant thematic shift in song lyrics over time, transitioning from romantic themes to a heightened focus on the sexualization of women. Additionally, we observe a substantial prevalence of profanity and misogynistic content across various topics, with a particularly high concentration in the largest thematic cluster. To further analyse gender bias across topics and genres in a quantitative way, we employ the Single Category Word Embedding Association Test (SC-WEAT) to calculate bias scores for word embeddings trained on the most prominent topics as well as individual genres. The results indicate a consistent male bias in words associated with intelligence and strength, while appearance and weakness words show a female bias. Further analysis highlights variations in these biases across topics, illustrating the interplay between thematic content and gender stereotypes in song lyrics.

Tuning Into Bias: A Computational Study of Gender Bias in Song Lyrics

Relation extraction (RE) in fiction presents unique NLP challenges due to implicit, narrative-driven relationships. Unlike factual texts, fiction weaves complex connections, yet existing RE datasets focus on non-fiction. To address this, we introduce Artificial Relationships in Fiction (ARF), a synthetically annotated dataset for literary RE. Built from diverse Project Gutenberg fiction, ARF considers author demographics, publication periods, and themes. We curated an ontology for fiction-specific entities and relations, and using GPT-4o, generated artificial relationships to capture narrative complexity. Our analysis demonstrates its value for finetuning RE models and advancing computational literary studies. By bridging a critical RE gap, ARF enables deeper exploration of fictional relationships, enriching NLP research at the intersection of storytelling and AI-driven literary analysis.

Artificial Relationships in Fiction: A Dataset for Advancing NLP in Literary Domains

Recent studies have shown that few-shot learning enables large language models (LLMs) to generate training data for supervised models at a low cost. However, for complex tasks, the quality of LLM-generated data often falls short compared to human-labeled data. This presents a critical challenge: how should one balance the trade-off between the higher quality but more expensive human-annotated data and the lower quality yet significantly cheaper LLM-generated data? In this paper, we tackle this question for a demanding task: conversational semantic frame analysis (SFA). To address this, we propose a novel method for synthesizing training data tailored to this complex task. Through experiments conducted across a wide range of budget levels, we find that smaller budgets favor a higher reliance on LLM-generated data to achieve optimal cost-efficiency.

Optimizing Cost-Efficiency with LLM-Generated Training Data for Conversational Semantic Frame Analysis

Developing specialised language models for low-resource domains typically involves a trade-off between two specialisation strategies: adapting a general-purpose model through continued pretraining or retraining a model from scratch. While adapting preserves the model's linguistic knowledge, retraining benefits from the flexibility of an in-domain tokeniser -- a potentially significant advantage when handling rare languages. This study investigates the impact of tokenisation, specialisation strategy, and pretraining data availability using classical scholarship -- a multilingual, code-switching and highly domain-specific field -- as a case study. Through extensive experiments, we assess whether domain-specific tokenisation improves model performance, whether character-based models provide a viable alternative to subword-based models, and which specialisation strategy is optimal given the constraints of limited pretraining data. Contrary to prior findings, our results show that in-domain tokenisation does not necessarily enhance performance. Most notably, adaptation consistently outperforms retraining, even with limited data, confirming its efficiency as the preferred strategy for resource-constrained domains. These insights provide valuable guidelines for developing specialised models in fields with limited textual resources.

Don't stop pretraining! Efficiently building specialised language models in resource-constrained settings.

The growing volume of digitized historical texts requires effective semantic search using text embeddings. However, pre-trained multilingual models face challenges with historical content due to OCR noise and outdated spellings. This study examines multilingual embeddings for cross-lingual semantic search in historical Luxembourgish (LB), a low-resource language. We collect historical Luxembourgish news articles from various periods and use GPT-4o for sentence segmentation and translation, generating 20,000 parallel training sentences per language pair. Additionally, we create a semantic search (Historical LB Bitext Mining) evaluation set and find that existing models perform poorly on cross-lingual search for historical Luxembourgish. Using our historical and additional modern parallel training data, we adapt several multilingual embedding models through contrastive learning or knowledge distillation and increase accuracy significantly for all models. We release our adapted models and historical Luxembourgish-German/French/English bitexts to support further research.

Adapting Multilingual Embedding Models to Historical Luxembourgish

Automatic poetry generation is an immensely complex task, even for the most advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) that requires a profound understanding of intelligence, world and linguistic knowledge, and a touch of creativity.
This paper investigates the use of LLMs in generating Russian syllabo-tonic poetry of various genres and styles. The study explores a character-level tokenization architectures and demonstrates how a language model can be pretrained and finetuned to generate poetry requiring knowledge of a language's phonetics. Additionally, the paper assesses the quality of the generated poetry and the effectiveness of the approach in producing different genres and styles. The study's main contribution is the introduction of two end-to-end architectures for syllabo-tonic Russian poetry: pretrained models, a comparative analysis of the approaches, and poetry evaluation metrics.

Generation of Russian Poetry of Different Genres and Styles Using Neural Networks with Character-Level Tokenization

Algorithmic hate speech detection faces significant challenges due to the diverse definitions and datasets used in research and practice. Social media platforms, legal frameworks, and institutions each apply distinct yet overlapping definitions, complicating classification efforts. This study addresses these challenges by demonstrating that existing datasets and taxonomies can be integrated into a unified model, enhancing prediction performance and reducing reliance on multiple specialized classifiers. The work introduces a universal taxonomy and a hate speech classifier capable of detecting a wide range of definitions within a single framework. Our approach is validated by combining two widely used but differently annotated datasets, showing improved classification performance on an independent test set. This work highlights the potential of dataset and taxonomy integration in advancing hate speech detection, increasing efficiency, and ensuring broader applicability across contexts.

Improving Hate Speech Classification with Cross-Taxonomy Dataset Integration

This paper investigates the application of prompt-answering Large Language Models (LLMs) for the task of Named Entity Recognition (NER) in historical texts. Historical NER presents unique challenges due to language change through time, spelling variation, limited availability of digitized data (and, in particular, labeled data), and errors introduced by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) processes. Leveraging the zero-shot capabilities of prompt-answering LLMs, we address these challenges by prompting the model to extract entities such as persons, locations, organizations, and dates from historical documents. We then conduct an extensive error analysis of the model output in order to identify and address potential weaknesses in the entity recognition process. The results show that, while such models display ability for extracting named entities, their overall performance is lackluster. Our analysis reveals that model performance is significantly affected by hallucinations in the model output, as well as by challenges imposed by the evaluation of NER output.

Prompting the Past: Exploring Zero-Shot Learning for Named Entity Recognition in Historical Texts Using Prompt-Answering LLMs

We present a clear distinction between the phenomena of comparisons and similes along with a fine-grained annotation guideline that facilitates the structural annotation and assessment of the two classes, with three major contributions: 1) a publicly available annotated data set of 100 comparative statements; 2) theoretically grounded annotation guidelines for human annotators; and 3) results of machine learning experiments to establish how the--often subtle--distinction between the two phenomena can be automated.

`... like a needle in a haystack'': Annotation and Classification of Comparative Statements

Recent studies suggest that canonical works possess unique textual profiles, often tied to innovation and higher cognitive demands. However, recent work on Danish 19th century literary novels has shown that some non-canonical works shared similar textual qualities with canonical works, underscoring the role of text-extrinsic factors in shaping canonicity. The present study examines the same corpus (more than 800 Danish novels from the Modern Breakthrough era (1870–1900)) to explore socio-economic and institutional factors, as well as demographic features, specifically, book prices, publishers, and the author's nationality – in determining canonical status. We combine expert-based and national definitions of canon to set up a classification experiment to test the predictive power of these external features, and to understand how they relate to that of text-intrinsic features. We show that the canonization process is influenced by external factors – such as publisher and nationality – but that text-intrinsic features nevertheless maintain predictive power in a dynamic interplay of text and context.

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Tuning Into Bias: A Computational Study of Gender Bias in Song Lyrics

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