Thailand

Human interactions are deeply rooted in the interplay of thoughts, beliefs, and desires made possible by Theory of Mind (ToM): our cognitive ability to understand the mental states of ourselves and others. Although ToM may come naturally to us, emulating it presents a challenge to even the most advanced Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent improvements to LLMs&#39; reasoning capabilities from simple yet effective prompting techniques such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) have seen limited applicability to ToM. In this paper, we turn to the prominent cognitive science theory ``Simulation Theory&#39;&#39; to bridge this gap. We introduce SimToM, a novel two-stage prompting framework inspired by Simulation Theory&#39;s notion of perspective-taking. To implement this idea on current ToM benchmarks, SimToM first filters context based on what the character in question knows before answering a question about their mental state. Our approach, which requires no additional training and minimal prompt-tuning, shows substantial improvement over existing methods, and our analysis reveals the importance of perspective-taking to Theory-of-Mind capabilities. Our findings suggest perspective-taking as a promising direction for future research into improving LLMs&#39; ToM capabilities.

ACL 2024

Think Twice: Perspective-Taking Improves Large Language Models&#39; Theory-of-Mind Capabilities

theory-of-mind

llms

prompting

### 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).

IJCNLP-AACL 2025

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

Human interactions are deeply rooted in the interplay of thoughts, beliefs, and desires made possible by Theory of Mind (ToM): our cognitive ability to understand the mental states of ourselves and others. Although ToM may come naturally to us, emulating it presents a challenge to even the most advanced Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent improvements to LLMs' reasoning capabilities from simple yet effective prompting techniques such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) have seen limited applicability to ToM. In this paper, we turn to the prominent cognitive science theory ``Simulation Theory'' to bridge this gap. We introduce SimToM, a novel two-stage prompting framework inspired by Simulation Theory's notion of perspective-taking. To implement this idea on current ToM benchmarks, SimToM first filters context based on what the character in question knows before answering a question about their mental state. Our approach, which requires no additional training and minimal prompt-tuning, shows substantial improvement over existing methods, and our analysis reveals the importance of perspective-taking to Theory-of-Mind capabilities. Our findings suggest perspective-taking as a promising direction for future research into improving LLMs' ToM capabilities.

Think Twice: Perspective-Taking Improves Large Language Models' Theory-of-Mind Capabilities

poster

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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Please register!

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.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved commendable accomplishments in various natural language processing tasks. However, LLMs still encounter significant challenges when dealing with complex scenarios involving multiple entities. These challenges arise from the presence of implicit relationships that demand multi-step reasoning. In this paper, we propose a novel approach ERA-CoT, which aids LLMs in understanding context by capturing relationships between entities and supports the reasoning of diverse tasks through Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT).Experimental results show that ERA-CoT demonstrates the superior performance of our proposed method compared to current CoT prompting methods, achieving a significant improvement of an average of 5.1\% on GPT3.5 compared to previous SOTA baselines. Our analysis indicates that ERA-CoT increases the LLM's understanding of entity relationships, significantly improves the accuracy of question answering, and enhances the reasoning ability of LLMs.

ERA-CoT: Improving Chain-of-Thought through Entity Relationship Analysis

Large language models exhibit high-level commonsense reasoning abilities, especially with enhancement methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, we find these CoT-like methods lead to a considerable number of originally correct answers turning wrong, which we define as the Toxic CoT problem. To interpret and mitigate this problem, we first utilize attribution tracing and causal tracing methods to probe the internal working mechanism of the LLM during CoT reasoning. Through comparisons, we prove that the model exhibits information loss from the question over the shallow attention layers when generating rationales or answers. Based on the probing findings, we design a novel method called RIDERS (Residual decodIng and sERial-position Swap), which compensates for the information deficit in the model from both decoding and serial-position perspectives. Through extensive experiments on multiple commonsense reasoning benchmarks, we validate that this method not only significantly eliminates Toxic CoT problems (decreased by $\textbf{23.6}$%), but also effectively improves the model's overall commonsense reasoning performance (increased by $\textbf{5.5}$%).

Focus on Your Question! Interpreting and Mitigating Toxic CoT Problems in Commonsense Reasoning

Advancing the frontier of subquadratic architectures for Language Models (LMs) is crucial in the rapidly evolving field of natural language processing. Current innovations, including State Space Models, were initially celebrated for surpassing Transformer performance on language modeling tasks. However, these models have revealed deficiencies in essential In-Context Learning capabilities -- a domain where the Transformer traditionally shines. The Based model emerged as a hybrid solution, blending a Linear Transformer with a kernel inspired by the Taylor expansion of exponential functions, augmented by convolutional networks. Mirroring the Transformer's in-context adeptness, it became a strong contender in the field. In our work, we present a singular, elegant alteration to the Based kernel that amplifies its In-Context Learning abilities evaluated with the Multi-Query Associative Recall task and overall language modeling process, as demonstrated on the Pile dataset.

Linear Transformers with Learnable Kernel Functions are Better In-Context Models

Medical open-domain question answering demands substantial access to specialized knowledge. Recent efforts have sought to decouple knowledge from model parameters, counteracting architectural scaling and allowing for training on common low-resource hardware. The retrieve-then-read paradigm has become ubiquitous, with model predictions grounded on relevant knowledge pieces from external repositories such as PubMed, textbooks, and UMLS. An alternative path, still under-explored but made possible by the advent of domain-specific large language models, entails constructing artificial contexts through prompting. As a result, "to generate or to retrieve" is the modern equivalent of Hamlet's dilemma. This paper presents MedGENIE, the first generate-then-read framework for multiple-choice question answering in medicine. We conduct extensive experiments on MedQA-USMLE, MedMCQA, and MMLU, incorporating a practical perspective by assuming a maximum of 24GB VRAM. MedGENIE sets a new state-of-the-art in the open-book setting of each testbed, allowing a small-scale reader to outcompete zero-shot closed-book 175B baselines while using up to 706x fewer parameters. Our findings reveal that generated passages are more effective than retrieved ones in attaining higher accuracy.

To Generate or to Retrieve? On the Effectiveness of Artificial Contexts for Medical Open-Domain Question Answering

Recent scholarship on reasoning in LLMs has supplied evidence of impressive performance and flexible adaptation to machine generated or human critique. Nonmonotonic reasoning, crucial to human cognition for navigating the real world, remains a challenging, yet understudied task. In this work, we study nonmonotonic reasoning capabilities of seven state-of-the-art LLMs in one abstract and one commonsense reasoning task featuring generics, such as `Birds fly', and exceptions, 'Penguins don't fly' (see Fig. 1). 
While LLMs exhibit reasoning patterns in accordance with human nonmonotonic reasoning abilities, they fail to maintain stable beliefs on truth conditions of generics at the addition of supporting examples ('Owls fly') or unrelated information ('Lions have manes').
Our findings highlight pitfalls in attributing human reasoning behaviours to LLMs as long as consistent reasoning remains elusive.

Are LLMs classical or nonmonotonic reasoners? Lessons from generics

Semantic Parsing of natural language questions into their executable logical form (LF) has shown state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA). However, these methods are not applicable for real-world applications, due to lack of KG-specific training data. Recent advances in the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led towards generating low-level LFs such as SPARQL and S-Expression in a few-shot setting. Unfortunately, these methods: (1) are limited to the knowledge of underlying LLM about the LF, (2) performs inferior for the harder complex benchmarks such as KQA Pro, (3) suffers while grounding the generated LF to a specific Knowledge Graph. Recently, a new LF called KoPL has been introduced that explicitly models complex reasoning process step-by-step in a symbolic manner and has shown SOTA on KQA Pro in fully-supervised setting. Inspired by this, we propose SymKGQA framework that generates step-by-step Symbolic LF i.e., KoPL in a few-shot in-context learning setting using LLM. Our framework is not dependent on pre-trained information of LLM about KoPL. We further build a Retrieval-Augmented Generation based Question-Aware Contextual KoPL (QUACK) resolver to ground the generated LF. Our experiments with different LLMs and few-shot settings demonstrate that SymKGQA outperforms all other few-shot and even many of the fully-supervised KGQA approaches.

SymKGQA: Few-Shot Knowledge Graph Question Answering via Symbolic Program Generation and Execution

We introduce a new unsupervised text embedding method, Meta-Task Prompting with Explicit One-Word Limitation (MetaEOL), for generating high-quality sentence embeddings from Large Language Models (LLMs) without the need for model fine-tuning. Leveraging meta-task prompting, MetaEOL guides LLMs to produce embeddings through a series of carefully designed prompts that address multiple representational aspects. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that embeddings averaged from various meta-tasks are versatile embeddings that yield competitive performance on Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) benchmarks and excel in downstream tasks, surpassing contrastive-trained models. Our findings suggest a new scaling law, offering a versatile and resource-efficient approach for embedding generation across diverse scenarios.

Meta-Task Prompting Elicits Embeddings from Large Language Models

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, they are not without their flaws and inaccuracies. Recent studies have introduced various methods to mitigate these limitations. Temporal reasoning (TR), in particular, presents a significant challenge for LLMs due to its reliance on diverse temporal concepts and intricate temporal logic. In this paper, we propose TG-LLM, a novel framework towards language-based TR. Instead of reasoning over the original context, we adopt a latent representation, temporal graph (TG) that enhances the learning of TR. A synthetic dataset (TGQA), which is fully controllable and requires minimal supervision, is constructed for fine-tuning LLMs on this text-to-TG translation task. We confirmed in experiments that the capability of TG translation learned on our dataset can be transferred to other TR tasks and benchmarks. On top of that, we teach LLM to perform deliberate reasoning over the TGs via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) bootstrapping and graph data augmentation. We observed that those strategies, which maintain a balance between usefulness and diversity, bring more reliable CoTs and final results than the vanilla CoT distillation.

Large Language Models Can Learn Temporal Reasoning

Table Question-Answering involves both understanding the natural language query and grounding it in the context of the input table to extract relevant information. 
In this context, many methods have highlighted the benefits of intermediate pre-training using SQL queries. 
However, while most approaches aim at 
generating final answers directly from inputs, 
we claim that there is better to do with SQL queries during training.
By learning to imitate a restricted subset of SQL-like algebraic operations, we demonstrate that their execution flow provides intermediate supervision steps that allow for increased generalization and structural reasoning compared to classical approaches. 
Our method, bridges the gap between semantic parsing and direct answering methods, offering valuable insights into which types of operations should be predicted by a generative architecture and which should be executed by an external algorithm. Our code can be found at https://github.com/RaphaelMouravieff/Partial-Exec.

Learning Relational Decomposition of Queries for Question Answering from Tables

This study explores the realm of knowledge base question answering (KBQA). KBQA is considered a challenging task, particularly in parsing intricate questions into executable logical forms. Traditional semantic parsing (SP)-based methods require extensive data annotations, which result in significant costs. Recently, the advent of few-shot in-context learning, powered by large language models (LLMs), has showcased promising capabilities. Yet, fully leveraging LLMs to parse questions into logical forms in low-resource scenarios poses a substantial challenge. To tackle these hurdles, we introduce Interactive-KBQA, a framework designed to generate logical forms through direct interaction with knowledge bases (KBs). Within this framework, we have developed three generic APIs for KB interaction. For each category of complex question, we devised exemplars to guide LLMs through the reasoning processes. Our method achieves competitive results on the WebQuestionsSP, ComplexWebQuestions, KQA Pro, and MetaQA datasets with a minimal number of examples (shots). Importantly, our approach supports manual intervention, allowing for the iterative refinement of LLM outputs. By annotating a dataset with step-wise reasoning processes, we showcase our model's adaptability and highlight its potential for contributing significant enhancements to the field.

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ERA-CoT: Improving Chain-of-Thought through Entity Relationship Analysis

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Testing Simulation Theory in LLMs’ Theory of Mind