This paper describes the CatFormCompare tool, designed to enable the comparison of phonological content between pairs of signs, especially in larger datasets. With this tool and a schema for coding categorical form (the SL CatForm coding schema), a pipeline is created that allows a feedback mechanism for advancing research—specifically by directly addressing one of the hard problems in sign language phonology: how to extract true minimal pairs from datasets coded for categorical form? Solving this problem would simultaneously improve phonological distance measurements for sign languages because it would mean that the units for measuring distance are grounded in the linguistic structure of the language and not simply a by-product of the coding system. Here we report on the tool and the first evaluation of its functioning.

This system paper presents the DeMeVa team’s approaches to the third edition of the Learning with Disagreements shared task (LeWiDi 2025; Leonardelli et al., 2025). We explore two directions: in-context learning (ICL) with large language models, where we compare example sampling strategies; and label distribution learning (LDL) methods with RoBERTa (Liu et al., 2019b), where we evaluate several fine-tuning methods. Our contributions are twofold: (1) we show that ICL can effectively predict annotator-specific annotations (perspectivist annotations), and that aggregating these predictions into soft labels yields competitive performance; and (2) we argue that LDL methods are promising for soft label predictions and merit further exploration by the perspectivist community.

This paper introduces a new large-scale n-gram corpus that is created specifically from social media text. Two distinguishing characteristics of this corpus are its monthly temporal attribute and that it is created from 1.65 billion comments of user-generated text in Reddit. The usefulness of this corpus is exemplified and evaluated by a novel Topic-based Latent Semantic Analysis (TLSA) algorithm. The experimental results show that unsupervised TLSA outperforms all the state-of-the-art unsupervised and semi-supervised methods in SEMEVAL 2015: paraphrase and semantic similarity in Twitter tasks.