Rania Elbadry, Sarfraz Ahmad, Ahmed Heakl, Dani Bouch, Momina Ahsan, Muhra AlMahri, Marwa Elsaid Khalil, Yuxia Wang, Salem Lahlou, Sophia Ananiadou, Veselin Stoyanov, Jimin Huang, Xueqing Peng, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Nurkhan Laiyk, Daniil Orel, Ayana Mussabayeva, Maiya Goloburda, Kamila Kuishibekova, Liya Goloburda, Diana Turmakhan, Preslav Nakov, Yuxia Wang, Fajri Koto. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Yuxia Wang, Rui Xing, Jonibek Mansurov, Giovanni Puccetti, Zhuohan Xie, Minh Ngoc Ta, Jiahui Geng, Jinyan Su, Mervat Abassy, Saadeldine Eletter, Kareem Elozeiri, Nurkhan Laiyk, Maiya Goloburda, Tarek Mahmoud, Raj Vardhan Tomar, Alexander Aziz, Ryuto Koike, Masahiro Kaneko, Artem Shelmanov, Ekaterina Artemova, Vladislav Mikhailov, Akim Tsvigun, Alham Fikri Aji, Nizar Habash, Iryna Gurevych, Preslav Nakov. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Zhuohan Xie, Daniil Orel, Rushil Thareja, Dhruv Sahnan, Hachem Madmoun, Fan Zhang, Debopriyo Banerjee, Georgi Nenkov Georgiev, Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Jimin Huang, Jinyan Su, Aaryamonvikram Singh, Rui Xing, Rania Elbadry, Chen Xu, Haonan Li, Fajri Koto, Ivan Koychev, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yuxia Wang, Salem Lahlou, Veselin Stoyanov, Sophia Ananiadou, Preslav Nakov. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

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Nurkhan Laiyk, Daniil Orel, Rituraj Joshi, Maiya Goloburda, Yuxia Wang, Preslav Nakov, Fajri Koto. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Social event detection involves identifying and categorizing important events from social media, which relies on labeled data, but annotation is costly and labor-intensive. To address this problem, we propose Augmentation framework for Social Event Detection (SED-Aug), a plug-and-play dual augmentation framework, which combines explicit text-based and implicit feature-space augmentation to enhance data diversity and model robustness. The explicit augmentation utilizes LLMs to enhance textual information through five diverse generation strategies. For implicit augmentation, we design five novel perturbation techniques that operate in the feature space on structural fused embeddings. These perturbations are crafted to keep the semantic and relational properties of the embeddings and make them more diverse. Specifically, SED-Aug outperforms the best baseline model by approximately 17.67% on the Twitter2012 dataset and by about 15.57% on the Twitter2018 dataset in terms of the average F1 score.

Mukhammed Togmanov, Nurdaulet Mukhituly, Diana Turmakhan, Jonibek Mansurov, Maiya Goloburda, Akhmed Sakip, Zhuohan Xie, Yuxia Wang, Bekassyl Syzdykov, Nurkhan Laiyk, Alham Fikri Aji, Ekaterina Kochmar, Preslav Nakov, Fajri Koto. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

The increased use of large language models (LLMs) across a variety of real-world applications calls for mechanisms to verify the fac- tual accuracy of their outputs. Difficulties lie in assessing the factuality of free-form responses in open domains. Also, different pa- pers use disparate evaluation benchmarks and measurements, which renders them hard to compare and hampers future progress. To mitigate these issues, we propose OpenFactCheck, a unified framework for building customized automatic fact-checking systems, benchmarking their accuracy, evaluating factuality of LLMs, and verifying claims in a document. OpenFactCheck consists of three modules: (i) CUSTCHECKER allows users to easily customize an automatic fact-checker and verify the factual correctness of documents and claims, (ii) LLMEVAL, a unified evaluation framework assesses LLM’s factuality ability from various perspectives fairly, and (iii) CHECKEREVAL is an extensible solution for gauging the reliability of automatic fact-checkers’ verification results using human-annotated datasets. Data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/yuxiaw/openfactcheck.

Yasser Ashraf, Yuxia Wang, Bin Gu, Preslav Nakov, Timothy Baldwin. 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). 2025.

Generative models are rapidly gaining popularity and being integrated into everyday applications, raising concerns over their safe use as various vulnerabilities are exposed. In light of this, the field of red teaming is undergoing fast-paced growth, highlighting the need for a comprehensive survey covering the entire pipeline and addressing emerging topics. Our extensive survey, which examines over 120 papers, introduces a taxonomy of fine-grained attack strategies grounded in the inherent capabilities of language models. Additionally, we have developed the “searcher” framework to unify various automatic red teaming approaches. Moreover, our survey covers novel areas including multimodal attacks and defenses, risks around LLM-based agents, overkill of harmless queries, and the balance between harmlessness and helpfulness. Warning: This paper contains examples that may be offensive, harmful, or biased.

Yuxia Wang, Jonibek Mansurov, Petar Ivanov, Jinyan Su, Artem Shelmanov, Akim Tsvigun, Osama Mohammed Afzal, Tarek Mahmoud, Giovanni Puccetti, Thomas Arnold, Alham Aji, Nizar Habash, Iryna Gurevych, Preslav Nakov. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Yuxia Wang, Jonibek Mansurov, Petar Ivanov, Jinyan Su, Artem Shelmanov, Akim Tsvigun, Chenxi Whitehouse, Osama Mohammed Afzal, Tarek Mahmoud, Toru Sasaki, Thomas Arnold, Alham Fikri Aji, Nizar Habash, Iryna Gurevych, Preslav Nakov. Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Yuxia Wang, Minghan Wang, Muhammad Arslan Manzoor, Fei Liu, Georgi Nenkov Georgiev, Rocktim Jyoti Das, Preslav Nakov. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2024.

Jiahui Geng, Fengyu Cai, Yuxia Wang, Heinz Koeppl, Preslav Nakov, Iryna Gurevych. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Abstract Despite the subjective nature of semantic textual similarity (STS) and pervasive disagreements in STS annotation, existing benchmarks have used averaged human ratings as gold standard. Averaging masks the true distribution of human opinions on examples of low agreement, and prevents models from capturing the semantic vagueness that the individual ratings represent. In this work, we introduce USTS, the first Uncertainty-aware STS dataset with ∼15,000 Chinese sentence pairs and 150,000 labels, to study collective human opinions in STS. Analysis reveals that neither a scalar nor a single Gaussian fits a set of observed judgments adequately. We further show that current STS models cannot capture the variance caused by human disagreement on individual instances, but rather reflect the predictive confidence over the aggregate dataset.

Training with noisy labelled data is known to be detrimental to model performance, especially for high-capacity neural network models in low-resource domains. Our experiments suggest that standard regularisation strategies, such as weight decay and dropout, are ineffective in the face of noisy labels. We propose a simple noisy label detection method that prevents error propagation from the input layer. The approach is based on the observation that the projection of noisy labels is learned through memorisation at advanced stages of learning, and that the Pearson correlation is sensitive to outliers. Extensive experiments over real-world human-disagreement annotations as well as randomly-corrupted and data-augmented labels, across various tasks and domains, demonstrate that our method is effective, regularising noisy labels and improving generalisation performance.

Autoregressive (AR) and Non-autoregressive (NAR) models have their own superiority on the performance and latency, combining them into one model may take advantage of both. Current combination frameworks focus more on the integration of multiple decoding paradigms with a unified generative model, e.g. Masked Language Model. However, the generalization can be harmful on the performance due to the gap between training objective and inference. In this paper, we aim to close the gap by preserving the original objective of AR and NAR under a unified framework. Specifically, we propose the Directional Transformer (Diformer) by jointly modelling AR and NAR into three generation directions (left-to-right, right-to-left and straight) with a newly introduced direction variable, which works by controlling the prediction of each token to have specific dependencies under that direction. The unification achieved by direction successfully preserves the original dependency assumption used in AR and NAR, retaining both generalization and performance. Experiments on 4 WMT benchmarks demonstrate that Diformer outperforms current united-modelling works with more than 1.5 BLEU points for both AR and NAR decoding, and is also competitive to the state-of-the-art independent AR and NAR models.

Abstract State-of-the-art classification and regression models are often not well calibrated, and cannot reliably provide uncertainty estimates, limiting their utility in safety-critical applications such as clinical decision-making. While recent work has focused on calibration of classifiers, there is almost no work in NLP on calibration in a regression setting. In this paper, we quantify the calibration of pre- trained language models for text regression, both intrinsically and extrinsically. We further apply uncertainty estimates to augment training data in low-resource domains. Our experiments on three regression tasks in both self-training and active-learning settings show that uncertainty estimation can be used to increase overall performance and enhance model generalization.

Mask-predict CMLM (Ghazvininejad et al., 2019) has achieved stunning performance among non-autoregressive NMT models, but we find that the mechanism of predicting all of the target words only depending on the hidden state of [MASK] is not effective and efficient in initial iterations of refinement, resulting in ungrammatical repetitions and slow convergence.In this work, we mitigate this problem by combining copied source with embeddings of [MASK] in decoder.Notably.it's not a straightforward copying that is shown to be useless, but a novel heuristic hybrid strategy -fence-mask.Experimental results show that it gains consistent boosts on both WMT14 En↔De and WMT16 En↔Ro corpus by 0.5 BLEU on average, and 1 BLEU for lessinformative short sentences.This reveals that incorporating additional information by proper strategies is beneficial to improve CMLM, particularly translation quality of short texts and speeding up early-stage convergence.