India

Identifying relevant text spans is important for several downstream tasks in NLP, as it contributes to model explainability. While most span identification approaches rely on relatively smaller pre-trained language models like BERT, a few recent approaches have leveraged the latest generation of Large Language Models (LLMs) for the task. Current work has focused on explicit span identification like Named Entity Recognition (NER), while more subjective span identification with LLMs in tasks like Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) has been underexplored. In this paper, we fill this important gap by presenting an evaluation of the performance of various LLMs on text span identification in three popular tasks, namely sentiment analysis, offensive language identification, and claim verification. We explore several LLM strategies like instruction tuning, in-context learning, and chain of thought. Our results indicate underlying relationships within text aid LLMs in identifying precise text spans.

IJCNLP-AACL 2025

Exploring the Performance of Large Language Models on Subjective Span Identification Tasks

token classification

large language models

fine-tuning

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

poster

### Welcome to IJCNLP-AACL 2025! 
 It is a great honor to host this joint conference in Mumbai, India, from December 20 to 24, 2025. The joint conferences of IJCNLP and AACL are organized with alternating leadership in the Asia-Pacific region. The event is run by the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP) in odd years, and by AACL in even years, while it is organized solely by ACL when the annual ACL meeting is held in the region. This year, the conference is primarily organized by AFNLP. 
*Kentaro Inui
MBZUAI, UAE
General Chair, IJCNLP-AACL 2025* 
Read full message and download the Conference Handbook [**here**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UTwxkAqSqI-GAoJC3wE1zZt5VP1Y8GX0/view?usp=sharing).

The 14th IJCNLP & 4th AACL will be held in Mumbai, India from December 20th to December 24th, 2025.

Reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs) with enhanced accuracy and explainability are increasingly being adopted in the medical domain, as the life-critical nature of clinical decision-making demands reliable support. Despite these advancements, existing reasoning LLMs often generate unnecessarily lengthy reasoning processes, leading to significant computational overhead and response latency. These limitations hinder their practical deployment in real-world clinical environments. To address these challenges, we introduce \textbf{ControlMed}, a medical language model that enables users to actively control the length of the reasoning process at inference time through fine-grained control markers. ControlMed is trained through a three-stage pipeline: 1) pre-training on a large-scale synthetic medical instruction dataset covering both \textit{direct} and \textit{reasoning responses}; 2) supervised fine-tuning with multi-length reasoning data and explicit length-control markers; and 3) reinforcement learning with model-based reward signals to enhance factual accuracy and response quality. Experimental results on a variety of English and Korean medical benchmarks demonstrate that our model achieves similar or better performance compared to state-of-the-art models. Furthermore, users can flexibly balance reasoning accuracy and computational efficiency by controlling the reasoning length as needed. These findings demonstrate that ControlMed is a practical and adaptable solution for clinical question answering and medical information analysis.

ControlMed: Adding Reasoning Control to Medical Language Model

Grammar competency estimation is essential for assessing linguistic proficiency in both written and spoken language; however, the spoken modality presents additional challenges due to its spontaneous, unstructured, and disfluent nature. Developing accurate grammar scoring models further requires extensive expert annotation, making large-scale data creation impractical. To address these limitations, we propose a zero-shot grammar competency estimation framework that leverages unlabeled data and Large Language Models (LLMs) without relying on manual labels. During training, we employ LLM-generated predictions on unlabeled data by using grammar competency rubric-based prompts. These predictions, treated as pseudo labels, are utilized to train a transformer-based model through a novel training framework designed to handle label noise effectively. We show that the choice of LLM for pseudo-label generation critically affects model performance and that the ratio of clean-to-noisy samples during training strongly influences stability and accuracy. Finally, a qualitative analysis of error intensity and score prediction confirms the robustness and interpretability of our approach. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in estimating grammar competency scores with high accuracy, paving the way for scalable, low-resource grammar assessment systems.

Zero-Shot Grammar Competency Estimation Using Large Language Model Generated Pseudo Labels

Ontologies have become essential in today’s digital age as a way of organising the vast amount of readily available unstructured text. In providing formal structure to this information, ontologies have immense value and application across various domains, e.g., e-commerce, where countless product listings necessitate proper product organisation. However, the manual construction of these ontologies is a time-consuming, expensive and laborious process. In this paper, we harness the recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) to develop a fully automated method of extracting product ontologies, in the form of meronymies, from raw review texts. We demonstrate that the ontologies produced by our method surpass an existing, BERT-based baseline when evaluating using an LLM-as-a-judge. Our investigation provides the groundwork for LLMs to be used more generally in (product or otherwise) ontology extraction.

Meronymic Ontology Extraction via Large Language Models

Many real-world eligibility problems, ranging from medical diagnosis to tax planning, can be mapped to decision problems expressed in natural language, wherein a model must make a binary choice based on the features of the user. Large-scale domains such as legal codes or frequently updated funding opportunities render human annotation (e.g., web forms or decision trees) impractical, suggesting a need for agents that can automatically assist in decision-making. Since relevant information is often only known to the user, it is important that these agents can ask the right questions. To evaluate this task, we propose BeNYfits, a new benchmark for determining user eligibility for multiple overlapping social benefits opportunities through interactive decision-making. Our experiments show that current language models struggle with frequent hallucinations, with GPT-4o scoring only 35.7 F1 using a ReAct-style chain-of-thought. We therefore introduce ProADA, a novel approach that uses program synthesis to assist in decision-making by mapping dialog planning to a code generation problem and using gaps in structured data to determine the best next action. Our agent, ProADA, improves the F1 score to 56.2 while using nearly the same number of dialog turns.

Program Synthesis Dialog Agents for Interactive Decision-Making

Unlike document-level AI-generated text (AIGT) detection, sentence-level AIGT detection remains underexplored, despite its importance for addressing collaborative writing scenarios where humans modify AIGT suggestions on a sentence-by-sentence basis. Prior sentence-level detectors often neglect the valuable context surrounding the target sentence, which may contain crucial linguistic artifacts that indicate a potential change in authorship. We propose **GL-CLiC**, a novel technique that leverages both **G**lobal and **L**ocal signals of **C**oherence and **L**ex**i**cal **C**omplexity, which we operationalize through discourse analysis and CEFR-based vocabulary sophistication. **GL-CLiC** models local coherence and lexical complexity by examining a sentence's relationship with its neighbors or peers, complemented with its document-wide analysis. Our experimental results show that **GL-CLiC** achieves superior performance and better generalization across domains compared to existing methods.

GL-CLiC: Global-Local Coherence and Lexical Complexity for Sentence-Level AI-Generated Text Detection

Mental health plays a crucial role in the overall well-being of an individual. In recent years, digital platforms have increasingly been used to expand mental health and emotional support. However, there are persistent challenges related to limited user accessibility, internet connectivity, and data privacy, which highlight the need for an offline, smartphone-based solutions. To address these challenges, we propose **EmoSApp (Emotional Support App)**: an entirely offline, smartphone-based conversational app designed to provide mental health and emotional support. EmoSApp leverages a language model, specifically the LLaMA-3.2-1B-Instruct, which is fine-tuned and quantized on a custom-curated ``Knowledge Dataset'' comprising 14,582 mental health QA pairs along with multi-turn conversational data, enabling robust domain expertise and fully on-device inference on resource-constrained smartphones.


Through qualitative evaluation with students and mental health professionals, we demonstrate that EmoSApp has the ability to respond coherently and empathetically, provide relevant suggestions to user’s mental health problems, and maintain interactive dialogue. Additionally, quantitative evaluations on nine commonsense and reasoning benchmarks, along with two mental health specific datasets, demonstrate EmoSApp's effectiveness in low-resource settings. By prioritizing on-device deployment and specialized domain-specific adaptation, EmoSApp serves as a blueprint for future innovations in portable, secure, and highly tailored AI-driven mental health support.

An Offline Mobile Conversational Agent for Mental Health Support: Learning from Emotional Dialogues and Psychological Texts with Student-Centered Evaluation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to support scientific writing, but their tendency to produce hallucinated content threatens academic reliability. Existing benchmarks have addressed hallucination detection in general-domain tasks, such as fact-checking or question answering, but they do not reflect the fine-grained, domain-specific needs of scientific communication. We introduce SciHallu, a dataset for identifying hallucinations in academic text at three levels of granularity: token, sentence, and paragraph. To establish a reliable ground truth, we select source passages from research papers published prior to the widespread adoption of LLMs. Our dataset includes both hallucinated and non-hallucinated paragraph instances, constructed through controlled perturbations at varying levels of noise and validated by human annotators. A rationale is paired with each instance, explaining the nature of the modification. SciHallu covers multiple academic fields, such as Computer Science, Health Sciences, and Humanities and Social Sciences. It is built using a model-guided annotation pipeline, followed by expert human validation. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs on both binary and fine-grained classification tasks, revealing challenges in detecting subtle hallucinations. SciHallu supports the development of context-aware systems for more trustworthy scientific content generation.

SciHallu: A Multi-Granularity Hallucination Detection Dataset for Scientific Writing

We present **JPharmatron**, a Japanese domain-specific large language model (LLM) for the pharmaceutical field, developed through continual pre-training on two billion Japanese pharmaceutical tokens and eight billion English biomedical tokens. For rigorous evaluation, we introduce **JPharmaBench**, a benchmark suite consisting of three new benchmarks: YakugakuQA, based on national pharmacist licensing exams; NayoseQA, which tests cross-lingual synonym and terminology normalization; and SogoCheck, a novel task involving cross-document consistency checking.
We evaluate our model against open-source medical LLMs and commercial models, including GPT-4o. Experimental results show that **JPharmatron** outperforms existing open models and achieves competitive performance with commercial ones.
Interestingly, even GPT-4o performs poorly on SogoCheck, suggesting that cross-sentence consistency reasoning remains an open challenge.
**JPharmatron** enables secure and local model deployment for pharmaceutical tasks, where privacy and legal constraints limit the use of closed models. Besides, **JPharmaBench** offers a reproducible framework for evaluating Japanese pharmaceutical natural language processing. Together, they demonstrate the feasibility of practical and cost-efficient language models for Japanese healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors.
Our model, codes, and datasets are available on HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/collections/EQUES/jpharmatron and https://huggingface.co/collections/EQUES/jpharmabench.

A Japanese Language Model and Three New Evaluation Benchmarks for Pharmaceutical NLP

We present ThaiOCRBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating vision-language models (VLMs) on Thai text-rich visual understanding tasks. Despite recent progress in multimodal modeling, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on high-resource languages, leaving Thai underrepresented, especially in tasks requiring document structure understanding. ThaiOCRBench addresses this gap by offering a diverse, human-annotated dataset comprising 2,808 samples across 13 task categories. We evaluate a wide range of state-of-the-art VLMs in a zero-shot setting, spanning both proprietary and open-source systems. Results show a significant performance gap, with proprietary models (e.g., Gemini 2.5 Pro) outperforming open-source counterparts. Notably, fine-grained text recognition and handwritten content extraction exhibit the steepest performance drops among open-source models. Through detailed error analysis, we identify key challenges such as language bias, structural mismatch, and hallucinated content. ThaiOCRBench provides a standardized framework for assessing VLMs in low-resource, script-complex settings, and provides actionable insights for improving Thai-language document understanding.

ThaiOCRBench: A Task-Diverse Benchmark for Vision-Language Understanding in Thai

Factor analysis studies have shown that the primary dimensions of word meaning are Valence (V), Arousal (A), and Dominance (D). Existing lexicons such as the NRC VAD Lexicon, published in 2018, include VAD association ratings for words. Here, we present a complement to it, which has **human ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance for ∼10k English Multiword Expressions (MWEs) and their constituent words**. We also increase the coverage of unigrams, especially words that have become more common since 2018. In all, the new **NRC VAD Lexicon v2 now has entries for ∼10k MWEs and ∼25k words, in addition to the entries in v1**. We show that the associations are highly reliable. We use the lexicon to examine emotional characteristics of MWEs, including: 1. The degree to which MWEs (idioms, noun compounds, and verb particle constructions) exhibit strong emotionality; 2. The degree of emotional compositionality in MWEs. The lexicon enables a wide variety of research in NLP, Psychology, Public Health, Digital Humanities, and Social Sciences. The NRC VAD Lexicon v2 is freely available through the project web- page: http://saifmohammad.com/ WebPages/nrc-vad.html

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ControlMed: Adding Reasoning Control to Medical Language Model

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