United States

Building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems often requires
combining separate tools for retrieval, re-ranking, and generation,
with incompatible data formats, evaluation pipelines, and deployment workflows.
We present \framework, an open-source Python toolkit that unifies these stages
in a single modular framework.\footnote{PyPI: \url{https://pypi.org/project/rankify/}}
\textsuperscript{,}\footnote{GitHub: \url{https://github.com/DataScienceUIBK/Rankify}}
\textsuperscript{,}\footnote{Docs: \url{https://rankify.readthedocs.io}}%
\textsuperscript{,}\footnote{Video: \url{https://youtu.be/kkLzomrM2ec}}
\framework provides 42 benchmark datasets with pre-retrieved documents and
pre-built indices, 15 retrievers (sparse, dense, and reasoning-augmented),
and 24 re-ranking models spanning 41 pointwise, pairwise, and listwise variants.
It also supports \textbf{6} RAG strategies across four inference backends
(Hugging Face, vLLM, LiteLLM, and OpenAI), enabling consistent experimentation
from local models to hosted APIs.
A unified pipeline interface allows users to compose retrieve--rerank--generate
workflows in a few lines of code, while an agentic assistant (\texttt{RankifyAgent}), a
REST server (\texttt{RankifyServer}), and an interactive web
playground support deployment and non-programmatic exploration.
Across 200+ configurations on QA and BEIR/TREC benchmarks with six generator LLMs,
re-ranking consistently improves downstream performance, yielding gains of
5--15 points in Exact Match and up to 8.5 points in RAGAS context precision
across diverse retriever--generator combinations.

ACL 2026

Rankify: A Comprehensive Python Toolkit for Retrieval, Re-Ranking, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation

## 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.

Synthetic data has emerged as a crucial solution to the data scarcity bottleneck in large language models (LLMs), particularly for specialized domains and low-resource languages. However, the broader adoption of existing synthetic data tools is severely hindered by convoluted workflows, fragmented data standards, and limited scalability across modalities.
To address these limitations, we develop DataArc-SynData-Toolkit, an open-source framework featuring: (1) a configuration-driven, end-to-end pipeline equipped with an intuitive visual interface and simplified CLI for exceptional usability; (2) a unified, quality-controllable synthesis paradigm that standardizes multi-source data generation to ensure high reusability; and (3) a highly modular architecture designed for seamless multimodal, multilingual, and multi-task adaptation.
We apply the toolkit in multiple application scenarios. 
Experimental results demonstrate that our toolkit achieves an optimal balance between generation efficiency and data quality. By offering an end-to-end and visually interactive pipeline, DataArc-SynData-Toolkit significantly lowers the technical barrier to synthetic data generation and subsequent model training, accelerating its practical deployment in real-world applications.

DataArc-SynData-Toolkit: A Unified Closed-Loop Framework for Multi-Path, Multimodal, and Multilingual Data Synthesis

Recent work in natural language processing, human-computer interaction, and computational social science takes interest in the study of decentralized content moderation, in which individual communities largely determine their own norms, rules, and enforcement thereof. A key challenge to this body of work is that, once moderated, content and related variables become difficult or impossible to recover; previous work often relied on 3rd-party historical data sources, but recent world events, legal disputes, and policy shifts have significantly disrupted these services, practically disabling their research use-cases. Therefore, in order to conduct new research and reproduce previous results, researchers must record content as it's created, and monitor variables of interest over time. In this work we present and publicly release a software system for the dynamic monitoring of Reddit posts, communities, and moderation actions, to enable scaleable and reproducible research on decentralized platform governance and content moderation. To the authors' knowledge, this system is presently the only available solution for general-purpose, real-time, policy-compliant longitudinal data collection on Reddit. Furthermore, the system's integration with the official Reddit API enables the collection of authentication-gated data such as community engagement metrics and moderation team information, which was impossible in previous historical data sources.

A System for Dynamically Tracking Content Moderation on Reddit

Legal practitioners in Thailand must navigate fragmented government websites to research over 3,800 active laws and 87,000 Supreme Court decisions, with no unified tool for cross-referencing, version tracking, or structural navigation. We present FourCorners, a deployed platform that addresses five practitioner pain points through three modules built on a temporal legal knowledge graph covering 552K nodes and 6.3M edges: (1) an AI legal assistant that performs grounded generation via structured graph retrieval, streaming verified source content inline with responses; (2) an interactive law reader that translates graph structure into navigation and comparison features; and (3) a court decision explorer with version-aware citations produced by temporal entity resolution across 87,394 rulings. The system discovers implicit cross-corpus relationships through co-citation analysis of Supreme Court decisions. Interviews with 20 legal professionals reveal that inline source verification fundamentally changes how practitioners interact with AI-generated legal content, and that cross-corpus enrichment surfaces legal relationships that existing tools leave invisible.

FourCorners: Grounded Thai Legal Research over a Temporal Knowledge Graph

The development of audio foundation models has accelerated rapidly since the emergence of GPT-4o. However, the lack of comprehensive evaluation has become a critical bottleneck for further progress in the field, particularly in audio generation. Current audio evaluation faces three major challenges: 
(1) audio evaluation lacks a unified framework, with datasets and code scattered across various sources;
(2) audio codec, as a key component of audio foundation models, lacks a widely accepted and holistic evaluation methodology; 
(3) existing speech benchmarks are heavily reliant on English, making it challenging to objectively assess models' performance on Chinese.
We introduce UltraEval-Audio, a unified framework addressing these challenges through a modular architecture supporting 10 languages, 14 task categories, 24 models, and 36 benchmarks with one-command evaluation and real-time leaderboards. For audio codec, we propose a three-dimensional evaluation scheme covering semantic accuracy, timbre fidelity, and acoustic quality. For Chinese evaluation, we introduce two new benchmarks: SpeechCMMLU and SpeechHSK. Our code, benchmarks, and leaderboards are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/UltraEval-Audio.

UltraEval-Audio: A Unified Framework for Comprehensive Evaluation of Audio Foundation Models

This paper introduces AnnoHID, a semi-automated annotation framework designed for medical texts in low-resource languages. The system integrates large language models (LLMs) for pre-annotation and human validation, significantly reducing annotation time while maintaining accuracy. We demonstrate its application to Bahasa Indonesia medical social media texts from Alodokter, a medical Q&A platform, for named entity recognition (NER) and medical concept normalization (MCN). We conducted a user study with 21 participants to demonstrate the effectiveness of AnnoHID. The results show that LLM-assisted annotation yields higher inter-annotator agreement for both NER (kappa = 0.76) and MCN (kappa = 0.63) and that human review improves raw LLM NER output, raising the F1 score from 0.39 to 0.45. The framework is multilingual, human-in-the-loop, and interoperable with standard medical terminologies, such as SNOMED-CT. Future work focuses on mitigating pre-annotation bias, reducing annotation overhead, and scaling evaluations to larger datasets and additional low-resource languages.

AnnoHID: LLM-Assisted Annotation Framework for Low-Resource Medical Texts

In the high-cost simulation-driven design domain, translating ambiguous design requirements into a mathematical optimization formulation is a bottleneck for optimizing product performance. This process is time-consuming and heavily reliant on expert knowledge. While large language models (LLMs) offer potential for automating this task, existing approaches either suffer from poor formalization that fails to accurately align with the design intent or rely on solver feedback for data filtering, which is unavailable due to the high simulation costs. To address this challenge, we propose automated problem formulation (APF), a solver-independent framework that utilizes LLMs to convert engineers' natural language requirements into executable optimization models. The core of this framework is an innovative pipeline for automatically generating high-quality data, which overcomes the difficulty of constructing suitable fine-tuning datasets in the absence of high-cost solver feedback with the help of data generation and test instance annotation. The generated high-quality dataset is used to perform supervised fine-tuning on LLMs, significantly enhancing their ability to generate accurate and executable optimization problem formulations. Experimental results on antenna design demonstrate that APF significantly outperforms the existing methods in both the accuracy of requirement formalization and the quality of resulting radiation efficiency curves in meeting the design goals.

Solver-Independent Automated Problem Formulation via LLMs for High-Cost Simulation-Driven Design

Existing hard-label text attacks often rely on inefficient "outside-in" strategies that traverse vast search spaces. We propose PivotAttack, a query-efficient "inside-out" framework. It employs a Multi-Armed Bandit algorithm to identify Pivot Sets—combinatorial token groups acting as prediction anchors—and strategically perturbs them to induce label flips. This approach captures inter-word dependencies and minimizes query costs. Extensive experiments across traditional models and Large Language Models demonstrate that PivotAttack consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both Attack Success Rate and query efficiency.

PivotAttack: Rethinking the Search Trajectory in Hard-Label Text Attacks via Pivot Words

The stateless architecture of Large Language Models inherently lacks the mechanism to preserve dynamic context, compelling agents to redundantly reprocess history to maintain long-horizon autonomy. While latent memory offers a solution, current approaches are hindered by architectural segregation, relying on auxiliary encoders that decouple memory from the reasoning backbone. We propose \textbf{FlashMem}, a framework that distills intrinsic memory directly from transient reasoning states via computation reuse. Leveraging the property that internal representations uniquely encode input trajectories, FlashMem identifies the last hidden state as a sufficient statistic for the interaction history. This enables a \textbf{Shared-KV Consolidator} to synthesize memory by attending directly to the backbone's frozen cache, eliminating redundant re-parameterization. Furthermore, a parameter-free \textbf{Cognitive Monitor} leverages attention entropy to adaptively trigger consolidation only when high epistemic uncertainty is detected. Experiments demonstrate that FlashMem matches the performance of heavy baselines while reducing inference latency by \textbf{5 times}, effectively bridging the gap between efficiency and persistent cognition.

FlashMem: Distilling Intrinsic Latent Memory via Computation Reuse

Anonymizing textual documents is a highly context-sensitive problem: the appropriate balance between privacy protection and utility preservation varies with the data domain, privacy objectives, and downstream application. However, existing anonymization methods rely on static, manually designed strategies that lack the flexibility to adjust to diverse requirements and often fail to generalize across domains. We introduce adaptive text anonymization, a new task formulation in which anonymization strategies are automatically adapted to specific privacy–utility requirements. We propose a framework for task-specific prompt optimization that automatically constructs anonymization instructions for language models, enabling adaptation to different privacy goals, domains, and downstream usage patterns. To evaluate our approach, we present a benchmark spanning five datasets with diverse domains, privacy constraints, and utility objectives. Across all evaluated settings, our framework consistently achieves a better privacy–utility trade-off than existing baselines, while remaining computationally efficient and effective on open-source language models, with performance comparable to larger closed-source models. Additionally, we show that our method can discover novel anonymization strategies that explore different points along the privacy–utility trade-off frontier.

Adaptive Text Anonymization: Learning Privacy-Utility Trade-offs via Prompt Optimization

We present CadLLM, a training-free method to accelerate the inference throughput of diffusion-based LLMs (dLLMs). We first investigate on the dynamic nature of the token unmasking confidence across blocks and steps. Based on this observation, we then present a lightweight adaptive approach that can control the generation block size, step size, and threshold based on the average confidence score of the unmasked tokens. We further reduce the softmaxing overhead of token probability generation by dynamically leveraging a subset of vocabulary size to regulate sampling breadth. CadLLM is a plug-and-play model-agnostic with KV caching based dLLMs. Extensive experiments on four popular tasks demonstrate the efficacy of CadLLM to yield throughput improvement of up to 1.1-2.28x over the state-of-the-art baseline with competitive accuracy.

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DataArc-SynData-Toolkit: A Unified Closed-Loop Framework for Multi-Path, Multimodal, and Multilingual Data Synthesis

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