Austria

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly engaging in moral and ethical reasoning, where criteria for judgment are often unclear, even for humans. While LLM alignment studies cover many areas, one important yet underexplored area is how LLMs make judgments about obligations. This work reveals a strong tendency in LLMs to judge non-obligatory contexts as obligations when prompts are augmented with modal expressions such as \textit{must} or \textit{ought to}. We introduce this phenomenon as Deontological Keyword Bias (DKB). We find that LLMs judge over 90\% of commonsense scenarios as obligations when modal expressions are present. This tendency is consist across various LLM families, question types, and answer formats. To mitigate DKB, we propose a judgment strategy that integrates few-shot examples with reasoning prompts. This study sheds light on how modal expressions, as a form of linguistic framing, influence the normative decisions of LLMs and underscores the importance of addressing such biases to ensure judgment alignment.

ACL 2025

Deontological Keyword Bias: The Impact of Modal Verbs on Normative Judgments of Language Models

in-context debiasing

obligation judgment in llms

deontological keyword bias

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

Quality Estimation (QE) models evaluate the quality of machine translations without reference translations, serving as the reward models for the translation task.
Due to the data scarcity, synthetic data generation has emerged as a promising solution.
However, synthetic QE data often suffers from distribution shift, which can manifest as discrepancies between pseudo and real translations, or in pseudo labels that do not align with human preferences.
To tackle this issue, we introduce DCSQE, a novel framework for alleviating distribution shift in synthetic QE data.
To reduce the difference between pseudo and real translations, we employ the constrained beam search algorithm and enhance translation diversity through the use of distinct generation models.
DCSQE uses references—i.e., translation supervision signals—to guide both the generation and annotation processes, enhancing the quality of token-level labels.
DCSQE further identifies the shortest phrase covering consecutive error tokens, mimicking human annotation behavior, to assign the final phrase-level labels.
Specially, we underscore that the translation model can not annotate translations of itself accurately.
Extensive experiments demonstrate that DCSQE outperforms SOTA baselines like CometKiwi in both supervised and unsupervised settings.
Further analysis offers insights into synthetic data generation that could benefit reward models for other tasks.
The code is available at https://github.com/NJUNLP/njuqe.

Alleviating Distribution Shift in Synthetic Data for Machine Translation Quality Estimation

Safety concerns of Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have gradually become an important problem in various applications. Surprisingly, previous works indicate a counterintuitive phenomenon that using textual unlearning to align MLLMs achieves comparable safety performances with MLLMs aligned with image-text pairs. To explain such a phenomenon, we discover a $\textit{\textbf{V}isual \textbf{S}afety \textbf{I}nformation \textbf{L}eakage} (\textbf{VSIL})$ problem in existing multimodal safety benchmarks, $\textit{i.e.}$, the potentially risky content in the image has been revealed in the textual query. Thus, MLLMs can easily refuse these sensitive image-text pairs according to textual queries only, leading to \textbf{unreliable cross-modality safety evaluation of MLLMs}. We also conduct a further comparison experiment between textual alignment and multimodal alignment to highlight this drawback. To this end, we construct $\textit{\textbf{V}isual \textbf{L}eakless \textbf{S}afety \textbf{B}ench} (\textbf{VLSBench})$ with 2.2k image-text pairs through an automated data pipeline. Experimental results indicate that VLSBench poses a significant challenge to both open-source and close-source MLLMs, $\textit{i.e.}$, LLaVA, Qwen2-VL and GPT-4o. Besides, we empirically compare textual and multimodal alignment methods on VLSBench and find that textual alignment is effective enough for multimodal safety scenarios with VSIL, while multimodal alignment is preferable for safety scenarios without VSIL.

VLSBench: Unveiling Visual Leakage in Multimodal Safety

Generative large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated gaps in diverse cultural awareness across the globe. We investigate the effect of retrieval augmented generation and search-grounding techniques on LLMs' ability to display familiarity with various national cultures. Specifically, we compare the performance of standard LLMs, LLMs augmented with retrievals from a bespoke knowledge base (i.e., KB grounding), and LLMs augmented with retrievals from a web search (i.e., search grounding) on multiple cultural awareness benchmarks. We find that search grounding significantly improves the LLM performance on multiple-choice benchmarks that test propositional knowledge (e.g., cultural norms, artifacts, and institutions), while KB grounding's effectiveness is limited by inadequate knowledge base coverage and a suboptimal retriever. However, search grounding also increases the risk of stereotypical judgments by language models and fails to improve evaluators' judgments of cultural familiarity in a human evaluation with adequate statistical power. These results highlight the distinction between propositional cultural knowledge and open-ended cultural fluency when it comes to evaluating LLMs' cultural awareness.

Towards Geo-Culturally Grounded LLM Generations

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in open-ended dialogue, yet their inability to retain and retrieve relevant information from long-term interactions limits their effectiveness in applications requiring sustained personalization. External memory mechanisms have been proposed to address this limitation, enabling LLMs to maintain conversational continuity. However, existing approaches struggle with two key challenges. First, rigid memory granularity fails to capture the natural semantic structure of conversations, leading to fragmented and incomplete representations. Second, fixed retrieval mechanisms cannot adapt to diverse dialogue contexts and user interaction patterns. In this work, we propose Reflective Memory Management (RMM), a novel mechanism for long-term dialogue agents, integrating forward- and backward-looking reflections: (1) Prospective Reflection, which dynamically summarizes interactions across granularities—utterances, turns, and sessions—into a personalized memory bank for effective future retrieval, and (2) Retrospective Reflection, which iteratively refines the retrieval in an online reinforcement learning (RL) manner based on LLMs' cited evidence. Experiments show that RMM demonstrates consistent improvement across various metrics and benchmarks. For example, RMM shows more than 10% accuracy improvement over the baseline without memory management on the LongMemEval dataset.

In Prospect and Retrospect: Reflective Memory Management for Long-term Personalized Dialogue Agents

In-context machine translation (MT) with large language models (LLMs) is a promising approach for low-resource MT, as it can readily take advantage of linguistic resources such as grammar books and dictionaries.
Such resources are usually selectively integrated into the prompt so that LLMs can directly perform translation without any specific training, via their in-context learning capability (ICL).
However, the relative importance of each type of resource, e.g., dictionary, grammar book, and retrieved parallel examples, is not entirely clear.
To address this gap, this study systematically investigates how each resource and its quality affect the translation performance, with the Manchu language as our case study. 
To remove any prior knowledge of Manchu encoded in the LLM parameters and single out the effect of ICL, we also experiment with an enciphered version of Manchu texts.
Our results indicate that high-quality dictionaries and good parallel examples are very helpful, while grammars hardly help.
In a follow-up study, we showcase a promising application of in-context MT: parallel data augmentation as a way to bootstrap a conventional MT model. 
When monolingual data abound, generating synthetic parallel data through in-context MT offers a pathway to mitigate data scarcity and build effective and efficient low-resource neural MT systems.

Understanding In-context Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages: A Case Study on Manchu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been found to struggle with systematic reasoning. Even on tasks where they appear to perform well, their performance often depends on shortcuts, rather than on genuine reasoning abilities, leading them to collapse on out-of-distribution (OOD) examples. Post-training strategies based on reinforcement learning and chain-of-thought prompting have recently been hailed as a step change. However, little is known about the potential of the resulting ``Large Reasoning Models'' (LRMs) beyond maths and programming-based problem solving, where genuine OOD problems can be sparse. In this paper, we focus on tasks that require systematic relational composition for qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning. The setting allows fine control over problem difficulty to precisely measure OOD generalization. We find that, zero-shot LRMs generally outperform their LLM counterparts in single-path reasoning tasks but struggle in the multi-path setting. Whilst showing comparatively better results, fine-tuned LLMs are also not capable of multi-path generalization. We also provide evidence for the behavioral interpretation for this, i.e., that LRMs are shallow disjunctive reasoners.

Benchmarking Systematic Relational Reasoning with Large Language and Reasoning Models

Causal discovery is fundamental to scientific research, yet traditional statistical algorithms face significant challenges, including expensive data collection, redundant computation for known relations, and unrealistic assumptions. While recent LLM-based methods excel at identifying commonly known causal relations, they fail to uncover novel relations. We introduce IRIS (Iterative Retrieval and Integrated System for Real-Time Causal Discovery), a novel framework that addresses these limitations. Starting with a set of initial variables, IRIS automatically collects relevant documents, extracts variables, and uncovers causal relations. Our hybrid causal discovery method combines statistical algorithms and LLM-based methods to discover known and novel causal relations. In addition to causal discovery on initial variables, the missing variable proposal component of IRIS identifies and incorporates missing variables to expand the causal graphs. Our approach enables real-time causal discovery from only a set of initial variables without requiring pre-existing datasets.

IRIS: An Iterative and Integrated Framework for Verifiable Causal Discovery in the Absence of Tabular Data

Efficient data selection is crucial to accelerate the pretraining of language model (LMs). While various methods have been proposed to enhance data efficiency, limited research has addressed the inherent conflicts between these approaches to achieve optimal data selection for LM pretraining. To tackle this problem, we propose a multi-actor collaborative data selection mechanism. Each data selection method independently prioritizes data based on its specific criterion and updates its prioritization rules using the current state of the model, functioning as an independent actor for data selection. Additionally, a console is designed to adjust the impacts of different actors at various stages and dynamically integrate information from all actors throughout the LM pretraining process. We conduct extensive empirical studies to evaluate our multi-actor framework. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves data efficiency, accelerates convergence in LM pretraining, and achieves an average relative performance gain up to 10.5% across multiple language model benchmarks compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

Efficient Pretraining Data Selection for Language Models via Multi-Actor Collaboration

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various domains but pose inherent privacy risks. Existing methods to evaluate privacy leakage in LLMs often use memorized prefixes or simple instructions to extract data, both of which well-alignment models can easily block. Meanwhile, Jailbreak attacks bypass LLM safety mechanisms to generate harmful content, but their role in privacy scenarios remains underexplored. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of jailbreak attacks in extracting sensitive information, bridging privacy leakage and jailbreak attacks in LLMs. Moreover, we propose PIG, a novel framework targeting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and addressing the limitations of current jailbreak methods. Specifically, PIG identifies PII entities and their types in privacy queries, uses in-context learning to build a privacy context, and iteratively updates it with three gradient-based strategies to elicit target PII. We evaluate PIG and existing jailbreak methods using two privacy-related datasets. Experiments on four white-box and two black-box LLMs show that PIG outperforms baseline methods and achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) results. The results underscore significant privacy risks in LLMs, emphasizing the need for stronger safeguards.

PIG: Privacy Jailbreak Attack on LLMs via Gradient-based Iterative In-Context Optimization

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has been developed as an efficient approach for adapting large language models (LLMs) by fine-tuning two low-rank matrices, thereby reducing the number of trainable parameters. However, prior research indicates that many of the weights in these matrices are redundant, leading to inefficiencies in parameter utilization. To address this limitation, we introduce Dense Low-Rank Adaptation (DenseLoRA), a novel approach that enhances parameter efficiency while achieving superior performance compared to LoRA. DenseLoRA builds upon the concept of representation fine-tuning, incorporating a single Encoder-Decoder to refine and compress hidden representations across all adaptation layers before applying adaptation. Instead of relying on two redundant low-rank matrices as in LoRA, DenseLoRA adapts LLMs through a dense low-rank matrix, improving parameter utilization and adaptation efficiency. We evaluate DenseLoRA on various benchmarks, showing that it achieves 83.8% accuracy with only 0.01% of trainable parameters, compared to LoRA's 80.8% accuracy with 0.70% of trainable parameters on LLaMA3-8B. Additionally, we conduct extensive experiments to systematically assess the impact of DenseLoRA’s components on overall model performance.

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Alleviating Distribution Shift in Synthetic Data for Machine Translation Quality Estimation

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