India

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&#39;&#39; 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&#39;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.

IJCNLP-AACL 2025

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

smartphone applications

offline

emotional support

chatbot

mental health

privacy

nlp applications

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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.

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.

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

Breaking Bad: Norms for Valence, Arousal, and Dominance for over 10k English Multiword Expressions

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly treated as universal, general-purpose solutions across NLP tasks, particularly in English. But does this assumption hold for low-resource, morphologically rich languages such as Sanskrit? We address this question by comparing instruction-tuned and in-context-prompted LLMs with smaller task-specific encoder–decoder models on the Sanskrit poetry-to-prose conversion task. This task is intrinsically challenging: Sanskrit verse exhibits free word order combined with rigid metrical constraints, and its conversion to canonical prose (anvaya) requires multi-step reasoning involving compound segmentation, dependency resolution, and syntactic linearisation. This makes it an ideal testbed to evaluate whether LLMs can surpass specialised models.

For LLMs, we apply instruction fine-tuning on general-purpose models and design in-context learning templates grounded in Pāṇinian grammar and classical commentary heuristics. For task-specific modelling, we fully fine-tune a ByT5-Sanskrit Seq2Seq model. Our experiments show that domain-specific fine-tuning of ByT5-Sanskrit significantly outperforms all instruction-driven LLM approaches. Human evaluation strongly corroborates this result, with scores exhibiting high correlation with Kendall’s Tau scores.
Additionally, our prompting strategies provide an alternative to fine-tuning when domain-specific verse corpora are unavailable, and the task-specific Seq2Seq model demonstrates robust generalisation on out-of-domain evaluations.
Our code$^1$ and dataset$^2$ are publicly available.

Still Not There: Can LLMs Outperform Smaller Task-Specific Seq2Seq Models on the Poetry-to-Prose Conversion Task?

Progress in biomedical Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Entity Linking (EL) is currently hindered by a fragmented data landscape, a lack of resources for building explainable models, and the limitations of semantically-blind evaluation metrics. To address these challenges, we present MedPath, a large-scale and multi-domain biomedical EL dataset that builds upon nine existing expert-annotated EL datasets. In MedPath, all entities are 1) normalized using the latest version of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), 2) augmented with mappings to 62 other biomedical vocabularies and, crucially, 3) enriched with full ontological paths---i.e., from general to specific---in up to 11 biomedical vocabularies. MedPath directly enables new research frontiers in biomedical NLP, facilitating training and evaluation of semantic-rich and interpretable EL systems, and the development of the next generation of interoperable and explainable clinical NLP models.

MedPath: Multi-Domain Cross-Vocabulary Hierarchical Paths for Biomedical Entity Linking

Question Generation (QG) is central to information retrieval, education, and knowledge assessment, yet its progress is bottlenecked by unreliable and non-scalable evaluation practices. Traditional metrics fall short in structured settings like document-grounded QG, and human evaluation, while insightful, remains expensive, inconsistent, and difficult to replicate at scale. We introduce AURA-QG: an Automated, Unsupervised, Replicable Assessment pipeline that scores question sets using only the source document. It captures four orthogonal dimensions i.e., answerability, non-redundancy, coverage, and structural entropy, without needing reference questions or relative baselines. Our method is modular, efficient, and agnostic to the question generation strategy. Through extensive experiments across four domains i.e., car manuals, economic surveys, health brochures, and fiction, we demonstrate its robustness across input granularities and prompting paradigms. Chain-of-Thought prompting, which first extracts answer spans and then generates targeted questions, consistently yields higher answerability and coverage, validating the pipeline’s fidelity. The metrics also exhibit strong agreement with human judgments, reinforcing their reliability for practical adoption. The complete implementation of our evaluation pipeline is publicly available.

AURA-QG: Automated Unsupervised Replicable Assessment for Question Generation

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly impacted data science workflows, giving rise to specialized data science agents designed to automate analytical tasks. Despite rapid adoption, systematic benchmarks evaluating the efficacy and limitations of these agents remain scarce. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark specifically crafted to reflect real-world user interactions with data science agents by observing usage of our commercial applications. We evaluate three LLMs: Claude-4.0-Sonnet, Gemini-2.5-Flash, and OpenAI-o4-Mini across three approaches: zero-shot with context engineering, multi-step with context engineering, and with SmolAgent. Our benchmark assesses performance across a diverse set of eight data science task categories, additionally exploring the sensitivity of models to common prompting issues, such as data leakage and slightly ambiguous instructions. We further investigate the influence of temperature parameters on overall and task-specific outcomes for each model and approach. Our findings reveal distinct performance disparities among the evaluated models and methodologies, highlighting critical factors that affect practical deployment. The benchmark dataset and evaluation framework introduced herein aim to provide a foundation for future research of more robust and effective data science agents.

DSBC : Data Science task Benchmarking with Context engineering

Although Farsi is widely spoken, no comprehensive benchmark exists for assessing commonsense reasoning in language models. We therefore present \textbf{FarSense}, a 6‑task benchmark for Farsi covering True/False judgment,  multiple-choice questions, Explanation, Cause‑Effect inference, Counterfactual reasoning, and Knowledge Completion. Starting from Farsi‑Wikipedia, we filtered noise and retained ~4,210 passages, rewrote them into realistic daily scenarios, and derived the above tasks from each scenario. Scenario and task generation quality was first judged via native‑speaker annotations on outputs from five major LLMs—GPT‑4o, Gemini-2.5-Flash, Mistral-Large, Qwen‑Plus, and DeepSeek‑Chat. Gemini-2.5-Flash demonstrated the highest performance, leading to its use in generating a large-scale dataset, subsequently finalized through meticulous two-step human validation.  Using \textbf{FarSense}, we measured the commonsense ability of the same five flagship LLMs and also fine‑tuned six compact models (1B–24B parameters) before re‑evaluating them. To ensure broad applicability, task wording was designed to minimize dialectal, cultural, or religious bias. Experiments show that targeted fine‑tuning yields substantial gains, confirming \textbf{FarSense} as a reliable, openly licensed resource for advancing reproducible commonsense understanding research in Farsi NLP. We publicly release all code and data at https://github.com/KamyarZeinalipour/FarSense.

FarSense: A Comprehensive Commonsense Benchmark and Evaluation Framework for the Farsi Language

The rapid growth of social networks has led to a surge in social bots, which often disseminate low-quality content and may manipulate public opinion, posing threats to online security. Although recent GNN-based bot detection methods perform strongly, they still face two major challenges. First, deep GNNs are prone to over-smoothing: neighbor aggregation blends bot and human node representations, obscuring bot-specific features. Second, social graphs are dominated by human–human and human–bot connections, while direct bot–bot links are scarce, making it difficult for effective bot representations to propagate within GNNs. To address these issues, we propose a Topology-Aware Gated Graph Neural Network (\framework) to detect social bots. \framework~ employs topology-aware data augmentation to synthesize realistic bot nodes that preserve the original graph structure, mitigating class imbalance; it also introduces a hierarchical gating mechanism that restructures node embeddings into a tree format, selectively filtering noise and enhancing discriminative features. Experiments on three standard benchmark datasets show that \framework consistently surpasses leading baselines in highly imbalanced settings, delivering superior accuracy and robustness.

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