GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
AdTEC: A Unified Benchmark for Evaluating Text Quality in Search Engine Advertising
Authors: Peinan Zhang; Yusuke Sakai; Masato Mita; Hiroki Ouchi; Taro Watanabe
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: As the fluency of ad texts automatically generated by natural language generation technologies continues to improve, there is an increasing demand to assess the quality of these creatives in real-world setting.We propose **AdTEC**, the first public benchmark to evaluate ad texts from multiple perspectives within practical advertising operations.Our contributions are as follows: (i) Defining five tasks for evaluating the quality of ad texts, as well as constructing a Japanese dataset based on the practical operational experiences of advertising agencies, which are typically maintained in-house. (ii) Validating the performance of existing pre-trained language models (PLMs) and human evaluators on this dataset. (iii) Analyzing the characteristics and providing challenges of the benchmark.Our results show that while PLMs have a practical level of performance in several tasks, humans continue to outperform them in certain domains, indicating that there remains significant potential for further improvement in this area.
Empowering Retrieval-based Conversational Recommendation with Contrasting User Preferences
Authors: Heejin Kook; Junyoung Kim; Seongmin Park; Jongwuk Lee
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) are designed to suggest the target item that the user is likely to prefer through multi-turn conversations. Recent studies stress that capturing sentiments in user conversations improves recommendation accuracy. However, they employ a single user representation, which may fail to distinguish between contrasting user intentions, such as likes and dislikes, potentially leading to suboptimal performance. To this end, we propose a novel conversational recommender model, called COntrasting user pReference expAnsion and Learning (CORAL). Firstly, CORAL extracts the user’s hidden pref- erences through contrasting preference expansion using the reasoning capacity of the LLMs. Based on the potential preference, CORAL explicitly differentiates the contrasting preferences and leverages them into the recommendation process via preference-aware learning. Extensive experiments show that CORAL significantly outperforms existing methods in three benchmark datasets, improving up to 99.72% in Recall@10. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/kookeej/CORAL.
LRQ: Optimizing Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models by Learning Low-Rank Weight-Scaling Matrices
Authors: Jung Hyun Lee; Jeonghoon Kim; June Yong Yang; Se Jung Kwon; Eunho Yang; Kang Min Yoo; Dongsoo Lee
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: With the commercialization of large language models (LLMs), weight-activation quantization has emerged to compress and accelerate LLMs, achieving high throughput while reducing inference costs. However, existing post-training quantization (PTQ) techniques for quantizing weights and activations of LLMs still suffer from non-negligible accuracy drops, especially on massive multitask language understanding. To address this issue, we propose Low-Rank Quantization (LRQ) - a simple yet effective post-training weight quantization method for LLMs that reconstructs the outputs of an intermediate Transformer block by leveraging low-rank weight-scaling matrices, replacing the conventional full weight-scaling matrices that entail as many learnable scales as their associated weights. Thanks to parameter sharing via low-rank structure, LRQ only needs to learn significantly fewer parameters while enabling the individual scaling of weights, thus boosting the generalization capability of quantized LLMs. We show the superiority of LRQ over prior LLM PTQ works under (i) 8-bit weight and per-tensor activation quantization, (ii) 4-bit weight and 8-bit per-token activation quantization, and (iii) low-bit weight-only quantization schemes. Our code is available at Software.
Towards Robust Knowledge Representations in Multilingual LLMs for Equivalence and Inheritance based Consistent Reasoning
Authors: Gaurav Arora; Srujana Merugu; Shreya Jain; Vaibhav Saxena
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Reasoning and linguistic skills form the cornerstone of human intelligence, facilitating problem-solving and decision-making. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to impressive linguistic capabilities and emergent reasoning behaviors, fueling widespread adoption across application domains. However, LLMs still struggle with complex reasoning tasks, highlighting their systemic limitations. In this work, we focus on evaluating whether LLMs have the requisite representations to reason using two foundational relationships: “equivalence” and “inheritance”. We introduce novel tasks and benchmarks spanning six languages and observe that current SOTA LLMs often produce conflicting answers to the same questions across languages in 17.3-57.5% of cases and violate inheritance constraints in up to 37.2% cases. To enhance consistency across languages, we propose novel “Compositional Representations” where tokens are represented as composition of equivalent tokens across languages, with resulting conflict reduction (up to -4.7%) indicating benefits of shared LLM representations.
LLMs as Meta-Reviewers’ Assistants: A Case Study
Authors: Eftekhar Hossain; Sanjeev Kumar Sinha; Naman Bansal; R. Alexander Knipper; Souvika Sarkar; John Salvador; Yash Mahajan; Sri Ram Pavan Kumar Guttikonda; Mousumi Akter; Md. Mahadi Hassan; Matthew Freestone; Matthew C. Williams Jr.; Dongji Feng; Santu Karmaker
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: One of the most important yet onerous tasks in the academic peer-reviewing process is composing meta-reviews, which involves assimilating diverse opinions from multiple expert peers, formulating one’s self-judgment as a senior expert, and then summarizing all these perspectives into a concise holistic overview to make an overall recommendation. This process is time-consuming and can be compromised by human factors like fatigue, inconsistency, missing tiny details, etc. Given the latest major developments in Large Language Models (LLMs), it is very compelling to rigorously study whether LLMs can help meta-reviewers perform this important task better. In this paper, we perform a case study with three popular LLMs, i.e., GPT-3.5, LLaMA2, and PaLM2, to assist meta-reviewers in better comprehending multiple experts’ perspectives by generating a controlled multi-perspective-summary (MPS) of their opinions. To achieve this, we prompt three LLMs with different types/levels of prompts based on the recently proposed TELeR taxonomy. Finally, we perform a detailed qualitative study of the MPSs generated by the LLMs and report our findings.
A Survey of NLP Progress in Sino-Tibetan Low-Resource Languages
Authors: Shuheng Liu; Michael Best
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Despite the increasing effort in including more low-resource languages in NLP/CL development, most of the world’s languages are still absent. In this paper, we take the example of the Sino-Tibetan language family which consists of hundreds of low-resource languages, and we look at the representation of these low-resource languages in papers archived on ACL Anthology. Our findings indicate that while more techniques and discussions on more languages are present in more publication venues over the years, the overall focus on this language family has been minimal. The lack of attention might be owing to the small number of native speakers and governmental support of these languages. The current development of large language models, albeit successful in a few quintessential rich-resource languages, are still trailing when tackling these low-resource languages. Our paper calls for the attention in NLP/CL research on the inclusion of low-resource languages, especially as increasing resources are poured into the development of data-driven language models.
Enhancing Language Model Hypernetworks with Restart: A Study on Optimization
Authors: Yihan Zhang; Jie Fu; Rongrong Ji; Jie Chen
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Hypernetworks are a class of meta-networks that generate weights for main neural networks. Their unique parameter spaces necessitate exploring suitable optimization strategies to enhance performance, especially for language models. However, a comprehensive investigation into optimization strategies for hypernetworks remains absent. To address this gap, we analyze the loss landscape of hypernetworks and propose that restart optimization strategies can improve their performance for language models. We find that hypernetworks have inherently more complicated loss landscapes compared to conventional networks due to their distinct parameter spaces. Consequently, a restart strategy that periodically resets the learning rate can facilitate better convergence for hypernetworks. Through experiments on instruction tuning and multi-task training, we demonstrate that the restart strategy consistently enhances the performance of hypernetworks for language models, often more effectively than for conventional deep neural networks. Our findings highlight the importance of tailored optimization techniques to unlock the full potential of hypernetworks in natural language processing tasks.
Functional Lexicon in Subword Tokenization
Authors: Zachary William Hopton; Yves Scherrer; Tanja Samardzic
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: The distinction between function and content units of the lexicon has been somewhat neglected in recent NLP work, but it could still be useful when working with low-resource languages, and, in particular, to improve cross-lingual transfer. In this paper, we investigate to what extent BPE subword tokenization can be used to identify units of the functional lexicon in a language without any annotated data. We analyze subword tokens in terms of their productivity and attempt to find thresholds that best distinguish function from content tokens. On a sample of seven diverse languages, we find that the best results are obtained with 50 BPE merges. We also show that this subword tokenization setting can be beneficial for the interlinear glossing task.
Getting More Juice Out of Your Data: Hard Pair Refinement Enhances Visual-Language Models Without Extra Data
Authors: Haonan Wang; Minbin Huang; Runhui Huang; Lanqing Hong; Hang Xu; Tianyang Hu; Xiaodan Liang; Zhenguo Li; Hong Cheng; Kenji Kawaguchi
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has become the standard for cross- modal image-text representation learning. Improving CLIP typically requires additional data and retraining with new loss functions, but these demands raise resource and time costs, limiting practical use. In this work, we introduce HELIP, a cost-effective strategy that improves CLIP models by exploiting challenging text-image pairs within existing datasets in continuous training. This eliminates the need for additional data or extensive retraining. Moreover, HELIP integrates effortlessly into current training pipelines with minimal code modifications, allowing for quick and seamless implementation. On comprehensive benchmarks, HELIP consistently boosts existing models. In particular, within just two epochs of training, it improves zero-shot classification accuracy on ImageNet for SLIP models pre-trained on CC3M, CC12M, and YFCC15M datasets by 3.05%, 4.47%, and 10.1% , respectively. In addition, on fine-grained classification datasets, HELIP improves the zero-shot performance of CLIP and SLIP by an average of 8.4% and 18.6%, and their linear probe performance by an average of 9.5% and 3.0%.
Evaluating the Prompt Steerability of Large Language Models
Authors: Erik Miehling; Michael Desmond; Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy; Elizabeth M. Daly; Kush R. Varshney; Eitan Farchi; Pierre Dognin; Jesus Rios; Djallel Bouneffouf; Miao Liu; Prasanna Sattigeri
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Building pluralistic AI requires designing models that are able to be shaped to represent a wide range of value systems and cultures. Achieving this requires first being able to evaluate the degree to which a given model is capable of reflecting various personas. To this end, we propose a benchmark for evaluating the steerability of model personas as a function of prompting. Our design is based on a formal definition of prompt steerability, which analyzes the degree to which a model’s joint behavioral distribution can be shifted from its baseline. By defining steerability indices and inspecting how these indices change as a function of steering effort, we can estimate the steerability of a model across various persona dimensions and directions. Our benchmark reveals that the steerability of many current models is limited — due to both a skew in their baseline behavior and an asymmetry in their steerability across many persona dimensions. We release an implementation of our benchmark at https://github.com/IBM/prompt-steering.
A Data-Driven Method for Analyzing and Quantifying Lyrics-Dance Motion Relationships
Authors: Kento Watanabe; Masataka Goto
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Dancing to music with lyrics is a popular form of expression. While it is generally accepted that there are relationships between lyrics and dance motions, previous studies have not explored these relationships. A major challenge is that the relationships between lyrics and dance motions are not constant throughout a song but are instead localized to specific parts. To address this challenge, we hypothesize that lyrics and dance motions that co-occur across multiple songs are related. Based on this hypothesis, we propose a novel data-driven method to detect the parts of songs where meaningful relationships between lyrics and dance motions exist. We use clustering to transform lyrics and dance motions into symbols, enabling the calculation of co-occurrence frequencies and detection of significant correlations. The effectiveness of our method is validated by a dataset of time-synchronized lyrics and dance motions, which showed high correlation values for emotionally salient lyrics such as “love”, which is expressed in heart-shaped motions. Furthermore, using our relationship detection method, we propose a method for retrieving dance motions from lyrics that outperforms previous text-to-motion retrieval methods, which focus on prose and non-dance motions.
CROPE: Evaluating In-Context Adaptation of Vision and Language Models to Culture-Specific Concepts
Authors: Malvina Nikandrou; Georgios Pantazopoulos; Nikolas Vitsakis; Ioannis Konstas; Alessandro Suglia
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: As Vision and Language models (VLMs) become accessible across the globe, it is important that they demonstrate cultural knowledge. In his paper, we introduce CROPE, a visual question answering benchmark designed to probe the knowledge of culture-specific concepts and evaluate the capacity for cultural adaptation through contextual information. This allows us to distinguish between parametric knowledge acquired during training and contextual knowledge provided during inference via visual and textual descriptions. Our evaluation of several state-of-the-art open VLMs shows large performance disparities between culture-specific and common concepts in the parametric setting. Moreover, experiments with contextual knowledge indicate that models struggle to effectively utilize multimodal information and bind culture specific concepts to their depictions. Our findings reveal limitations in the cultural understanding and adaptability of current VLMs that need to be addressed toward more culturally inclusive models.
PicPersona-TOD : A Dataset for Personalizing Utterance Style in Task-Oriented Dialogue with Image Persona
Authors: Jihyun Lee; Yejin Jeon; Seungyeon Seo; Gary Lee
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems are designed to fulfill user requests through natural language interactions, yet existing systems often produce generic, monotonic responses that lack individuality and fail to adapt to users’ personal attributes. To address this, we introduce PicPersona-TOD, a novel dataset that incorporates user images as part of the persona, enabling personalized responses tailored to user-specific factors such as age or emotional context. This is facilitated by first impressions, dialogue policy-guided prompting, and the use of external knowledge to reduce hallucinations. Human evaluations confirm that our dataset enhances user experience, with personalized responses contributing to a more engaging interaction. Additionally, we introduce a new NLG model, Pictor, which not only personalizes responses, but also demonstrates robust performance across unseen domains.
Scaling LLM Inference Efficiently with Optimized Sample Compute Allocation
Authors: Kexun Zhang; Shang Zhou; Danqing Wang; William Yang Wang; Lei Li
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Sampling is a basic operation for large language models (LLMs). In reinforcement learning rollouts and meta generation algorithms such as Best-of-N, it is essential to sample correct trajectories within a given compute budget. To find an optimal allocation for sample compute budgets, several choices need to be made:Which sampling configurations (model, temperature, language, etc.) to use?How many samples to generate in each configuration?We formulate these choices as a learning problem and propose OSCA, an algorithm that Optimizes Sample Compute Allocation by finding an optimal mix of different inference configurations.Our experiments show that with our learned mixed allocation, we can achieve accuracy better than the best single configuration with 128x less compute on code generation and 25x less compute on 4 reasoning tasks.is also shown to be effective in agentic workflows beyond single-turn tasks, achieving a better accuracy on SWE-Bench with 3x less compute than the default configuration.Our code and generations are released at https://github.com/LeiLiLab/OSCA.
Large Language Models for Persian-English Idiom Translation
Authors: Sara Rezaeimanesh; Faezeh Hosseini; Yadollah Yaghoobzadeh
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown superior capabilities in translating figurative language compared to neural machine translation (NMT) systems. However, the impact of different prompting methods and LLM-NMT combinations on idiom translation has yet to be thoroughly investigated. This paper introduces two parallel datasets of sentences containing idiomatic expressions for Persian→English and English→Persian translations, with Persian idioms sampled from our PersianIdioms resource, a collection of 2,200 idioms and their meanings, with 700 including usage examples.Using these datasets, we evaluate various open- and closed-source LLMs, NMT models, and their combinations. Translation quality is assessed through idiom translation accuracy and fluency. We also find that automatic evaluation methods like LLM-as-a-judge, BLEU, and BERTScore are effective for comparing different aspects of model performance. Our experiments reveal that Claude-3.5-Sonnet delivers outstanding results in both translation directions. For English→Persian, combining weaker LLMs with Google Translate improves results, while Persian→English translations benefit from single prompts for simpler models and complex prompts for advanced ones.
Follow the Beaten Path: The Role of Route Patterns on Vision-Language Navigation Agents Generalization Abilities
Authors: Kourosh T Baghaei; Dieter Pfoser; Antonios Anastasopoulos
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Vision and language navigation (VLN) is a challenging task towards the creation of embodied agents that requires spatial and temporal reasoning over the instructions provided in natural language and aligning them with the visual perception of an environment. Although a number of methods and approaches have been developed, none achieves human level performance in outdoor settings (by up to 75 percent). The contributions of visual and language modalities to the success of VLN have been studied, however here we focus on an overlooked property of routes and show that navigational instructions can be represented as patterns of actions that also describe trajectory shapes. Through carefully crafted experiments, we show that agents generalization to unseen environments depends not only on visual and linguistic features, but also on the shape of trajectories presented to the model during the fine-tuning. Our experiments show that the diversity of patterns of actions during training is a key contributor to high success rates for agents. Last, we propose a solution based on data augmentation that fills the gap in missing patterns of training data. Our findings will guide researchers towards improved practices in the development and evaluation of VLN datasets and agents.