Analysis of Emotion in Rumour Threads on Social Media

Rumours in online social media pose significant risks to modern society, motivating the need for better understanding of how they develop. We focus specifically on the interface between emotion and rumours in threaded discourses, building on the surprisingly sparse literature on the topic which has largely focused on emotions within the original rumour posts themselves, and largely overlooked the comparative differences between rumours and non-rumours. In this work, we provide a comprehensive analytical emotion framework, contrasting rumour and non-rumour cases using existing NLP datasets to further understand the emotion dynamics within rumours. Our framework reveals several findings: rumours exhibit more negative sentiment and emotions, including anger, fear and pessimism, while non-rumours evoke more positive emotions; emotions are contagious in online interactions, with rumours facilitate negative emotions and non-rumours foster positive emotions; and based on causal analysis, surprise acts as a bridge between rumours and other emotions, pessimism is driven by sadness and fear, optimism by joy and love.

Is Human-Like Text Liked by Humans? Multilingual Human Detection and Preference Against AI

Prior studies have shown that distinguishing text generated by large language models (LLMs) from human-written one is highly challenging, and often no better than random guessing. To verify the generalizability of this finding across languages and domains, we perform an extensive case study to identify the upper bound of human detection accuracy. Across 16 datasets covering 9 languages and 9 domains, 19 annotators achieved an average detection accuracy of 87.6%, thus challenging previous conclusions. We find that major gaps between human and machine text lie in concreteness, cultural nuances, and diversity. Prompting by explicitly explaining the distinctions in the prompts can partially bridge the gaps in over 50% of the cases. However, we also find that humans do not always prefer human-written text, particularly when they cannot clearly identify its source.

GenAI Content Detection Task 1: English and Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detection: AI vs. Human

We present the GenAI Content Detection Task~1 -- a shared task on binary machine generated text detection, conducted as a part of the GenAI workshop at COLING 2025. The task consists of two subtasks: Monolingual (English) and Multilingual. The shared task attracted many participants: 36 teams made official submissions to the Monolingual subtask during the test phase and 26 teams -- to the Multilingual. We provide a comprehensive overview of the data, a summary of the results -- including system rankings and performance scores -- detailed descriptions of the participating systems, and an in-depth analysis of submissions. https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/COLING-2025-Workshop-on-MGT-Detection-Task1

Large Language Models as Code Executors: An Exploratory Study

The capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly evolved, extending from natural language processing to complex tasks like code understanding and generation. We expand the scope of LLMs' capabilities to a broader context, using LLMs to execute code snippets to obtain the output. This paper pioneers the exploration of LLMs as code executors, where code snippets are directly fed to the models for execution, and outputs are returned. We are the first to comprehensively examine this feasibility across various LLMs, including OpenAI's o1, GPT-4o, GPT-3.5, DeepSeek, and Qwen-Coder. Notably, the o1 model achieved over 90% accuracy in code execution, while others demonstrated lower accuracy levels. Furthermore, we introduce an Iterative Instruction Prompting (IIP) technique that processes code snippets line by line, enhancing the accuracy of weaker models by an average of 7.22% (with the highest improvement of 18.96%) and an absolute average improvement of 3.86% against CoT prompting (with the highest improvement of 19.46%). Our study not only highlights the transformative potential of LLMs in coding but also lays the groundwork for future advancements in automated programming and the completion of complex tasks.

Loki: An Open-Source Tool for Fact Verification

We introduce Loki, an open-source tool designed to address the growing problem of misinformation. Loki adopts a human-centered approach, striking a balance between the quality of fact-checking and the cost of human involvement. It decomposes the fact-checking task into a five-step pipeline: breaking down long texts into individual claims, assessing their check-worthiness, generating queries, retrieving evidence, and verifying the claims. Instead of fully automating the claim verification process, Loki provides essential information at each step to assist human judgment, especially for general users such as journalists and content moderators. Moreover, it has been optimized for latency, robustness, and cost efficiency at a commercially usable level. Loki is released under an MIT license and is available on GitHub. We also provide a video presenting the system and its capabilities.

Unconditional Truthfulness: Learning Conditional Dependency for Uncertainty Quantification of Large Language Models

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is a perspective approach to detecting Large Language Model (LLM) hallucinations and low quality output. In this work, we address one of the challenges of UQ in generation tasks that arises from the conditional dependency between the generation steps of an LLM. We propose to learn this dependency from data. We train a regression model, which target variable is the gap between the conditional and the unconditional generation confidence. During LLM inference, we use this learned conditional dependency model to modulate the uncertainty of the current generation step based on the uncertainty of the previous step. Our experimental evaluation on nine datasets and three LLMs shows that the proposed method is highly effective for uncertainty quantification, achieving substantial improvements over rivaling approaches.

LLM-DetectAIve: a Tool for Fine-Grained Machine-Generated Text Detection

The widespread accessibility of large language models (LLMs) to the general public has significantly amplified the dissemination of machine-generated texts (MGTs). Advancements in prompt manipulation have exacerbated the difficulty in discerning the origin of a text (human-authored vs machinegenerated). This raises concerns regarding the potential misuse of MGTs, particularly within educational and academic domains. In this paper, we present $\textbf{LLM-DetectAIve}$ -- a system designed for fine-grained MGT detection. It is able to classify texts into four categories: human-written, machine-generated, machine-written machine-humanized, and human-written machine-polished. Contrary to previous MGT detectors that perform binary classification, introducing two additional categories in LLM-DetectiAIve offers insights into the varying degrees of LLM intervention during the text creation. This might be useful in some domains like education, where any LLM intervention is usually prohibited. Experiments show that LLM-DetectAIve can effectively identify the authorship of textual content, proving its usefulness in enhancing integrity in education, academia, and other domains. LLM-DetectAIve is publicly accessible at https://huggingface.co/spaces/raj-tomar001/MGT-New. The video describing our system is available at https://youtu.be/E8eT_bE7k8c.

Benchmarking Uncertainty Quantification Methods for Large Language Models with LM-Polygraph

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is becoming increasingly recognized as a critical component of applications that rely on machine learning (ML). The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has stimulated researchers to seek efficient and effective approaches to UQ in text generation tasks, as in addition to their emerging capabilities, these models have introduced new challenges for building safe applications. As with other ML models, LLMs are prone to make incorrect predictions, ``hallucinate'' by fabricating claims, or simply generate low-quality output for a given input. UQ is a key element in dealing with these challenges. However research to date on UQ methods for LLMs has been fragmented, with disparate evaluation methods. In this work, we tackle this issue by introducing a novel benchmark that implements a collection of state-of-the-art UQ baselines, and provides an environment for controllable and consistent evaluation of novel techniques by researchers in various text generation tasks. Our benchmark also supports the assessment of confidence normalization methods in terms of their ability to provide interpretable scores. Using our benchmark, we conduct a large-scale empirical investigation of UQ and normalization techniques across nine tasks and shed light on the most promising approaches.

Evaluating Transparency of Machine Generated Fact Checking Explanations

An important factor when it comes to generating fact-checking explanations is the selection of evidence: intuitively, high-quality explanations can only be generated given the right evidence. In this work, we investigate the impact of human-curated vs. machine-selected evidence for explanation generation using large language models. To assess the quality of explanations, we focus on transparency (whether an explanation cites sources properly) and utility (whether an explanation is helpful in clarifying a claim). Surprisingly, we found that large language models generate similar or higher quality explanations using machine-selected evidence, suggesting carefully curated evidence (by humans) may not be necessary. That said, even with the best model, the generated explanations are not always faithful to the sources, suggesting further room for improvement in explanation generation for fact-checking.