China

NLP benchmarks rely on standardized datasets for training and evaluating models and are crucial for advancing the field. Traditionally, expert annotations ensure high-quality labels; however, the cost of expert annotation does not scale well with the growing demand for larger datasets required by modern models. While crowd-sourcing provides a more scalable solution, it often comes at the expense of annotation precision and consistency. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities to enhance the annotation process, particularly for detecting label errors in existing datasets. In this work, we consider the recent approach of LLM-as-a-judge, leveraging an ensemble of LLMs to flag potentially mislabeled examples. We conduct a case study on four factual consistency datasets from the TRUE benchmark, spanning diverse NLP tasks, and on SummEval, which uses Likert-scale ratings of summary quality across multiple dimensions. We empirically analyze the labeling quality of existing datasets and compare expert, crowd-sourced, and LLM-based annotations in terms of the agreement, label quality, and efficiency, demonstrating the strengths and limitations of each annotation method. Our findings reveal a substantial number of label errors, which, when corrected, induce a significant upward shift in reported model performance. This suggests that many of the LLMs&#39; so-called mistakes are due to label errors rather than genuine model failures. Additionally, we discuss the implications of mislabeled data and propose methods to mitigate them in training to improve performance.

EMNLP 2025

Are LLMs Better than Reported? Detecting Label Errors and Mitigating Their Effect on Model Performance

label errors handling

label errors detection

nlp datasets

automatic evaluation of datasets

llms

data annotation

factuality

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields 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.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

NLP benchmarks rely on standardized datasets for training and evaluating models and are crucial for advancing the field. Traditionally, expert annotations ensure high-quality labels; however, the cost of expert annotation does not scale well with the growing demand for larger datasets required by modern models. While crowd-sourcing provides a more scalable solution, it often comes at the expense of annotation precision and consistency. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities to enhance the annotation process, particularly for detecting label errors in existing datasets. In this work, we consider the recent approach of LLM-as-a-judge, leveraging an ensemble of LLMs to flag potentially mislabeled examples. We conduct a case study on four factual consistency datasets from the TRUE benchmark, spanning diverse NLP tasks, and on SummEval, which uses Likert-scale ratings of summary quality across multiple dimensions. We empirically analyze the labeling quality of existing datasets and compare expert, crowd-sourced, and LLM-based annotations in terms of the agreement, label quality, and efficiency, demonstrating the strengths and limitations of each annotation method. Our findings reveal a substantial number of label errors, which, when corrected, induce a significant upward shift in reported model performance. This suggests that many of the LLMs' so-called mistakes are due to label errors rather than genuine model failures. Additionally, we discuss the implications of mislabeled data and propose methods to mitigate them in training to improve performance.

poster

## 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*

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

Semantic similarity between two sentences depends on the aspects considered between those sentences. To study this phenomenon, Deshpande et al. (2023) proposed the Conditional Semantic Textual Similarity (C-STS) task and annotated a human-rated similarity dataset containing pairs of sentences compared under two different conditions. However, Tu et al. (2024) found various annotation issues in this dataset and showed that manually re-annotating a small portion of it leads to more accurate C-STS models. Despite these pioneering efforts, the lack of large and accurately annotated C-STS datasets remains a blocker for making progress on this task as evidenced by the subpar performance of the C-STS models. To address this training data need, we resort to Large Language Models (LLMs) to correct the condition statements and similarity ratings in the original dataset proposed by Deshpande et al. (2023). Our proposed method is able to re-annotate a large training dataset for the C-STS task with minimal manual effort. Importantly, by training a supervised C-STS model on our re-annotated training data we achieve a novel state-of-the-art (SoTA) for C-STS, thereby validating the accuracy of our dataset. The re-annotated dataset is submitted anonymously to ARR and will be publicly released upon paper acceptance to expedite the progress of C-STS research.

Annotating Training Data for Conditional Semantic Textual Similarity Measurement using Large Language Models

Speech summarization has become an essential tool for efficiently managing and accessing the growing volume of spoken and audiovisual content. However, despite its increasing importance, speech summarization remains loosely defined. The field intersects with several research areas, including speech recognition, text summarization, and specific applications like meeting summarization. This survey not only examines existing datasets and evaluation protocols, which are crucial for assessing the quality of summarization approaches, but also synthesizes recent developments in the field, highlighting the shift from traditional systems to advanced models like fine-tuned cascaded architectures and end-to-end solutions. In doing so, we surface the ongoing challenges, such as the need for realistic evaluation benchmarks, multilingual datasets, and long-context handling.

Summarizing Speech: A Comprehensive Survey

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in language understanding and generation, leading to growing interest in zero-shot relation triplet extraction (ZeroRTE), a task that aims to extract triplets for unseen relations without annotated data. However, existing methods typically depend on costly fine-tuning and lack the structured semantic guidance required for accurate and interpretable extraction. To overcome these limitations, we propose FrameRTE, a novel ZeroRTE framework that adopts a “frame first, then extract” paradigm. Rather than extracting triplets directly, FrameRTE first constructs high-quality Relation Semantic Frames (RSFs) through a unified pipeline that integrates frame retrieval, synthesis, and enhancement. These RSFs serve as structured and interpretable knowledge scaffolds that guide frozen LLMs in the extraction process. Building upon these RSFs, we further introduce a human-inspired three-stage reasoning pipeline consisting of semantic frame evocation, frame-guided triplet extraction, and core frame elements validation to achieve semantically constrained extraction. Experiments demonstrate that FrameRTE achieves competitive zero-shot performance on multiple benchmarks. Moreover, the RSFs we construct serve as high-quality semantic resources that can enhance other extraction methods, showcasing the synergy between linguistic knowledge and foundation models.

Frame First, Then Extract: A Frame-Semantic Reasoning Pipeline for Zero-Shot Relation Triplet Extraction

This paper presents BOUQuET, a multi-way, multicentric and multi-register/domain dataset and benchmark, and its broader collaborative extension initiative. This dataset is handcrafted in 8 non-English languages s (i.e. Egyptian Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, and Spanish), each of these source languages being represented among the most widely spoken ones and therefore having the potential to serve as pivot languages that will enable more accurate translations. The dataset is specially designed to avoid contamination and be multi-centric, so as to enforce representation of multilingual language features. In addition, the dataset goes beyond the sentence level, as it is organized in paragraphs of various lengths. Compared with related machine translation (MT) datasets, we show that BOUQuET has a broader representation of domains while simplifying the translation task for non-experts. Therefore, BOUQuET is specially suitable for the open initiative and call for translation participation that we are launching to extend it to a multi-way parallel corpus to any written language.

BOUQuET : dataset, Benchmark and Open initiative for Universal Quality Evaluation in Translation

As LLMs excel on standard reading comprehension benchmarks, attention is shifting toward evaluating their capacity for complex abstract reasoning and inference. Literature-based benchmarks, with their rich narrative and moral depth, provide a compelling framework for evaluating such deeper comprehension skills. Here, we present Morables, a human-verified benchmark built from fables and short stories drawn from historical literature. The main task is structured as multiple-choice questions targeting moral inference, with carefully crafted distractors that challenge models to go beyond shallow, extractive question answering. To further stress-test model robustness, we introduce adversarial variants designed to surface vulnerabilities such as data contamination. Our findings show that while larger models outperform smaller ones, they remain susceptible to adversarial manipulation and often rely on superficial patterns rather than true moral reasoning. Interestingly, reasoning-enhanced models fail to bridge this gap, suggesting that scale -- not reasoning ability -- is the primary driver of performance.

Morables: A Benchmark for Assessing Abstract Moral Reasoning in LLMs with Fables

Information retrieval (IR) is the task of finding relevant documents in response to a user query. Although Spanish is the second most spoken native language, current IR benchmarks lack Spanish data, which limits the development of information access tools for Spanish speakers. We introduce MessIRve, a large-scale Spanish IR dataset with almost 700 thousand queries from Google's autocomplete API and relevant documents sourced from Wikipedia. MessIRve's queries reflect diverse Spanish-speaking regions, unlike other datasets that are translated from English or do not consider dialectal variations. The large size of the dataset allows it to cover a wide variety of topics, unlike smaller datasets. We provide a comprehensive description of the dataset, comparisons with existing datasets, and baseline evaluations of prominent IR models. Our contributions aim to advance Spanish IR research and improve information access for Spanish speakers.

MessIRve: A Large-Scale Spanish Information Retrieval Dataset

This paper introduces AFRIDOC-MT, a document-level multi-parallel translation dataset covering English and five African languages: Amharic, Hausa, Swahili, Yorùbá, and Zulu. The dataset comprises 334 health and 271 information technology news documents, all human-translated from English to these languages. We conduct document-level translation benchmark experiments by evaluating the ability of neural machine translation (NMT) models and large language models (LLMs) to translate between English and these languages, at both the sentence and pseudo-document levels, the outputs being realigned to form complete documents for evaluation. Our results indicate that NLLB-200 achieves the best average performance among the standard NMT models, while GPT-4o outperforms general-purpose LLMs. Fine-tuning selected models leads to substantial performance gains, but models trained on sentences struggle to generalize effectively to longer documents. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that some LLMs exhibit issues such as under-generation, over-generation, repetition of words and phrases, and off-target translations, specifically for translation into African languages.

AFRIDOC-MT: Document-level MT Corpus for African Languages

Puns are a form of humorous wordplay that exploits polysemy and phonetic similarity. While LLMs have shown promise in detecting puns, we show in this paper that their understanding often remains shallow, lacking the nuanced grasp typical of human interpretation. By systematically analyzing and reformulating existing pun benchmarks, we demonstrate how subtle changes in puns are sufficient to mislead LLMs. Our contributions include comprehensive and nuanced pun detection benchmarks, human evaluation across recent LLMs, and an analysis of the robustness challenges these models face in processing puns.

Pun Unintended: LLMs and the Illusion of Humor Understanding

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance on tasks requiring complex linguistic abilities, such as reference disambiguation and metaphor recognition/generation. Although LLMs possess impressive capabilities, their internal mechanisms for processing and representing linguistic knowledge remain largely opaque. Prior research on linguistic mechanisms is limited by coarse granularity, limited analysis scale, and narrow focus. In this study, we propose LinguaLens, a systematic and comprehensive framework for analyzing the linguistic mechanisms of large language models, based on Sparse Auto-Encoders (SAEs). We extract a broad set of Chinese and English linguistic features across four dimensions—morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. By employing counterfactual methods, we construct a large‐scale counterfactual dataset of linguistic features for mechanism analysis. Our findings reveal intrinsic representations of linguistic knowledge in LLMs, uncover patterns of cross‐layer and cross‐lingual distribution, and demonstrate the potential to control model outputs. This work provides a systematic suite of resources and methods for studying linguistic mechanisms, offers strong evidence that LLMs possess genuine linguistic knowledge, and lays the foundation for more interpretable and controllable language modeling in future research.

LinguaLens: Towards Interpreting Linguistic Mechanisms of Large Language Models via Sparse Auto-Encoder

Understanding how Transformer-based language models store and retrieve factual associations is critical for improving interpretability and enabling targeted model editing. Prior work, primarily on GPT-style models, has identified MLP modules in early layers as key contributors to factual recall. However, it remains unclear whether these findings generalize across different autoregressive architectures. To address this, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of factual recall across several models---including GPT, LLaMA, Qwen, and DeepSeek---analyzing where and how factual information is encoded and accessed. Consequently, we find that Qwen-based models behave differently from previous patterns: attention modules in the earliest layers contribute more to factual recall than MLP modules. Our findings suggest that even within the autoregressive Transformer family, architectural variations can lead to fundamentally different mechanisms of factual recall.

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Annotating Training Data for Conditional Semantic Textual Similarity Measurement using Large Language Models

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