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Human–AI collaboration in knowledge-intensive tasks such as fact-checking requires understanding model uncertainty in multi‑document reasoning amid conflicting/agreeing evidence. Yet, existing methods only express uncertainty as numbers or hedges without revealing which evidence conflicts cause the uncertainty, leaving users unable to resolve disagreements. We present CLUE (**C**onflict-&amp;Agreement-aware **L**anguage-model **U**ncertainty **E**xplanations), a plug‑and‑play white‑box framework that, to our knowledge, is the first to generate natural‑language explanations of model uncertainty grounded in conflicting/agreeing evidence. CLUE (i) identifies span‑level claim–evidence and inter‑evidence relations that signal conflict or agreement without supervision, and (ii) uses these relations to steer explanation generation, articulating how they drive the model&#39;s uncertainty. Across three language models and two fact‑checking datasets, CLUE produces explanations that more faithfully track model uncertainty and better align with the model’s fact‑checking decisions than span‑agnostic explanation prompting; human raters also judge them more helpful, more informative, less redundant, and more logically consistent with the input. By explicitly tying uncertainty to evidence conflicts and agreements, CLUE supports practical fact‑checking and other tasks that require reasoning over complex, conflicting information.

ACL 2026

Explaining Sources of Uncertainty in Automated Fact-Checking

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Human–AI collaboration in knowledge-intensive tasks such as fact-checking requires understanding model uncertainty in multi‑document reasoning amid conflicting/agreeing evidence. Yet, existing methods only express uncertainty as numbers or hedges without revealing which evidence conflicts cause the uncertainty, leaving users unable to resolve disagreements. We present CLUE (**C**onflict-&Agreement-aware **L**anguage-model **U**ncertainty **E**xplanations), a plug‑and‑play white‑box framework that, to our knowledge, is the first to generate natural‑language explanations of model uncertainty grounded in conflicting/agreeing evidence. CLUE (i) identifies span‑level claim–evidence and inter‑evidence relations that signal conflict or agreement without supervision, and (ii) uses these relations to steer explanation generation, articulating how they drive the model's uncertainty. Across three language models and two fact‑checking datasets, CLUE produces explanations that more faithfully track model uncertainty and better align with the model’s fact‑checking decisions than span‑agnostic explanation prompting; human raters also judge them more helpful, more informative, less redundant, and more logically consistent with the input. By explicitly tying uncertainty to evidence conflicts and agreements, CLUE supports practical fact‑checking and other tasks that require reasoning over complex, conflicting information.

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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.

Legal QA benchmarks have predominantly focused on case law, overlooking the unique challenges of statute-centric regulatory reasoning. In statutory domains, relevant evidence is distributed across hierarchically linked documents, creating a statutory retrieval gap where conventional retrievers fail and models often hallucinate under incomplete context. We introduce SearchFireSafety, a structure- and safety-aware benchmark for statute-centric legal QA. Instantiated on fire-safety regulations as a representative case, the benchmark evaluates whether models can retrieve hierarchically fragmented evidence and safely abstain when statutory context is insufficient. SearchFireSafety adopts a dual-track evaluation framework combining real-world questions that require citation-aware retrieval and synthetic partial-context scenarios that stress-test hallucination and refusal behavior. Experiments across multiple large language models show that graph-guided retrieval substantially improves performance, but also reveal a critical safety trade-off: domain-adapted models are more likely to hallucinate when key statutory evidence is missing. Our findings highlight the need for benchmarks that jointly evaluate hierarchical retrieval and model safety in statute-centric regulatory settings.

Evaluating Structure-Aware Retrieval and Safety in Statute-Centric Legal QA

We introduce SkMTEB, the first comprehensive MTEB-style text embedding benchmark for Slovak, a low-resource West Slavic language, comprising 31 datasets across 7 task types---nearly 4$\times$ the depth of existing multilingual benchmark coverage for Slovak. Our evaluation of 31 embedding models reveals that large instruction-tuned multilingual models achieve the strongest performance, while existing Slovak-specific models trained for NLU tasks transfer poorly to embedding tasks. To address the need for efficient, locally-deployable Slovak embeddings, we develop \texttt{e5-sk-small} (45M parameters) and \texttt{e5-sk-large} (365M) by applying vocabulary trimming and fine-tuning to Multilingual E5 models. Despite size reductions of up to 62\%, our open-source models achieve competitive performance with proprietary APIs while remaining locally deployable for semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We release the benchmark, models, datasets, and code openly, hoping our approach offers a replicable path for other under-resourced languages.

 SkMTEB: Slovak Massive Text Embedding Benchmark and Model Adaptation

Coreference resolution is typically evaluated using aggregate statistical metrics such as CoNLL-F1
, which measure structural overlap between predicted and gold clusters. While widely used, these metrics offer limited diagnostic insights, penalizing errors without revealing whether a system struggles with specific semantic categories, such as people, locations, or events, and making it difficult to interpret model capabilities or derive actionable improvements. We address this gap by introducing a semantically-enhanced evaluation framework for coreference resolution. Our approach overlays Concept and Named Entity Recognition (CNER) onto coreference outputs, assigning semantic labels to nominal mentions and propagating them to entire coreference clusters. This enables the computation of typed scores aimed at evaluating mention extraction and linking capabilities stratified by semantic class. Across our experiments on OntoNotes, LitBank, and PreCo, we show that our framework uncovers systematic weaknesses that remain obscured by aggregate metrics. Furthermore, we show that these diagnostics can be used to design targeted, low-cost data augmentation strategies, achieving measurable out-of-domain improvements.

 Interpretable Coreference Resolution Evaluation Using Explicit Semantics

Language models are increasingly deployed in interactive settings where users reason about facts over time rather than in isolation.
In such scenarios, correct behavior requires models to maintain and update implicit temporal assumptions established earlier in a conversation. We study this challenge through the lens of temporal scope stability: the ability to preserve, override, or transfer time-scoped factual context across dialogue turns. We introduce ChronoScope, a large-scale diagnostic benchmark designed to isolate temporal scope behavior in controlled multi-turn interactions, comprising over one million deterministically generated question chains grounded in Wikidata. ChronoScope evaluates whether models can correctly retain inferred temporal scope when follow-up questions omit explicit time references, spanning implicit carryover, explicit scope switching, cross-entity transfer, and longer temporal trajectories.
Through extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art language models, we find that temporal scope stability is frequently violated in controlled multi-turn settings, with models often drifting toward present-day assumptions despite correct underlying knowledge.
These failures intensify with interaction length and persist even under oracle context conditions, revealing a gap between single-turn factual accuracy and coherent temporal reasoning under sequential interaction.
We make our dataset and evaluation suite publicly available at \url{https://github.com/yashkumaratri/ChronoScope}.

 Evaluating Temporal Consistency in Multi-Turn Language Models

Logical vulnerabilities in software stem from flaws in program logic rather than memory safety, which can lead to critical security failures. Although existing automated program‐repair techniques primarily focus on repairing memory‐corruption vulnerabilities, they struggle with logical vulnerabilities because of their limited semantic understanding of the vulnerable code and its expected behavior. On the other hand, recent successes of large language models (LLMs) in understanding and repairing code are promising. However, no framework currently exists to analyze the capabilities and limitations of such techniques for logical vulnerabilities. We aim to systematically evaluate both traditional and LLM-based repair approaches for addressing real-world logical vulnerabilities. To facilitate our assessment, we created the first-ever dataset, LogicDS, comprising 122 logical vulnerabilities that reflect tangible security impact. We also developed a systematic framework, LogicEval, to evaluate patches for logical vulnerabilities. Evaluations suggest that compilation and testing failures are primarily driven by prompt sensitivity, loss of code context, and difficulty in patch localization.

 LogicEval: A Systematic Framework for Evaluating Automated Repair Techniques for Logical Vulnerabilities in Real-World Software

While annotated corpora are crucial in the field of natural language processing (NLP), those containing copyrighted material are difficult to exchange among researchers. Yet, such corpora are necessary to fully represent the diversity of data found in the wild in the context of NLP tasks. We tackle this issue by proposing a method to lawfully share the annotations of any sequential copyrighted corpus. The corpus creator shares the annotations in clear, along with a non-reversible hashed version of the source material. The corpus user must own the source material, and apply the same hash function to their own tokens, in order to match them to the shared annotations. Crucially, our method is robust to reasonable divergences in the version of the copyrighted data owned by the user. As an illustration, we present alignment experiments on different editions of novels. Our results show that our method is able to correctly correctly align 98.7 to 99.79% of tokens depending on the novel, provided the user version is sufficiently close to the corpus creator's version. We publicly release novelties-bookshare, a Python implementation of our method.

Overcoming Copyright Barriers in Corpus Distribution Through Non-Reversible Hashing

Code-switching, alternating between languages within a conversation, is natural for multilingual users, yet poses fundamental challenges for large language models (LLMs). When a user code-switches in their prompt to an LLM, they typically do not specify the expected language of the LLM response, and thus LLMs must infer the output language from contextual and pragmatic cues. We find that current LLMs systematically fail to align with this expectation, responding in undesired languages even when cues are clear to humans. We introduce OLA, a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' Output Language Alignment in code-switched interactions. OLA focuses on Korean--English code-switching and spans simple intra-sentential mixing to instruction–content mismatches. Even frontier models frequently misinterpret implicit language expectation, exhibiting a systematic bias toward non-English responses. We further show this bias generalizes beyond Korean to Chinese and Indonesian pairs. Models also show instability through mid-response switching and language intrusions. Chain-of-Thought prompting fails to resolve these errors, indicating weak pragmatic reasoning about output language. However, Code-Switching Aware DPO with minimal data (~1K examples) substantially reduces misalignment, suggesting these failures stem from insufficient alignment rather than fundamental limitations. Our results highlight the need to align multilingual LLMs with users' implicit expectations in real-world code-switched interactions.

OLA: Output Language Alignment in Code-Switched LLM Interactions

Modern evaluation of Legal QA systems is shifting from terminal accuracy toward process-aware analyses of model reasoning. We propose a diagnostic framework grounded in monotonic pedagogical scaffolding, where language models receive gold-standard, case-relevant information across stages aligned with the canonical legal framework FIRAC — Facts, Issue, Rules, Application, Conclusion. By strictly adding solution-relevant content at each step, we introduce a controlled monotonic intervention that allows for the evaluation of reasoning trajectories rather than isolated outcomes.

This longitudinal design enables the introduction of two transition-based diagnostics: Errors-to-Success (E2S) quantifies the guidance required to reach correctness, while Success-to-Errors (S2E) measures the fragility of that correctness under additional structure. These local patterns define a global robustness criterion termed Stable Accuracy, which credits a response only if the model maintains correctness throughout all scaffolding stages and enforces a higher bar for correctness by distinguishing sustained reasoning from transient patterns.

We instantiate the framework on 3,123 Brazilian Bar Exam questions paired with expert-annotated explanations. Our findings reveal model instability patterns hidden from accuracy-only metrics and demonstrate that terminal accuracy systematically overestimates legal reasoning competence. To test the robustness of our diagnostics, we also evaluate a majority-vote aggregation across multiple reasoning samples, finding that the observed instability patterns persist under this stronger inference setting. Furthermore, principal component analysis indicates that legal domains cluster into distinct regions, suggesting systematic differences in reasoning demands across domains. While focused on the legal domain, our evaluation protocol is generalizable to any task with a staged reasoning structure.

Monotonic Scaffolding as a Diagnostic Lens for Legal Reasoning in LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) store and recall factual knowledge, yet the precise mechanism of how entity representations are transformed to enable specific attribute retrieval remains underexplored. In this work, we investigate this mechanism through the lens of an ``attribute-computation path''—a sequence of computational steps over the entity representation required to elicit a target attribute. We then propose an iterative patching protocol to identify a minimal subset of layers necessary for this computation. Applying our method to LLaMA 3.1 8B and Qwen 3 8B, we find that these paths are non-contiguous, often skipping layers, and that models possess multiple, functionally-equivalent paths for the same entity and fact, highlighting a high degree of redundancy in attribute computation. This implies that knowledge computation is highly distributed, potentially explaining the localization-editing mismatch and suggesting that knowledge storage and retrieval in LLMs is far from being well understood.

Factual Retrieval in LLMs Is a Redundant, Distributed and Non-Contiguous Process

Many approaches to LLM red-teaming leverage an attacker LLM to discover jailbreaks against a target. Several of them task the attacker with identifying effective strategies through trial and error, resulting in a semantically limited range of successes. Another approach discovers diverse attacks by combining crowdsourced harmful queries and tactics into instructions for the attacker, but does so at random, limiting effectiveness. This article introduces a novel framework, Adaptive Instruction Composition, that combines crowdsourced texts according to an adaptive mechanism trained to jointly optimize effectiveness with diversity. We use reinforcement learning to balance exploration with exploitation in a combinatorial space of instructions to guide the attacker toward diverse generations tailored to target vulnerabilities. We demonstrate that our approach substantially outperforms random combination on a set of effectiveness and diversity metrics, even under model transfer. Further, we show that it surpasses a host of recent adaptive approaches on Harmbench. We employ a lightweight neural contextual bandit that adapts to contrastive embedding inputs, and provide ablations suggesting that the contrastive pretraining enables the network to rapidly generalize and scale to the massive space as it learns.

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Evaluating Structure-Aware Retrieval and Safety in Statute-Centric Legal QA

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