Austria

Grice&#39;s Quantity Maxims dictate that human speakers aim for the optimal quantity of information during conversation. To empower LLMs to self-repair their responses toward optimal quantity and improve their attentive listening skills, we propose Q-Tuning and Q-Traveling, which draw on heuristic path-finding to enable decoder-only LLMs to travel among multiple ``Q-alternatives&#39;&#39; (Quantity Alternatives) and search for the optimal quantity in coordination with a conversation goal. Automatic and human evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of Q-Tuning and Q-Traveling in constructing human-like, user-centered conversation agents.

ACL 2025

Towards LLM-powered Attentive Listener: A Pragmatic Approach through Quantity Self-Repair

attentive listening; pragmatics; dialogue systems

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EMNLP 2024

EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

Grice's Quantity Maxims dictate that human speakers aim for the optimal quantity of information during conversation. To empower LLMs to self-repair their responses toward optimal quantity and improve their attentive listening skills, we propose Q-Tuning and Q-Traveling, which draw on heuristic path-finding to enable decoder-only LLMs to travel among multiple ``Q-alternatives'' (Quantity Alternatives) and search for the optimal quantity in coordination with a conversation goal. Automatic and human evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of Q-Tuning and Q-Traveling in constructing human-like, user-centered conversation agents.

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)

The effective utilization of structured data, integral to corporate data strategies, has been challenged by the rise of large language models (LLMs) capable of processing unstructured information. This shift prompts the question: can LLMs interpret structured data directly in its unstructured form? We propose an automatic evaluation data generation method for assessing LLMs' reasoning capabilities on structure-rich text to explore this. Our approach supports 8 structured languages and 29 tasks, generating data with adjustable complexity through controllable nesting and structural width. We introduce StrucText-Eval, a benchmark containing 5,800 pre-generated and annotated samples designed to evaluate how well LLMs understand and reason through structured text. StrucText-Eval is divided into two suites: a regular Test suite (3,712 samples) and a Test-Hard suite (2,088 samples), the latter emphasizing the gap between human and model performance on more complex tasks. Experimental results show that while open-source LLMs achieve a maximum accuracy of 74.9% on the standard dataset, their performance drops significantly to 45.8% on the harder dataset. In contrast, human participants reach an accuracy of 92.6% on StrucText-Eval-Hard, highlighting LLMs' current limitations in handling intricate structural information.

StrucText-Eval: Evaluating Large Language Model's Reasoning Ability in Structure-Rich Text

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in environmental perception, reasoning-based decision-making, and simulating complex human behaviors, particularly in interactive role-playing contexts. This paper introduces the Multiverse Interactive Role-play Ability General Evaluation (MIRAGE), a comprehensive framework designed to assess LLMs' proficiency in portraying advanced human behaviors through murder mystery games. MIRAGE features eight intricately crafted scripts encompassing diverse themes and styles, providing a rich simulation. To evaluate LLMs' performance, MIRAGE employs four distinct methods: the Trust Inclination Index (TII) to measure dynamics of trust and suspicion, the Clue Investigation Capability (CIC) to measure LLMs' capability of conducting information, the Interactivity Capability Index (ICI) to assess role-playing capabilities and the Script Compliance Index (SCI) to assess LLMs' capability of understanding and following instructions. Our experiments indicate that even popular models like GPT-4 face significant challenges in navigating the complexities presented by the MIRAGE. The datasets and simulation codes are available in https://github.com/lime728/MIRAGE.

MIRAGE: Exploring How Large Language Models Perform in Complex Social Interactive Environments

Currently, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in the field of psychological counseling. However, existing mental health LLMs overlook a critical issue where they do not consider the fact that different psychological counselors exhibit different personal styles, including linguistic style and therapy techniques, etc. As a result, these LLMs fail to satisfy the individual needs of clients who seek different counseling styles. To help bridge this gap, we propose PsyDT, a novel framework using LLMs to construct the Digital Twin of Psychological counselor with personalized counseling style. Compared to the time-consuming and costly approach of collecting a large number of real-world counseling cases to create a specific counselor's digital twin, our framework offers a faster and more cost-effective solution. To construct PsyDT, we utilize dynamic one-shot learning by using GPT-4 to capture counselor's unique counseling style, mainly focusing on linguistic style and therapy techniques. Subsequently, using existing single-turn long-text dialogues with client's questions, GPT-4 is guided to synthesize multi-turn dialogues of specific counselor. Finally, we fine-tune the LLMs on the synthetic dataset, PsyDTCorpus, to achieve the digital twin of psychological counselor with personalized counseling style. Experimental results indicate that our proposed PsyDT framework can synthesize multi-turn dialogues that closely resemble real-world counseling cases and demonstrate better performance compared to other baselines, thereby show that our framework can effectively construct the digital twin of psychological counselor with a specific counseling style.

PsyDT: Using LLMs to Construct the Digital Twin of Psychological Counselor with Personalized Counseling Style for Psychological Counseling

Dyslexia, a common learning disability, requires an early diagnosis. However, current screening tests are very time- and resource-consuming. We present an LSTM that aims to automatically classify dyslexia based on eye movements recorded during natural reading
combined with basic demographic information and linguistic features. The proposed model reaches an AUC of 0.93 and outperforms the
state-of-the-art model by 7 %. We report several ablation studies demonstrating that the fixation features matter the most for classification.

Automatic detection of dyslexia based on eye movements during reading in Russian

Large language models (LLM) have prioritized expanding the context window from which models can incorporate more information. However, training models to handle long contexts presents significant challenges. These include the scarcity of high-quality natural long-context data, the potential for performance degradation on short-context tasks, and the reduced training efficiency associated with attention mechanisms. In this paper, we introduce Untie the Knots (UtK), a novel data augmentation strategy employed during the continue pre-training phase, designed to efficiently enable LLMs to gain long-context capabilities without the need to modify the existing data mixture. In particular, we chunk the documents, shuffle the chunks, and create a complex and knotted structure of long texts; LLMs are then trained to untie these knots and identify relevant segments within seemingly chaotic token sequences. This approach greatly improves the model's performance by accurately attending to relevant information in long context and the training efficiency is also largely increased. We conduct extensive experiments on models with 7B and 72B parameters, trained on 20 billion tokens, demonstrating that UtK achieves 75% and 84.5% accurracy on RULER at 128K context length, significantly outperforming other long context strategies. The trained models will open-source for further research.

Untie the Knots: An Efficient Data Augmentation Strategy for Long-Context Pre-Training in Language Models

We present a novel evaluation framework designed to assess the lexical proficiency and linguistic creativity of Transformer-based Language Models (LMs). We validate the framework by analyzing the performance of a set of LMs of different sizes, in both mono- and multilingual configuration, across tasks involving the generation, definition, and contextual usage of lexicalized words, neologisms, and nonce words. To support these evaluations, we developed a novel dataset of lexical entries for the Italian language, including curated definitions and usage examples sourced from various online platforms. The results highlight the robustness and effectiveness of our framework in evaluating multiple dimensions of LMs' linguistic understanding and offer an insight, through the assessment of their linguistic creativity, on the lexical generalization abilities of LMs.

Evaluating Lexical Proficiency in Neural Language Models

Measuring the prevalence and dimensions of self beliefs is essential for understanding human self-perception and various psychological outcomes. In this paper, we develop a novel task for classifying language that contains explicit or implicit mentions of the author's self beliefs. 
We contribute a set of 2,000 human-annotated self beliefs, 100,000 LLM-labeled examples, and 10,000 surveyed self belief paragraphs. We then evaluate several encoder-based classifiers and training routines for this task. Our trained model, SelfAwareNet, achieved an AUC of 0.944, outperforming 0.839 from OpenAI's state-of-the-art GPT-4o model. Using this model we derive data-driven categories of self beliefs and demonstrate their ability to predict valence, depression, anxiety, and stress. We release the resulting self belief classification model and annotated datasets for use in future research.

Capturing Author Self Beliefs in Social Media Language

We show that existing evaluations for assessing the factuality of news from conventional sources, such as claims on fact-checking websites, result in high accuracies over time for LLM-based detectors—even after their knowledge cutoffs. This suggests that recent popular false information from such sources can be easily identified due to its likely presence in pre-training/retrieval corpora or the emergence of salient, yet shallow, patterns in these datasets. Instead, we argue that a proper factuality evaluation dataset should test a model's ability to reason about current events by retrieving and reading related evidence. To this end, we develop a novel pipeline that leverages natural language feedback from a RAG-based detector to iteratively modify real-time news into deceptive variants that challenge LLMs. Our iterative rewrite decreases the binary classification ROC-AUC by an absolute 17.5 percent for a strong RAG-based GPT-4o detector. Our experiments reveal the important role of RAG in both evaluating and generating challenging news examples, as retrieval-free LLM detectors are vulnerable to unseen events and adversarial attacks, while feedback from RAG-based evaluation helps discover more deceitful patterns.

Real-time Fake News from Adversarial Feedback

Multi-modal Emotion Recognition in Conversation (MMERC) aims to identify speakers' emotional states using multi-modal conversational data, significant for various domains. MMERC requires addressing emotional causes: contextual factors that influence emotions, alongside emotional evidence directly expressed in the target utterance. Existing methods primarily model general conversational dependencies, such as sequential utterance relationships or inter-speaker dynamics, but fall short in capturing diverse and detailed emotional causes, including emotional contagion, influences from others, and self-referenced or externally introduced events. To address these limitations, we propose the Evidence-Cause Attention Network for Multi-Modal Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ECERC). ECERC integrates emotional evidence with contextual causes through five stages: Evidence Gating extracts and refines emotional evidence across modalities; Cause Encoding captures causes from conversational context; Evidence-Cause Interaction uses attention to integrate evidence with diverse causes, generating rich candidate features for emotion inference; Feature Gating adaptively weights contributions of candidate features; and Emotion Classification classifies emotions. We evaluate ECERC on two widely used benchmark datasets, IEMOCAP and MELD. Experimental results show that ECERC achieves competitive performance in weighted F1-score and accuracy, demonstrating its effectiveness in MMERC

ECERC: Evidence-Cause Attention Network for Multi-Modal Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Aligned representations across languages is a desired property in multilingual large language models (mLLMs), as alignment can improve performance in cross-lingual tasks. Typically alignment requires fine-tuning a model, which is computationally expensive, and sizable language data, which often may not be available. A data-efficient alternative to fine-tuning is model interventions --- a method for manipulating model activations to steer generation into the desired direction. We analyze the effect of a popular intervention (finding experts) on the alignment of cross-lingual representations in mLLMs. We identify the neurons to manipulate for a given language and introspect the embedding space of mLLMs pre- and post-manipulation. We show that modifying the mLLM's activations changes its embedding space such that cross-lingual alignment is enhanced. Further, we show that the changes to the embedding space translate into improved downstream performance on retrieval tasks, with up to 2x improvements in top-1 accuracy on cross-lingual retrieval.

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StrucText-Eval: Evaluating Large Language Model's Reasoning Ability in Structure-Rich Text

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