Austria

Automatic medical coding has the potential to ease documentation and billing processes. For this task, transparency plays an important role for medical coders and regulatory bodies, which can be achieved using explainability methods. However, the evaluation of these approaches has been mostly limited to short text and binary settings due to a scarcity of annotated data. Recent efforts by Cheng et al. (2023) have introduced the MDACE dataset, which provides a valuable resource containing code evidence in clinical records. In this work, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the MDACE dataset and perform plausibility evaluation of current explainable ICD coding systems from an applied perspective. With this, we contribute to a deeper understanding of automatic ICD coding and evidence extraction. Our findings reveal that ground truth evidence aligns with code descriptions to a certain degree. An investigation into state-of-the-art approaches shows a high overlap with ground truth evidence. We propose introduce match measures and highlight success and failure cases. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations for developing and evaluating explainable ICD coding systems.

ACL 2025

The anatomy of evidence: An investigation into explainable ICD coding

plausibility evaluation

evidence extraction

medical coding

explainable machine learning

text classification

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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

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### 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)

Human readers can efficiently comprehend scrambled words, a phenomenon known as Typoglycemia, primarily by relying on word form; if word form alone is insufficient, they further utilize contextual cues for interpretation. While advanced large language models (LLMs) exhibit similar abilities, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. To investigate this, we conduct controlled experiments to analyze the roles of word form and contextual information in semantic reconstruction and examine LLM attention patterns. Specifically, we first propose SemRecScore, a reliable metric to quantify the degree of semantic reconstruction, and validate its effectiveness. Using this metric, we study how word form and contextual information influence LLMs’ semantic reconstruction ability, identifying word form as the core factor in this process. Furthermore, we analyze how LLMs utilize word form and find that they rely on specialized attention heads to extract and process word form information, with this mechanism remaining stable across varying levels of word scrambling. This distinction between LLMs’ fixed attention patterns primarily focused on word form and human readers’ adaptive strategy in balancing word form and contextual information provides insights into enhancing LLM performance by incorporating human-like, context-aware mechanisms. Code is available on: https://github.com/Aurora-cx/TypoLLM.

Word Form Matters: LLMs’ Semantic Reconstruction under Typoglycemia

Model knowledge editing enables the efficient correction of erroneous information and the continuous updating of outdated knowledge within language models. While existing research has demonstrated strong performance in single-instance or few-instance sequential editing and one-time massive editing scenarios, the batched sequential editing paradigm remains a significant challenge. The primary issue lies in the model’s tendency to gradually forget previously edited knowledge and become increasingly unstable after multiple iterations of batched editing. 
To address these challenges, we propose **SeqMMR**, an enhanced framework for batched sequential knowledge editing that leverages **Seq**uential **M**odel **M**erging and a model **R**outer. Our approach iteratively merges parameters from current batch-edited models with those of their predecessors, ensuring that newly emerging knowledge is integrated while mitigating the forgetting of previously edited knowledge. Furthermore, the model router directs queries unrelated to the edited knowledge to an unedited model backup, preventing unintended alterations in model predictions. Extensive experiments across various datasets demonstrate that our approach effectively mitigates knowledge forgetting, improves performance across all previous batches, and better preserves the model's general capabilities.

SeqMMR: Sequential Model Merging and LLM Routing for Enhanced Batched Sequential Knowledge Editing

We present a novel pipeline, ReflectEvo, to demonstrate that small language models (SLMs) can enhance meta introspection through reflection learning. This process iteratively generates self-reflection for self-training, fostering a continuous and self-evolving process. Leveraging this pipeline, we construct ReflectEvo-460k, a large-scale, comprehensive, self-generated reflection dataset with broadened instructions and diverse multi-domain tasks. Building upon this dataset, we demonstrate the effectiveness of reflection learning to improve SLMs' reasoning abilities using SFT and DPO with remarkable performance, substantially boosting Llama-3 from 52.4% to 71.2% and Mistral from 44.4% to 71.1%. It validates that ReflectEvo can rival or even surpass the reasoning capability of the three prominent open-sourced models on BIG-bench without distillation from superior models or fine-grained human annotation. We further conduct a deeper analysis of the high quality of self-generated reflections and their impact on error localization and correction. Our work highlights the potential of continuously enhancing the reasoning performance of SLMs through iterative reflection learning in the long run.

Improving Meta Introspection of Small LLMs by Learning Self-Reflection from Self-Generated Data

We present GaRAGe, a large RAG benchmark with human-curated long-form answers and annotations of each grounding passage, allowing a fine-grained evaluation of whether LLMs can identify relevant grounding when generating RAG answers. Our benchmark contains 2366 questions of diverse complexity, dynamism, and topics, and includes over 35K annotated passages retrieved from both private document sets and the Web, to reflect real-world RAG use cases. This makes it an ideal test bed to evaluate an LLM’s ability to identify only the relevant information necessary to compose a response, or provide a deflective response when there is insufficient information. Evaluations of multiple state-of-the-art LLMs on GaRAGe show that the models tend to over-summarise rather than (a) ground their answers strictly on the annotated relevant passages (reaching at most a Relevance-Aware Factuality Score of 60%), or (b) deflect when no relevant grounding is available (reaching at most 31% true positive rate in deflections). The F1 in attribution to relevant sources is at most 58.9%, and we show that performance is particularly reduced when answering time-sensitive questions and when having to draw knowledge from sparser private grounding sources.

GaRAGe: A Benchmark with Grounding Annotations for RAG Evaluation

Improving context faithfulness in large language models is essential for developing trustworthy retrieval augmented generation systems and mitigating hallucinations, especially in long-form question answering (LFQA) tasks or scenarios involving knowledge conflicts. Existing methods either intervene LLMs only at inference without addressing their inherent limitations or overlook the potential for self-improvement. In this paper, we introduce GenDiE(Generate, Discriminate, Evolve), a novel self-evolving framework that enhances context faithfulness through fine-grained sentence-level optimization. GenDiE combines both generative and discriminative training, equipping LLMs with self-generation and self-scoring capabilities to facilitate iterative self-evolution. This supports both data construction for model alignment and score-guided search during inference. Furthermore, by treating each sentence in a response as an independent optimization unit, GenDiE effectively addresses the limitations of previous approaches that optimize at the holistic answer level, which may miss unfaithful details. Experiments on ASQA (in-domain LFQA) and ConFiQA (out-of-domain counterfactual QA) datasets demonstrate that GenDiE surpasses various baselines in both faithfulness and correctness, and exhibits robust performance for domain adaptation.

Generate, Discriminate, Evolve: Enhancing Context Faithfulness via Fine-Grained Sentence-Level Self-Evolution

Paraphrasing is rooted in semantics, which makes evaluating paraphrase generation systems hard. Current paraphrase generators are typically evaluated using borrowed metrics from adjacent text-to-text tasks, like machine translation or text summarization. These metrics tend to have ties to the surface form of the reference text. This is not ideal for paraphrases as we typically want variation in the lexicon while persisting semantics. To address this problem, and inspired by learned similarity evaluation on plain text, we propose PAM, a Paraphrase AMR-Centric Evaluation Metric. This metric uses AMR graphs extracted from the input text, which consist of semantic structures agnostic to the text surface form, making the resulting evaluation metric more robust to variations in syntax or lexicon. Additionally, we evaluated PAM on different semantic textual similarity datasets and found that it improves the correlations with human semantic scores when compared to other AMR-based metrics.

PAM: Paraphrase AMR-Centric Evaluation Metric

Recent advances in mechanistic interpretability have highlighted the potential of automating interpretability pipelines in analyzing the latent representations within LLMs. While they may enhance our understanding of internal mechanisms, the field lacks standardized evaluation methods for assessing the validity of discovered features. We attempt to bridge this gap by introducing FADE: Feature Alignment to Description Evaluation, a scalable model-agnostic framework for evaluating feature-description alignment. FADE evaluates alignment across four key metrics - Clarity, Responsiveness, Purity, and Faithfulness - and systematically quantifies the causes for the misalignment of feature and their description. We apply FADE to analyze existing open-source feature descriptions, and assess key components of automated interpretability pipelines, aiming to enhance descriptions quality. Our findings highlight fundamental challenges in generating feature descriptions, particularly for SAEs as compared to MLP neurons, providing insights into the limitations and future directions of automated interpretability.

FADE: Why Bad Descriptions Happen to Good Features

Many current studies focus on extracting tests or treatments when constructing clinical pathways, often neglecting the patient's symptoms and diagnosis, leading to incomplete diagnostic and therapeutic logic. Therefore, this paper aims to extract clinical pathways from electronic medical records that encompass complete diagnostic and therapeutic logic, including temporal information, patient symptoms, diagnosis, and tests or treatments. To achieve this objective, we propose a novel clinical pathway representation: the clinical status pathway. We also design a LLM-based pipeline framework for extracting clinical status pathway from electronic medical records, with the core concept being to improve extraction accuracy by modeling the diagnostic and treatment processes. In our experiments, we apply this framework to construct a comprehensive breast cancer-specific clinical status pathway and evaluate its performance on medical question-answering and decision-support tasks, demonstrating significant improvements over traditional clinical pathways. The code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EMR2CSP-BD11

EMRs2CSP : Mining Clinical Status Pathway from Electronic Medical Records

Analyzing texts spanning long periods of time is critical for researchers in historical linguistics and related disciplines. However, publicly available corpora suitable for such analyses are scarce. The Project Gutenberg (PG) corpus presents a significant yet underutilized opportunity in this context, due to the absence of accurate temporal metadata. We take advantage of language models and information retrieval to explore four sources of information -- Open Web, Wikipedia, Open Library API, and Project Gutenberg (PG) -- to add missing temporal metadata to PG books. Through 20 experiments employing state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) methods, we estimate the production years of all PG books. We curate an enriched metadata repository for PG books and propose a refined version of the PG corpus, which includes 53774 books with a total of 3.8 billion tokens in 11 languages, produced between 1600 and 2000. This work provides a new resource for computational linguistics and humanities studies focusing on diachronic analyses. All experiments data are published for the public (https://drive.proton.me/urls/DNQE5562RM#L2ldqrQ88Y6B).

Filling the Temporal Void: Recovering Missing Publication Years in the Project Gutenberg Corpus Using LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in tasks requiring interpretive and inferential accuracy. In this paper, we introduce ExpliCa, a new dataset for evaluating LLMs in explicit causal reasoning. ExpliCa uniquely integrates both causal and temporal relations presented in different linguistic orders and explicitly expressed by linguistic connectives. The dataset is enriched with crowdsourced human acceptability ratings. We tested LLMs on ExpliCa through prompting and perplexity-based metrics. We assessed seven commercial and open-source LLMs, revealing that even top models struggle to reach 0.80 accuracy. Interestingly, models tend to confound temporal relations with causal ones, and their performance is also strongly influenced by the linguistic order of the events. Finally, perplexity-based scores and prompting performance are differently affected by model size.

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Word Form Matters: LLMs’ Semantic Reconstruction under Typoglycemia

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