Malta

Misinformation and disinformation phenomena existed long before the advent of digital technologies. The exponential use of social media platforms, whose information feeds have created the conditions for many to many communication and instant amplification of the news has accelerated the diffusion of inaccurate and misleading information. As a result, the identification of claims have emerged as a pivotal technology for combating the influence of misinformation and disinformation within news media. Most existing work has concentrated on claim analysis at the sentence level, neglecting the crucial exploration of supplementary attributes such as the claimer and the claim object of the claim or confining it by limiting its scope to a predefined list of topics. Furthermore, previous research has been mostly centered around political debates, Wikipedia articles, and COVID-19 related content. By leveraging the advanced capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and text generation, we propose a novel architecture utilizing LLMs finetuned with LoRA to transform the claim, claimer and claim object detection task into a Question Answering (QA) setting. We evaluate our approach in a dataset of 867 scientific news articles of 3 domains (Health, Climate Change, Nutrition) (HCN), which are human annotated with the major claim, the claimer and the object of the major claim. We also evaluate our proposed model in the benchmark dataset of NEWSCLAIMS. Experimental and qualitative results showcase the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We make our dataset publicly available to encourage further research.

EACL 2024

Leveraging fine-tuned Large Language Models with LoRA for Effective Claim, Claimer, and Claim Object Detection

argumentation mining

claim detection

large language models

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields 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.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

technical paper

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
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To access the EACL 2024 event page you need to register [**here**](https://acl.swoogo.com/EACL2024). 

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As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

In-context learning with Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising avenue of research in Dialog State Tracking (DST). However, the best-performing in-context learning methods involve retrieving and adding similar examples to the prompt, requiring access to labeled training data. Procuring such training data for a wide range of domains and applications is time-consuming, expensive, and, at times, infeasible. While zero-shot learning requires no training data, it significantly lags behind the few-shot setup. Thus, `\textit{Can we efficiently generate synthetic data for any dialogue schema to enable few-shot prompting?}' Addressing this question, we propose \method, a data generation framework tailored for DST, utilizing LLMs. Our approach only requires the dialogue schema and a few hand-crafted dialogue templates to synthesize natural, coherent, and free-flowing dialogues with DST annotations. Few-shot learning using data from {\method} results in $4-5\%$ improvement in Joint Goal Accuracy over the zero-shot baseline on MultiWOZ 2.1 and 2.4. Remarkably, our few-shot learning approach recovers nearly $98\%$ of the performance compared to the few-shot setup using human-annotated training data\footnote{Our synthetic data and code can be accessed at \\ \url{ https://github.com/apple/ml-synthdst}.}.

SynthDST: Synthetic Data is All You Need for Few-Shot Dialog State Tracking

Adversarial attacks against Language models (LMs) are a significant concern. In particular, adversarial samples exploit the model's sensitivity to small input changes. While these changes appear insignificant on the semantics of the input sample, they result in significant decay in model performance. In this paper, we propose Targeted Paraphrasing via RL (TPRL), an approach to automatically learn a policy to generate challenging samples that improve the model’s performance. TPRL leverages FLAN-T5, a language model, as a generator and employs a self-learned policy using a proximal policy optimization to generate the adversarial examples automatically. TPRL's reward is based on the confusion induced in the classifier, preserving the original text meaning through a Mutual Implication score. We demonstrate \& evaluate TPRL's effectiveness in discovering natural adversarial attacks and improving model performance through extensive experiments on four diverse NLP classification tasks via Automatic \& Human evaluation. TPRL outperforms strong baselines, exhibits generalizability across classifiers and datasets, and combines the strengths of language modeling and reinforcement learning to generate diverse and influential adversarial examples.

Finding a Needle in the Adversarial Haystack: A Targeted Paraphrasing Approach For Uncovering Edge Cases with Minimal Distribution Distortion

The prevalence of information manipulation online has created a need for propaganda detection systems. Such systems have typically focused on the surface words, ignoring the linguistic structure. Here we aim to bridge this gap. In particular, we present the first attempt at using discourse analysis for the task. We consider both paragraph-level and token-level classification and we propose a discourse-aware Transformer architecture. Our experiments on English and Russian demonstrate sizeable performance gains compared to a number of baselines. Moreover, our ablation study emphasizes the importance of specific types of discourse features, and our in-depth analysis reveals a strong correlation between propaganda instances and discourse spans.

Unleashing the Power of Discourse-Enhanced Transformers for Propaganda Detection

Image captioning models are typically trained by treating all samples equally, neglecting to account for mismatched or otherwise difficult data points. In contrast, recent work has shown the effectiveness of training models by scheduling the data using curriculum learning strategies. This paper contributes to this direction by actively curating difficult samples in datasets without increasing the total number of samples. We explore the effect of using three data curation methods within the training process: complete removal of an sample, caption replacement, or image replacement via a text-to-image generation model. Experiments on the Flickr30K and COCO datasets with the BLIP and BEiT-3 models demonstrate that these curation methods do indeed yield improved image captioning models, underscoring their efficacy.

The Role of Data Curation in Image Captioning

Large language models excel in text generation and generalization, however they face challenges in text editing tasks, especially in correcting spelling errors and mistyping.
In this paper, we present a methodology for generative spelling correction (SC), tested on English and Russian languages and potentially can be extended to any language with minor changes. Our research mainly focuses on exploring natural spelling errors and mistyping in texts and studying how those errors can be emulated in correct sentences to enrich generative models' pre-train procedure effectively. 
We investigate the effects of emulations in various text domains and examine two spelling corruption techniques: 1) first one mimics human behavior when making a mistake through leveraging statistics of errors from a particular dataset, and 2) second adds the most common spelling errors, keyboard miss clicks, and some heuristics within the texts.
We conducted experiments employing various corruption strategies, models' architectures, and sizes in the pre-training and fine-tuning stages and evaluated the models using single-domain and multi-domain test sets. As a practical outcome of our work, we introduce SAGE (Spell checking via Augmentation and Generative distribution Emulation).

A Methodology for Generative Spelling Correction via Natural Spelling Errors Emulation across Multiple Domains and Languages

Prior work has uncovered a set of common problems in state-of-the-art context-based question answering (QA) systems: a lack of attention to the context when the latter conflicts with a model’s parametric knowledge, little robustness to noise, and a lack of consistency with their answers. However, most prior work focus on one or two of those problems in isolation, which makes it difficult to see trends across them. We aim to close this gap, by first outlining a set of – previously discussed as well as novel – desiderata for QA models. We then survey relevant analysis and methods papers to provide an overview of the state of the field. The second part of our work presents experiments where we evaluate 15 QA systems on 5 datasets according to all desiderata at once. We find many novel trends, including (1) systems that are less susceptible to noise are not necessarily more consistent with their answers when given irrelevant context; (2) most systems that are more susceptible to noise are more likely to correctly answer according to a context that conflicts with their parametric knowledge; and (3) the combination of conflicting knowledge and noise can reduce system performance by up to 96%. As such, our desiderata help increase our understanding of how these models work and reveal potential avenues for improvements.

Desiderata For The Context Use Of Question Answering Systems

Cross-lingual summarization aims to generate a summary in one language
given input in a different language, allowing for the dissemination of
relevant content among different language speaking populations. The
task is challenging mainly due to the paucity of cross-lingual
datasets and the compounded difficulty of summarizing and
translating.
This work presents $\mu$PLAN, an approach to cross-lingual summarization that uses an intermediate planning step as a cross-lingual bridge. 
We formulate the plan as a sequence of entities capturing the
summary's content and the order in which it should be
communicated. Importantly, our plans abstract from surface form: using
a multilingual knowledge base, we align entities to their canonical
designation across languages and generate the summary conditioned on
this cross-lingual bridge and the input. Automatic and human evaluation on the XWikis dataset (across four language pairs) demonstrates 
that our planning objective achieves state-of-the-art performance in
terms of informativeness and faithfulness. Moreover, $\mu$PLAN models
improve the zero-shot transfer to new cross-lingual language pairs
compared to baselines without a planning component.

µPLAN: Summarizing using a Content Plan as Cross-Lingual Bridge

The five human senses – vision, taste, smell, hearing, and touch – are key concepts that shape human perception of the world. The extraction of sensory references (i.e., expressions that evoke the presence of a sensory experience) in textual corpus is a challenge of high interest, with many applications in various areas. In this paper, we propose SENSE-LM, an information extraction system tailored for the discovery of sensory references in large collections of textual documents. Based on the novel idea of combining the strength of large language models and linguistic resources such as sensorimotor norms, it addresses the task of sensory information extraction at a coarse-grained (sentence binary classification) and fine-grained (sensory term extraction) level.
Our evaluation of SENSE-LM for two sensory functions, Olfaction and Audition, and comparison with state-of-the-art methods emphasize a significant leap forward in automating these complex tasks.

SENSE-LM : A Synergy between a Language Model and Sensorimotor Representations for Auditory and Olfactory Information Extraction

Using large language models (LMs) for query or document expansion can improve generalization in information retrieval. However, it is unknown whether these techniques are universally beneficial or only effective in specific settings, such as for particular retrieval models, dataset domains, or query types. To answer this, we conduct the first comprehensive analysis of LM-based expansion. We find that there exists a strong negative correlation between retriever performance and gains from expansion: expansion improves scores for weaker models, but generally harms stronger models. We show this trend holds across a set of eleven expansion techniques, twelve datasets with diverse distribution shifts, and twenty-four retrieval models. Through qualitative error analysis, we hypothesize that although expansions provide extra information (potentially improving recall), they add additional noise that makes it difficult to discern between the top relevant documents (thus introducing false positives). Our results suggest the following recipe: use expansions for weaker models or when the target dataset significantly differs from training corpus in format; otherwise, avoid expansions to keep the relevance signal clear.

When do Generative Query and Document Expansions Fail? A Comprehensive Study Across Methods, Retrievers, and Datasets

That the recent LLM breakthroughs are solely due to scaling is a myth. Many difficult research problems had to be solved to make models like GPT4 and Mixtral possible. One of those difficult research problems is data quality. Data quality is a great challenge for NLP researchers with many opportunities for innovation and impact on current generative AI developments. I will focus on two examples in my talk: quality data for training a highly multilingual language model and quality data for instruction tuning.

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SynthDST: Synthetic Data is All You Need for Few-Shot Dialog State Tracking

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Next from EACL 2024

SynthDST: Synthetic Data is All You Need for Few-Shot Dialog State Tracking

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Claim Verification in the Age of Large Language Models: A Survey

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

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