Austria

Data augmentation, a widely-employed technique for addressing data scarcity, involves generating synthetic data examples which are then used to augment available training data. Researchers have seen surprising success from simple methods, such as random perturbations from natural examples, where models seem to benefit even from data with nonsense words, or data that doesn&#39;t conform to the rules of the language. A second line of research produces synthetic data that does in fact follow all linguistic constraints; these methods require some linguistic expertise and are generally more challenging to implement. No previous work has done a systematic, empirical comparison of both linguistically-naive and linguistically-motivated data augmentation strategies, leaving uncertainty about whether the additional time and effort of linguistically-motivated data augmentation work in fact yields better downstream performance.

In this work, we conduct a careful and comprehensive comparison of augmentation strategies (both linguistically-naive and linguistically-motivated) for two low-resource languages with different morphological properties, Uspanteko and Arapaho. We evaluate the effectiveness of many different strategies and their combinations across two important sequence-to-sequence tasks for low-resource languages: machine translation and interlinear glossing. We find that linguistically-motivated strategies can have benefits over naive approaches, but only when the new examples they produce are not significantly unlike the training data distribution.

ACL 2025

Is linguistically-motivated data augmentation worth it?

linguistically inspired

low-resource languages

data augmentation

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

EACL 2023

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Data augmentation, a widely-employed technique for addressing data scarcity, involves generating synthetic data examples which are then used to augment available training data. Researchers have seen surprising success from simple methods, such as random perturbations from natural examples, where models seem to benefit even from data with nonsense words, or data that doesn't conform to the rules of the language. A second line of research produces synthetic data that does in fact follow all linguistic constraints; these methods require some linguistic expertise and are generally more challenging to implement. No previous work has done a systematic, empirical comparison of both linguistically-naive and linguistically-motivated data augmentation strategies, leaving uncertainty about whether the additional time and effort of linguistically-motivated data augmentation work in fact yields better downstream performance.

In this work, we conduct a careful and comprehensive comparison of augmentation strategies (both linguistically-naive and linguistically-motivated) for two low-resource languages with different morphological properties, Uspanteko and Arapaho. We evaluate the effectiveness of many different strategies and their combinations across two important sequence-to-sequence tasks for low-resource languages: machine translation and interlinear glossing. We find that linguistically-motivated strategies can have benefits over naive approaches, but only when the new examples they produce are not significantly unlike the training data distribution.

technical paper

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

Self-harm detection on social media is critical for early intervention and mental health support, yet remains challenging due to the subtle, context-dependent nature of such expressions. Identifying self-harm intent aids suicide prevention by enabling timely responses, but current large language models (LLMs) struggle to interpret implicit cues in casual language and emojis. This work enhances LLMs’ comprehension of self-harm by distinguishing intent through nuanced language–emoji interplay. We present the \textit{C}entennial \textit{E}moji \textit{S}ensitivity \textit{M}atrix (\textit{CESM-100})—a curated set of 100 emojis with contextual self-harm interpretations—and the \textit{S}elf-\textit{H}arm \textit{I}dentification a\textit{N}d intent \textit{E}xtraction with \textit{S}upportive emoji sensitivity (\textit{SHINES}) dataset, offering detailed annotations for self-harm labels, casual mentions (CMs), and serious intents (SIs). Our unified framework:
a) enriches inputs using CESM-100;
b) fine-tunes LLMs for multi-task learning—self-harm detection (primary) and CM/SI span detection (auxiliary);
c) generate explainable rationales for self-harm predictions. We evaluate the framework on three state-of-the-art LLMs—Llama 3, Mental-Alpaca, and MentalLlama—across zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuned scenarios. By coupling intent differentiation with contextual cues, our approach commendably enhances LLM performance in both detection and explanation tasks, effectively addressing the inherent ambiguity in self-harm signals. The \textit{SHINES} dataset, \textit{CESM-100} and codebase are publicly available at: https://www.iitp.ac.in/%7eai-nlp-ml/resources.html#SHINES

Just a Scratch: Enhancing LLM Capabilities for Self-harm Detection through Intent Differentiation and Emoji Interpretation

The widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) has heightened concerns about their security, particularly their vulnerability to jailbreak attacks that leverage crafted prompts to generate malicious outputs. While prior research has been conducted on general security capabilities of LLMs, their specific susceptibility to jailbreak attacks in code generation remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we propose MalwareBench, a benchmark dataset containing 3,520 jailbreaking prompts for malicious code-generation, designed to evaluate LLM robustness against such threats. MalwareBench is based on 320 manually crafted malicious code generation requirements, covering 11 jailbreak methods and 29 code functionality categories. Experiments show that mainstream LLMs exhibit limited ability to reject malicious code-generation requirements, and the combination of multiple jailbreak methods further reduces the model's security capabilities: specifically, the average rejection rate for malicious content is 60.93%, dropping to 39.92% when combined with jailbreak attack algorithms. Our work highlights that the code security capabilities of LLMs still pose significant challenges.

LLMs Caught in the Crossfire: Malware Requests and Jailbreak Challenges

Reader curiosity, the drive to seek information, is crucial for textual engagement, yet remains relatively underexplored in NLP. Building on Loewenstein’s Information Gap Theory, we introduce a framework that models reader curiosity by quantifying semantic information gaps within a text’s semantic structure. Our approach leverages BERTopic-inspired topic modeling and persistent homology to analyze the evolving topology (connected components, cycles, voids) of a dynamic semantic network derived from text segments, treating these features as proxies for information gaps. To empirically evaluate this pipeline, we collect reader curiosity ratings from participants (*n* = 49) as they read S. Collins’s “The Hunger Games” novel. We then use the topological features from our pipeline as independent variables to predict these ratings, and experimentally show that they significantly improve curiosity prediction compared to a baseline model (73% vs. 30% explained deviance), validating our approach. This pipeline offers a new computational method for analyzing text structure and its relation to reader engagement.

Persistent Homology of Topic Networks for the Prediction of Reader Curiosity

Previous continual learning setups for embodied intelligence focused on executing low-level actions based on human commands, neglecting the ability to learn high-level planning and multi-level knowledge. To address these issues, we propose the Hierarchical Embodied Continual Learning Setups (HEC) that divide the agent's continual learning process into two layers: high-level instructions and low-level actions, and define five embodied continual learning sub-setups. Building on these setups, we introduce the Task-aware $\textbf{M}$ixture $\textbf{o}$f $\textbf{I}$ncremental $\textbf{L}$oRA $\textbf{E}$xperts (Task-aware MoILE) method. This approach achieves task recognition by clustering visual-text embeddings and uses both a task-level router and a token-level router to select the appropriate LoRA experts. To effectively address the issue of catastrophic forgetting, we apply Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to the LoRA parameters obtained from prior tasks, preserving key components while orthogonally training the remaining parts. The experimental results show that our method stands out in reducing the forgetting of old tasks compared to other methods, effectively supporting agents in retaining prior knowledge while continuously learning new tasks.

Hierarchical-Task-Aware Multi-modal Mixture of Incremental LoRA Experts for Embodied Continual Learning

Text embeddings from PLM-based models enable a wide range of applications, yet their performance often degrades on longer texts. In this paper, we introduce a phenomenon we call \textbf{Length Collapse}, where embeddings of longer texts tend to cluster together. This clustering results in a distributional inconsistency between the embeddings of short and long texts. We further investigate how these differences contribute to the performance decline observed with longer texts across various downstream tasks. Through a rigorous theoretical analysis of the self-attention mechanism, which acts as a low-pass filter in PLM-based models, we demonstrate that as text length increases, the strength of low-pass filtering intensifies, causing embeddings to retain more low-frequency components. As a result, input token features become more similar, leading to clustering and ultimately the collapse of embeddings for longer texts. To address this issue, we propose a simple method, TempScale, which mitigates the Length Collapse phenomenon. By narrowing the gap in low-pass filtering rates between long and short texts, TempScale ensures more consistent embeddings across different text lengths. This approach leads to performance improvements of \textbf{0.94\%} on MTEB and \textbf{1.10\%} on LongEmbed, which focuses specifically on long-context retrieval, providing strong evidence for the validity of our analysis. The source code is available at \textcolor{blue}{\url{https://github.com/Yuqi-Zhou/Length_Collapse}}.

Length-Induced Embedding Collapse in PLM-based Models

This paper introduces a pioneering methodology, termed StructTuning, to efficiently transform foundation Large Language Models (LLMs) into domain specialists. It significantly reduces the training corpus needs to a mere 5% while achieving an impressive 100% of traditional knowledge injection performance. Motivated by structured human education, we propose a novel two-stage strategy for knowledge injection and alignment: Structure-aware Continual Pre-Training (SCPT) and Structure-aware Supervised Fine-Tuning (SSFT). In the SCPT phase, we automatically extract the domain knowledge taxonomy and reorganize the training corpora, enabling LLMs to effectively link textual segments to targeted knowledge points within the taxonomy. In the SSFT phase, we explicitly prompt models to elucidate the underlying knowledge structure in their outputs, leveraging the structured domain insight to address practical problems. Our ultimate method was extensively evaluated across model architectures and scales on LongBench and MMedBench datasets, demonstrating superior performance against other knowledge injection methods. We also explored our method’s scalability across different training corpus sizes, laying the foundation to enhance domain-specific LLMs with better data utilization.

Structure-aware Domain Knowledge Injection for Large Language Models

Social determinants of health (SDOH) extraction from clinical text is critical for downstream healthcare analytics. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown promise, they may rely on superficial cues leading to spurious predictions. Using the MIMIC portion of the SHAC (Social History Annotation Corpus) dataset and focusing on drug status extraction as a case study, we demonstrate that mentions of alcohol or smoking can falsely induce models to predict current/past drug use where none is present, while also uncovering concerning gender disparities in model performance. We further evaluate mitigation strategies—such as prompt engineering and chain-of-thought reasoning—to reduce these false positives, providing insights into enhancing LLM reliability in health domains.

Spurious Correlations and Beyond: Understanding and Mitigating Shortcut Learning in SDOH Extraction with Large Language Models

Model merging for Large Language Models (LLMs) directly fuses the parameters of different models finetuned on various tasks, creating a unified model for multi-domain tasks. However, due to potential vulnerabilities in models available on open-source platforms, model merging is susceptible to backdoor attacks. In this paper, we propose $\textit{Merge Hijacking}$, the first backdoor attack targeting model merging in LLMs. The attacker constructs a malicious upload model and releases it. Once a victim user merges it with any other models, the resulting merged model inherits the backdoor while maintaining utility across tasks. Merge Hijacking defines two main objectives—effectiveness and utility—and achieves them through four steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack across different models, merging algorithms, and tasks. Additionally, we show that the attack remains effective even when merging real-world models. Moreover, our attack demonstrates robustness against two inference-time defenses (Paraphrasing and CLEANGEN) and one training-time defense (Fine-pruning).

Merge Hijacking: Backdoor Attacks to Model Merging of Large Language Models

The adeptness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in comprehending and following natural language instructions is critical for their deployment in sophisticated real-world applications. Existing evaluations mainly focus on fragmented constraints or narrow scenarios, but they overlook the comprehensiveness and authenticity of constraints from the user's perspective. To bridge this gap, we propose CFBench, a large-scale Chinese Comprehensive Constraints Following Benchmark for LLMs, featuring 1,000 curated samples that cover more than 200 real-life scenarios and over 50 NLP tasks. CFBench meticulously compiles constraints from real-world instructions and constructs an innovative systematic framework for constraint types, which includes 10 primary categories and over 25 subcategories, and ensures each constraint is seamlessly integrated within the instructions. To make certain that the evaluation of LLM outputs aligns with user perceptions, we propose an advanced methodology that integrates multi-dimensional assessment criteria with requirement prioritization, covering various perspectives of constraints, instructions, and requirement fulfillment. Evaluating current leading LLMs on CFBench reveals substantial room for improvement in constraints following, and we further investigate influencing factors and enhancement strategies. The data and code will be made available.

CFBench: A Comprehensive Constraints-Following Benchmark for LLMs

In recent research on large language models (LLMs), there has been a growing emphasis on aligning these models with human values to reduce the impact of harmful content. However, current alignment methods often rely solely on singular forms of feedback, such as preferences, annotated labels, or natural language critiques, overlooking the potential advantages of combining these feedback types. This limitation leads to suboptimal performance, even when ample training data is available. In this paper, we introduce Diverse AI Feedback (DAIF) as a novel method to enhance LLM alignment with diverse feedback mechanisms. Our approach involves collecting three distinct types of feedback tailored to problems of varying difficulty levels within the training dataset. Specifically, we exploit critique feedback for easy problems, refinement feedback for medium problems, and preference feedback for hard problems. By training our model with this diversified feedback, we achieve enhanced alignment performance while using less training data. To assess the effectiveness of DAIF, we evaluate it against previous methods in three downstream tasks: question answering, dialog generation, and text summarization. Experimental results demonstrate that DAIF achieves superior performance even with a smaller training dataset.

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Just a Scratch: Enhancing LLM Capabilities for Self-harm Detection through Intent Differentiation and Emoji Interpretation

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