India

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong instruction-following capabilities in text-based tasks. However, this ability often deteriorates in multimodal models after alignment with non-text modalities such as images or audio. While several recent efforts have investigated instruction-following performance in text and vision-language models, instruction-following in audio-based large language models remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce IFEval-Audio, a novel evaluation dataset designed to assess the ability to follow instructions in an audio LLM. IFEval-Audio contains 280 audio–instruction–answer triples across six diverse dimensions: Content, Capitalization, Symbol, List Structure, Length, and Format. Each example pairs an audio input with a text instruction, requiring the model to generate an output that follows a specified structure. We benchmark state-of-the-art audio LLMs on their ability to follow audio-involved instructions. The dataset is released publicly to support future research in this emerging area.

IJCNLP-AACL 2025

IFEval-Audio: Benchmarking Instruction-Following Capability in Audio-based Large Language Models

audiollms

multimodal models

instruction following

### 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. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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NAACL 2025

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

poster

### Welcome to IJCNLP-AACL 2025! 
 It is a great honor to host this joint conference in Mumbai, India, from December 20 to 24, 2025. The joint conferences of IJCNLP and AACL are organized with alternating leadership in the Asia-Pacific region. The event is run by the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP) in odd years, and by AACL in even years, while it is organized solely by ACL when the annual ACL meeting is held in the region. This year, the conference is primarily organized by AFNLP. 
*Kentaro Inui
MBZUAI, UAE
General Chair, IJCNLP-AACL 2025* 
Read full message and download the Conference Handbook [**here**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UTwxkAqSqI-GAoJC3wE1zZt5VP1Y8GX0/view?usp=sharing).

The 14th IJCNLP & 4th AACL will be held in Mumbai, India from December 20th to December 24th, 2025.

In this work, we address the challenge of generalizable audio deepfake detection (ADD) across diverse speech synthesis paradigms—including conventional text-to-speech (TTS) systems and modern diffusion or flow-matching (FM) based generators. Prior work has mostly targeted individual synthesis families and often fails to generalize across paradigms due to overfitting to generation-specific artifacts. We hypothesize that synthetic speech, irrespective of its generative origin, leaves behind shared structural distortions in the embedding space that can be aligned through geometry-aware modeling. To this end, we propose RHYME, a unified detection framework that fuses utterance-level embeddings from diverse pretrained speech encoders using non-Euclidean projections. RHYME maps representations into hyperbolic and spherical manifolds—where hyperbolic geometry excels at modeling hierarchical generator families, and spherical projections capture angular, energy-invariant cues such as periodic vocoder artifacts. The fused representation is obtained via Riemannian barycentric averaging, enabling synthesis invariant alignment. RHYME outperforms individual PTMs and homogeneous fusion baselines, achieving top performance and setting new state-of-the-art in cross-paradigm ADD.

Curved Worlds, Clear Boundaries: Generalizing Speech Deepfake Detection using Hyperbolic and Spherical Geometry Spaces

While automatic speech recognition (ASR) now achieves human-level accuracy for a dozen or so languages, the majority of the world's languages lack the resources needed to train robust ASR models. For many of these languages, the largest available source of transcribed speech data consists of recordings of the Bible. Bible recordings are appealingly large and well-structured resources, but they have notable limitations: the vocabulary and style are constrained, and the recordings are typically produced by a single speaker in a studio. These factors raise an important question: to what extent are Bible recordings useful for developing ASR models to transcribe contemporary naturalistic speech, the goal of most ASR applications? In this paper, we use Bible recordings alongside contemporary speech recordings to train ASR models in a selection of under-resourced and endangered languages. We find that models trained solely on Bible data yield shockingly weak performance when tested on contemporary everyday speech, even when compared to models trained on other (non-Bible) out-of-domain data. We identify one way of effectively leveraging Bible data in the ASR training pipeline via a two-stage training regime. Our results highlight the need to re-assess reported results relying exclusively on Bible data and to use Bible data carefully and judiciously.

Faithful Transcription: Leveraging Bible Recordings to Improve ASR for Endangered Languages

Learners of a second language (L2) often map non-native phonemes to similar native-language (L1) phonemes, making conventional L2-focused training slow and effortful. To address this, we propose an L1-grounded pronunciation training method based on compositional phoneme approximation (CPA), a feature-based representation technique that approximates L2 sounds with sequences of L1 phonemes.
Evaluations with 20 Korean non-native English speakers show that CPA-based training achieves a 76\% in-box formant rate in acoustic analysis, 17.6\% relative improvement in phoneme recognition accuracy, and over 80\% of speech being rated as more native-like, with minimal training. Project page: \url{https://gsanpark.github.io/CPA-Pronunciation}.

Compositional Phoneme Approximation for L1-Grounded L2 Pronunciation Training

Multimodal sentiment analysis identifies human emotional tendencies by analyzing text, visual, and auditory modalities. In most studies, the textual modality is usually considered to contain the most emotional information and is regarded as the dominant modality. Existing methods mostly map auxiliary modalities into a semantic space close to the dominant modality, which overly relies on the dominant modality. In this work, we propose a Feature Decomposition-Augmentation (FeaDA) framework, which aims to elevate the role of auxiliary modalities in multimodal data fusion. We first design a projector to decompose auxiliary modalities into partial features, which contain features for emotion judgment, and then utilize these decomposed features to guide the fusion process with KL loss, thereby enhancing the status of auxiliary modality fusion. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we conducted experiments on the CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI, and CH-SIMS datasets. The experimental results show that our FeaDA framework outperforms mutilmodal sentiment analysis methods of the same type in main metrics. Our code is available at https://github.com/PowerLittleYin/FeaDA-main.

Feature Decomposition-Augmentation Network for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used for modeling sentiment trends on social media text. We examine whether LLMs have a polarity association bias---positive or negative---when encountering specific types of lexical word mentions. Such polarity association bias could lead to the wrong classification of neutral statements and thus a distorted estimation of sentiment trends. We estimate the severity of the polarity association bias across five widely used LLMs, identifying lexical word mentions spanning a diverse range of linguistic and psychological categories that correlate with this bias. Our results show a moderate to strong degree of polarity association bias in these LLMs.

To Labor is Not to Suffer: Exploration of Polarity Association Bias in LLMs for Sentiment Analysis

Claims that large language models (LLMs) have complex reasoning ability have stirred broad interests, and controversies, of academics and non-academics alike. A popular basis for such claims comes from LLMs' ability to solve coding problems, which involves understanding the problem statement and providing code that solves the problem. Although such abilities are remarkable feats worth praising, we argue that they come from memorization rather than reasoning. We first show that LLMs' problem-solving ability degrades with increased recency of the problem, likely due to the reduced amount of training data for more recent problems, regardless of the problem difficulty labeled by human experts. Additionally, we show that an LLM often fails to solve the problem when presented with reworded but equivalent problem statements, further suggesting their limited reasoning ability.

Large Language Models Exhibit Limited Reasoning Ability on Coding Problems

The web-scale of pretraining data has created an important evaluation challenge: to disentangle linguistic competence on cases well-represented in pretraining data from generalization to out-of-domain language, specifically the dynamic, real-world instances less common in pretraining data. To this end, we construct a diagnostic evaluation to systematically assess natural language understanding in LLMs by leveraging Construction Grammar (CxG). CxG provides a psycholinguistically grounded framework for testing generalization, as it explicitly links syntactic forms to abstract, non-lexical meanings. Our novel inference evaluation dataset consists of English phrasal constructions, for which speakers are known to be able to abstract over commonplace instantiations in order to understand and produce creative instantiations. Our evaluation dataset uses CxG to evaluate two central questions: first, if models can "understand" the semantics of sentences for instances that are likely to appear in pretraining data less often, but are intuitive and easy for people to understand. Second, if LLMs can deploy the appropriate constructional semantics given constructions that are syntactically identical but with divergent meanings. Our results demonstrate that state-of-the-art models, including GPT-o1, exhibit a performance drop of over 40% on our second task, revealing a failure to generalize over syntactically identical forms to arrive at distinct constructional meanings in the way humans do. We make our novel dataset and associated experimental data, including prompts and model responses, publicly available.

Beyond Memorization: Assessing Semantic Generalization in Large Language Models Using Phrasal Constructions

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit inherent limitations in working memory, which often affect their overall capabilities. However, prior studies have largely focused on describing such constraints without identifying their causes or providing practical strategies to cope with them. In this paper, we investigate the limited working memory capacity of LLMs through a series of empirical studies. Specifically, we examine the factors involved in the limited capacity and explore strategies to make more effective use of it. Our analysis shows that the number and difficulty of tasks in a single input largely strain the working memory of LLMs. In response, we design a cognitive marker consisting of simple token sequences theoretically grounded in cognitive science. Further analyses show that the cognitive marker reduces the overall prediction difficulty and uncertainty for the models to process the input, and its effectiveness is confirmed across various evaluation settings. Overall, our study incorporates cognitively motivated perspectives into the analysis of model behavior and highlights the need for deeper exploration of working memory in LLMs.

Exploring Working Memory Capacity in LLMs: From Stressors to Human-Inspired Strategies

Sequence models like Transformers and RNNs often overallocate attention to irrelevant context, leading to noisy intermediate representations. This degrades LLM capabilities by promoting hallucinations, weakening long-range and retrieval abilities, and reducing robustness. Recent work has shown that differential design can mitigate this issue in Transformers, improving their effectiveness across various applications. In this paper, we explore whether these techniques, originally developed for Transformers, can be applied to Mamba, a recent architecture based on selective state-space layers that achieves Transformer-level performance with greater efficiency. We show that a naive adaptation of differential design to Mamba is insufficient and requires careful architectural modifications. To address this, we introduce a novel differential mechanism for Mamba, empirically validated on language modeling benchmarks, demonstrating improved retrieval capabilities and superior performance over vanilla Mamba. Finally, we conduct extensive ablation studies and empirical analyses to justify our design choices and provide evidence that our approach effectively mitigates the overallocation problem in Mamba-based models.

Differential Mamba

We present FOCUS, a benchmark and task setting for Socratic question generation that delivers more informative and targeted feedback to learners. Unlike prior datasets, which rely on broad typologies and lack grounding in the source text, FOCUS introduces a new formulation: each Socratic question is paired with a fine-grained, 11-type typology and an explicit source span from the argument it targets. This design supports clearer, more actionable feedback and facilitates interpretable model evaluation. FOCUS includes 440 annotated instances with moderate partial-match agreement, establishing it as a reliable benchmark. Baseline experiments with representative state-of-the-art models reveal, through detailed error analysis, that even strong models struggle with span selection and context-sensitive categories. An extension study on the LogicClimate dataset further confirms the generalizability of the task and annotation framework. FOCUS sets a new standard for pedagogically grounded and informative Socratic question generation.

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Next from IJCNLP-AACL 2025

Curved Worlds, Clear Boundaries: Generalizing Speech Deepfake Detection using Hyperbolic and Spherical Geometry Spaces

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