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Evaluating natural language generation systems is challenging due to the diversity of valid outputs. While human evaluation is the gold standard, it suffers from inconsistencies, lack of standardisation, and demographic biases, limiting reproducibility. LLM-based evaluators offer a scalable alternative but are highly sensitive to prompt design, where small variations can lead to significant discrepancies. In this work, we propose an inversion learning method that learns effective reverse mappings from model outputs back to their input instructions, enabling the automatic generation of highly effective, model-specific evaluation prompts. Our method requires only a single evaluation sample and eliminates the need for time-consuming manual prompt engineering, thereby improving both efficiency and robustness. Our work contributes toward a new direction for more robust and efficient LLM-based evaluation.

ACL 2026

Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Inversion Learning for Highly Effective NLG Evaluation Prompts

## 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*

EMNLP 2025

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

technical paper

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

Data preparation is a critical step in enhancing the usability of tabular data and thus boosts downstream data-driven tasks. Traditional methods often face challenges in capturing the intricate relationships within tables and adapting to the tasks involved. Recent advances in Language Models (LMs), especially in Large Language Models (LLMs), offer new opportunities to automate and support tabular data preparation. However, why LMs suit tabular data preparation (i.e., how their capabilities match task demands) and how to use them effectively across phases still remain to be systematically explored. In this survey, we systematically analyze the role of LMs in enhancing tabular data preparation processes, focusing on four core phases: data acquisition, integration, cleaning, and transformation. For each phase, we present an integrated analysis of how LMs can be combined with other components for different preparation tasks, highlight key advancements, and outline prospective pipelines.

Empowering Tabular Data Preparation with Language Models: Why and How?

Large language models (LLMs) integrated with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have become a dominant framework for building intelligent assistants. In real-world applications such as ChatGPT with web search, the retrieved document often comes from diverse, potentially unreliable sources and may contain inconsistent claims. Unlike traditional search engines that rely on users to manually compare information, LLM-based systems typically feed all retrieved content into the model's context, requiring LLMs to autonomously identify, differentiate, and reason over conflicting viewpoints. Unlike mainstream LLM evaluation tasks like math and code generation that are primarily focused on reasoning with factual context, question-answering with multi-source references requires fundamentally different capabilities to identify and reason over knowledge contradictions. In this paper, we introduce ConfRAG, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs' reasoning capability over real-world conflicting documents retrieved from the web. It consists of 1,814 real-world questions, each paired with an average of 9.58 retrieved paragraphs from heterogeneous online sources. A total of 57.2% of the questions exhibit explicit contradictions. We further propose three structured evaluation tasks, answer clustering, answer coverage, and reason coverage, to quantify a model's ability to organize and explain contradictory content. Experiments with state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4.1 and Claude-3-7-Sonnet reveal substantial performance gaps, highlighting the need for more targeted research in contradiction-aware question answering. To the best of our knowledge, ConfRAG is the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate contradiction-aware reasoning on real-world long web documents.

Benchmarking LLM's Capability in Reasoning over Conflicting Web References

We introduce PR-XAI, a feature attribution method for transformer models based on the PageRank algorithm. The proposed PR-XAI models the attention mechanism as a directed graph, with weights derived from attention weights and their gradients. Evaluations across five well-known text classification datasets and three different architectures show that PR-AG, one variant of PR-XAI, outperforms state-of-the-art attribution methods in faithfulness and classification metrics, with significant gains on long-form text.

PR-XAI: PageRank-Based Feature Attribution for Transformers

Earlier Sign Language Production (SLP) models typically relied on autoregressive methods that generate output tokens one by one, which inherently provide temporal alignment. Although techniques like Teacher Forcing can prevent model collapse during training, they still cannot solve the problem of error accumulation during inference, since ground truth is unavailable at that stage. In contrast, more recent approaches based on diffusion models leverage step-by-step denoising to enable high-quality generation. However, the iterative nature of these models and the requirement to denoise entire sequences limit their applicability in real-time tasks like SLP. To address it, we propose a hybrid autoregressive-diffusion model for Sign Language Production (SLP), combining sequential dependency modeling with iterative refinement. A Multi-Scale Pose Representation module captures fine-grained articulator features, while a Confidence-Aware Causal Attention mechanism guides generation using joint-level confidence scores. Experiments on PHOENIX14T and How2Sign show improved generation quality and real-time efficiency.

Hybrid Autoregressive-Diffusion Model for Real-Time Sign Language Production

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in tasks such as code generation and mathematical reasoning. However, their potential to internalize structured spatial knowledge remains underexplored. This study investigates whether LLMs, grounded in locally relative human observations, can construct coherent global spatial cognition by integrating fragmented relational descriptions. We focus on two core aspects of spatial cognition: spatial perception, where models infer consistent global layouts from local positional relationships, and spatial navigation, where models learn road connectivity from trajectory data and plan optimal paths between unconnected locations. Experiments conducted in a simulated urban environment demonstrate that LLMs not only generalize to unseen spatial relationships between points of interest (POIs) but also exhibit latent representations aligned with real-world spatial distributions. Furthermore, LLMs can learn road connectivity from trajectory descriptions, enabling accurate path planning and dynamic spatial awareness during navigation.

Can LLMs Learn to Map the World from Local Descriptions?

Timely detection of depression symptoms is essential for early intervention, and the continuous stream of user-generated content on social media provides an ideal source for this purpose. To address this challenge, we propose **HOPE**, a **H**ybrid **O**ptimized **P**arallel **E**ncoding framework that combines supervised symptom relevance signals with unsupervised intrinsic semantic clustering. This parallel design enables robust symptom detection under limited labeled data and introduces a distinctive semantic-similarity perspective with automatic class-anchor adjustment. We also propose an optimized hybrid semantic fusion mechanism to combine supervised and unsupervised scores through a learnable module. We evaluate our system on multiple benchmark datasets and surpass previous approaches, demonstrating its effectiveness in detecting fine-grained symptoms and early warning of mental health risk. Source code is available at https://github.com/candleMind/hope.

HOPE: Hybrid Optimized Parallel Encoding with Supervised and Unsupervised Semantic Fusion for Depression Symptom Detection

In-context learning (ICL) leverages demonstrations to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs). However, traditional ICL struggles with complex reasoning mainly due to superficial, example-level implicit imitation. To address these limitations, we introduce **ThoughtICR**, an automated **Thought**-level **I**n-**C**ontext **R**easoning paradigm that shifts from surface-level examples to more guidance-oriented thought patterns. Specifically, we first define atomic reasoning actions and construct thought patterns on small-scale seed data using Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). During inference, we dynamically select appropriate thought patterns based on target problem attributes, providing explicit guidance for model reasoning. Thanks to its automated and strategic design, our method enables seamless plug-and-play integration with various post-training techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that our method improves performance across different model sizes and generalizes effectively across reasoning domains. Using only small-scale seed data, we achieve 80.6% accuracy on MATH and 62.5% on AMC, surpassing GPT-4o’s 77.2% and 57.5%, respectively. Moreover, compared to test-time scaling methods, our approach reduces computational costs by over 10. Our code is available at https://github.com/jinyangwu/ThoughtICR.

Beyond Examples: Towards Automated Thought-level In-Context Reasoning for Large Language Models

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) is largely hindered by their large number of parameters. Structural pruning has emerged as a promising solution. Prior structured pruning methods directly remove unimportant parameters based on certain metrics, which often causes knowledge loss and necessitates extensive retraining. To overcome this, we introduce a novel pruning method **TRSP**: **T**wo-Stage **R**egularization-Based **S**tructured **P**runing for LLMs. Specifically, we multiply the output of each transformer layer by an initial learnable weight and iteratively learn these weights by adding their $\ell_1$-norm as a regularization term to the loss function, serving as the first-stage regularization. Subsequently, we apply additional regularization to the difference between the output and input of layers with smaller weights, encouraging the shift of knowledge to the preserved layers. This serves as the second-stage regularization. TRSP retains more knowledge and better preserves model performance than direct parameter elimination. Through extensive experimentation we show that TRSP outperforms strong layer-wise structured pruning methods without requiring retraining. As a layer-wise pruning method, it delivers notable end-to-end acceleration, making it a promising solution for efficient LLM deployment.

Two-Stage Regularization-Based Structured Pruning for LLMs

Translating natural language mathematical statements into formal, executable code is a fundamental challenge in automated theorem proving. While prior work has focused on generation and compilation success, little attention has been paid to the critic phase—the evaluation of whether generated formalizations truly capture the semantic intent of the original problem. In this paper, we introduce CriticLean, a novel critic-guided reinforcement learning framework that elevates the role of the critic from a passive validator to an active learning component. 
Specifically, first, we propose the CriticLeanGPT, trained via supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, to rigorously assess the semantic fidelity of Lean 4 formalizations. 
Then, we introduce CriticLeanBench, a benchmark designed to measure models' ability to distinguish semantically correct from incorrect formalizations, and demonstrate that our trained CriticLeanGPT models can significantly outperform strong open- and closed-source baselines. Building on the CriticLean framework, we construct FineLeanCorpus, a dataset comprising over 509K problems that exhibits rich domain diversity, broad difficulty coverage, and high correctness based on human evaluation.
Overall, our findings highlight that optimizing the critic phase is essential for producing reliable formalizations and we hope our CriticLean will provide valuable insights for future advances in formal mathematical reasoning.

CriticLean: Critic-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Mathematical Formalization

The world is in the grip of ecological, meaning, and language crises that are converging into a metacrisis. Big AI is accelerating them all. LLM engineering sits at the core. Despite the public good motives of language engineers and the promise of LLMs, this work is being leveraged to create unprecedented wealth and power for a handful of individuals and corporations while causing existential harm to life on earth. As a profession, we urgently need to come together to explore alternatives and to design a life-affirming future for our field of natural language processing that is centered on human flourishing on a living planet.

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Empowering Tabular Data Preparation with Language Models: Why and How?

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