CoNLL 2025 | CoNLL

Vienna, Austria, July 31 - August 1, 2025 (co-located with ACL)

(New!) ~~Tentative~~ Program Schedule (below)

Welcome to the 29th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2025). CoNLL is a yearly conference organized by SIGNLL (ACL's Special Interest Group on Natural Language Learning), focusing on theoretically, cognitively, and scientifically motivated approaches to computational linguistics. In particular, it seeks to explore the interaction between theoretical issues in linguistics and cognition, on the one hand, and computational modeling, on the other. Questions that CoNLL addresses are e.g.: How do computational models inform us about how language and cognition work? Which phenomena do they capture, which do they not capture? Conversely, how do linguistics and cognitive science contribute to understanding, and possibly improving, AI models?

We welcome work targeting any aspect of language and its computational modeling, including but not only:

Computational Psycholinguistics, Cognition and Linguistics
Computational Social Science and Sociolinguistics
Interaction and Dialogue
Language Acquisition, Learning, Emergence, and Evolution
Multimodality and Grounding
Typology and Multilinguality
Speech and Phonology
Syntax and Morphology
Semantics and Pragmatics
Theoretical Analysis and Interpretation of ML Models for NLP
Resources and Tools for Scientifically Motivated Research

Invited Speakers

Jean-Rémi King, CNRS / Meta AI
Title: Emergence of Language in the Human Brain
Abstract:
Deep learning has made major progress in natural language processing. Beyond these technical performance, these algorithms offer new methods to understand and model how language is processed in the human brain. Using both encoding (representation -> brain) and decoding (brain -> representations), we show that the comparison between modern speech and language models effectively accounts for brain responses to natural speech as recorded with EEG, MEG, iEEG and fMRI, including in children between 2 and 12 years old. This systematic comparison provides an operational foundation to model language in the adult and developing brain, and thus offers a new path to understand the neural and computational bases of this human-specific ability.

Raquel Fernández, University of Amsterdam
Title: The Interplay between Gestures and Speech in Face-to-Face Communication
Abstract:
The primary form of language use is face-to-face dialogue — an inherently multimodal setup where we use speech in tandem with non-verbal signals such as gaze and gestures. However, how speech and gestures interact in face-to-face communication is not yet well understood. I will present our work on gesture representation learning, which aims to shed light on this question. We propose a self-supervised learning approach that grounds body movements in spoken language to learn representations of iconic gestures in referential tasks. Our experiments show that the resulting gesture embeddings exhibit properties that align with theoretically motivated hypotheses and highlight the complementary roles of gesture and speech in face-to-face reference resolution. More generally, our work advances the use of data-driven computational modelling to study fundamental properties of multimodal communication.

Author instructions:

Oral presentations should be 15 minutes in length. A common laptop will be provided. To ensure a smooth experience, we collect presentation slides in advance via Underline and upload them to the designated laptops.

Poster presentations should be A0 in portrait format. If you need local printing in Vienna, please check the ACL 2025 FAQ: https://2025.aclweb.org/faq/#Print-Shops-for-Poster

Online presentation (optional): We kindly invite you to submit a pre-recorded video presentation (max. 15 minutes) and/or poster via Underline by July 10, 2025. The submission form can be found here: https://acl2025-workshops.paperform.co/ (select W:15 29th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning).

Detailed instructions on preparing and uploading your materials to Underline are available here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1B26aSIWCRTYEFKvndrYWspNBUpimN6v…

Program Schedule

Note that we invite all poster authors to present in both Poster session 1 and Poster session 2.

Thursday, July 31, 2025

09:20 - 09:30
Opening Remarks

09:30 - 10:30
Invited talk: Raquel Fernández

10:30 - 11:00
Coffee break

11:00 - 12:20
Oral session 1: Phonology, Morphology, and Syntax

A Linguistically Motivated Analysis of Intonational Phrasing in Text-to-Speech Systems: Revealing Gaps in Syntactic Sensitivity
Charlotte Pouw, Afra Alishahi and Willem Zuidema
Principal Parts Detection for Computational Morphology: Task, Models and Benchmark
Dorin Keshales, Omer Goldman and Reut Tsarfaty
Is Incremental Structure Prediction Process Universal across Languages?: Revisiting Parsing Strategy through Speculation
Taiga Ishii and Yusuke Miyao
GCG-Based Artificial Languages for Evaluating Inductive Biases of Neural Language Models
Nadine El-Naggar, Tatsuki Kuribayashi and Ted Briscoe

12:20 - 14:00
Lunch break

14:00 - 15:30
Poster session 1 (See papers to be presented as posters below.)

15:30 – 16:00
Coffee break

16:00 – 17:20
Oral session 2: Semantics, Affect, and Multimodality

Experiential Semantic Information and Brain Alignment: Are Multimodal Models Better than Language Models?
Anna Bavaresco and Raquel Fernández
A Continuous Approach to Metaphorically Motivated Regular Polysemy in Language Models
Anna Temerko, Marcos Garcia and Pablo Gamallo
What is an Abstract Reasoner"? Revisiting Experiments and Arguments about Large Language Models
Tian Yun, Chen Sun and Ellie Pavlick
An Appraisal Theoretic Approach to Modelling Affect Flow in Conversation Corpora
Alok Debnath, Yvette Graham and Owen Conlan

17:20 – 18:00
Discussion session

Friday, August 1, 2025

09:30 - 10:30
Invited talk: Jean-Rémi King

10:30 - 11:00
Coffee break

11:00 - 12:20
Oral session 3: LLMs, Linguistic Structure, and Psycholinguistics

Evidence of Generative Syntax in LLMs
Mary Kennedy
Derivational Probing: Unveiling the Layer-wise Derivation of Syntactic Structures in Neural Language Models
Taiga Someya, Ryo Yoshida, Hitomi Yanaka and Yohei Oseki
Investigating Psychometric Predictive Power of Syntactic Attention
Ryo Yoshida, Yushi Sugimoto and Yohei Oseki
Components of Creativity: Language Model-based Predictors for Clustering and Switching in Verbal Fluency
Sina Zarrieß, Simeon Junker, Judith Sieker and Özge Alacam

12:20 - 14:00
Lunch break

14:00 - 15:30
Poster session 2 (See papers to be presented as posters below.)

15:30 - 16:00
Coffee break

16:00 - 17:00
Oral session 4: Best Paper Session

Quasi-symbolic Semantic Geometry over Transformer-based Variational AutoEncoder
Yingji Zhang, Danilo Carvalho and Andre Freitas
Accelerating Large Language Model Pretraining via LFR Pedagogy: Learn, Focus, and Review
Neha Prakriya, Jui-Nan Yen, Cho-Jui Hsieh and Jason Cong
From Stories to Statistics: Methodological Biases in LLM-Based Narrative Flow Quantification
Amal Sunny, Advay Gupta, Yashashree Chandak and Vishnu Sreekumar

17:00 - 17:15
Closing

Posters

HKCanto-Eval: A Benchmark for Evaluating Cantonese Language Understanding and Cultural Comprehension in LLMs
Tsz Chung Cheng, Chung Shing Cheng, Chaak-ming Lau, Eugene Lam, Wong Chun Yat, Hoi On Yu and Cheuk Hei Chong
LawToken: a single token worth more than its constituents
Yu-Hsiang Tseng, Hsin-Yu Chou and Shu-Kai Hsieh
Interpersonal Memory Matters: A New Task for Proactive Dialogue Utilizing Conversational History
Bowen Wu, Wenqing Wang, Lihaoran Lihaoran, Yunhan Deng, Ying Li, Jingsong Yu and Baoxun Wang
WinoWhat: A Parallel Corpus of Paraphrased WinoGrande Sentences with Common Sense Categorization
Ine Gevers, Victor De Marez, Luna De Bruyne and Walter Daelemans
Planning for Success: Exploring LLM Long-term Planning Capabilities in Table Understanding
Thị-Nhung Nguyễn, Hoang Ngo, Dinh Phung, Thuy-Trang Vu and Dat Quoc Nguyen
Short-circuiting Shortcuts: Mechanistic Investigation of Shortcuts in Text Classification
Leon Eshuijs, Shihan Wang and Antske Fokkens
Do Construction Distributions Shape Formal Language Learning in German BabyLMs?
Bastian Bunzeck, Daniel Duran and Sina Zarrieß
Adapting Large Language Models for Movie Domain with Narrative Understanding Tasks
Siqi Shen and Amanmeet Garg
What Does Memory Retrieval Leave on the Table? Modelling the Cost of Semi-Compositionality with MINERVA2 and sBERT
Sydelle De Souza, Ivan Vegner, Francis Mollica and Leonidas A. A. Doumas
Polarity Inversion Operators in PLM
David Kletz, Pascal Amsili and Marie Candito
Dynamic Epistemic Friction in Dialogue
Timothy Obiso, Kenneth Lai, Abhijnan Nath, Nikhil Krishnaswamy and James Pustejovsky
A Three-Tier LLM Framework for Forecasting Student Engagement from Qualitative Longitudinal Data
Ahatsham Hayat, Helen Martinez, Bilal Khan and Mohammad Rashedul Hasan
Bridging the Socioeconomic Gap in Education: A Hybrid AI and Human Annotation Approach
Nahed Abdelgaber, Labiba Jahan, Arham Vinit Doshi, Rishi Suri, Hamza Reza Pavel and Jia Zhang
Construction Identification and Disambiguation Using BERT: A Case Study of NPN
Wesley Scivetti and Nathan Schneider
Timestep Embeddings Trigger Collapse in Diffusion Text Generation
Ryota Nosaka and Takuya Matsuzaki
Lost in Variation? Evaluating NLI Performance in Basque and Spanish Geographical Variants
Jaione Bengoetxea, Itziar Gonzalez-Dios and Rodrigo Agerri
Compositionality and Event Retrieval in Complement Coercion: A Study of Language Models in a Low-resource Setting
Matteo Radalelli, Emmanuele Chersoni, Alessandro Lenci and Giosuè Baggio
DLU: Dictionary Look-Up Data and Prediction
David Strohmaier, Gladys Tyen, Hongyi Gu, Diane Nicholls, Zheng Yuan and Paula Buttery
IPA CHILDES & G2P+: Feature-Rich Resources for Cross-Lingual Phonology and Phonemic Language Modeling
Zebulon Goriely and Paula Buttery
BabyLM’s First Words: Word Segmentation as a Phonological Probing Task
Zebulon Goriely and Paula Buttery
Beyond Accuracy: Revisiting Out-of-Distribution Generalization in NLI Models
Zahra Delbari and Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Spatial Relation Marking Across Languages: Extraction, Evaluation, Analysis
Barend Beekhuizen
Human-likeness of LLMs in the Mental Lexicon
Bei Xiao, Xufeng Duan, David A. Haslett and Zhenguang Cai
Vorm: Translations and a Constrained Hypothesis Space Support Unsupervised Morphological Segmentation Across Languages
Barend Beekhuizen
Do Large Language Models Solve Verbal Analogies Like Children Do?
Tamar Johnson, Mathilde ter Veen, Rochelle Choenni, Han van der Maas, Ekaterina Shutova and Claire E. Stevenson
[Non-archival] Exploring Alignment in Shared Cross-lingual Spaces
Basel Mousi, Nadir Durrani, Fahim Dalvi, Majd Hawasly and Ahmed Abdelali
[Non-archival] Why do objects have many names? A study on word informativeness in language use and lexical systems
Eleonora Gualdoni and Gemma Boleda
[Non-archival] A Survey of AMR Applications: In the ten years since the development of the Abstract Meaning
Shira Wein and Juri Opitz
[Non-archival] Eye Movement Traces of Linguistic Knowledge in Native and Non-Native Reading
Yevgeni Berzak and Roger Levy
[Non-archival] Category Locality Theory: A unified account of locality effects in sentence comprehension
Shinnosuke Isono
[Findings] Is a cute puyfred cute? Context-dependent form-meaning systematicity in LLMs
Jaïr Waal and Giovanni Cassani

Venue/Visa

CoNLL 2025 will be held in Vienna, Austria. Please note that it is an in-person conference. We expect all accepted papers to be presented physically and presenting authors must register through ACL (workshop). If you need a visa, we encourage you to submit your visa application at submission time. See here for more information.

Contact

Questions? E-mail conll.chairs@gmail.com

Social Media

Program Chairs

Gemma Boleda, Universitat Pompeu Fabra / ICREA
Michael Roth, University of Technology Nuremberg

Area Chairs

Christian Bentz, University of Passau
Zhenguang G. Cai, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Tanise Ceron, Bocconi University
Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, McGill University
Iria De Dios, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Max van Duijn, Leiden University
Kilian Evang, HHU Düsseldorf
Agnieszka Faleńska, University of Stuttgart
Aina Garí Soler, INRIA
Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Dieuwke Hupkes, Meta AI Research
Xixian Liao, Barcelona Supercomputing Center
Brielen Madureira, University of Potsdam
Yohei Oseki, University of Tokyo
Sandro Pezzelle, University of Amsterdam
Emily Prud'hommeaux, Boston College
Tanja Samardžić, University of Zurich
Carina Silberer, University of Stuttgart
Ece Takmaz, Utrecht University
Tessa Verhoef, Leiden University
Yang Xu, University of Toronto
Wei Zhao, University of Aberdeen

Publicity Chairs

Snigdha Chaturvedi, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Anvesh Rao Vijjini, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Publication Chairs

Emily Cheng, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Selina Meyer, University of Technology Nuremberg

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