China

We introduce GreekBarBench, a benchmark that evaluates LLMs on legal questions across five different legal areas from the Greek Bar exams, requiring citations to statutory articles and case facts. To tackle the challenges of free-text evaluation, we propose a three-dimensional scoring system combined with an LLM-as-a-judge approach. We also develop a meta-evaluation benchmark to assess the correlation between LLM-judges and human expert evaluations, revealing that simple, span-based rubrics improve their alignment. Our systematic evaluation of 13 proprietary and open-weight LLMs shows that even though the best models outperform average expert scores, they fall short of the 95th percentile of experts.

EMNLP 2025

GreekBarBench: A Challenging Benchmark for Free-Text Legal Reasoning and Citations

legal

greek

reasoning

benchmark

workshop paper

## 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."<br>

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

[**Link to Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1johU5QqVVYO4RfH7QcIORr7qrVBdzdwC/view?usp=sharing)





<br>

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

This paper investigates personal perceptions of mental workload through an innovative, non-directive corpus annotation method, allowing individuals of diverse profiles to define their own dimensions of annotation based on their personal perception. It contrasts with traditional approaches guided by explicit objectives and strict guidelines.
Mental workload, a multifaceted concept in psychology, is characterized through various academic definitions and models. Our research, aligned with the principles of the perspectivist approach, aims to examine the degree to which individuals share a common understanding of this concept when reading the same texts. It seeks to compare the corpus produced by this non-directive annotation method. 
The participants, mainly employees of a large French enterprise and some academic experts on mental workload, were given the freedom to propose labels and annotate a set of texts.
The experimental protocol revealed notable similarities in labels, segments, and overall annotation behavior, despite the absence of predefined guidelines. These findings suggest that individuals, given the freedom, tend to develop overlapping representations of mental workload. Furthermore, they demonstrate how non-directive annotation can uncover shared and diverse perceptions of complex concepts like mental workload, contributing to a richer understanding of how such perceptions are constructed across different individuals.

Non-directive corpus annotation to reveal individual perspectives with underspecified guidelines: the case of mental workload

Multi-party dialogue is a critical setting for studying collaborative reasoning and decision-making, yet existing datasets rarely focus on structured, in-depth complex reasoning tasks. We introduce DeliChess, a novel dataset of group deliberation dialogues in which participants collaboratively solve multiple-choice chess puzzles. Each group first completes the puzzle individually, then engages in a multi-party discussion before submitting a revised collective answer. The dataset includes 107 dialogues with full transcripts, pre- and post-discussion choices, and metadata on puzzle difficulty and move quality. We evaluate performance using three metrics based on chess engine evaluations, and find that deliberation significantly improves group accuracy. We further analyse the role of probing utterances (i.e., messages that elicit proposals, justifications, or strategic reflection) using a classifier trained on prior deliberation data. While probing makes group performance more variable after discussion, it does not consistently lead to better performance. Our dataset offers a rich testbed for modelling group reasoning, dialogue dynamics, and the resolution of differing perspectives and opinions in a well-defined strategic domain.

DeliChess: A Multi-party Dialogue Dataset for Deliberation in Chess Problem Solving


Identifying subjective phenomena, such as irony in language, poses unique challenges, as these tasks involve subjective interpretation shaped by both cultural and individual perspectives. Unlike conventional models that rely on aggregated annotations, perspectivist approaches aim to capture the diversity of viewpoints by leveraging the knowledge of specific annotator groups, promoting fairness and representativeness. However, such models often incur substantial computational costs, particularly when fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained language models. We also observe that the fine-tuning process can negatively impact fairness, producing certain perspective models that are underrepresented and have limited influence on the outcome. To address these, we explore two complementary strategies: (i) the adoption of traditional machine learning algorithms—such as Support Vector Machines, Random Forests, and XGBoost—as lightweight alternatives; and (ii) the application of calibration techniques to reduce imbalances in inference generation across perspectives. Our results demonstrate up to 12× faster processing with no statistically significant drop in accuracy. Notably, calibration significantly enhances fairness, reducing inter-group bias and leading to more balanced predictions across diverse social perspectives.

Calibration as a Proxy for Fairness and Efficiency in a Perspectivist Ensemble Approach to Irony Detection

The task of perspective-aware classification introduces a bottleneck in terms of parametric efficiency that did not get enough recognition in existing studies. In this article, we aim to address this issue by applying an existing architecture, the hypernetwork+adapters combination, to perspectivist classification. Ultimately, we arrive at a solution that can compete with specialized models in adopting user perspectives on hate speech and toxicity detection, while also making use of considerably fewer parameters. Our solution is architecture-agnostic and can be applied to a wide range of base models out of the box.

Hypernetworks for Perspectivist Adaptation

Subjective NLP tasks like offensive language detection often suffer from annotator disagreement, leading to noisy labels. We propose Weak Ensemble Learning (WEL), a framework that models annotator disagreement by constructing and aggregating weak predictors from diverse annotator perspectives. WEL does not require annotator metadata and outperforms strong baselines across four benchmark datasets.

Weak Ensemble Learning from Multiple Annotators for Subjective Text Classification

Access to high-quality labeled data remains a limiting factor in applied supervised learning. Active learning (AL), a popular approach to optimizing the use of limited annotation budgets in training ML models, often relies on at least one of several simplifying assumptions, which rarely hold in practice when acknowledging human label variation (HLV). Label variation (LV), i.e., differing labels for the same instance, is common, especially in natural language processing. Yet annotation frameworks often still rest on the assumption of a single ground truth, overlooking HLV, i.e., the occurrence of plausible differences in annotations, as an informative signal. 
In this paper, we examine foundational assumptions about truth and label nature, highlighting the need to decompose observed LV into signal (e.g., HLV) and noise (e.g., annotation error). We survey how the AL and (H)LV communities have addressed---or neglected---these distinctions and propose a conceptual framework for incorporating HLV throughout the AL loop, including instance selection, annotator choice, and label representation. We further discuss the integration of large language models (LLM) as annotators. Our work aims to lay a conceptual foundation for (H)LV-aware active learning, better reflecting the complexities of real-world annotation.

Revisiting Active Learning under (Human) Label Variation

For datasets to accurately represent diverse opinions in a population, they must preserve variation in data labels while filtering out spam or low-quality responses. How can we balance annotator reliability and representation? We empirically evaluate how a range of heuristics for annotator filtering affect the preservation of variation on subjective tasks. We find that these methods, designed for contexts in which variation from a single ground-truth label is considered noise, often remove annotators who disagree instead of spam annotators, introducing suboptimal tradeoffs between accuracy and label diversity. We find that conservative settings for annotator removal (<5%) are best, after which all tested methods increase the mean absolute error from the true average label. We analyze performance on synthetic spam to observe that these methods often assume spam annotators are more random than real spammers tend to be: most spammers are distributionally indistinguishable from real annotators, and the minority that are distinguishable tend to give fixed answers, not random ones. Thus, tasks requiring the preservation of variation reverse the intuition of existing spam filtering methods: spammers tend to be less random than non-spammers, so metrics that assume variation is spam fare worse. These results highlight the need for spam removal methods that account for label diversity.

Balancing Quality and Variation: Spam Filtering Distorts Data Label Distributions

This position paper argues that annotation disagreement in Natural Language Inference (NLI) is not mere noise but often reflects meaningful variation, especially when triggered by ambiguity in the premise or hypothesis. While underspecified guidelines and annotator behavior contribute to variation, content-based ambiguity provides a process-independent signal of divergent human perspectives. We call for a shift toward ambiguity-aware NLI that first identifies ambiguous input pairs, classifies their types, and only then proceeds to inference. To support this shift, we present a framework that incorporates ambiguity detection and classification prior to inference. We also introduce a unified taxonomy that synthesizes existing taxonomies, illustrates key subtypes with examples, and motivates targeted detection methods that better align models with human interpretation. Although current resources lack datasets explicitly annotated for ambiguity and subtypes, this gap presents an opportunity: by developing new annotated resources and exploring unsupervised approaches to ambiguity detection, we enable more robust, explainable, and human-aligned NLI systems.

From Disagreement to Understanding: The Case for Ambiguity Detection in NLI

Irony is a subjective and pragmatically complex phenomenon, often conveyed through rhetorical figures and interpreted differently across individuals. In this study, we adopt a perspectivist approach, accounting for the socio-demographic background of annotators, to investigate whether specific rhetorical strategies promote a shared perception of irony within demographic groups, and whether Large Language Models (LLMs) reflect specific perspectives.
Focusing on the Italian subset of the perspectivist MultiPICo dataset, we manually annotate rhetorical figures in ironic replies using a linguistically grounded taxonomy. The annotation is carried out by expert annotators balanced by generation and gender, enabling us to analyze inter-group agreement and polarization. Our results show that some rhetorical figures lead to higher levels of agreement, suggesting that certain rhetorical strategies are more effective in promoting a shared perception of irony.
We fine-tune multilingual LLMs for rhetorical figure classification, and evaluate whether their outputs align with different demographic perspectives. Results reveal that models show varying degrees of alignment with specific groups, reflecting potential perspectivist behavior in model predictions.
These findings highlight the role of rhetorical figures in structuring irony perception and underscore the importance of socio-demographics in both annotation and model evaluation.

Towards a Perspectivist Understanding of Irony through Rhetorical Figures

Toxicity labels at sub-document granularity and disaggregated labels lead to more nuanced and personalized toxicity classification and facilitate analysis. We re-annotate a subset of 1983 posts of the Jigsaw Toxic Comment Classification Challenge and provide disaggregated toxicity labels and spans that identify inappropriate language and targets of toxic statements.

Manual analysis shows that five annotations per instance effectively capture meaningful disagreement patterns and allow for finer distinctions between genuine disagreement and that arising from annotation error or inconsistency. Our main findings are: (1) Disagreement often stems from divergent interpretations of edge-case toxicity. (2) Disagreement is especially high in cases of toxic statements involving non-human targets. (3) Disagreement on whether a passage consists of inappropriate language occurs not only on inherently questionable terms, but also on words that may be inappropriate in specific contexts while remaining acceptable in others. (4) Transformer-based models effectively learn from aggregated data that reduces false negative classifications by being more sensitive towards minority opinions for posts to be toxic. We publish the new annotations under the CC BY 4.0 license.

Content not yet available

Next from EMNLP 2025

Non-directive corpus annotation to reveal individual perspectives with underspecified guidelines: the case of mental workload

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES