Language identification (LID) is a fundamental step in curating multilingual corpora. However, LID models still perform poorly for many languages, especially on the noisy and heterogeneous web data often used to train multilingual language models. In this paper, we introduce CommonLID, a community-driven, human-annotated LID benchmark for the web domain, covering 109 languages. Many of the included languages have been previously under-served, making CommonLID a key resource for developing more representative high-quality text corpora. We show CommonLID’s value by using it, alongside five other common evaluation sets, to test eight popular LID models. We analyse our results to situate our contribution and to provide an overview of the state of the art. In particular, we highlight that existing evaluations overestimate LID accuracy for many languages in the web domain. We make CommonLID and the code used to create it available under an open, permissive license.

Allusion recognition—a task demanding contextual activation of cultural knowledge—serves as a critical test of LLMs’ ability to deploy stored information in open-ended, figurative settings. We introduce a framework for evaluating Persian literary allusions through (1) classical poetry annotations and (2) LLM-generated texts incorporating allusions in novel contexts. By combining knowledge assessments, multiple-choice tasks, and open-ended recognition, we analyze whether failures stem from knowledge gaps or activation challenges. Evaluations across eleven LLMs highlight a notable observation: models exhibit strong foundational knowledge and high multiple-choice accuracy, yet performance drops substantially in open-ended tasks, especially for indirect references. Reasoning-optimized models generalize better to novel contexts, whereas distilled models show marked degradation in cultural reasoning. The gap underscores that LLMs’ limitations arise not from missing knowledge but from difficulties in spontaneously activating cultural references without explicit cues. We propose allusion recognition as a benchmark for contextual knowledge deployment, highlighting the need for training paradigms that bridge factual recall and culturally grounded reasoning. Our code, datasets and results are available at https://github.com/MelikaNobakhtian/Allusion

ImageArg is a shared task at the 10th ArgMining Workshop at EMNLP 2023. It leverages the ImageArg dataset to advance multimodal persuasiveness techniques. This challenge comprises two distinct subtasks: 1) Argumentative Stance (AS) Classification: Assessing whether a given tweet adopts an argumentative stance. 2) Image Persuasiveness (IP) Classification: Determining if the tweet image enhances the persuasive quality of the tweet. We conducted various experiments on both subtasks and ranked sixth out of the nine participating teams.