Automatic fact-checking aims to support professional fact-checkers by offering tools that can help speed up manual fact-checking. Yet, existing frameworks fail to address the key step of producing output suitable for broader dissemination to the general public: while human fact-checkers communicate their findings through fact-checking articles, automated systems typically produce little or no justification for their assessments. Here, we aim to bridge this gap. We argue for the need to extend the typical automatic fact-checking pipeline with automatic generation of full fact-checking articles. We first identify key desiderata for such articles through a series of interviews with experts from leading fact-checking organizations. We then develop QRAFT, an LLM-based agentic framework that mimics the writing workflow of human fact-checkers. Finally, we assess the practical usefulness of QRAFT through human evaluations with professional fact-checkers. Our evaluation shows that while QRAFT outperforms several previously proposed text-generation approaches, it lags considerably behind expert-written articles. We hope that our work will enable further research in this new and important direction.

The CheckThat! lab aims to advance the development of innovative technologies designed to identify and counteract online disinformation and manipulation efforts across various languages and platforms. The first five editions focused on key tasks in the information verification pipeline, including check-worthiness, evidence retrieval and pairing, and verification. Since the 2023 edition, the lab has expanded its scope to address auxiliary tasks that support research and decision-making in verification. In the 2025 edition, the lab revisits core verification tasks while also considering auxiliary challenges. Task 1 focuses on the identification of subjectivity (a follow-up from CheckThat! 2024), Task 2 addresses claim normalization, Task 3 targets fact-checking numerical claims, and Task 4 explores scientific web discourse processing. These tasks present challenging classification and retrieval problems at both the document and span levels, including multilingual settings.

Neural scaling laws have revolutionized the design and optimization of large-scale AI models by revealing predictable relationships between model size, dataset volume, and computational resources. Early research established power-law relationships in model performance, leading to compute-optimal scaling strategies. However, recent studies highlighted their limitations across architectures, modalities, and deployment contexts. Sparse models, mixture-of-experts, retrieval-augmented learning, and multimodal models often deviate from traditional scaling patterns. Moreover, scaling behaviors vary across domains such as vision, reinforcement learning, and fine-tuning, underscoring the need for more nuanced approaches. In this survey, we synthesize insights from over 50 studies, examining the theoretical foundations, empirical findings, and practical implications of scaling laws. We also explore key challenges, including data efficiency, inference scaling, and architecture-specific constraints, advocating for adaptive scaling strategies tailored to real-world applications. We suggest that while scaling laws provide a useful guide, they do not always generalize across all architectures and training strategies.

Counterspeech has emerged as a popular and effective strategy for combating online hate speech, sparking growing research interest in automating its generation using language models. However, the field still lacks standardised evaluation protocols and reliable automated evaluation metrics that align with human judgement. Current automatic evaluation methods, primarily based on similarity metrics, do not effectively capture the complex and independent attributes of counterspeech quality, such as contextual relevance, aggressiveness, or argumentative coherence. This has led to an increased dependency on labor-intensive human evaluations to assess automated counter-speech generation methods. To address these challenges, we introduce CSEval, a novel dataset and framework for evaluating counterspeech quality across four dimensions: contextual-relevance, aggressiveness, argument-coherence, and suitableness. Furthermore, we propose Auto-Calibrated COT for Counterspeech Evaluation (Auto-CSEval), a prompt-based method with auto-calibrated chain-of-thoughts (CoT) for scoring counterspeech using large language models. Our experiments show that Auto-CSEval outperforms traditional metrics like ROUGE, METEOR, and BertScore in correlating with human judgement, indicating a significant improvement in automated counterspeech evaluation.

Mental illness is a widespread and debilitating condition with substantial societal and personal costs. Traditional diagnostic and treatment approaches, such as self-reported questionnaires and psychotherapy sessions, often impose significant burdens on both patients and clinicians, limiting accessibility and efficiency. Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly in Natural Language Processing and multimodal techniques, hold great potential for recognizing and addressing conditions such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and post-traumatic stress disorder. However, privacy concerns, including the risk of sensitive data leakage from datasets and trained models, remain a critical barrier to deploying these AI systems in real-world clinical settings. These challenges are amplified in multimodal methods, where personal identifiers such as voice and facial data can be misused. This paper presents a critical and comprehensive study of the privacy challenges associated with developing and deploying AI models for mental health. We further prescribe potential solutions, including data anonymization, synthetic data generation, and privacy-preserving model training, to strengthen privacy safeguards in practical applications. Additionally, we discuss evaluation frameworks to assess the privacy-utility trade-offs in these approaches. By addressing these challenges, our work aims to advance the development of reliable, privacy-aware AI tools to support clinical decision-making and improve mental health outcomes.

The ever-increasing size of large language models (LLMs) presents significant challenges for deployment due to their heavy computational and memory requirements. Current model pruning techniques attempt to alleviate these issues by relying heavily on external calibration datasets to determine which parameters to prune or compress, thus limiting their flexibility and scalability across different compression ratios. Moreover, these methods often cause severe performance degradation, particularly in downstream tasks, when subjected to higher compression rates. In this paper, we propose PruneNet, a novel model compression method that addresses these limitations by reformulating model pruning as a policy learning process. PruneNet decouples the pruning process from the model architecture, eliminating the need for calibration datasets. It learns a stochastic pruning policy to assess parameter importance solely based on intrinsic model properties while preserving the spectral structure to minimize information loss. PruneNet can compress the LLaMA-2-7B model in just 15 minutes, achieving over 80% retention of its zero-shot performance with a 30% compression ratio, outperforming existing methods that retain only 75% performance. Furthermore, on complex multitask language understanding tasks, PruneNet demonstrates its robustness by preserving up to 80% performance of the original model, proving itself a superior alternative to conventional structured compression techniques.

A taxonomy is a hierarchical graph containing knowledge to provide valuable insights for various web applications. Online retail organizations like Microsoft and Amazon utilize taxonomies to improve product recommendations and optimize advertisement by enhancing query interpretation. However, the manual construction of taxonomies requires significant human effort. As web content continues to expand at an unprecedented pace, existing taxonomies risk becoming outdated, struggling to incorporate new and emerging information effectively. As a consequence, there is a growing need for dynamic taxonomy expansion to keep them relevant and up-to-date. Existing taxonomy expansion methods often rely on classical word embeddings to represent entities. However, these embeddings fall short in capturing hierarchical polysemy, where an entity's meaning can vary based on its position in the hierarchy and its surrounding context. To address this challenge, we introduce QuanTaxo, an innovative quantum-inspired framework for taxonomy expansion. QuanTaxo encodes entity representations in quantum space, effectively modeling hierarchical polysemy by leveraging the principles of Hilbert space to capture interference effects between entities, yielding richer and more nuanced representations. Comprehensive experiments on four real-world benchmark datasets show that QuanTaxo significantly outperforms classical embedding models, achieving substantial improvements of 18.45% in accuracy, 20.5% in Mean Reciprocal Rank, and 17.87% in Wu & Palmer metrics across eight classical embedding-based baselines. We further highlight the superiority of QuanTaxo through extensive ablation and case studies.

Bilingual lexical processing is shaped by the complex interplay of phonological, orthographic, and semantic features of two languages within an integrated mental lexicon. In humans, this is evident in the ease with which cognate words - words similar in both orthographic form and meaning (e.g., blind, meaning "sightless" in both English and German) - are processed, compared to the challenges posed by interlingual homographs, which share orthographic form but differ in meaning (e.g., gift, meaning "present" in English but "poison" in German). We investigate how multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) handle such phenomena, focusing on English-Spanish, English-French, and English-German cognates, non-cognate, and interlingual homographs. Specifically, we evaluate their ability to disambiguate meanings and make semantic judgments, both when these word types are presented in isolation or within sentence contexts. Our findings reveal that while certain LLMs demonstrate strong performance in recognizing cognates and non-cognates in isolation, they exhibit significant difficulty in disambiguating interlingual homographs, often performing below random baselines. This suggests LLMs tend to rely heavily on orthographic similarities rather than semantic understanding when interpreting interlingual homographs. Further, we find LLMs exhibit difficulty in retrieving word meanings, with performance in isolative disambiguation tasks having no correlation with semantic understanding. Finally, we study how the LLM processes interlingual homographs in incongruent sentences. We find models to opt for different strategies in understanding English and non-English homographs, highlighting a lack of a unified approach to handling cross-lingual ambiguities.

In mental health counseling, a variety of earlier studies have focused on dialogue modeling. However, most of these studies give limited to no emphasis on the quality of interaction between a patient and a therapist. The therapeutic bond between a patient and a therapist directly correlates with effective mental health counseling. It involves developing the patient's trust on the therapist over the course of counseling. To assess the therapeutic bond in counseling, we introduce trust as a therapist-assistive metric. Our definition of trust involves patients' willingness and openness to express themselves and, consequently, receive better care. We conceptualize it as a dynamic trajectory observable through textual interactions during the counseling. To facilitate trust modeling, we present MENTAL-TRUST, a novel counseling dataset comprising manual annotation of 212 counseling sessions with first-of-its-kind seven expert-verified ordinal trust levels. We project our problem statement as an ordinal classification task for trust quantification and propose a new benchmark, TrustBench, comprising a suite of classical and state-of-the-art language models on MENTAL-TRUST. We evaluate the performance across a suite of metrics and lay out an exhaustive set of findings. Our study aims to unfold how trust evolves in therapeutic interactions.

The crisis of mental health issues is escalating. Effective counseling serves as a critical lifeline for individuals suffering from conditions like PTSD, stress, etc. Therapists forge a crucial therapeutic bond with clients, steering them towards positivity. Unfortunately, the massive shortage of professionals, high costs, and mental health stigma pose significant barriers to consulting therapists. As a substitute, Virtual Mental Health Assistants (VMHAs) have emerged in the digital healthcare space. However, most existing VMHAs lack the commonsense to understand the nuanced sentiments of clients to generate effective responses. To this end, we propose EmpRes, a novel sentiment-guided mechanism incorporating commonsense awareness for generating responses. By leveraging foundation models and harnessing commonsense knowledge, EmpRes aims to generate responses that effectively shape the client's sentiment towards positivity. We evaluate the performance of EmpRes on HOPE, a benchmark counseling dataset, and observe a remarkable performance improvement compared to the existing baselines across a suite of qualitative and quantitative metrics. Moreover, our extensive empirical analysis and human evaluation show that the generation ability of EmpRes is well-suited and, in some cases, surpasses the gold standard. Further, we deploy EmpRes as a chat interface for users seeking mental health support. We address the deployed system's effectiveness through an exhaustive user study with a significant positive response. Our findings show that 91% of users find the system effective, 80% express satisfaction, and over 85.45% convey a willingness to continue using the interface and recommend it to others, demonstrating the practical applicability of EmpRes in addressing the pressing challenges of mental health support, emphasizing user feedback, and ethical considerations in a real-world context.