Austria

Propaganda detection on social media remains challenging due to task complexity and limited high-quality labeled data. This paper introduces a novel framework that combines human expertise with Large Language Model (LLM) assistance to improve both annotation consistency and scalability. We propose a hierarchical taxonomy that organizes 14 fine-grained propaganda techniques \cite{martino2020semeval} into three broader categories, conduct a human annotation study on the HQP dataset \cite{maarouf2023hqp} that reveals low inter-annotator agreement for fine-grained labels, and implement an LLM-assisted pre-annotation pipeline that extracts propagandistic spans, generates concise explanations, and assigns local labels as well as a global label. A secondary human verification study shows significant improvements in both agreement and time-efficiency. Building on this, we fine-tune smaller language models (SLMs) to perform structured annotation. Instead of fine-tuning on human annotations, we train on high-quality LLM-generated data, allowing a large model to produce these annotations and a smaller model to learn to generate them via knowledge distillation. Our work contributes towards the development of scalable and robust propaganda detection systems, supporting the idea of transparent and accountable media ecosystems in line with SDG 16. The code is publicly available at our GitHub repository\footnote{\url{https://github.com/XplaiNLP/NLP4PI_2025_submission}}.

ACL 2025

Hybrid Annotation for Propaganda Detection: Integrating LLM Pre-Annotations with Human Intelligence

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

workshop 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)

The ability of Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to categorize text into multiple classes has motivated their use in online content moderation tasks, such as hate speech and fake news detection. However, there is limited understanding of how or why these methods make such decisions, or why certain content is moderated in the first place. To investigate the hidden mechanisms behind content moderation, we explore multiple directions: 1) training classifiers to reverse-engineer content moderation decisions across countries; 2) explaining content moderation decisions by analyzing Shapley values and LLM-guided explanations. Our primary focus is on content moderation decisions made across countries, using pre-existing corpora sampled from the Twitter Stream Grab. Our experiments reveal interesting patterns in censored posts, both across countries and over time. Through human evaluations of LLM-generated explanations across three LLMs, we assess the effectiveness of using LLMs in content moderation. Finally, we discuss potential future directions, as well as the limitations and ethical considerations of this work.

Revealing Hidden Mechanisms of Cross-Country Content Moderation with Natural Language Processing

Publications in the AI for Good space have tended to focus on the research and model development that can support high-impact applications. However, very few AI for Good papers discuss the process of deploying and collaborating with the partner organization, and the resulting real-world impact. In this work, we share details about the close collaboration with a humanitarian-to-humanitarian (H2H) organization and how to not only deploy the AI model in a resource-constrained environment, but also how to maintain it for continuous performance updates, and share key takeaways for practitioners.

Operationalizing AI for Good: Spotlight on Deployment and Integration of AI Models in Humanitarian Work

Multilingual large language models have gained prominence for their proficiency in processing and generating text across languages. Like their monolingual counterparts, multilingual models are likely to pick up on stereotypes and other social biases during training. In this paper, we study a phenomenon we term "stereotype leakage", which refers to how training a model multilingually may lead to stereotypes expressed in one language showing up in the models' behavior in another. We propose a measurement framework for stereotype leakage and investigate its effect in English, Russian, Chinese, and Hindi and with GPT-3.5, mT5, and mBERT. Our findings show a noticeable leakage of positive, negative, and nonpolar associations across all languages. We find that GPT-3.5 exhibits the most stereotype leakage of these models, and Hindi is the most susceptible to leakage effects.

Multilingual Large Language Models Leak Human Stereotypes across Language Boundaries

While the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change (CC) is undisputed now for a long time, public discourse is still divided. Considering the case of Europe, in the majority of countries, an influential right-wing party propagates climate scepticism or outright denial. Our work addresses the German party, which represents the second-largest faction in the federal parliament. In order to make the partys discourse on CC accessible to NLP-based analyses, we are compiling the, a collection of parliamentary speeches and other material from various sources. We report on first analyses of this new dataset using sentiment and emotion analysis as well as classification of populist language, which demonstrate clear differences to the language use of the two largest competing parties (social democrats and conservatives). We make the corpus available to enable further studies of the party's rhetoric on CC topics.

AfD-CCC: Analyzing the Climate Change Discourse of a German Right-wing Political Party

Sustainability reports are key instruments for communicating corporate impact, but their unstructured format and varied content pose challenges for large-scale analysis. This paper presents an unsupervised method to annotate paragraphs from sustainability reports against both the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) standards. The approach combines structured metadata from GRI content indexes, official GRI–SDG mappings, and text semantic similarity models to produce weakly supervised annotations at scale. To evaluate the quality of these annotations, we train a multi-label classifier on the automatically labeled data and evaluate it on the trusted OSDG Community Dataset. The results show that our method yields meaningful labels and improves classification performance when combined with human-annotated data. Although preliminary, this work offers a foundation for scalable sustainability analysis and opens future directions toward assessing the credibility and depth of corporate sustainability claims.

Unsupervised Sustainability Report Labeling based on the integration of the GRI and SDG standards

Moral judgments in LLMs increasingly capture the attention of researchers in AI ethics domain. This study explores moral judgments of three open-source large language models (LLMs)—Qwen-1.5-14B, Llama3-8B, and DeepSeek-R1 in plausible moral dilemmas, examining their sensitivity to social exposure and collaborative decision-making. Using a dual-process framework grounded in deontology and utilitarianism, we evaluate LLMs' responses to moral dilemmas under varying social contexts. Results reveal that all models are significantly influenced by moral norms rather than consequences, with DeepSeek-R1 exhibiting a stronger action tendency compared to Qwen-1.5-14B and Llama3-8B, which show higher inaction preferences. Social exposure and collaboration impact LLMs differently: Qwen-1.5-14B becomes less aligned with moral norms under observation, while DeepSeek-R1's action tendency is moderated by social collaboration. These findings highlight the nuanced moral reasoning capabilities of LLMs and their varying sensitivity to social cues, providing insights into the ethical alignment of AI systems in socially embedded contexts.

What Counts Underlying LLMs' Moral Dilemma Judgments?

TikTok has emerged as a key platform for discussing polarizing topics, including climate change. Despite its growing influence, there is limited research exploring how content features shape emotional alignment between video creators and audience comments, as well as their impact on user engagement. Using a combination of pretrained and fine-tuned textual and visual models, we analyzed 7,110 TikTok videos related to climate change, focusing on content features such as semantic clustering of video transcriptions, visual elements, tonal shifts, and detected emotions. (1) Our findings reveal that positive emotions and videos featuring factual content or vivid environmental visuals exhibit stronger emotional alignment. Furthermore, emotional intensity and tonal coherence in video speech are significant predictors of higher engagement levels, offering new insights into the dynamics of climate change communication on social media. (2) Our preference learning analysis reveals that comment emotions play a dominant role in predicting video shareability, with both positive and negative emotional responses acting as key drivers of content diffusion. We conclude that user engagement—particularly emotional discourse in comments—significantly shapes climate change content shareability.

Insights into Climate Change Narratives: Emotional Alignment and Engagement Analysis on TikTok

Out-of-context and misattributed imagery is the leading form of media manipulation in today's misinformation and disinformation landscape. The existing methods attempting to detect this practice often only consider whether the semantics of the imagery corresponds to the text narrative, missing manipulation so long as the depicted objects or scenes somewhat correspond to the narrative at hand. To tackle this, we introduce News Media Provenance Dataset, a dataset of news articles with provenance-tagged images. We formulate two tasks on this dataset, location of origin relevance (LOR) and date and time of origin relevance (DTOR), and present baseline results on six large language models (LLMs). We identify that, while the zero-shot performance on LOR is promising, the performance on DTOR hinders, leaving room for specialized architectures and future work.

Dataset of News Articles with Provenance Metadata for Media Relevance Assessment

Understanding how humans perceive and describe food is essential for NLP applications such as semantic search, recommendation, and structured food communication. However, textual similarity often fails to reflect perceptual similarity, which is shaped by sensory experience, wine knowledge, and individual context. To address this, we introduce Sensory Anchors—structured reference points that align textual and perceptual representations. Using Red Wine as a case study, we collect free-form descriptions, metaphor-style responses, and perceptual similarity rankings from participants with varying levels of wine knowledge. These rankings reflect holistic perceptual judgments, with wine knowledge emerging as a key factor. Participants with higher wine knowledge produced more consistent rankings and moderately aligned descriptions, while those with lower knowledge showed greater variability. These findings suggest that structured descriptions based on higher wine knowledge may not generalize across users, underscoring the importance of modeling perceptual diversity. We also find that metaphor-style prompts enhance alignment between language and perception, particularly for less knowledgeable participants. Sensory Anchors thus provide a flexible foundation for capturing perceptual variability in food language, supporting the development of more inclusive and interpretable NLP systems.

Bridging Perceptual Gaps in Food NLP: A Structured Approach Using Sensory Anchors

Phishing attacks represent a significant cybersecurity threat, necessitating adaptive detection techniques. This study explores few-shot Adaptive Linguistic Prompting (ALP) in detecting phishing webpages through the multimodal capabilities of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro. ALP is a structured semantic reasoning method that guides LLMs to analyze textual deception by breaking down linguistic patterns, detecting urgency cues, and identifying manipulative diction commonly found in phishing content. By integrating textual, visual, and URL-based analysis, we propose a unified model capable of identifying sophisticated phishing attempts. Our experiments demonstrate that ALP significantly enhances phishing detection accuracy by guiding LLMs through structured reasoning and contextual analysis. The findings highlight the potential of ALP-integrated multimodal LLMs to advance phishing detection frameworks, achieving an F1-score of 0.93—surpassing traditional approaches. These results establish a foundation for more robust, interpretable, and adaptive linguistic-based phishing detection systems using LLMs.

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