Austria

Publicly significant images from events carry valuable contextual information with applications in domains such as journalism and education. However, existing methodologies often struggle to accurately extract this contextual relevance from images. To address this challenge, we introduce GETREASON (Geospatial Event Temporal Reasoning), a framework designed to go beyond surfacelevel image descriptions and infer deeper contextual meaning. We hypothesize that extracting global event, temporal, and geospatial information from an image enables a more accurate understanding of its contextual significance. We also introduce a new metric GREAT (Geospatial, Reasoning and Event Accuracy with Temporal alignment) for a reasoning capturing evaluation. Our layered multi-agentic approach, evaluated using a reasoning-weighted metric, demonstrates that meaningful information can be inferred from images, allowing them to be effectively linked to their corresponding events and broader contextual background.

ACL 2025

GETReason: Enhancing Image Context Extraction through Hierarchical Multi-Agent Reasoning

structured responses

agentic framework

information extraction

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

poster

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
[Read more](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GI_hvOpjswAuYdUTromfeDiPpCcqidwg/view?usp=sharing)

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Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

The rapid evolution of scientific fields introduces challenges in organizing and retrieving scientific literature. While expert-curated taxonomies have traditionally addressed this need, the process is time-consuming and expensive. Furthermore, recent automatic taxonomy construction methods either (1) over-rely on a specific corpus, sacrificing generalizability, or (2) depend heavily on the general knowledge of large language models (LLMs) contained within their pre-training datasets, often overlooking the dynamic nature of evolving scientific domains. Additionally, these approaches fail to account for the multi-faceted nature of scientific literature, where a single research paper may contribute to multiple dimensions (e.g., methodology, new tasks, evaluation metrics, benchmarks). To address these gaps, we propose TaxoAdapt, a framework that dynamically adapts an LLM-generated taxonomy to a given corpus across multiple dimensions. TaxoAdapt performs iterative hierarchical classification, expanding both the taxonomy width and depth based on corpus' topical distribution. We demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance across a diverse set of computer science conferences over the years to showcase its ability to structure and capture the evolution of scientific fields. As a multidimensional method, TaxoAdapt generates taxonomies that are 26.51% more granularity-preserving and 50.41% more coherent than the most competitive baselines judged by LLMs.

TaxoAdapt: Aligning LLM-Based Multidimensional Taxonomy Construction to Evolving Research Corpora

Leveraging multi-agentic frameworks to enhance large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated significant potential recently, with most existing studies focusing on prompting and developing workflows with frozen LLMs. In this paper, we aim to further unleash the power of such multi-agentic frameworks for post-training LLMs for better collaboration. Specifically, we develop a new paradigm of Multi-Agent Post-co-training for collaborative LLMs with Reinforcement Learning (MAPoRL). In MAPoRL, multiple LLMs first generate their own responses and engage in discussions to collaboratively enhance the final response output; the final output is then scored by a verifier, where the scores serve as the reward and is maximized through multi-agent RL. Additionally, MAPoRL also reshapes the reward above with additional incentives to encourage corrective and persuasive outputs in the discussions. A key novelty from most existing LLM post-training paradigms is the advocacy of co-training multiple LLMs together, and the use of RL for better generalization. Accompanied by a few analytical insights, our experiments show that training single LLMs solely is insufficient for encouraging collaboration, while multi-agent co-training can significantly enhance the collaboration performance across multiple datasets, with generalization to unseen domains, compared to that of multiple LLMs before post-training.

MAPoRL: Multi-Agent Post-Co-Training for Collaborative Large Language Models with Reinforcement Learning

Graphical User Interface (GUI) automation relies on accurate GUI grounding. However, obtaining large-scale, high-quality labeled data remains a key challenge, particularly in desktop environments like Windows Operating System (OS). Existing datasets primarily focus on structured web-based elements, leaving a gap in real-world GUI interaction data for non-web applications. To address this, we introduce a new framework that leverages LLMs to generate large-scale GUI grounding data, enabling automated and scalable labeling across diverse interfaces. To ensure high accuracy and reliability, we manually validated and refined 5,000 GUI coordinate-instruction pairs, creating WinSpot—the first benchmark specifically designed for GUI grounding tasks in Windows environments. WinSpot provides a high-quality dataset for training and evaluating visual GUI agents, establishing a foundation for future research in GUI automation across diverse and unstructured desktop environments.

WinSpot: GUI Grounding Benchmark with Multimodal Large Language Models

We propose a novel method to integrate a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) into a span-based Named Entity Recognition (NER) model to model the shared and unshared information among labels in multiple datasets and ease the training on the datasets. 
Experimental results using multiple biomedical datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method, achieving improved performance on the BioRED dataset.

Enhancing NER by Harnessing Multiple Datasets with Conditional Variational Autoencoders

The safety mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) exhibit notable fragility, as even fine-tuning on datasets without harmful content may still undermine their safety capabilities. Meanwhile, existing safety alignment methods predominantly rely on the fine-tuning process, which inadvertently leads to the increased complexity and computational resources required. To address these issues, we introduce LSSF, a novel safety re-alignment framework with \underline{L}ow-Rank \underline{S}afety \underline{S}ubspace \underline{F}usison. Our proposed method exploits the low-rank characteristics of safety information in LLMs by constructing a low-rank projection matrix to extract the principal components of safety vectors. Notably, this projection matrix represents the low-rank safety subspace of the LLMs, which we have observed to remain stable during fine-tuning process and is isolated from the model's general capabilities. These principal components are used to effectively restore safety alignment when combined with fine-tuned LLMs through linear arithmetic. Additionally, to account for the varying encoding densities of safety information across different layers of LLMs, we propose a novel metric called safety singular value entropy. This metric quantifies the encoding density and allows for the dynamic computation of the safety-critical rank for each safety vector. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed post-hoc alignment method can effectively restore the safety alignment of fine-tuned models with minimal impact on their performance on downstream tasks.

LSSF: Safety Alignment for Large Language Models through Low-Rank Safety Subspace Fusion

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their ability to understand both natural language and code, driving their use in tasks like natural language-to-code (NL2Code) and code summarisation. However, LLMs are prone to hallucination—outputs that stray from intended meanings. Detecting hallucinations in code summarisation is especially difficult due to the complex interplay between programming and natural languages. We introduce a first-of-its-kind dataset, CodeSumEval, with $\sim$10K samples, curated specifically for hallucination detection in code summarisation. We further propose a novel Entity Tracing Framework (ETF) that a) utilises static program analysis to identify code entities from the program and b) uses LLMs to map and verify these entities and their intents within generated code summaries. Our experimental analysis demonstrates the framework’s effectiveness, leading to a 73\% F1 score. The proposed approach provides a method for detecting hallucinations by tracing entities from the summary to the code, allowing us to evaluate summary accuracy and localise the error within the summary.

ETF: An Entity Tracing Framework for Hallucination Detection in Code Summaries

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), encounter the challenge of distribution shift. 
Current approaches typically address this issue through online sampling from the target policy, which requires significant computational resources.
In this paper, we hypothesize that during off-policy training, while the ranking order of output generated by policy changes, their overall distribution remains relatively stable.
This stability allows the conversion of the sampling process from the target policy into a computationally
efficient re-ranking of preference data.
Building on this hypothesis, we propose a new framework that leverages the model's intrinsic safety judgment capability to extract reward signals, which are then used to calculate label confidence for preference reordering. 
Extensive experiments and theoretical analysis demonstrate that the proposed method effectively addresses the distribution shift issue, 
remarkably enhancing the safety performance while avoiding about 300x computational overheads.

Representation-based Reward Modeling for Efficient Safety Alignment of Large Language Model

We introduce a professionally translated extension of the TruthfulQA benchmark designed to evaluate truthfulness in Basque, Catalan, Galician, and Spanish. Truthfulness evaluations of large language models (LLMs) have primarily been focused on English. However, the ability of LLMs to maintain truthfulness across languages remains under-explored. Our study evaluates 12 state-of-the-art open LLMs, comparing base and instruction-tuned models using human evaluation, multiple-choice metrics, and LLM-as-a-Judge scoring. Our findings reveal that, while LLMs perform best in English and worst in Basque (the lowest-resourced language), overall truthfulness discrepancies across languages are smaller than anticipated. Furthermore, we show that LLM-as-a-Judge correlates more closely with human judgments than multiple-choice metrics, and that informativeness plays a critical role in truthfulness assessment. Our results also indicate that machine translation provides a viable approach for extending truthfulness benchmarks to additional languages, offering a scalable alternative to professional translation. Finally, we observe that universal knowledge questions are better handled across languages than context- and time-dependent ones, highlighting the need for truthfulness evaluations that account for cultural and temporal variability. Datasets, models and code are publicly available under open licenses.

Truth Knows No Language: Evaluating Truthfulness Beyond English

Misinformation can be countered with fact-checking, but the process is costly and slow. Identifying checkworthy claims is the first step, where automation can help scale fact-checkers' efforts. However, detection methods struggle with content that is (1) multimodal, (2) from diverse domains, and (3) synthetic. We introduce HintsOfTruth, a public dataset for multimodal checkworthiness detection with 27K real-world and synthetic image/claim pairs. The mix of real and synthetic data makes this dataset unique and ideal for benchmarking detection methods. We compare fine-tuned and prompted Large Language Models (LLMs). We find that well-configured lightweight text-based encoders perform comparably to multimodal models but the former only focus on identifying non-claim-like content. Multimodal LLMs can be more accurate but come at a significant computational cost, making them impractical for large-scale applications. When faced with synthetic data, multimodal models perform more robustly.

HintsOfTruth: A Multimodal Checkworthiness Detection Dataset with Real and Synthetic Claims

Multimodal coreference resolution (MCR) aims to identify mentions referring to the same entity across different modalities, such as text and visuals, and is essential for understanding multimodal content. In the era of rapidly growing multimodal content and social media, MCR is particularly crucial for interpreting user interactions and bridging text-visual references to improve communication and personalization. However, MCR research for real-world dialogues remains unexplored due to the lack of sufficient data resources. To address this gap, we introduce TikTalkCoref, the first Chinese multimodal coreference dataset for social media in real-world scenarios, derived from the popular Douyin short-video platform. This dataset pairs short videos with corresponding textual dialogues from user comments and includes manually annotated coreference clusters for both person mentions in the text and the coreferential person head regions in the corresponding video frames. We also present an effective benchmark approach for MCR, focusing on the celebrity domain, and conduct extensive experiments on our dataset, providing reliable benchmark results for this newly constructed dataset. We release the TikTalkCoref dataset to facilitate future research on MCR for real-world social media dialogues at https://github.com/lxystaruni/TikTalkCoref.

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