Austria

Recent studies on reasoning in language models (LMs) have sparked a debate on whether they can learn systematic inferential principles or merely exploit superficial patterns in the training data. To understand and uncover the mechanisms adopted for formal reasoning in LMs, this paper presents a mechanistic interpretation of syllogistic inference. Specifically, we present a methodology for circuit discovery aimed at interpreting content-independent and formal reasoning mechanisms. Through two distinct intervention methods, we uncover a sufficient and necessary circuit involving middle-term suppression that elucidates how LMs transfer information to derive valid conclusions from premises.
Furthermore, we investigate how belief biases manifest in syllogistic inference, finding evidence of partial contamination from additional attention heads responsible for encoding commonsense and contextualized knowledge. Finally, we explore the generalization of the discovered mechanisms across various syllogistic schemes, model sizes and architectures. The identified circuit is sufficient and necessary for syllogistic schemes on which the models achieve high accuracy ($\geq$ 60\%), with compatible activation patterns across models of different families. Overall, our findings suggest that LMs learn transferable content-independent reasoning mechanisms, but that, at the same time, such mechanisms do not involve generalizable and abstract logical primitives, being susceptible to contamination by the same world knowledge acquired during pre-training.

ACL 2025

Reasoning Circuits in Language Models: A Mechanistic Interpretation of Syllogistic Inference

circuit analysis

syllogistic reasoning

mechanistic interpretability

### 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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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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### 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)

Large Language Models have emerged to show remarkable capabilities in the NLP domain. The effectiveness can mainly be attributed to the ability to adapt to an array of downstream tasks. However, generally, full fine-tuning is a computationally expensive job. To mitigate this, many techniques have been developed that prime efficiency, a prominent one being Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). However, LoRA and its variants employ re-parametrized additive updates. In this paper, we propose Low Rank Multiplicative Adaptation (LoRMA), which shifts the paradigm of additive updates to a much richer space of matrix multiplicative transformations. We tackle challenges such as computational complexity and rank inhibition by strategically ordering matrix operations and introducing rank inflation strategies. We conduct extensive experiments to show the effectiveness of our approach in terms of evaluation metrics and computational costs.

LoRMA: Low Rank Multiplicative Adaptation for LLMs

As Large Language Models are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains, their ability to detect false assumptions and reason critically is crucial for ensuring reliable outputs. False-premise questions (FPQs) serve as an important evaluation method by exposing cases where flawed assumptions lead to incorrect responses. While existing benchmarks focus on single-hop FPQs, real-world reasoning often requires multi-hop inference, where models must verify consistency across multiple reasoning steps rather than relying on surface-level cues. To address this gap, we introduce MultiHoax, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs' ability to handle false premises in complex, multi-step reasoning tasks. Our dataset spans seven countries and ten diverse knowledge categories, using Wikipedia as the primary knowledge source to enable cross-regional factual reasoning. Experiments reveal that state-of-the-art LLMs struggle to detect false premises across different countries, knowledge categories, and multi-hop reasoning types, highlighting the need for improved false premise detection and more robust multi-hop reasoning capabilities in LLMs.

MultiHoax: A Dataset of Multi-hop False-premise questions

The proliferation of hate speech has caused significant harm to society. The intensity and directionality of hate are closely tied to the target and argument it is associated with. However, research on hate speech detection in Chinese has lagged behind, and existing datasets lack span-level fine-grained annotations. Furthermore, the lack of research on Chinese hateful slang poses a significant challenge. In this paper, we provide two valuable fine-grained Chinese hate speech detection research resources. First, we construct a Span-level Target-Aware Toxicity Extraction dataset (STATE ToxiCN), which is the first span-level Chinese hate speech dataset. Secondly, we evaluate the span-level hate speech detection performance of existing models using STATE ToxiCN. Finally, we conduct the first study on Chinese hateful slang and evaluate the ability of LLMs to understand hate semantics. Our work contributes valuable resources and insights to advance span-level hate speech detection in Chinese.

STATE ToxiCN: A Benchmark for Span-level Target-Aware Toxicity Extraction in Chinese Hate Speech Detection

Reliable responses from large language models (LLMs) require adherence to user instructions and retrieved information. While alignment techniques help LLMs align with human intentions and values, improving context-faithfulness through alignment remains underexplored. To address this, we propose Context-DPO, the first alignment method specifically designed to enhance LLMs' context-faithfulness. We introduce ConFiQA, a benchmark that simulates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) scenarios with knowledge conflicts to evaluate context-faithfulness. By leveraging faithful and stubborn responses to questions with provided context from ConFiQA, our Context-DPO aligns LLMs through direct preference optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Context-DPO significantly improves context-faithfulness, achieving 35% to 280% improvements on popular open-source models. Further analysis demonstrates that Context-DPO preserves LLMs' generative capabilities while providing interpretable insights into context utilization.

Context-DPO: Aligning Language Models for Context-Faithfulness

Knowledge editing (KE) methods offer an efficient way to modify knowledge in large language models. Current KE evaluations typically assess editing success by considering only the edited knowledge without any preceding contexts. In real-world applications, however, preceding contexts often trigger the retrieval of the original knowledge and undermine the intended edit. To address this issue, we have developed CHED—a benchmark designed to evaluate the context robustness of KE methods. Evaluations on CHED show that they often fail when preceding contexts are present. To mitigate this shortcoming, we introduce CoRE, a KE method designed to strengthen context robustness by minimizing context-sensitive variance in hidden states of the model for edited knowledge. This method not only improves the editing success rate in situations where a preceding context is present but also preserves the overall capabilities of the model. We also provide an in-depth analysis of the differing impacts of preceding contexts when introduced as user utterances versus assistant responses, and we dissect attention-score patterns to assess how specific tokens influence editing success. We release our dataset and code at [https://github.com/holi-lab/CoRE](https://github.com/holi-lab/CoRE).

Context Robust Knowledge Editing for Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly impacted various domains, especially through organized LLM-driven autonomous agents. A representative scenario is in software development, where agents can collaborate in a team like humans, following predefined phases to complete sub-tasks sequentially. However, for an agent team, each phase yields only one possible outcome. This results in the completion of only one development chain, thereby losing the opportunity to explore multiple potential decision paths within the solution space. Consequently leading to suboptimal results or extensive trial and error. To address this, we introduce Cross-Team Orchestration (Croto), a scalable multi-team framework that enables orchestrated teams to jointly propose various task-oriented solutions and interact with their insights in a self-independence while cross-team collaboration environment for superior solutions generation. Experiments reveal a notable increase in software quality compared to state-of-the-art baselines. We further tested our framework on story generation tasks, which demonstrated a promising generalization ability of our framework in other domains. The code and data is available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/ChatDev/tree/macnet

Multi-Agent Collaboration via Cross-Team Orchestration

Performance in the KG-to-Text task has improved over the years, particularly in English. However, models are still prone to mistakes like Additions and Omissions. Furthermore, few languages are taken into account since both train and test data are not readily available. In this paper, we hope to facilitate the development and improvement of multilingual KG-to-Text models by providing a multilingual evaluation framework that is reference-less (no need for test data) and permits estimating how much a KG-to-Text Model under- (omission) or over- (addition) generates. We focus on two high (English, Russian) and five low (Breton, Irish, Maltese, Welsh, Xhosa) resource languages and show that our metric has fair to moderate correlation with reference-based metrics, positioning it as a consistent alternative when no references are available. We also show that our metric outperforms prior reference-less metrics in correlation with existing human judgments. Additional human evaluation shows moderate to strong correlation with human annotators in assessing precision and recall at a higher granularity level than shown in previous studies. Since our metric provides scores for precision and recall, it helps better assess the level of over- or under-generation of multilingual KG-to-Text models.

Semantic Evaluation of Multilingual Data-to-Text Generation via NLI Fine-Tuning: Precision, Recall and F1 scores

Neural retrieval methods using transformer-based pre-trained language models have advanced multilingual and cross-lingual retrieval. However, their effectiveness for low-resource, morphologically rich languages such as Amharic remains underexplored due to data scarcity and suboptimal tokenization. We address this gap by introducing Amharic-specific dense retrieval models based on pre-trained Amharic BERT and RoBERTa backbones. Our proposed RoBERTa-Base-Amharic-Embed model (110M parameters) achieves a 17.6\% relative improvement in MRR@10 and a 9.86\% gain in Recall@10 over the strongest multilingual baseline, Arctic Embed 2.0 (568M parameters). More compact variants, such as RoBERTa-Medium-Amharic-Embed (42M), remain competitive while being over 13$\times$ smaller. Additionally, we train a ColBERT-based late interaction retrieval model that achieves the highest MRR@10 score (0.843) among all evaluated models. We benchmark our proposed models against both sparse and dense retrieval baselines to systematically assess retrieval effectiveness in Amharic. Our analysis highlights key challenges in low-resource settings and underscores the importance of language-specific adaptation. To foster future research in low-resource IR, we publicly release our dataset, codebase, and trained models at https://github.com/kidist-amde/amharic-ir-benchmarks.

Optimized Text Embedding Models and Benchmarks for Amharic Passage Retrieval

Temporal Logic (TL), especially Signal Temporal Logic (STL), enables precise formal specification, making it widely used in cyber-physical systems such as autonomous driving and robotics. Automatically transforming NL into STL is an attractive approach to overcome the limitations of manual transformation, which is time-consuming and error-prone. However, due to the lack of datasets, automatic transformation currently faces significant challenges and has not been fully explored. In this paper, we propose a NL-STL dataset named STL-Diversity-Enhanced (STL-DivEn), comprising 16,000 samples enriched with diverse patterns. To develop the dataset, we first manually create a small-scale seed set of NL-STL pairs. Next, representative examples are identified through clustering and used to guide large language models (LLMs) in generating additional NL-STL pairs. Finally, diversity and accuracy are ensured through rigorous rule-based filters and human validation. Furthermore, we introduce the Knowledge-Guided STL Transformation (KGST) framework, a novel approach for transforming natural language into STL, involving a generate-then-refine process based on external knowledge. Statistical analysis shows that the STL-DivEn dataset exhibits more diversity than the existing NL-STL dataset. Moreover, both metric-based and human evaluations indicate that our KGST approach outperforms baseline models in transformation accuracy on STL-DivEn and DeepSTL datasets. Dataset and code will be released upon publication.

Enhancing Transformation from Natural Language to Signal Temporal Logic Using LLMs with Diverse External Knowledge

Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) is a critical task that focuses on identifying predicate-argument structures in sentences. Span-based SRL, a prominent paradigm, is often tackled using BIO-based or graph-based methods. However, these approaches often fail to capture the inherent relationship between syntax and semantics. While syntax-aware models have been proposed to address this limitation, they heavily rely on pre-existing syntactic resources, limiting their general applicability. In this work, we propose a lexicalized tree representation for span-based SRL, which integrates constituency and dependency parsing to explicitly model predicate-argument structures. By structurally representing predicates as roots and arguments as subtrees directly linked to the predicate, our approach bridges the gap between syntactic and semantic representations. Experiments on standard benchmarks (CoNLL05 and CoNLL12) demonstrate that our model achieves competitive performance, with particular improvement in predicate-given settings.

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LoRMA: Low Rank Multiplicative Adaptation for LLMs

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