China

Ranking online reviews by their intrinsic quality is a critical task for e-commerce platforms and information services, impacting user experience and business outcomes. However, *quality* is a domain-dependent and dynamic concept, making its assessment a formidable challenge. Traditional methods relying on hand-crafted features are unscalable across domains and fail to adapt to evolving content patterns, while modern deep learning approaches often produce black-box models that lack interpretability and may prioritize semantics over quality. To address these challenges, we propose AutoQual, an LLM-based agent that automates the discovery of interpretable features for review quality. AutoQual mimics a human research process, iteratively generating feature hypotheses through reflection, operationalizing them via autonomous tool implementation, and accumulating experience in a persistent memory. This framework allows for the adaptive discovery of fine-grained and effective quality indicators. We deploy our method on a large-scale online platform with a billion-level user base. Large-scale A/B testing confirms its effectiveness, increasing average reviews viewed per user by 0.79\% and the conversion rate of review readers by 0.27\%.

EMNLP 2025

AutoQual: An LLM Agent for Automated Discovery of Interpretable Features for Review Quality Assessment

review quality assessment

llm-based agent

large language models

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.

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.

Large language models (LLMs) can modify JSON documents through natural language commands, but current approaches regenerate entire structures for each edit, resulting in computational inefficiency. We present JSON Whisperer, a framework that enables LLMs to generate RFC 6902 diff patches-expressing only the necessary modifications-rather than complete documents.
We identify two key challenges in patch-based editing: (1) LLMs often miss related updates when generating isolated patches, and (2) array manipulations require tracking index shifts across operations, which LLMs handle poorly. To address these issues, we introduce EASE (Explicitly Addressed Sequence Encoding), which transforms arrays into dictionaries with stable keys, eliminating index arithmetic complexities.
Our evaluation shows that patch generation with EASE reduces token usage by 31\% while maintaining edit quality within 5\% of full regeneration with particular gains for complex instructions and list manipulations.

JSON Whisperer: Efficient JSON Editing with LLMs

Recently, the demand for small, efficient reasoning models to support real-world applications has driven the exploration of knowledge distillation approaches that balance reasoning performance and inference speed. In this paper, we further extend the DistilQwen model collection, initialized from Qwen models, by introducing four model series specifically designed to meet industrial needs. The distilled model collection includes: (1) slow-thinking models, optimized for reasoning tasks requiring high accuracy; (2) two series of adaptive-thinking models, which dynamically adjust their reasoning strategies based on input tasks to maximize efficiency across varied scenarios; and (3) distilled reward models for adaptive thinking, which support further reinforcement learning of reasoning models utilizing distilled knowledge. Comprehensive evaluations across several benchmarks demonstrate the inference efficiency and strong reasoning performance of reasoning models, together with the usefulness of distilled reward models. We further show how these models benefit industry practitioners by providing scalable model training and inference functionalities in an AI platform.

Thinking with DistilQwen: A Tale of Four Distilled Reasoning and Reward Model Series

Automatic Term Extraction (ATE) is a critical component in downstream NLP tasks such as document tagging, ontology construction and patent analysis. Current state-of-the-art methods require expensive human annotation and struggle with domain transfer, limiting their practical deployment. This highlights the need for more robust, scalable solutions and realistic evaluation settings. To address this, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark spanning seven diverse domains, enabling performance evaluation at both the document- and corpus-levels. Furthermore, we propose a robust LLM-based model that outperforms both supervised cross-domain encoder models and few-shot learning baselines and performs competitively with its GPT-4o teacher on this benchmark.
The first step of our approach is generating psuedo-labels with this black-box LLM on general and scientific domains to ensure generalizability. Building on this data, we fine-tune the first LLMs for ATE. To further enhance document-level consistency, oftentimes needed for downstream tasks, we introduce lightweight post-hoc heuristics. Our approach exceeds previous approaches on 5/7 domains with an average improvement of 10 percentage points. We release our dataset and fine-tuned models to support future research in this area

Crossing Domains without Labels: Distant Supervision for Term Extraction

High-quality content is critical for driving customer satisfaction and conversions across digital platforms and e-commerce. Ensuring that essential information is complete, accurate, and aligned with customer expectations presents a significant challenge at scale. Existing approaches to content evaluation often treat all information uniformly, without prioritizing based on customer relevance, and rely heavily on manual prompt design to encode domain expertise into Large Language Models (LLMs). We present ISEE, a unified framework that addresses these limitations through three core innovations: (1) automated identification of customer-impacting features by synthesizing signals from search behavior, queries, and feedback, enabling targeted content improvements; (2) an instruction-tuned multimodal LLM trained to reliably follow structured operational guidelines, reducing dependence on manual prompt engineering; and (3) robust zero-shot generalization to new product content, features and SOPs via targeted instruction tuning. Evaluated across 20 product categories and 150 product specific features, ISEE achieves 90% precision at 78% recall in detecting content inconsistencies, outperforming much larger (> 200B parameters) models while using a compact 12B architecture.

I-SEE: An Instruction-tuned, SOP-Enhanced Quality Evaluator for Product Content

The functionality of Large Language Model (LLM) agents is primarily determined by two capabilities: action planning and answer summarization. The former, action planning, is the core capability that dictates an agent's performance. However, prevailing training paradigms employ end-to-end, multi-objective optimization that jointly trains both capabilities. This paradigm faces two critical challenges: imbalanced optimization objective allocation and scarcity of verifiable data, making it difficult to enhance the agent's planning capability. To address these challenges, we propose Reinforcement Learning with Tool-use Rewards (RLTR), a novel framework that decouples the training process to enable a focused, single-objective optimization of the planning module. Crucially, RLTR introduces a reward signal based on tool-use completeness to directly evaluate the quality of tool invocation sequences. This method offers a more direct and reliable training signal than assessing the final response content, thereby obviating the need for verifiable data. Our experiments demonstrate that RLTR achieves an 8%–12% improvement in planning performance compared to end-to-end baselines. Moreover, this enhanced planning capability, in turn, translates to a 5%–6% increase in the final response quality of the overall agent system.

Encouraging Good Processes Without the Need for Good Answers: Reinforcement Learning for LLM Agent Planning

Contact centers process millions of customer conversations daily, requiring Quality Assurance (QA) teams to evaluate agent performance against compliance and service standards, often by answering agent evaluation questionnaires. Traditional manual QA cannot scale to growing volumes, while fully automated evaluation using large language models presents a cost-performance trade-off. High-performing models excel at detecting rare but business-critical Answers of Interest (AoI) but incur prohibitive costs, while smaller fine-tuned models are economical but suffer from poor AoI precision, generating high false positive rates that erode agent trust and waste QA resources. We introduce STREAQ, a two-tier selective routing framework to intelligently route queries between cost-efficient and high-capability models. Based on benchmarking on a proprietary dataset across six large LMs, STREAQ achieves substantial cost reduction while preserving critical performance. Using Nova-Pro, STREAQ reduces daily costs by 48% from 34,162 to17,842 while retaining 88.9% of full-model AoI precision. Our ablation studies reveal that flawed reasoning from smaller models can degrade performance, emphasizing the importance of carefully designing routing systems, making enterprise-scale automated QA both practical and economically viable.

STREAQ: Selective Tiered Routing for Effective and Affordable Contact Center Quality Assurance

We present a high-quality, multi-domain dataset for the Text2Cypher task which is enabling the translation of natural language (NL) questions into executable Cypher queries over graph databases. The dataset comprises 27,529 NL queries and corresponding Cyphers spanning across 11 real-world graph datasets, each accompanied by its corresponding graph database for grounded query execution. To ensure correctness, the queries are validated through a rigorous pipeline combining automated schema, runtime and value checks, along with manual review for logical correctness. Queries are further categorized by complexity to support fine-grained evaluation. We have released our benchmark dataset and code to replicate our data synthesis pipeline on new graph datasets, supporting extensibility and future research for the task of Text2Cypher.

Mind the Query: A Benchmark Dataset towards Text2Cypher Task

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on benign data can paradoxically erode a language model’s safety alignment, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting of safety behaviors. Although prior work shows that randomly adding safety examples can reduce harmful output, the principles that make certain examples more effective than others remain poorly understood. This paper investigates the hypothesis that the effectiveness of a safety example is governed by two key factors: its instruction-response behavior (e.g., refusal vs. explanation) and its semantic diversity across harm categories. We systematically evaluate sampling strategies based on these axes and find that structured, diversity-aware sampling significantly improves model safety. Our method reduces harmfulness by up to 41% while adding only 0.05% more data to the fine-tuning set.

How to Fine-Tune Safely on a Budget: Model Adaptation Using Minimal Resources

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across diverse tasks, but they remain susceptible to hallucinations—generating content that appears plausible but contains factual inaccuracies. We present Finch-Zk, a black-box framework that leverages fine-grained cross-model consistency to detect and mitigate hallucinations in LLM outputs without requiring external knowledge sources. Finch-Zk introduces two key innovations: 1) a cross-model consistency checking strategy that reveals fine-grained inaccuracies by comparing responses generated by diverse models from semantically-equivalent prompts, and 2) a targeted mitigation technique that applies precise corrections to problematic segments while preserving accurate content. Experiments on the FELM dataset show Finch-Zk improves hallucination detection F1 scores by 6-39\% compared to existing approaches. For mitigation, Finch-Zk achieves 7-8 absolute percentage points improvement in answer accuracy on the GPQA-diamond dataset when applied to state-of-the-art models like Llama 4 Maverick and Claude 4 Sonnet. Extensive evaluation across multiple models demonstrates that Finch-Zk provides a practical, deployment-ready safeguard for enhancing factual reliability in production LLM systems.

Zero-knowledge LLM hallucination detection and mitigation through fine-grained cross-model consistency

Identifying attribute values from product profiles is a key task for improving product search, recommendation, and business analytics on e-commerce platforms, which we called Product Attribute Value Identification (PAVI) . However, existing PAVI methods face critical challenges, such as cascading errors, inability to handle out-of-distribution (OOD) attribute values, and lack of generalization capability. To address these limitations, we introduce Multi-Value-Product Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MVP-RAG), combining the strengths of retrieval, generation, and classification paradigms. MVP-RAG defines PAVI as a retrieval-generation task, where the product title description serves as the query, and products and attribute values act as the corpus. It first retrieves similar products of the same category and candidate attribute values, and then generates the standardized attribute values. The key advantages of this work are: (1) the proposal of a multi-level retrieval scheme, with products and attribute values as distinct hierarchical levels in PAVI domain (2) attribute value generation of large language model to significantly alleviate the OOD problem and (3) its successful deployment in a real-world industrial environment. Extensive experimental results on the dataset demonstrate that the proposed method performs better than the state-of-the-art baselines.

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Next from EMNLP 2025

JSON Whisperer: Efficient JSON Editing with LLMs

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Enhancing LLM-Generated Academic Reviews Towards Human-Level Quality

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