26 May 2025, by Janis-Marie Paul

Photo: Janis-Marie Paul

The Hub of Computing and Data Science (HCDS) and the Language Technology (LT) group at Universität Hamburg made a strong showing at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), the most prestigious international conference in Computational Linguistics and NLP. 

ACL 2025 received a large number of high-quality submissions, and we are proud that 11 papers involving HCDS and LT researchers were accepted across the main conference, Findings and Demos.
The accepted contributions cover a wide range of topics, including cross-cultural emotion analysis, argument summarization, multimodal and multilingual benchmarks, and language model interpretability. 

These contributions reflect the breadth and depth of our research – from fundamental innovation to socially relevant applications – and underline HCDS’s commitment to diversity, open resources, and collaborative science. 

Congratulations to all authors and collaborators – we are proud of this outstanding presence at ACL 2025!

ACL HCDS & LT List: 

1. Tadesse Destaw Belay, Ahmed Haj Ahmed, Alvin C Grissom II, Iqra Ameer, Grigori Sidorov, Olga Kolesnikova, Seid Muhie Yimam, CULEMO: Cultural Lenses on Emotion - Benchmarking LLMs for Cross-Cultural Emotion Understanding è Main 
    
2. Centurio: On Drivers of Multilingual Ability of Large Vision-Language Model Gregor Geigle, Florian Schneider, Carolin Holtermann, Chris Biemann, Radu Timofte, Anne Lauscher, Goran Glavaš, **equal contribution, è Main 
    
3. Irina Nikishina, Saba Anwar, Nikolay Dolgov, Maria Manina, Daria Ignatenko, Artem Shelmanov, Chris Biemann, How to Compare Things Properly? A Study on Answering Comparative Questions using Argument Summarization è main 
    
4. Viktor Moskvoretskii, Maria Marina, Mikhail Salnikov, Nikolay Ivanov, Sergey Pletenev, Daria Galimzianova, Nikita Krayko, Vasily Konovalov, Irina Nikishina, Alexander Panchenko, Adaptive Retrieval Without Self-Knowledge? Bringing Uncertainty Back Home  è main  
    
5. Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Nedjma Ousidhoum, Idris Abdulmumin, Jan Philip Wahle, Terry Ruas, Meriem Beloucif, Christine de Kock, Nirmal Surange, Daniela Teodorescu, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Alham Fikri Aji, Felermino D. M. A. Ali, Ilseyar Alimova, Vladimir Araujo, Nikolay Babakov, Naomi Baes, Ana-Maria Bucur, Andiswa Bukula, Guanqun Cao, Rodrigo Tufiño, Rendi Chevi, Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke, Alexandra Ciobotaru, Daryna Dementieva, Murja Sani Gadanya, Robert Geislinger, Bela Gipp, Oumaima Hourrane, Oana Ignat, Falalu Ibrahim Lawan, Rooweither Mabuya, Rahmad Mahendra, Vukosi Marivate, Andrew Piper, Alexander Panchenko, Charles Henrique Porto Ferreira, Vitaly Protasov, Samuel Rutunda, Manish Shrivastava, Aura Cristina Udrea, Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare, Sophie Wu, Florian Valentin Wunderlich, Hanif Muhammad Zhafran, Tianhui Zhang, Yi Zhou, Saif M. Mohammad: BRIGHTER: BRIdging the Gap in Human-Annotated Textual Emotion Recognition Datasets for 28 Languages -  è Main 
    
6. Naquee Rizwan, Seid Muhie Yimam, Daryna Dementieva, Florian Skupin, Tim Fischer, Daniil Moskovskiy, Aarushi Ajay Borkar, Robert Geislinger, Punyajoy Saha, Sarthak Roy, Martin Semmann, Alexander Panchenko, Chris Biemann, Animesh Mukherjee, Bridging Policies, Platforms and Research: Advancing NLP for Hate Speech Proactive Mitigation è Findings
   
   
7. Florian Schneider, Carolin Holtermann, Chris Biemann, Anne Lauscher,  GIMMICK - Globally Inclusive Multimodal Multitask Cultural Knowledge Benchmarking  è Findings
   
   
8. Fabian David Schmidt, Florian Schneider, Chris Biemann, Goran Glavaš,  MVL-SIB: A Massively Multilingual Vision-Language Benchmark for Cross-Modal Topical Matching,  **equal contribution è Findings
   
   
9. Xintong Wang, Jingheng Pan, Liang Ding, Longyue Wang, Longqin Jiang, Xingshan Li, Chris Biemann, CogSteer: Cognition-Inspired Selective Layer Intervention for Efficiently Steering Large Language Models è Findings
   
   
10. Yanfang Zhou, Xiaodong Li, Yuntao Liu, Yongqiang Zhao, Xintong Wang, Zhenyu Li, Jinlong Tian, Xinhai Xu, M2PA: A Multi-Memory Planning Agent for Open Worlds Inspired by Cognitive Theory è Findings
    
    
11. Yanfang Zhou, Yuntao Liu, Xiaodong Li, Yongqiang Zhao, Xintong Wang, Jinlong Tian, Zhenyu Li, Xinhai Xu, Metagent-P: A Neuro-Symbolic Planning Agent with Metacognition for Open Worlds è Findings 

ACL Demo 

Torben Hannemann, Frank Hammerschmidt, Simon Kazemi, Gregor Stange, Viktoria Wrobel, Robert Geislinger and Seid Muhie Yimam: LECTURE4ALL: A Lightweight Approach to Precise Timestamp Detection in Online Lecture Videos