Austria

Although generically expressing empathy is straightforward, effectively conveying empathy in specialized settings presents nuanced challenges. We present a conceptually motivated investigation into the use of figurative language and causal semantic context to facilitate targeted empathetic response generation within a specific mental health support domain, studying how these factors may be leveraged to promote improved response quality. Our approach achieves a 7.6% improvement in BLEU, a 36.7% reduction in Perplexity, and a 7.6% increase in lexical diversity (D-1 and D-2) compared to models without these signals, and human assessments show a 24.2% increase in empathy ratings. These findings provide deeper insights into grounded empathy understanding and response generation, offering a foundation for future research in this area.

ACL 2025

From Heart to Words: Generating Empathetic Responses via Integrated Figurative Language and Semantic Context Signals

empathy cause

empathy generation

figurative language

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

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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.

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)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely found to struggle with logical reasoning, where even fine-tuned models fail dramatically on out-of-distribution problems. However, existing work has focused on relatively complex ``many-hop'' reasoning problems. In this paper, we analyse the performance of fine-tuned LLMs on simple reasoning problems, all of which can be solved in at most three inference steps. Due to the simplicity of these problems, the model cannot encounter test problems that are fundamentally different from those it has seen during training. Unfortunately, however, we find that the models remain highly brittle, being susceptible to seemingly innocent perturbations, such as the addition of duplicates to the set of premises and shuffling the order in which the premises are presented.

There's No Such Thing as Simple Reasoning for LLMs

Automated definition generation systems have been proposed to support vocabulary expansion for language learners. The main barrier to the success of these systems is that learners often struggle to understand definitions due to the presence of potentially unfamiliar words and grammar, particularly when non-standard language is involved. To address these challenges, we propose CLIX, the task of Cross-Lingual explanations of Idiomatic eXpressions. We explore the capabilities of current NLP models for this task, and observe that while it remains challenging, large language models show promise. Finally, we perform a detailed error analysis to highlight the key challenges that need to be addressed before we can reliably incorporate these systems into educational tools.

CLIX: Cross-Lingual Explanations of Idiomatic Expressions

LLMs excel in decision-making by reasoning over long contexts and identifying key factors. However, processing transcripts from complex scenarios presents challenges due to ungrammatical sentences, repetitions, and hedging. For example, in an earnings call, a company executive may project a positive revenue outlook despite uncertainty about future earnings. LLMs must systematically account for such uncertainty in decision-making. In this paper, we introduce DeFine, a framework that constructs probabilistic factor profiles from complex scenarios and integrates them with analogical reasoning. By leveraging insights from past experiences, DeFine helps LLMs make informed decisions in novel situations. Our approach separates uncertainty quantification from decision-making, making it particularly useful in fields such as financial investment decisions and medical consultations, where handling uncertainty is crucial.

DeFine: Enhancing LLM Decision-Making with Factor Profiles and Analogical Reasoning

Current Large Language Model (LLM) agents demonstrate strong reasoning and tool use capabilities, but often lack self-awareness, failing to balance these approaches effectively. This imbalance leads to **Tool Overuse**, where models unnecessarily rely on external tools for tasks solvable with parametric knowledge, increasing computational overhead. Inspired by human metacognition, we introduce **SMART** (Strategic Model-Aware Reasoning with Tools), a paradigm that enhances an agent’s self-awareness to optimize task handling and reduce tool overuse. To support this paradigm, we introduce **SMART-ER**, a dataset spanning three domains, where reasoning alternates between parametric knowledge and tool-dependent steps, with each step enriched by rationales explaining when tools are necessary. Through supervised training, we develop **SMARTAgent**, a family of models that dynamically balance parametric knowledge and tool use. Evaluations show that SMARTAgent reduces tool use by 24% while improving performance by over 37%, enabling 7B-scale models to match its 70B counterpart and GPT-4. Additionally, SMARTAgent generalizes to out-of-distribution test data like GSM8K and MINTQA, maintaining accuracy with just one-fifth the tool calls. These highlight the potential of strategic tool use to enhance reasoning, mitigate overuse, and bridge the gap between model size and performance, advancing intelligent and resource-efficient agent designs.

SMART: Self-Aware Agent for Tool Overuse Mitigation

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to remarkable improvements in language understanding and text generation. However, challenges remain in enhancing their performance for underrepresented languages, ensuring continual learning without catastrophic forgetting, and developing robust evaluation methodologies. This work addresses these issues by investigating the impact of Continued Pretraining (CPT) on multilingual models and proposing a comprehensive evaluation framework for LLMs. Our first contribution explores CPT strategies for languages with limited representation in multilingual models, focusing on Galician. We analyze how CPT with Galician corpora improves text generation while assessing the trade-offs between linguistic enrichment and task-solving capabilities. Our findings show that CPT with small, high-quality corpora and diverse instructions enhances both task performance and linguistic quality. Our second contribution is a structured evaluation framework based on distinguishing task-based and language-based assessments, leveraging existing and newly developed benchmarks for Galician. Additionally, we contribute new Galician LLMs, datasets for evaluation and instructions, and an evaluation framework.

Enhancing Multilingual Large Language Models: Continued Pretraining and Comprehensive Evaluation for Underrepresented Languages

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating external information into the response generation process. However, how context-faithful LLMs are and what factors influence LLMs' context faithfulness remain largely unexplored. In this study, we investigate the impact of memory strength and evidence presentation on LLMs' receptiveness to external evidence. We quantify the memory strength of LLMs by measuring the divergence in LLMs' responses to different paraphrases of the same question, which is not considered by previous works. We also generate evidence in various styles to examine LLMs' behavior. Our results show that for questions with high memory strength, LLMs are more likely to rely on internal memory. Furthermore, presenting paraphrased evidence significantly increases LLMs' receptiveness compared to simple repetition or adding details.

Investigating Context Faithfulness in Large Language Models: The Roles of Memory Strength and Evidence Style

This paper delves into a novel backdoor attack scenario, aiming to uncover potential security risks associated with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) during multi-round open-ended conversations with users. In the practical use of MLLMs, users have full control over the interaction process with the model, such as using their own collected photos and posing arbitrary open-ended questions. Traditional backdoor attacks that rely on adding external triggers are less applicable. To this end, we introduce a new shadow-activated backdoor attacking paradigm in this paper, wherein attacks implicitly inject malicious content into the responses of MLLMs when the responses explicitly relate to the shadowed object, i.e., without any triggers. To facilitate the shadow-activated backdoor attack, we present a novel framework named BadMLLM to achieve the desired behaviors by constructing a poisoned dataset using GPT-4 Vision and implementing an attention-regularized tuning strategy to address the semantic discontinuity between the original response and the inserted promotion. Extensive experimental results conducted on five MLLMs, three objects, and two types of promotion slogans have demonstrated impressive performance in achieving both efficacy and utility goals, thereby highlighting the significant potential risks concealed within MLLMs.

Shadow-Activated Backdoor Attacks on Multimodal Large Language Models

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved software development automation, including bug localization, code synthesis, program repair, and test generation. However, most prior work on program repair focuses on isolated elements, such as classes or functions, neglecting their interdependencies, which limits repair accuracy. We present SynFix, a RelationGraph-based approach that integrates LLMs with structural search and synchronization techniques for coordinated program repair across codebases. SynFix constructs a \textbf{RelationGraph} to capture relationships among classes, functions, variables, and their interactions (e.g., imports, inheritance, dependencies). Each RelationGraph node includes detailed code descriptions to help LLMs understand root causes and retrieve relevant contexts. By analyzing one-hop nodes in the RelationGraph, SynFixensures repairs account for dependent updates across components. Patch validation is conducted using regression tests from the SWE-bench benchmark suite. Evaluated on SWE-bench datasets, SynFix resolves 52.33% of issues in \textbf{SWE-bench-lite} (300 GitHub issues), 55.8% in \textbf{SWE-bench-verified} (500 issues), and 29.86% in \textbf{SWE-bench-full} (2,294 issues), outperforming baselines such as Swe-Agent, Agentless and AutoCodeRover. The codebase is available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AutoFix-EC86/}.

SynFix: Synchronous Repair for Codebase via RelationGraph

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have shown promise in tackling complex tasks. However, existing solutions often suffer from limited agent coordination and heavy reliance on predefined Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), which demand extensive human input. To address these limitations, we propose MegaAgent, a large-scale autonomous LLM-based multi-agent system. MegaAgent generates agents based on task complexity and enables dynamic task decomposition, parallel execution, efficient communication, and comprehensive system monitoring of agents. In evaluations, MegaAgent demonstrates exceptional performance, successfully developing a Gobang game within 800 seconds and scaling up to 590 agents in a national policy simulation to generate multi-domain policies. It significantly outperforms existing systems, such as MetaGPT, in both task completion efficiency and scalability. By eliminating the need for predefined SOPs, MegaAgent demonstrates exceptional scalability and autonomy, setting a foundation for advancing true autonomy in MAS. Code is available at https://github.com/Xtra-Computing/MegaAgent

MegaAgent: Dynamic Agent Coordination Without SOPs

As large language models (LLMs) become an important way of information access, there have been increasing concerns that LLMs may intensify the spread of unethical content, including implicit bias that hurts certain populations without explicit harmful words. In this paper, we conduct a rigorous evaluation of LLMs' implicit bias towards certain demographics by attacking them from a psychometric perspective to elicit agreements to biased viewpoints. Inspired by psychometric principles in cognitive and social psychology, we propose three attack approaches, i.e., Disguise, Deception, and Teaching. Incorporating the corresponding attack instructions, we built two benchmarks: (1) a bilingual dataset with biased statements covering four bias types (2.7K instances) for extensive comparative analysis, and (2) BUMBLE, a larger benchmark spanning nine common bias types (12.7K instances) for comprehensive evaluation. Extensive evaluation of popular commercial and open-source LLMs shows that our methods can elicit LLMs' inner bias more effectively than competitive baselines. Our attack methodology and benchmarks offer an effective means of assessing the ethical risks of LLMs, driving progress toward greater accountability in their development.

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There's No Such Thing as Simple Reasoning for LLMs

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