Thomas Seidl
Author directory2026
Beyond Input Understanding: Diagnosing Multilingual Mathematical Reasoning with Directed Acyclic Trace Graphs
Jiaqiao Zhang | Zhoujun Li | Raoyuan Zhao | Jian Lan | Thomas Seidl | Michael A. Hedderich | Hinrich Schuetze | Yihong Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jiaqiao Zhang | Zhoujun Li | Raoyuan Zhao | Jian Lan | Thomas Seidl | Michael A. Hedderich | Hinrich Schuetze | Yihong Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong mathematical reasoning performance in English, but remain much less reliable in many low- and medium-resource languages. This gap is often explained as a failure to understand non-English problem statements. We show that this view is incomplete: even when the problem is given in English, controlling the model’s reasoning language can substantially reduce accuracy, suggesting that language also affects reasoning execution itself. To study this effect, we introduce DATG, a Directed Acyclic Trace Graph framework that maps reasoning traces to language-independent mathematical anchors and dependencies. This allows us to align target-language traces with reference DAGs and measure whether they cover required mathematical nodes, respect dependency edges, and avoid harmful mathematical actions. Experiments on the Qwen3 series across 12 languages show that non-English reasoning often suffers from reduced anchor coverage and weaker dependency fidelity, especially in low-resource languages. Motivated by this diagnosis, we propose Loop-Retry and Formula-Retry, two simple test-time controls targeting DATG-exposed failure modes, and show that they consistently improve target-language reasoning performance in low-resource languages.
2023
Cross-Domain Argument Quality Estimation
Michael Fromm | Max Berrendorf | Evgeniy Faerman | Thomas Seidl
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Michael Fromm | Max Berrendorf | Evgeniy Faerman | Thomas Seidl
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Argumentation is one of society’s foundational pillars, and, sparked by advances in NLP, and the vast availability of text data, automated mining of arguments receives increasing attention. A decisive property of arguments is their strength or quality. While there are works on the automated estimation of argument strength, their scope is narrow:They focus on isolated datasets and neglect the interactions with related argument-mining tasks, such as argument identification and evidence detection. In this work, we close this gap by approaching argument quality estimation from multiple different angles:Grounded on rich results from thorough empirical evaluations, we assess the generalization capabilities of argument quality estimation across diverse domains and the interplay with related argument mining tasks. We find that generalization depends on a sufficient representation of different domains in the training part. In zero-shot transfer and multi-task experiments, we reveal that argument quality is among the more challenging tasks but can improve others. We publish our code at https://github.com/fromm-m/acl-cross-domain-aq.
2021
Active Learning for Argument Strength Estimation
Nataliia Kees | Michael Fromm | Evgeniy Faerman | Thomas Seidl
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP
Nataliia Kees | Michael Fromm | Evgeniy Faerman | Thomas Seidl
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP
High-quality arguments are an essential part of decision-making. Automatically predicting the quality of an argument is a complex task that recently got much attention in argument mining. However, the annotation effort for this task is exceptionally high. Therefore, we test uncertainty-based active learning (AL) methods on two popular argument-strength data sets to estimate whether sample-efficient learning can be enabled. Our extensive empirical evaluation shows that uncertainty-based acquisition functions can not surpass the accuracy reached with the random acquisition on these data sets.