Austria

Empowering LLMs with the ability to precisely understand long contexts is crucial for many downstream applications. However, handling long contexts with conventional transformer architecture requires substantial training and inference resources. Existing context condensing methods cannot accurately understand the full context, as there is a considerable amount of information loss in the condensing process. To address these issues, we present **FocusLLM**, a framework designed to extend the fixed context length of any decoder-only LLM, allowing the model to focus on relevant information from very long sequences. FocusLLM first divides long text input into chunks based on the model&#39;s original context length. It then employs the **_dynamic condensing_** process to distill crucial information from each chunk. Ultimately, through the novel **_parallel decoding_** mechanism, FocusLLM can integrate the extracted information into its local context. FocusLLM stands out for great training efficiency and versatility: trained with an 8K input length and with much less training cost than previous methods, FocusLLM exhibits superior performance across downstream tasks and maintains strong language modeling ability when handling extensive long texts, even up to 400K tokens. Our code is available at https://github.com/leezythu/FocusLLM.

ACL 2025

FocusLLM: Precise Understanding of Long Context by Dynamic Condensing

condensing

long context

language model

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
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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.

Empowering LLMs with the ability to precisely understand long contexts is crucial for many downstream applications. However, handling long contexts with conventional transformer architecture requires substantial training and inference resources. Existing context condensing methods cannot accurately understand the full context, as there is a considerable amount of information loss in the condensing process. To address these issues, we present **FocusLLM**, a framework designed to extend the fixed context length of any decoder-only LLM, allowing the model to focus on relevant information from very long sequences. FocusLLM first divides long text input into chunks based on the model's original context length. It then employs the **_dynamic condensing_** process to distill crucial information from each chunk. Ultimately, through the novel **_parallel decoding_** mechanism, FocusLLM can integrate the extracted information into its local context. FocusLLM stands out for great training efficiency and versatility: trained with an 8K input length and with much less training cost than previous methods, FocusLLM exhibits superior performance across downstream tasks and maintains strong language modeling ability when handling extensive long texts, even up to 400K tokens. Our code is available at https://github.com/leezythu/FocusLLM.

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)

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on widely benchmarked high-resource languages. However, linguistic nuances of under-resourced languages remain unexplored. We introduce Batayan, a holistic Filipino benchmark that systematically evaluates LLMs across three key natural language processing (NLP) competencies: understanding, reasoning, and generation. Batayan consolidates eight tasks, three of which have not existed prior for Filipino corpora, covering both Tagalog and code-switched Taglish utterances. Our rigorous, native-speaker-driven adaptation and validation processes ensures fluency and authenticity to the complex morphological and syntactic structures of Filipino, alleviating the pervasive translationese bias in existing Filipino corpora. We report empirical results on a variety of open-source and commercial LLMs, highlighting significant performance gaps that signal the under-representation of Filipino in pre-training corpora, the unique hurdles in modeling Filipino's rich morphology and construction, and the importance of explicit Filipino language support. Moreover, we discuss the practical challenges encountered in dataset construction and propose principled solutions for building culturally and linguistically-faithful resources in under-represented languages. We also provide a public evaluation suite as a clear foundation for iterative, community-driven progress in Filipino NLP.

Batayan: A Filipino NLP benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models

One of the goals of automatic evaluation metrics in grammatical error correction (GEC) is to rank GEC systems such that it matches human preferences. However, current automatic evaluations are based on procedures that diverge from human evaluation. Specifically, human evaluation derives rankings by aggregating sentence-level relative evaluation results, e.g., pairwise comparisons, using a rating algorithm, whereas automatic evaluation averages sentence-level absolute scores to obtain corpus-level scores, which are then sorted to determine rankings. In this study, we propose an aggregation method for existing automatic evaluation metrics which aligns with human evaluation methods to bridge this gap. We conducted experiments using various metrics, including edit-based metrics, 
-gram based metrics, and sentence-level metrics, and show that resolving the gap improves results for the most of metrics on the SEEDA benchmark.We also found that even BERT-based metrics sometimes outperform the metrics of GPT-4.

Rethinking Evaluation Metrics for Grammatical Error Correction: Why Use a Different Evaluation Process than Human?

Seed science is essential for modern agriculture, directly influencing crop yields and global food security. However, challenges such as interdisciplinary complexity and high costs with limited returns hinder progress, leading to a shortage of experts and insufficient technological support. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise across various fields, their application in seed science remains limited due to the scarcity of digital resources, complex gene-trait relationships, and the lack of standardized benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce SeedBench—the first multi-task benchmark specifically designed for seed science. Developed in collaboration with domain experts, SeedBench focuses on seed breeding and simulates key aspects of modern breeding processes. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 26 leading LLMs, encompassing proprietary, open-source, and domain-specific fine-tuned models. Our findings not only highlight the substantial gaps between the power of LLMs and the real-world seed science problems, but also make a foundational step for research on LLMs for seed design.

SeedBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Seed Science

We present 𝛿-Stance, a large-scale dataset of stances involved in legal argumentation.𝛿-Stance contains stance-annotated argument pairs, semi-automatically mined from millions of examples of U.S. judges citing precedent in context using citation signals. The dataset aims to facilitate work on the legal argument stance classification task, which involves assessing whether a case summary strengthens or weakens a legal argument (polarity) and to what extent (intensity). To assess the complexity of this task, we evaluate various existing NLP methods, including zero-shot prompting proprietary large language models (LLMs), and supervised fine-tuning of smaller open-weight language models (LMs) on 𝛿-Stance. Our findings reveal that although prompting proprietary LLMs can help predict stance polarity, supervised model fine-tuning on 𝛿-Stance is necessary to distinguish intensity. We further find that alternative strategies such as domain-specific pretraining and zero-shot prompting using masked LMs remain insufficient. Beyond our dataset’s utility for the legal domain, we further find that fine-tuning small LMs on 𝛿-Stance improves their performance in other domains. Finally, we study how temporal changes in signal definition can impact model performance, highlighting the importance of careful data curation for downstream tasks by considering the historical and sociocultural context. We publish the associated dataset to foster further research on legal argument reasoning.

𝛿-Stance: A Large-Scale Real World Dataset of Stances in Legal Argumentation

Theory of Mind (ToM)—the ability to reason about the mental states of oneself and others—is a cornerstone of human social intelligence. As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into daily life, understanding their ability to interpret and respond to human mental states is crucial for enabling effective interactions. In this paper, we review LLMs' ToM capabilities by analyzing both evaluation benchmarks and enhancement strategies. For evaluation, we focus on recently proposed and widely used story-based benchmarks. For enhancement, we provide an in-depth analysis of recent methods aimed at improving LLMs' ToM abilities. Furthermore, we outline promising directions for future research to further advance these capabilities and better adapt LLMs to more realistic and diverse scenarios. Our survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers interested in evaluating and advancing LLMs' ToM capabilities.

Theory of Mind in Large Language Models: Assessment and Enhancement

The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis proposes that speakers aim to distribute information evenly throughout a text, balancing production effort and listener comprehension difficulty. However, language typically does not maintain a strictly uniform information rate; instead, it fluctuates around a global average. These fluctuations are often explained by factors such as syntactic constraints, stylistic choices, or audience design. In this work, we explore an alternative perspective: that these fluctuations may be influenced by an implicit linguistic pressure towards periodicity, where the information rate oscillates at regular intervals, potentially across multiple frequencies simultaneously. We apply harmonic regression and introduce a novel extension called time scaling to detect and test for such periodicity in information contours. Analyzing texts in English, Spanish, German, Dutch, Basque, and Brazilian Portuguese, we find consistent evidence of periodic patterns in information rate. Many dominant frequencies align with discourse structure, suggesting these oscillations reflect meaningful linguistic organization. Beyond highlighting the connection between information rate and discourse structure, our approach offers a general framework for uncovering structural pressures at various levels of linguistic granularity.

The Harmonic Structure of Information Contours

Prompt-based language models like GPT4 and LLaMa have been used for a wide variety of use cases such as simulating agents, searching for information, or for content analysis. For all of these applications and others, political biases in these models can affect their performance. Several researchers have attempted to study political bias in language models using evaluation suites based on surveys, such as the Political Compass Test (PCT), often finding a particular leaning favored by these models. However, there is some variation in the exact prompting techniques, leading to diverging findings, and most research relies on constrained-answer settings to extract model responses. Moreover, the Political Compass Test is not a scientifically valid survey instrument. In this work, we contribute a political bias measured informed by political science theory, building on survey design principles to test a wide variety of input prompts, while taking into account prompt sensitivity. We then prompt 11 different open and commercial models, differentiating between instruction-tuned and non-instruction-tuned models, and automatically classify their political stances from 88,110 responses. Leveraging this dataset, we compute political bias profiles across different prompt variations and find that while PCT exaggerates bias in certain models like GPT3.5, measures of political bias are often unstable, but generally more left-leaning for instruction-tuned models. Code and data are available at https://github.com/MaFa211/theory_grounded_pol_bias.

Only a Little to the Left: A Theory-grounded Measure of Political Bias in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various tasks, yet they often struggle with context-faithfulness generations that properly reflect contextual knowledge. While existing approaches focus on enhancing the decoding strategies, they ignore the fundamental mechanism of how contextual information is processed within LLMs’ internal states. As a result, LLMs remain limited in their ability to fully leverage contextual knowledge. In this paper, we propose Context-aware Layer Enhancement (CaLE), a novel intervention method that enhances the utilization of contextual knowledge within LLMs' internal representations. By employing $\mathcal{V}$-usable information analysis, CaLE strategically amplifies the growth of contextual information at an optimal layer, thereby enriching representations in the final layer. Our experiments demonstrate that CaLE effectively improves context-faithful generation in Question-Answering tasks, particularly in scenarios involving unknown or conflicting contextual knowledge.

Exploiting Contextual Knowledge in LLMs through V-usable Information based Layer Enhancement

Academic citations are widely used for evaluating research and tracing knowledge flows. Such uses typically rely on raw citation counts and neglect variability in citation types. In particular, citations can vary in their fidelity as original knowledge from cited studies may be paraphrased, summarized, or reinterpreted, possibly wrongly, leading to variation in how much information changes from cited to citing paper. In this study, we introduce a computational pipeline to quantify citation fidelity at scale. Using full texts of papers, the pipeline identifies citations in citing papers and the corresponding claims in cited papers, and applies supervised models to measure fidelity at the sentence level. Analyzing a large-scale multi-disciplinary dataset of approximately 13 million citation sentence pairs, we find that citation fidelity is higher when authors cite papers that are 1) more recent and intellectually close, 2) more accessible, and 3) the first author has a lower H-index and the author team is medium-sized. Using a quasi-experiment, we establish the "telephone effect" - when citing papers have low fidelity to the original claim, future papers that cite the citing paper and the original have lower fidelity to the original. Our work reveals systematic differences in citation fidelity, underscoring the limitations of analyses that rely on citation quantity alone and the potential for distortion of evidence.

The Noisy Path from Source to Citation: Measuring How Scholars Engage with Past Research

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle to accurately read and comprehend extremely long texts. Current methods for improvement typically rely on splitting long contexts into fixed-length chunks. However, fixed truncation risks separating semantically relevant content, leading to ambiguity and compromising accurate understanding. To overcome this limitation, we propose a straightforward approach for dynamically separating and selecting chunks of long context, facilitating a more streamlined input for LLMs. In particular, we compute semantic similarities between adjacent sentences, using lower similarities to adaptively divide long contexts into variable-length chunks. We further train a question-aware classifier to select sensitive chunks that are critical for answering specific questions. Experimental results on both single-hop and multi-hop question-answering benchmarks show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms strong baselines. Notably, it maintains robustness across a wide range of input lengths, handling sequences of up to 256k tokens. Our datasets and code are available at the following link: https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/DCS

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Batayan: A Filipino NLP benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models

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Is It Really Long Context if All You Need Is Retrieval? Towards Genuinely Difficult Long Context NLP

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Next from ACL 2025

Batayan: A Filipino NLP benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models

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Is It Really Long Context if All You Need Is Retrieval? Towards Genuinely Difficult Long Context NLP

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

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