Austria

The rapid growth of social media platforms has raised significant concerns regarding online content toxicity. When Large Language Models (LLMs) are used for toxicity detection, two key challenges emerge: 1) the absence of domain-specific toxicity knowledge leads to false negatives; 2) the excessive sensitivity of LLMs to toxic speech results in false positives, limiting freedom of speech. To address these issues, we propose a novel method called *MetaTox*, leveraging graph search on a meta-toxic knowledge graph to enhance hatred and toxicity detection. First, we construct a comprehensive meta-toxic knowledge graph by utilizing LLMs to extract toxic information through a three step pipeline. Second, we query the graph via retrieval and ranking processes to supplement accurate, relevant toxicity knowledge. Extensive experiments and case studies across multiple datasets demonstrate that our MetaTox boosts overall toxicity detection performance, particularly in out-of-domain settings. In addition, under in-domain scenarios, we surprisingly find that small language models are more competent. Our code is available at https://github.com/YiboZhao624/MetaTox.

ACL 2025

Enhancing LLM-based Hatred and Toxicity Detection with Meta-Toxic Knowledge Graph

knowledge graph

hate speech detection

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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)

As large language models (LLMs) are applied across diverse domains, the ability to selectively unlearn specific information has become increasingly essential. For instance, LLMs are expected to provide certain confidential information to authorized internal users, such as employees or trusted partners, while withholding it from external users, including the general public and unauthorized entities. In response to this challenge, we propose a novel method termed ''in-context knowledge unlearning'', which enables the model to selectively forget information in test-time based on the query context. Our method fine-tunes pre-trained LLMs to enable prompt unlearning of target knowledge within the context, while preserving other knowledge. Experiments on TOFU, AGE and RWKU datasets using Llama2-7B/13B and Mistral-7B models show that our method achieves up to 95% forget accuracy while retaining 80% of unrelated knowledge, significantly outperforming baselines in both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. Further investigation of the model's internal behavior revealed that while fine-tuned LLMs generate correct predictions in the middle layers and maintain them up to the final layer, they make the decision to forget at the last layer, i.e. ''LLMs pretend to forget''. Our findings offer valuable insight into the improvement of the robustness of the unlearning mechanisms in LLM, setting a foundation for future research in the field.

Answer When Needed, Forget When Not: Language Models Pretend to Forget via In-Context Knowledge Unlearning

In this paper, we present TituLLMs, the first large pretrained Bangla LLMs, available in 1b and 3b parameter sizes. Due to computational constraints during both training and inference, we focused on smaller models. To train TituLLMs, we collected a pretraining dataset of approximately ∼ 37 billion tokens. We extended the Llama-3.2 tokenizer to incorporate language- and culture-specific knowledge, which also enables faster training and inference. There was a lack of benchmarking datasets to benchmark LLMs for Bangla. To address this gap, we developed five benchmarking datasets. We benchmarked various LLMs, including TituLLMs, and demonstrated that TituLLMs outperforms its initial multilingual versions. However, this is not always the case, highlighting the complexities of language adaptation. Our work lays the groundwork for adapting existing multilingual open models to other low-resource languages. To facilitate broader adoption and further research, we have made the TituLLMs models and benchmarking datasets publicly available.

TituLLMs: A Family of Bangla LLMs with Comprehensive Benchmarking

Documents are fundamental to preserving and disseminating information, often incorporating complex layouts, tables, and charts that pose significant challenges for automatic document understanding (DU). While vision-language large models (VLLMs) have demonstrated improvements across various tasks, their effectiveness in processing long-context vision inputs remains unclear. This paper introduces WikiMixQA, a benchmark comprising 1,000 multiple-choice questions (MCQs) designed to evaluate cross-modal reasoning over tables and charts extracted from 4,000 Wikipedia pages spanning seven distinct topics. Unlike existing benchmarks, WikiMixQA emphasizes complex reasoning by requiring models to synthesize information from multiple modalities. We evaluate 12 state-of-the-art vision-language models, revealing that while proprietary models achieve ~70% accuracy when provided with direct context, their performance deteriorates significantly when retrieval from long documents is required. Among these, GPT-4-o is the only model exceeding 50% accuracy in this setting, whereas open-source models perform considerably worse, with a maximum accuracy of 27%. These findings underscore the challenges of long-context, multi-modal reasoning and establish WikiMixQA as a crucial benchmark for advancing document understanding research.

WikiMixQA: A Multimodal Benchmark for Question Answering over Tables and Charts

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various natural language tasks but often struggle with long-horizon planning problems requiring structured reasoning. This limitation has drawn interest in integrating neuro-symbolic approaches within the Automated Planning (AP) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) communities. However, identifying optimal AP deployment frameworks can be daunting. This paper aims to provide a timely survey of the current research with an in-depth analysis, positioning LLMs as tools for extracting and refining planning models to support reliable AP planners. By systematically reviewing the current state of research, we highlight methodologies, and identify critical challenges and future directions, hoping to contribute to the joint research on NLP and Automated Planning.

LLMs as Planning Modelers: A Survey for Leveraging Large Language Models to Construct Automated Planning Models

Ensuring the safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical for generating responses consistent with human values. However, LLMs remain vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks, where carefully crafted prompts manipulate them into producing toxic content. One category of such attacks reformulates the task as an optimization problem, aiming to elicit affirmative responses from the LLM. However, these methods heavily rely on predefined objectionable behaviors, limiting their effectiveness and adaptability to diverse harmful queries. In this study, we first identify why the vanilla target loss is suboptimal and then propose enhancements to the loss objective. We introduce DSN (Don’t Say No) attack, which combines a cosine decay schedule method with refusal suppression to achieve higher success rates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DSN outperforms baseline attacks and achieves state-of-the-art attack success rates (ASR). DSN also shows strong universality and transferability to unseen datasets and black-box models.

Don't Say No: Jailbreaking LLM by Suppressing Refusal

As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly produce human-quality text, understanding how readers perceive and evaluate AI-generated literature becomes critical. This paper investigates the interplay between measurable textual features and reader preferences in the context of short stories. We analyze multiple datasets where readers (ranging from literary experts to lay audiences) evaluated both human-authored and LLM-generated texts. We propose to model reader's preferences as weighted combinations of intrinsic textual features such as coherence, sentiment volatility, thematic entropy, etc. Results show that (1) when LLM-generated text closely approximates the feature distributions of human text, readers struggle to distinguish them; (2) expert and non-expert readers prioritize distinctly different textual features, revealing systematic variations in literary judgment; and (3) these preference patterns are remarkably stable across diverse datasets. Our framework provides a step towards understanding and potentially tailoring AI-generated literature to meet the expectations of specific audiences.

When AI Writes Like Humans: Capturing the Emergent Patterns of Literary Judgment via Intrinsic Textual Metrics

Large Language Models encode behaviors like refusal within their activation space, but identifying these behaviors remains challenging. Existing methods depend on predefined refusal templates detectable in output tokens or manual review. We introduce **COSMIC** (Cosine Similarity Metrics for Inversion of Concepts), an automated framework for direction selection that optimally identifies steering directions and target layers using cosine similarity, entirely independent of output text. COSMIC achieves steering effectiveness comparable to prior work without any prior knowledge or assumptions of a model’s refusal behavior such as the use of certain refusal tokens. Additionally, COSMIC successfully identifies refusal directions in adversarial scenarios and models with weak safety alignment, demonstrating its robustness across diverse settings.

COSMIC: Generalized Refusal Identification in LLM Activations

We propose IMPARA-GED, a novel reference-free automatic grammatical error correction (GEC) evaluation method with grammatical error detection (GED) capabilities. We focus on the quality estimator of IMPARA, an existing automatic GEC evaluation method, and construct that of IMPARA-GED using a pre-trained language model with enhanced GED capabilities. Experimental results on SEEDA, a meta-evaluation dataset for automatic GEC evaluation methods, demonstrate that IMPARA-GED achieves the highest correlation with human sentence-level evaluations.

IMPARA-GED: Grammatical Error Detection is Boosting Reference-free Grammatical Error Quality Estimator

Psychology research has shown that humans are poor at estimating their performance on tasks, tending towards underconfidence on easy tasks and overconfidence on difficult tasks. We examine three LLMs, Llama-3-70B-instruct, Claude-3-Sonnet, and GPT-4o, on a range of QA tasks of varying difficulty, and show that models exhibit subtle differences from human patterns of overconfidence: less sensitive to task difficulty, and when prompted to answer based on different personas---e.g., expert vs layman, or different race, gender, and ages---the models will respond with stereotypically biased confidence estimations even though their underlying answer accuracy remains the same. Based on these observations, we propose a novel method, Answer-Free Confidence Estimation (AFCE), for improving confidence calibration and LLM interpretability in these settings. AFCE is a self-assessment method that employs two stages of prompting, first eliciting only confidence scores on questions without answers, then asking separately for the answer. Experiments on MMLU and GPQA datasets spanning subjects and difficulty show that AFCE significantly improves confidence calibration performance for the most difficult problems where overconfidence is most pronounced.

Do Language Models Mirror Human Confidence? Exploring Psychological Insights to Address Overconfidence in LLMs

State-of-the-art methods for grammatical error correction require large amounts of parallel data for training. Due to lack of gold-labeled data, techniques that create synthetic training data have become popular. We show that models trained on such data tend to correct a limited range of grammar and spelling mistakes that involve character-level changes, but perform poorly on (more complex) phenomena that require word-level changes. We propose to address the gap in performance on such errors by generating synthetic data through selective data augmentation via round-trip machine translation. We show that the proposed technique, SeLex-RT is capable of generating mistakes that are similar to those observed with language learners. Using the approach with two types of state-of-the-art learning frameworks and two languages (Russian and Ukrainian), we achieve substantial improvements, compared to training on synthetic data produced with standard techniques. The method is especially effective in low-resource settings. Analysis of the output reveals that models trained on data noisified using round-trip translation are capable of making word-level changes and correct lexical errors common with language learners.

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Answer When Needed, Forget When Not: Language Models Pretend to Forget via In-Context Knowledge Unlearning

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Can LLMs Recognize Toxicity? A Structured Investigation Framework and Toxicity Metric

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