Austria

Persuasion (or propaganda) techniques detection is a relatively novel task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). While there have already been a number of annotation campaigns, they have been based on heuristic guidelines, which have never been thoroughly discussed. Here, we present the first systematic analysis of a complex annotation task -detecting 22 persuasion techniques in memes-, for which we provided continuous expert oversight. The presence of an expert allowed us to critically analyze specific aspects of the annotation process. Among our findings, we show that inter-annotator agreement alone inadequately assessed annotation correctness. We thus define and track different error types, revealing that expert feedback shows varying effectiveness across error categories. This pattern suggests that distinct mechanisms underlie different kinds of misannotations.
Based on our findings, we advocate for the necessity of expert oversight in annotation tasks and periodic quality audits. In order to reduce the costs for this, we introduce a probabilistic model for optimizing intervention scheduling. To support future research on annotation quality&#39;s impact on model performance, we release our comprehensive dataset containing all individual annotator labels, all consolidated annotations, and all expert revisions.

ACL 2025

Annotating the Annotators: Analysis, Insights and Modelling from an Annotation Campaign on Persuasion Techniques Detection

persuasion techniques

perspectivism

annotation

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

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.

Persuasion (or propaganda) techniques detection is a relatively novel task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). While there have already been a number of annotation campaigns, they have been based on heuristic guidelines, which have never been thoroughly discussed. Here, we present the first systematic analysis of a complex annotation task -detecting 22 persuasion techniques in memes-, for which we provided continuous expert oversight. The presence of an expert allowed us to critically analyze specific aspects of the annotation process. Among our findings, we show that inter-annotator agreement alone inadequately assessed annotation correctness. We thus define and track different error types, revealing that expert feedback shows varying effectiveness across error categories. This pattern suggests that distinct mechanisms underlie different kinds of misannotations.
Based on our findings, we advocate for the necessity of expert oversight in annotation tasks and periodic quality audits. In order to reduce the costs for this, we introduce a probabilistic model for optimizing intervention scheduling. To support future research on annotation quality's impact on model performance, we release our comprehensive dataset containing all individual annotator labels, all consolidated annotations, and all expert revisions.

poster

### 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.* 
[Read more](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GI_hvOpjswAuYdUTromfeDiPpCcqidwg/view?usp=sharing)

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

Nowadays, news, legislation, guidelines, and corporate reports are discussing the impact of climate change, how to best prevent future damage and adapt to a changing environment. Navigating this wealth of information can be overwhelming for citizens, journalists, legislators, and other stakeholders. Hence, significant efforts have been made in the natural language processing community to facilitate the automatic analysis of a large corpus of text via tasks such as climate-related topic detection, climate risk classification, question answering over climate topics, and many more. In this work, we perform a reproducibility study on 8 tasks and 29 datasets, testing 6 models. Our goal is to highlight potential issues within datasets and evaluation methodologies while also providing cleaned versions of those datasets and a reliable testing platform. We identify in each dataset annotation errors, which can be leveraged to provide new and higher quality datasets. Finally, we release a toolbox containing the cleaned datasets and the evaluation code of models, together with a pipeline for applying the models on corporate documents.

Benchmarking the Benchmarks: Reproducing Climate-Related NLP Tasks

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced conversational AI assistants. However, systematically evaluating how well these assistants apply personalization—adapting to individual user preferences while completing tasks—remains challenging. Existing personalization benchmarks focus on chit-chat, non-conversational tasks, or narrow domains, failing to capture the complexities of personalized task-oriented assistance. To address this, we introduce PersonaLens, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating personalization in task-oriented AI assistants. Our benchmark features diverse user profiles equipped with rich preferences and interaction histories, along with two specialized LLM-based agents: a user agent that engages in realistic task-oriented dialogues with AI assistants, and a judge agent that employs the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm to assess personalization, response quality, and task success. Through extensive experiments with current LLM assistants across diverse tasks, we reveal significant variability in their personalization capabilities, providing crucial insights for advancing conversational AI systems.

PersonaLens: A Benchmark for Personalization Evaluation in Conversational AI Assistants

Large Language Models have demonstrated outstanding performance across various downstream tasks and have been widely applied in multiple scenarios. Human-annotated preference data is used for training to further improve LLMs' performance, which is constrained by the upper limit of human performance. Therefore, Self-Rewarding method has been proposed, where LLMs generate training data by rewarding their own outputs. However, the existing self-rewarding paradigm is not effective in mathematical reasoning scenarios and may even lead to a decline in performance. In this work, we propose the Process-based Self-Rewarding pipeline for language models, which introduces long-thought reasoning, step-wise LLM-as-a-Judge, and step-wise preference optimization within the self-rewarding paradigm. Our new paradigm successfully enhances the performance of LLMs on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks through iterative Process-based Self-Rewarding, demonstrating the immense potential of self-rewarding to achieve artificial intelligence that may surpass human capabilities.

Process-based Self-Rewarding Language Models

Question answering over mixed sources, like text and tables, has been advanced by verbalizing all contents and encoding it with a language model. A prominent case of such heterogeneous data is personal information: user devices log vast amounts of data every day, such as calendar entries, workout statistics, shopping records, streaming history, and more. Information needs range from simple look-ups to queries of analytical nature. The challenge is to provide humans with convenient access with small footprint, so that all personal data stays on the user devices. We present ReQAP, a novel method that creates an executable operator tree for a given question, via recursive decomposition. Operators are designed to enable seamless integration of structured and unstructured sources, and the execution of the operator tree yields a traceable answer. We further release the PerQA benchmark, with persona-based data and questions, covering a diverse spectrum of realistic user needs.

Recursive Question Understanding for Complex Question Answering over Heterogeneous Personal Data

Language models (LMs) can make a correct prediction based on many possible signals in a prompt, not all corresponding to recall of factual associations. However, current interpretations of LMs fail to take this into account. For example, given the query "Astrid Lindgren was born in" with the corresponding completion "Sweden", no difference is made between whether the prediction was based on knowing where the author was born or assuming that a person with a Swedish-sounding name was born in Sweden. In this paper, we present a model-specific recipe - PrISM - for constructing datasets with examples of four different prediction scenarios: generic language modeling, guesswork, heuristics recall and exact fact recall. We apply two popular interpretability methods to the scenarios: causal tracing (CT) and information flow analysis. We find that both yield distinct results for each scenario. Results for exact fact recall and generic language modeling scenarios confirm previous conclusions about the importance of mid-range MLP sublayers for fact recall, while results for guesswork and heuristics indicate a critical role of late last token position MLP sublayers. In summary, we contribute resources for a more extensive and granular study of fact completion in LMs, together with analyses that provide a more nuanced understanding of how LMs process fact-related queries.

Fact Recall, Heuristics or Pure Guesswork? Precise Interpretations of Language Models for Fact Completion

Despite exceptional capabilities in knowledge-intensive tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) face a critical gap in understanding how they internalize new knowledge, particularly how acquired knowledge becomes structurally embedded in their neural computations. We address this issue through the lens of knowledge circuit evolution, identifying computational subgraphs that facilitate knowledge storage and processing. Our systematic analysis of circuit evolution throughout continual pre-training reveals several key findings: (1) the acquisition of new knowledge is influenced by its relevance to pre-existing knowledge; (2) the evolution of knowledge circuits exhibits a distinct phase shift from formation to optimization; (3) the evolution of knowledge circuits follows a deep-to-shallow pattern. These insights not only advance our theoretical understanding of the mechanisms of new knowledge acquisition in LLMs, but also provide potential implications for improving continual pre-training strategies to enhance model performance.

How Do LLMs Acquire New Knowledge? A Knowledge Circuits Perspective on Continual Pre-Training

Temporal tabular question answering presents a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), requiring robust reasoning over structured data—a task where traditional prompting methods often fall short. These methods face challenges such as memorization, sensitivity to table size, and reduced performance on complex queries. To overcome these limitations, we introduce TEMPTABQA-C, a synthetic dataset designed for systematic and controlled evaluations, alongside a symbolic intermediate representation that transforms tables into database schemas. This structured approach allows LLMs to generate and execute SQL queries, enhancing generalization and mitigating biases. By incorporating adaptive fewshot prompting with contextually tailored examples, our method achieves superior robustness, scalability, and performance. Experimental results consistently highlight improvements across key challenges, setting a new benchmark for robust temporal reasoning with LLMs.

LLM-Symbolic Integration for Robust Temporal Tabular Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed AI across diverse domains, with prompting being central to their success in guiding model outputs. However, manual prompt engineering is both labor-intensive and domain-specific, necessitating the need for automated solutions. We introduce PromptWizard, a novel, fully automated framework for discrete prompt optimization, utilizing a self-evolving, self-adapting mechanism. Through a feedback-driven critique and synthesis process, PromptWizard achieves an effective balance between exploration and exploitation, iteratively refining both prompt instructions and in-context examples to generate human-readable, task-specific prompts. This guided approach systematically improves prompt quality, resulting in superior performance across 45 tasks. PromptWizard excels even with limited training data, smaller LLMs, and various LLM architectures. Additionally, our cost analysis reveals a substantial reduction in API calls, token usage, and overall cost, demonstrating PromptWizard's efficiency, scalability, and advantages over existing prompt optimization strategies.

PromptWizard: Optimizing Prompts via Task-Aware, Feedback-Driven Self-Evolution

Multiple-choice exam questions with "None of the above" (NA) options have been extensively studied in educational testing, in which existing research suggests that they better assess true knowledge. However, their impact on Large Language Models (LLMs) evaluation remains underexplored. Through systematic experiments with 28 LLMs on the MMLU benchmark, we examine how NA options affect model performance and confidence calibration. Our analysis reveals that NA options, when used as the correct answer, lead to a consistent 30-50% performance drop across models regardless of scale--suggesting that LLMs lack the meta-cognitive ability to systematically evaluate and reject all given options when none are correct. This degradation shows strong domain dependence, with minimal impact on mathematical reasoning (14.6% drop) but severe effects on tasks requiring uncertainty handling like business ethics (48.1% drop). Our results highlight important implications for benchmark design and raise questions about LLMs' ability to handle uncertainty in real-world applications.

None of the Above, Less of the Right Parallel Patterns in Human and LLM Performance on Multi-Choice Questions Answering

Recent advances in handling long sequences have unlocked new possibilities for long-context in-context learning (ICL). While existing research predominantly focuses on performance gains driven by additional in-context examples, the impact on the trustworthiness of generated responses remains underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by investigating how increased examples influence predictive uncertainty—an essential aspect in trustworthiness. We begin by systematically quantifying uncertainty across different “shot” configurations in ICL, emphasizing the role of example quantity. Through uncertainty decomposition, we introduce a novel perspective on performance enhancement, focusing on epistemic uncertainty (EU). Our results reveal that additional examples reduce total uncertainty in both simple and complex tasks by injecting task-specific knowledge, thereby diminishing EU and enhancing performance. For complex tasks, these advantages emerge only after addressing the increased noise and uncertainty associated with longer inputs. Finally, we investigate the progression of internal confidence across layers, uncovering the underlying mechanisms that drive the reduction in uncertainty.

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Benchmarking the Benchmarks: Reproducing Climate-Related NLP Tasks

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