ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Linear Relational Decoding of Morphology in Language Models (2025)

A two-part affine approximation has been found to be a good approximation for transformer computations over certain subject-object relations. Adapting the Bigger Analogy Test Set, we show that the linear transformation W s , where s is a middle-layer representation of a subject token and W is derived from model derivatives, can accurately reproduce final object states for many relations. This linear technique achieves 90{\%} faithfulness on morphological relations, with similar findings across languages and models. Our results suggest that some conceptual relationships in language models, such as morphology, are readily interpretable from latent space and are sparsely encoded by cross-layer linear transformations.
SPY: Enhancing Privacy with Synthetic PII Detection Dataset (2025)

We introduce **SPY Dataset**: a novel synthetic dataset for the task of **Personal Identifiable Information (PII) detection**, underscoring the significance of protecting PII in modern data processing. Our research innovates by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate a dataset that emulates real-world PII scenarios. Through evaluation, we validate the dataset`s quality, providing a benchmark for PII detection. Comparative analyses reveal that while PII and Named Entity Recognition (NER) share similarities, **dedicated NER models exhibit limitations** when applied to PII-specific contexts. This work contributes to the field by making the generation methodology and the generated dataset publicly, thereby enabling further research and development in this field.
Tighter Clusters, Safer Code? Improving Vulnerability Detection with Enhanced Contrastive Loss (2025)

Distinguishing vulnerable code from non-vulnerable code is challenging due to high inter-class similarity. Supervised contrastive learning (SCL) improves embedding separation but struggles with intra-class clustering, especially when variations within the same class are subtle. We propose Cluster-Enhanced Supervised Contrastive Loss (CESCL), an extension of SCL with a distance-based regularization term that tightens intra-class clustering while maintaining inter-class separation. Evaluating on CodeBERT and GraphCodeBERT with Binary Cross Entropy (BCE), BCE + SCL, and BCE + CESCL, our method improves F1 score by 1.76{\%} on CodeBERT and 4.1{\%} on GraphCodeBERT, demonstrating its effectiveness in code vulnerability detection and broader applicability to high-similarity classification tasks.
Text Extraction and Script Completion in Images of Arabic Script-Based Calligraphy: A Thesis Proposal (2025)

Arabic calligraphy carries rich historical information and meaning. However, the complexity of its artistic elements and the absence of a consistent baseline make text extraction from such works highly challenging. In this paper, we provide an in-depth analysis of the unique obstacles in processing and interpreting these images, including the variability in calligraphic styles, the influence of artistic distortions, and the challenges posed by missing or damaged text elements. We explore potential solutions by leveraging state-of-the-art architectures and deep learning models, including visual language models, to improve text extraction and script completion.
Subasa - Adapting Language Models for Low-resourced Offensive Language Detection in Sinhala (2025)

Accurate detection of offensive language is essential for a number of applications related to social media safety. There is a sharp contrast in performance in this task between low and high-resource languages. In this paper, we adapt fine-tuning strategies that have not been previously explored for Sinhala in the downstream task of offensive language detection. Using this approach, we introduce four models: {\textquotedblleft}Subasa-XLM-R{\textquotedblright}, which incorporates an intermediate Pre-Finetuning step using Masked Rationale Prediction. Two variants of {\textquotedblleft}Subasa-Llama{\textquotedblright} and {\textquotedblleft}Subasa-Mistral{\textquotedblright}, are fine-tuned versions of Llama (3.2) and Mistral (v0.3), respectively, with a task-specific strategy. We evaluate our models on the SOLD benchmark dataset for Sinhala offensive language detection. All our models outperform existing baselines. Subasa-XLM-R achieves the highest Macro F1 score (0.84) surpassing state-of-the-art large language models like GPT-4o when evaluated on the same SOLD benchmark dataset under zero-shot settings. The models and code are publicly available.
Integrating Symbolic Execution into the Fine-Tuning of Code-Generating LLMs (2025)

Code-generating Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential tools in modern software development, enhancing productivity and accelerating development. This paper aims to investigate the fine-tuning of code-generating LLMs using Reinforcement Learning and Direct Preference Optimization, further improving their performance. To achieve this, we enhance the training data for the reward model with the help of symbolic execution techniques, ensuring more comprehensive and objective data. With symbolic execution, we create a custom dataset that better captures the nuances in code evaluation. Our reward models, fine-tuned on this dataset, demonstrate significant improvements over the baseline, CodeRL, in estimating the quality of generated code. Our code-generating LLMs, trained with the help of reward model feedback, achieve similar results compared to the CodeRL benchmark.
Through the Looking Glass: Common Sense Consistency Evaluation of Weird Images (2025)

Measuring how real images look is a complex task in artificial intelligence research. For example, an image of Albert Einstein holding a smartphone violates common-sense because modern smartphone were invented after Einstein`s death. We introduce a novel method, which we called Through the Looking Glass (TLG), to assess image common sense consistency using Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) and Transformer-based encoder. By leveraging LVLM to extract atomic facts from these images, we obtain a mix of accurate facts. We proceed by fine-tuning a compact attention-pooling classifier over encoded atomic facts. Our TLG has achieved a new state-of-the-art performance on the WHOOPS! and WEIRD datasets while leveraging a compact fine-tuning component.
ColorFoil: Investigating Color Blindness in Large Vision and Language Models (2025)

With the utilization of Transformer architecture, large Vision and Language (V{\&}L) models have shown promising performance in even zero-shot settings. Several studies, however, indicate a lack of robustness of the models when dealing with complex linguistics and visual attributes. In this work, we introduce a novel V{\&}L benchmark - ColorFoil, by creating color-related foils to assess the models' perception ability to detect colors like red, white, green, etc. We evaluate seven state-of-the-art V{\&}L models including CLIP, ViLT, GroupViT, and BridgeTower, etc. in a zero-shot setting and present intriguing findings from the V{\&}L models. The experimental evaluation indicates that ViLT and BridgeTower demonstrate much better color perception capabilities compared to CLIP and its variants and GroupViT. Moreover, CLIP-based models and GroupViT struggle to distinguish colors that are visually distinct to humans with normal color perception ability.
Towards Practical and Knowledgeable LLMs for a Multilingual World: A Thesis Proposal (2025)

The frontier of large language model (LLM) development has largely been substantiated by knowledge-intensive tasks specified in English. In this proposed thesis, I argue for the key role that multilinguality occupies in the development of \textit{practical} and \textit{knowledgeable} LLMs.First, I consider practical methods to improve LLM`s performance on standard natural language processing (NLP) tasks by leveraging their existing multilingual knowledge.Then, I investigate the underlying multilingual knowledge of LLMs with two benchmarks: on complex reasoning, and on territorial disputes. These benchmarks reveal LLMs' inconsistent performance across languages. I then design efficient techniques, both at inference-time and training-time, to address these discrepancies. Finally, I extend the territorial disputes benchmark to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) setting, comparing the effects of different retrieval settings on cross-lingual robustness. My proposal shows that informed use of multilinguality enhances LLMs' capabilities, and our understanding thereof.
MDC$^3$: A Novel Multimodal Dataset for Commercial Content Classification in Bengali (2025)

Identifying commercial posts in resource-constrained languages among diverse and unstructured content remains a significant challenge for automatic text classification tasks. To address this, this work introduces a novel dataset named MDC$^3$ (Multimodal Dataset for Commercial Content Classification), comprising 5,007 annotated Bengali social media posts classified as commercial and noncommercial. A comprehensive annotation guideline accompanying the dataset is included to aid future dataset creation in resource-constrained languages. Furthermore, we performed extensive experiments on MDC$^3$ considering both unimodal and multimodal domains. Specifically, the late fusion of textual (mBERT) and visual (ViT) models (i.e., ViT+mBERT) achieves the highest F1 score of 90.91, significantly surpassing other baselines.
DateLogicQA: Benchmarking Temporal Biases in Large Language Models (2025)

We introduce DateLogicQA, a human-curated benchmark of 190 questions specifically designed to understand temporal bias in Large Language Models (LLMs). Covering seven date formats across past, present, and future contexts, DateLogicQA examines four reasoning types: commonsense, factual, conceptual, and numerical. Through human-led evaluations of 12 state-of-the-art LLMs, we identify Representation-Level Bias, arising from suboptimal embeddings that distort date semantics, and Logical-Level Bias, manifesting when correct date tokens yield flawed temporal reasoning. Our findings underscore persistent challenges in handling various date formats and temporal contexts, revealing the need for more robust pretraining data, targeted post-training methods, and precise tokenization strategies. By illuminating these biases, we provide actionable insights to guide the development of LLMs for accurate temporal reasoning across diverse real-world applications.
AMR-RE: Abstract Meaning Representations for Retrieval-Based In-Context Learning in Relation Extraction (2025)

Existing in-context learning (ICL) methods for relation extraction (RE) often prioritize language similarity over structural similarity, which may result in overlooking entity relationships. We propose an AMR-enhanced retrieval-based ICL method for RE to address this issue. Our model retrieves in-context examples based on semantic structure similarity between task inputs and training samples. We conducted experiments in the supervised setting on four standard English RE datasets. The results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three datasets and competitive results on the fourth. Furthermore, our method outperforms baselines by a large margin across all datasets in the more demanding unsupervised setting.
Linguistic Analysis of Veteran Job Interviews to Assess Effectiveness in Translating Military Expertise to the Civilian Workforce (2025)

The ways in which natural language processing (NLP) can inform how veterans can improve effectiveness in translating military experience to workforce utility is underexplored. We design NLP experiments to evaluate the degree of explanation in veteran job interview responses as a proxy for perceived hireability. We examine linguistic and psycholinguistic features, context, and participant variability to investigate the mechanics of effective communication in employee selection. Results yield good performance when distinguishing between varying degrees of explanation in responses using LIWC features, indicating robustness of linguistic feature integration. Classifying Over- and Under-explained responses reflects challenges of class imbalance and the limitations of tested NLP methods for detecting subtleties in overly verbose or concise communication. Our findings have immediate applications for assistive technologies in job interview settings, and broader implications for enhancing automated communication assessment tools and refining strategies for training and interventions in communication-heavy fields.
MetaMeme: A Dataset for Meme Template and Meta-Category Classification (2025)

This paper introduces a new dataset for classifying memes by their template and communicative intent.It includes a broad selection of meme templates and examples scraped from imgflip and a smaller hand-annotated set of memes scraped from Reddit.The Reddit memes have been annotated for meta-category using a novel annotation scheme that classifies memes by the structure of the perspective they are being used to communicate.YOLOv11 and ChatGPT 4o are used to provide baseline modeling results.We find that YOLO struggles with template classification on real-world data but outperforms ChatGPT in classifying meta-categories.
Representing and Clustering Errors in Offensive Language Detection (2025)

Content moderation is essential in preventing the spread of harmful content on the Internet. However, there are instances where moderation fails and it is important to understand when and why that happens. Workflows that aim to uncover a system`s weakness typically use clustering of the data points' embeddings to group errors together. In this paper, we evaluate the K-Means clustering of four text representations for the task of offensive language detection in English and Levantine Arabic. We find Sentence-BERT (SBERT) embeddings give the most human-interpretable clustering for English errors and the grouping is mainly based on the targeted group in the text. Meanwhile, SBERT embeddings of Large Language Model (LLM)-generated linguistic features give the most interpretable clustering for Arabic errors.
ELIOT: Zero-Shot Video-Text Retrieval through Relevance-Boosted Captioning and Structural Information Extraction (2025)

Recent advances in video-text retrieval (VTR) have largely relied on supervised learning and fine-tuning. In this paper, we introduce , a novel zero-shot VTR framework that leverages off-the-shelf video captioners, large language models (LLMs), and text retrieval methods{---}entirely \textbf{without} additional training or annotated data. Due to the limited power of captioning methods, the captions often miss important content in the video, resulting in unsatisfactory retrieval performance. To translate more information into video captions, we first generates initial captions for videos, then enhances them using a relevance-boosted captioning strategy powered by LLMs, enriching video descriptions with salient details. To further emphasize key content, we propose structural information extraction, organizing visual elements such as objects, events, and attributes into structured templates, further boosting the retrieval performance. Benefiting from the enriched captions and structuralized information, extensive experiments on several video-text retrieval benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of over existing fine-tuned and pretraining methods without any data. They also show that the enriched captions capture key details from the video with minimal noise. Code and data will be released to facilitate future research.
Can Large Language Models Advance Crosswalks? The Case of Danish Occupation Codes (2025)

Crosswalks, which map one classification system to another, are critical tools for harmonizing data across time, countries, or frameworks. However, constructing crosswalks is labor-intensive and often requires domain expertise. This paper investigates the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to assist in creating crosswalks, focusing on two Danish occupational classification systems from different time periods as a case study. We propose a two-stage, prompt-based framework for this task, where LLMs perform similarity assessments between classification codes and identify final mappings through a guided decision process. Using four instruction-tuned LLMs and comparing them against an embedding-based baseline, we evaluate the performance of different models in crosswalks. Our results highlight the strengths of LLMs in crosswalk creation compared to the embedding-based baseline, showing the effectiveness of the interactive prompt-based framework for conducting crosswalks by LLMs. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of model combinations across two interactive rounds, highlighting the importance of model selection and consistency. This work contributes to the growing field of NLP applications for domain-specific knowledge mapping and demonstrates the potential of LLMs in advancing crosswalk methodologies.
Paraphrase-based Contrastive Learning for Sentence Pair Modeling (2025)

To improve the performance of sentence pair modeling tasks, we propose an additional pre-training method, also known as transfer fine-tuning, for pre-trained masked language models.Pre-training for masked language modeling is not necessarily designed to bring semantically similar sentences closer together in the embedding space.Our proposed method aims to improve the performance of sentence pair modeling by applying contrastive learning to pre-trained masked language models, in which sentence embeddings of paraphrase pairs are made similar to each other.While natural language inference corpora, which are standard in previous studies on contrastive learning, are not available on a large-scale for non-English languages, our method can construct a training corpus for contrastive learning from a raw corpus and a paraphrase dictionary at a low cost.Experimental results on four sentence pair modeling tasks revealed the effectiveness of our method in both English and Japanese.
Do Video Language Models really understand the video contexts? (2025)

This paper examines how well visual language models (VLMs) understand video question answering (VideoQA) tasks and generate responses accordingly. Recently, VLMs based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance, but the processes of understanding and reasoning in VLMs remain under-explored. To tackle this challenge, we propose Video Understanding and Response Consistency Assessment, VURCA, a framework that incorporates a fine-grained question generation and answering process to measure how well the responses generated by VLMs align with what the model understands. In addition, we introduce an extended benchmark dataset, FgNExT-QA, which builds upon NExT-QA by incorporating more fine-grained VideoQA tasks. FgNExT-QA is designed to evaluate fine-grained understanding in video question answering. Through experiments, we found that despite the strong overall QA performance of VLMs, their understanding of both the video content and the question remains limited. In particular, they exhibit poor video comprehension in fine-grained VideoQA tasks.
Evaluating Text Style Transfer Evaluation: Are There Any Reliable Metrics? (2025)

Text style transfer (TST) is the task of transforming a text to reflect a particular style while preserving its original content. Evaluating TSToutputs is a multidimensional challenge, requiring the assessment of style transfer accuracy, content preservation, and naturalness. Us-ing human evaluation is ideal but costly, as is common in other natural language processing (NLP) tasks; however, automatic metrics forTST have not received as much attention as metrics for, e.g., machine translation or summarization. In this paper, we examine both set ofexisting and novel metrics from broader NLP tasks for TST evaluation, focusing on two popular subtasks{---}sentiment transfer and detoxification{---}in a multilingual context comprising English, Hindi, and Bengali. By conducting meta-evaluation through correlation with hu-man judgments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of these metrics when used individually and in ensembles. Additionally, we investigatethe potential of large language models (LLMs) as tools for TST evaluation. Our findings highlight newly applied advanced NLP metrics andLLM-based evaluations provide better insights than existing TST metrics. Our oracle ensemble approaches show even more potential.
(CPER) From Guessing to Asking: An Approach to Resolving Persona Knowledge Gap in LLMs during Multi-Turn Conversations (2025)

In multi-turn dialogues, large language models face a critical challenge of ensuring coherence while adapting to user-specific information.. This study introduces the persona knowledge gap, the discrepancy between a model`s internal understanding and the knowledge required for coherent, personalized conversations. While prior research has recognized these gaps, computational methods for their identification and resolution remain underexplored. We propose Conversation Preference Elicitation and Recommendation (CPER), a novel framework that dynamically detects and resolves persona knowledge gaps using intrinsic uncertainty quantification and feedback-driven refinement. CPER consists of three key modules: a Contextual Understanding Module for preference extraction, a Dynamic Feedback Module for measuring uncertainty and refining persona alignment, and a Persona-Driven Response Generation module for adapting responses based on accumulated user context. We evaluate CPER on two real-world datasets: CCPE-M for preferential movie recommendations and ESConv for mental health support. Using A/B testing, human evaluators preferred CPER`s responses 42{\%} more often than baseline models in CCPE-M and 27{\%} more often in ESConv. A qualitative human evaluation confirms that CPER`s responses are preferred for maintaining contextual relevance and coherence, particularly in longer (12+ turn) conversations.
Streamlining LLMs: Adaptive Knowledge Distillation for Tailored Language Models (2025)

Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA-3 offer transformative potential across industries, e.g., enhancing customer service, revolutionizing medical diagnostics, or identifying crises in news articles. However, deploying LLMs faces challenges such as limited training data, high computational costs, and issues with transparency and explainability. Our research focuses on distilling compact, parameter-efficient tailored language models (TLMs) from LLMs for domain-specific tasks with comparable performance. Current approaches like knowledge distillation, fine-tuning, and model parallelism address computational efficiency but lack hybrid strategies to balance efficiency, adaptability, and accuracy. We present ANON - an adaptive knowledge distillation framework integrating knowledge distillation with adapters to generate computationally efficient TLMs without relying on labeled datasets. ANON uses cross-entropy loss to transfer knowledge from the teacher`s outputs and internal representations while employing adaptive prompt engineering and a progressive distillation strategy for phased knowledge transfer. We evaluated ANON`s performance in the crisis domain, where accuracy is critical and labeled data is scarce. Experiments showed that ANON outperforms recent approaches of knowledge distillation, both in terms of the resulting TLM performance and in reducing the computational costs for training and maintaining accuracy compared to LLMs for domain-specific applications.