Austria

To address the global challenge of online hate speech, prior research has developed detection models to flag such content on social media. However, due to systematic biases in evaluation datasets, the real-world effectiveness of these models remains unclear, particularly across geographies. We introduce HateDay, the first global hate speech dataset representative of social media settings, constructed from a random sample of all tweets posted on September 21, 2022 and covering eight languages and four English-speaking countries. Using HateDay, we uncover substantial variation in the prevalence and composition of hate speech across languages and regions. We show that evaluations on academic datasets greatly overestimate real-world detection performance, which we find is very low, especially for non-European languages. Our analysis identifies key drivers of this gap, including models’ difficulty to distinguish hate from offensive speech and a mismatch between the target groups emphasized in academic datasets and those most frequently targeted in real-world settings. We argue that poor model performance makes public models ill-suited for automatic hate speech moderation and find that high moderation rates are only achievable with substantial human oversight. Our results underscore the need to evaluate detection systems on data that reflects the complexity and diversity of real-world social media.

ACL 2025

HateDay: Insights from a Global Hate Speech Dataset Representative of a Day on Twitter

llms

resources

hate speech

text classification

generalization

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
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ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

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)

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable advancements, yet hallucination, where models produce inaccurate or non-factual statements, remains a significant challenge for real-world deployment. Although current classification-based methods, such as SAPLMA, are highly efficient in mitigating hallucinations, they struggle when non-factual information arises in the early or mid-sequence of outputs, reducing their reliability. To address these issues, we propose Hallucination Detection-Neural Differential Equations (HD-NDEs), a novel method that systematically assesses the truthfulness of statements by capturing the full dynamics of LLMs within their latent space. Our approaches apply neural differential equations (Neural DEs) to model the dynamic system in the latent space of LLMs. Then, the sequence in the latent space is mapped to the classification space for truth assessment. The extensive experiments across five datasets and six widely used LLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of HD-NDEs, especially, achieving over 14% improvement in AUC-ROC on the True-False dataset compared to state-of-the-art techniques.

HD-NDEs: Neural Differential Equations for Hallucination Detection in LLMs

Binaural audio enriches immersive experiences by enabling the perception of the spatial locations of sounding objects in AR, VR, and embodied AI applications. While existing audio spatialization methods can generally map any available monaural audio to binaural audio signals, they often lack the flexible and interactive control needed in complex multi-object user-interactive environments. To address this, we propose a Text-guided Audio Spatialization (TAS) framework that utilizes diverse text prompts and evaluates our model from unified generation and comprehension perspectives. Due to the limited availability of high-quality, large-scale stereo data, we construct the SpatialTAS dataset, which encompasses 376,000 simulated binaural audio samples to facilitate the training of our model. Our model learns binaural differences guided by 3D spatial location and relative position prompts, enhanced with flipped-channel audio. Experimental results show that our model can generate high quality binaural audios for various audio types on both simulated and real-recorded datasets. Besides, we establish an assessment model based on Llama-3.1-8B, which evaluates the semantic accuracy of spatial locations through a spatial reasoning task. Results demonstrate that by utilizing text prompts for flexible and interactive control, we can generate binaural audio with both high quality and semantic consistency in spatial locations.

In-the-wild Audio Spatialization with Flexible Text-guided Localization

Real-world RAG applications often encounter long-context input scenarios, where redundant information and noise results in higher inference costs and reduced performance. To address these challenges, we propose LongRefiner, an efficient plug-and-play refiner that leverages the inherent structural characteristics of long documents. LongRefiner employs dual-level query analysis, hierarchical document structuring, and adaptive refinement through multi-task learning on a single foundation model. Experiments on seven QA datasets demonstrate that LongRefiner achieves competitive performance in various scenarios while using 10x fewer computational costs and latency compared to the best baseline. Further analysis validates that LongRefiner is scalable, efficient, and effective, providing practical insights for real-world long-text RAG applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/ignorejjj/LongRefiner.

Hierarchical Document Refinement for Long-context Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to generating content that exhibits gender biases, raising significant ethical concerns. Alignment, the process of fine-tuning LLMs to better align with desired behaviors, is recognized as an effective approach to mitigate gender biases. Although proprietary LLMs have made significant strides in mitigating gender bias, their alignment datasets are not publicly available. The commonly used and publicly available alignment dataset, HH-RLHF, still exhibits gender bias to some extent. There is a lack of publicly available alignment datasets specifically designed to address gender bias. Hence, we developed a new dataset named GenderAlign, aiming at mitigating a comprehensive set of gender biases in LLMs. This dataset comprises 8k single-turn dialogues, each paired with a "chosen" and a "rejected" response. Compared to the "rejected" responses, the "chosen" responses demonstrate lower levels of gender bias and higher quality. Furthermore, we categorized the gender biases in the "rejected" responses of GenderAlign into 4 principal categories. The experimental results show the effectiveness of GenderAlign in reducing gender bias in LLMs.

GenderAlign: An Alignment Dataset for Mitigating Gender Bias in Large Language Models

Despite the rapidly growing demand for multimodal retrieval, progress in this field remains severely constrained by a lack of training data. In this paper, we introduce MegaPairs, a novel data synthesis method that leverages vision language models (VLMs) and open-domain images, together with a massive synthetic dataset generated from this method. Our empirical analysis shows that MegaPairs generates high-quality data, enabling the multimodal retriever to significantly outperform the baseline model trained on 70$\times$ more data from existing datasets. Moreover, since MegaPairs solely relies on general image corpora and open-source VLMs, it can be easily scaled up, enabling continuous improvements in retrieval performance. In this stage, we produced more than 26 million training instances and trained several models of varying sizes using this data. These new models achieve state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across 4 popular composed image retrieval (CIR) benchmarks and the highest overall performance on the 36 datasets provided by MMEB. They also demonstrate notable performance improvements with additional downstream fine-tuning. Our code, synthesized dataset, and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/VectorSpaceLab/MegaPairs.

MegaPairs: Massive Data Synthesis for Universal Multimodal Retrieval

Digitized literary corpora of the 19th century favor canonical and novelistic forms, sidelining a broader and more diverse literary production. Serialized fiction – widely read but embedded in newspapers – remains especially underexplored, particularly in low-resource languages like Danish. 
This paper addresses this gap by developing methods to identify fiction in digitized Danish newspapers (1818–1848).
We (1) introduce a manually annotated dataset of 1,394 articles and (2) evaluate classification pipelines using both selected linguistic features and embeddings, achieving F1-scores of up to 0.91. Finally, we (3) analyze feuilleton fiction via interpretable features to test its drift in discourse from neighboring nonfiction.
Our results support the construction of alternative literary corpora and contribute to ongoing work on modeling the fiction–nonfiction boundary by operationalizing discourse-level distinctions at scale.

Fact from Fiction: Finding Serialized Novels in Newspapers

Human processing of idioms heavily depends on interpreting the surrounding context in which they appear. While large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance on idiomaticity detection benchmarks, this success may be driven by reasoning shortcuts present in existing datasets. To address this, we introduce a novel, controlled contrastive dataset (DICE) specifically designed to assess whether LLMs can effectively leverage context to disambiguate idiomatic meanings. Furthermore, we investigate the influence of collocational frequency and sentence probability—proxies for human processing known to affect idiom resolution—on model performance. Our results show that LLMs frequently fail to resolve idiomaticity when it depends on contextual understanding, performing better on sentences deemed more likely by the model. Additionally, idiom frequency influences performance but does not guarantee accurate interpretation. Our findings emphasize the limitations of current models in grasping contextual meaning and highlight the need for more context-sensitive evaluation.

Rolling the DICE on Idiomaticity: How LLMs Fail to Grasp Context

As modern large language models (LLMs) become integral to everyday tasks, concerns about their inherent biases and their potential impact on human decision-making have emerged. While bias in models are well-documented, less is known about how these biases influence human decisions. This paper presents two interactive experiments investigating the effects of partisan bias in LLMs on political opinions and decision-making. Participants interacted freely with either a biased liberal, biased conservative, or unbiased control model while completing these tasks. We found that participants exposed to partisan biased models were significantly more likely to adopt opinions and make decisions which matched the LLM's bias. Even more surprising, this influence was seen when the model bias and personal political partisanship of the participant were opposite. However, we also discovered that prior knowledge of AI was weakly correlated with a reduction of the impact of the bias, highlighting the possible importance of AI education for robust mitigation of bias effects. Our findings not only highlight the critical effects of interacting with biased LLMs and its ability to impact public discourse and political conduct, but also highlights potential techniques for mitigating these risks in the future.

Biased LLMs can Influence Political Decision-Making

Diffusion models have emerged as a promising approach for text generation, with recent works falling into two main categories: discrete and continuous diffusion models. Discrete diffusion models apply token corruption independently using categorical distributions, allowing for different diffusion progress across tokens but lacking fine-grained control. Continuous diffusion models map tokens to continuous spaces and apply fine-grained noise, but the diffusion progress is uniform across tokens, limiting their ability to capture semantic nuances. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{\underline{N}}on-simultan\textbf{\underline{e}}ous C\textbf{\underline{o}}ntinuous \textbf{\underline{Diff}}usion Models (NeoDiff), a novel diffusion model that integrates the strengths of both discrete and continuous approaches. NeoDiff introduces a Poisson diffusion process for the forward process, enabling a flexible and fine-grained noising paradigm, and employs a time predictor for the reverse process to adaptively modulate the denoising progress based on token semantics. Furthermore, NeoDiff utilizes an optimized schedule for inference to ensure more precise noise control and improved performance. Our approach unifies the theories of discrete and continuous diffusion models, offering a more principled and effective framework for text generation. Experimental results on several text generation tasks demonstrate NeoDiff's superior performance compared to baselines of non-autoregressive continuous and discrete diffusion models, iterative-based methods and autoregressive diffusion-based methods. These results highlight NeoDiff's potential as a powerful tool for generating high-quality text and advancing the field of diffusion-based text generation.

Unifying Continuous and Discrete Text Diffusion with Non-simultaneous Diffusion Processes

Text embeddings from large language models (LLMs) have achieved excellent results in tasks such as information retrieval, semantic textual similarity, etc. In this work, we show an interesting finding: when feeding a text into the LLM-based embedder, the obtained text embedding will be able to be aligned with the key tokens in the input text. We first fully analyze this phenomenon on eight LLM-based embedders and show that this phenomenon is universal and is not affected by model architecture, training strategy, and embedding method. With a deeper analysis, we find that the main change in embedding space between these embedders and their LLM backbones is in the first principal component. By adjusting the first principal component, we can align text embedding with the key tokens. Finally, we give several examples to demonstrate the vast application potential of this finding: (1) we propose a simple and practical sparse retrieval method based on the aligned tokens, which can achieve 80% of the dense retrieval effect of the same model while reducing the computation significantly; (2) we show that our findings provide a novel perspective to help understand novel technologies (e.g., instruction-following embedding) and fuzzy concepts (e.g., semantic relatedness vs. similarity) in this field.

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HD-NDEs: Neural Differential Equations for Hallucination Detection in LLMs

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Robust Hate Speech Detection: A Cross-Dataset Empirical Comparison