Probing LLMs for Multilingual Discourse Generalization Through a Unified Label Set

Discourse understanding is essential for many NLP tasks, yet most existing work remains constrained by framework-dependent discourse representations. This work investigates whether large language models (LLMs) capture discourse knowledge that generalizes across languages and frameworks. We address this question along two dimensions: (1) developing a unified discourse relation label set to facilitate cross-lingual and cross-framework discourse analysis, and (2) probing LLMs to assess whether they encode generalizable discourse abstractions. Using multilingual discourse relation classification as a testbed, we examine a comprehensive set of 23 LLMs of varying sizes and multilingual capabilities. Our results show that LLMs, especially those with multilingual training corpora, can generalize discourse information across languages and frameworks. Further layer-wise analyses reveal that language generalization at the discourse level is most salient in the intermediate layers. Lastly, our error analysis provides an account of challenging relation classes.

Better Aligned with Survey Respondents or Training Data? Unveiling Political Leanings of LLMs on U.S. Supreme Court Cases

The increased adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their potential to shape public opinion have sparked interest in assessing these models' political leanings. Building on previous research that compared LLMs and human opinions and observed political bias in system responses, we take a step further to investigate the underlying causes of such biases by empirically examining how the values and biases embedded in training corpora shape model outputs. Specifically, we propose a method to quantitatively evaluate political leanings embedded in the large pretraining corpora. Subsequently we investigate to whom are the LLMs' political leanings more aligned with, their pretrainig corpora or the surveyed human opinions. As a case study, we focus on probing the political leanings of LLMs in 32 U.S. Supreme Court cases, addressing contentious topics such as abortion and voting rights. Our findings reveal that LLMs strongly reflect the political leanings in their training data, and no strong correlation is observed with their alignment to human opinions as expressed in surveys. These results underscore the importance of responsible curation of training data and the need for robust evaluation metrics to ensure LLMs' alignment with human-centered values.

Pragmatics in the Era of Large Language Models: A Survey on Datasets, Evaluation, Opportunities and Challenges

Understanding pragmatics-the use of language in context-is crucial for developing NLP systems capable of interpreting nuanced language use. Despite recent advances in language technologies, including large language models, evaluating their ability to handle pragmatic phenomena such as implicatures and references remains challenging. To advance pragmatic abilities in models, it is essential to understand current evaluation trends and identify existing limitations. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of resources designed for evaluating pragmatic capabilities in NLP, categorizing datasets by the pragmatics phenomena they address. We analyze task designs, data collection methods, evaluation approaches, and their relevance to real-world applications. By examining these resources in the context of modern language models, we highlight emerging trends, challenges, and gaps in existing benchmarks. Our survey aims to clarify the landscape of pragmatic evaluation and guide the development of more comprehensive and targeted benchmarks, ultimately contributing to more nuanced and context-aware NLP models.

M-ABSA: A Multilingual Dataset for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a crucial task in information extraction and sentiment analysis, aiming to identify aspects with associated sentiment elements in text. However, existing ABSA datasets are predominantly English-centric, limiting the scope for multilingual evaluation and research. To bridge this gap, we present M-ABSA, a comprehensive dataset spanning 7 domains and 21 languages, making it the most extensive multilingual parallel dataset for ABSA to date. Our primary focus is on triplet extraction, which involves identifying aspect terms, aspect categories, and sentiment polarities. The dataset is constructed through an automatic translation process with human review to ensure quality. We perform extensive experiments using various baselines to assess performance and compatibility on M-ABSA. Our empirical findings highlight that the dataset enables diverse evaluation tasks, such as multilingual and multi-domain transfer learning, and large language model evaluation, underscoring its inclusivity and its potential to drive advancements in multilingual ABSA research.

The Validation Gap: A Mechanistic Analysis of How Language Models Compute Arithmetic but Fail to Validate It

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to validate their output and identify potential errors is crucial for ensuring robustness and reliability. However, current research indicates that LLMs struggle with self-correction, encountering significant challenges in detecting errors. While studies have explored methods to enhance self-correction in LLMs, relatively little attention has been given to understanding the models' internal mechanisms underlying error detection. In this paper, we present a mechanistic analysis of error detection in LLMs, focusing on simple arithmetic problems. Through circuit analysis, we identify the computational subgraphs responsible for detecting arithmetic errors across four smaller-sized LLMs. Our findings reveal that all models heavily rely on $\textit{consistency heads}$--attention heads that assess surface-level alignment of numerical values in arithmetic solutions. Moreover, we observe that the models' internal arithmetic computation primarily occurs in higher layers, whereas validation takes place in middle layers, before the final arithmetic results are fully encoded. This structural dissociation between arithmetic computation and validation seems to explain why current LLMs struggle to detect even simple arithmetic errors.

Correcting Annotator Bias in Training Data: Population-Aligned Instance Replication (PAIR)

Models trained on crowdsourced labels may not reflect broader population views when annotator pools are not representative. Since collecting representative labels is challenging, we propose Population-Aligned Instance Replication (PAIR), a method to address this bias through statistical adjustment. Using a simulation study of hate speech and offensive language detection, we create two types of annotators with different labeling tendencies and generate datasets with varying proportions of the types. Models trained on unbalanced annotator pools show poor calibration compared to those trained on representative data. However, PAIR, which duplicates labels from underrepresented annotator groups to match population proportions, significantly reduces bias without requiring new data collection. These results suggest statistical techniques from survey research can help align model training with target populations even when representative annotator pools are unavailable. We conclude with three practical recommendations for improving training data quality.

Add Noise, Tasks, or Layers? MaiNLP at the VarDial 2025 Shared Task on Norwegian Dialectal Slot and Intent Detection

Slot and intent detection (SID) is a classic natural language understanding task. Despite this, research has only more recently begun focusing on SID for dialectal and colloquial varieties. Many approaches for low-resource scenarios have not yet been applied to dialectal SID data, or compared to each other on the same datasets. We participate in the VarDial 2025 shared task on slot and intent detection in Norwegian varieties, and compare multiple set-ups: varying the training data (English, Norwegian, or dialectal Norwegian), injecting character-level noise, training on auxiliary tasks, and applying Layer Swapping, a technique in which layers of models fine-tuned on different datasets are assembled into a model. We find noise injection to be beneficial while the effects of auxiliary tasks are mixed. Though some experimentation was required to successfully assemble a model from layers, it worked surprisingly well; a combination of models trained on English and small amounts of dialectal data produced the most robust slot predictions. Our best models achieve 97.6% intent accuracy and 85.6% slot F1 in the shared task.

Improving Dialectal Slot and Intent Detection with Auxiliary Tasks: A Multi-Dialectal Bavarian Case Study

Reliable slot and intent detection (SID) is crucial in natural language understanding for applications like digital assistants. Encoder-only transformer models fine-tuned on high-resource languages generally perform well on SID. However, they struggle with dialectal data, where no standardized form exists and training data is scarce and costly to produce. We explore zero-shot transfer learning for SID, focusing on multiple Bavarian dialects, for which we release a new dataset for the Munich dialect. We evaluate models trained on auxiliary tasks in Bavarian, and compare joint multi-task learning with intermediate-task training. We also compare three types of auxiliary tasks: token-level syntactic tasks, named entity recognition (NER), and language modelling. We find that the included auxiliary tasks have a more positive effect on slot filling than intent classification (with NER having the most positive effect), and that intermediate-task training yields more consistent performance gains. Our best-performing approach improves intent classification performance on Bavarian dialects by 5.1 and slot filling F1 by 8.4 percentage points.

KARRIEREWEGE: A Large Scale Career Path Prediction Dataset

Accurate career path prediction can support many stakeholders, like job seekers, recruiters, HR, and project managers. However, publicly available data and tools for career path prediction are scarce. In this work, we introduce KARRIEREWEGE, a comprehensive, publicly available dataset containing over 500k career paths, significantly surpassing the size of previously available datasets. We link the dataset to the ESCO taxonomy to offer a valuable resource for predicting career trajectories. To tackle the problem of free-text inputs typically found in resumes, we enhance it by synthesizing job titles and descriptions resulting in KARRIEREWEGE+. This allows for accurate predictions from unstructured data, closely aligning with real-world application challenges. We benchmark existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models on our dataset and a prior benchmark and observe improved performance and robustness, particularly for free-text use cases, due to the synthesized data.

A Rose by Any Other Name: LLM-Generated Explanations Are Good Proxies for Human Explanations to Collect Label Distributions on NLI

Disagreement in human labeling is ubiquitous, and can be captured in human judgment distributions (HJDs). Recent research has shown that explanations provide valuable information for understanding human label variation (HLV) and large language models (LLMs) can approximate HJD from a few human-provided label-explanation pairs. However, collecting explanations for every label is still time-consuming. This paper examines whether LLMs can be used to replace humans in generating explanations for approximating HJD. Specifically, we use LLMs as annotators to generate model explanations for a few given human labels. We test ways to obtain and combine these label-explanations with the goal to approximate human judgment distribution. We further compare the resulting human with model-generated explanations, and test automatic and human explanation selection. Our experiments show that LLM explanations are promising for NLI: to estimate HJD, generated explanations yield comparable results to human's when provided with human labels. Importantly, our results generalize from datasets with human explanations to i) datasets where they are not available and ii) challenging out-of-distribution test sets.