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Hallucination has been a popular topic in natural language generation (NLG). In real-world applications, unfaithful content can result in poor data quality or loss of trust from end users. Thus, it is crucial to fact-check before adopting NLG for production usage, which can be expensive if done manually. In this paper, we investigate automated faithfulness evaluation in guided NLG. We developed a rubric template and used large language models (LLMs) to score the generation on quantifiable scales. We compared popular LLMs as well as widely adopted natural language inference (NLI) models in scoring quality and sensitivity. In addition, we developed methods for the generation of synthetic unfaithful data, as well as heuristics to quantify the percentage of hallucination. Our results on 4 travel-domain industry dataset show that GPT-4 can provide accurate judgement and explanation of whether a source and a generation are factually consistent. Furthermore, we found that tuning NLI models on synthetic data can improve performance. Lastly, we present insights on the latency and cost of deploying such a system.

NAACL 2025

On A Scale From 1 to 5: Quantifying Hallucination in Faithfulness Evaluation

explanability

faithfulness

evaluation

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. 
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ACL 2026

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

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

Many adversarial attack approaches are proposed to verify the vulnerability of language models. However, they require numerous queries and the information on the target model. Even black-box attack methods also require the target model's output information. They are not applicable in real-world scenarios, as in hard black-box settings where the target model is closed and inaccessible. Even the recently proposed hard black-box attacks still require many queries and demand extremely high costs for training adversarial generators. To address these challenges, we propose Q-faker (Query-free Hard Black-box Attacker), a novel and efficient method that generates adversarial examples without accessing the target model. To avoid accessing the target model, we use a surrogate model instead. The surrogate model generates adversarial sentences for a target-agnostic attack. During this process, we leverage controlled generation techniques. We evaluate our proposed method on eight datasets. Experimental results demonstrate our method's effectiveness including high transferability and the high quality of the generated adversarial examples, and prove its practical in hard black-box settings.

Q-FAKER: Query-free Hard Black-box Attack via Controlled Generation

Teaching large language models (LLMs) to use tools for solving complex problems can grant them human-like reasoning abilities. ReAct and its variants are popular frameworks for tool use in both single-agent and multi-agent systems. To address issues like error propagation and limited exploration in ReAct, the Deep First Search Decision Tree (DFSDT) was proposed, but it faces challenges such as rollback instability, redundant context, and premature termination in single-agent settings. We introduce ''Smurfs,'' a novel multi-agent system (MAS) that enhances DFSDT with a modular, context-efficient, and training-free design. Smurfs surpasses baseline methods in both the open-ended StableToolBench and the closed-ended HotpotQA tasks, reducing token usage by 60.9% compared to DFSDT and enabling Mistral-7b to perform on par with GPT-4-DFSDT. Extensive ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of Smurfs' core components, offering valuable insights for the construction and interpretation of MAS, and paving the way for future exploration. We release the code at [https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/Smurfs](https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/Smurfs).

Smurfs: Multi-Agent System using Context-Efficient DFSDT for Tool Planning

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) succeed in human-guided conversations such as instruction following and question answering, the potential of LLM-guided conversations—where LLMs direct the discourse and steer the conversation's objectives—remains under-explored. In this study, we first characterize LLM-guided conversation into three fundamental components: (i) Goal Navigation; (ii) Context Management; (iii) Empathetic Engagement, and propose GuideLLM as an installation. We then implement an interviewing environment for the evaluation of LLM-guided conversation. Specifically, various topics are involved in this environment for comprehensive interviewing evaluation, resulting in around 1.4k turns of utterances, 184k tokens, and over 200 events mentioned during the interviewing for each chatbot evaluation. We compare GuideLLM with 6 state-of-the-art LLMs such as GPT-4o and Llama-3-70b-Instruct, from the perspective of interviewing quality, and autobiography generation quality. For automatic evaluation, we derive user proxies from multiple autobiographies and employ LLM-as-a-judge to score LLM behaviors. We further conduct a human-involved experiment by employing 45 human participants to chat with GuideLLM and baselines. We then collect human feedback, preferences, and ratings regarding the qualities of conversation and autobiography. Experimental results indicate that GuideLLM significantly outperforms baseline LLMs in automatic evaluation and achieves consistent leading performances in human ratings.

GuideLLM: Exploring LLM-Guided Conversation with Applications in Autobiography Interviewing

In human conversations, short backchannel utterances such as ''yeah'' and ''oh'' play a crucial role in facilitating smooth and engaging dialogue. These backchannels signal attentiveness and understanding without interrupting the speaker, making their accurate prediction essential for creating more natural conversational agents. This paper proposes a novel method for real-time, continuous backchannel prediction using a fine-tuned Voice Activity Projection (VAP) model. While existing approaches have relied on turn-based or artificially balanced datasets, our approach predicts both the timing and type of backchannels in a continuous and frame-wise manner on unbalanced, real-world datasets. We first pre-train the VAP model on a general dialogue corpus to capture conversational dynamics and then fine-tune it on a specialized dataset focused on backchannel behavior. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms baseline methods in both timing and type prediction tasks, achieving robust performance in real-time environments. This research offers a promising step toward more responsive and human-like dialogue systems, with implications for interactive spoken dialogue applications such as virtual assistants and robots.

Yeah, Un, Oh: Continuous and Real-time Backchannel Prediction with Fine-tuning of Voice Activity Projection

Dialogue State Tracking (DST) is crucial for understanding user needs and executing appropriate system actions in task-oriented dialogues. Majority of existing DST methods are designed to work within predefined ontologies and assume the availability of gold domain labels, struggling with adapting to new slots values. While Large Language Models (LLMs)-based systems show promising zero-shot DST performance, they either require extensive computational resources or they underperform existing fully-trained systems, limiting their practicality. To address these limitations, we propose a zero-shot, open-vocabulary system that integrates domain classification and DST in a single pipeline. Our approach includes reformulating DST as a question-answering task for less capable models and employing self-refining prompts for more adaptable ones. Our system does not rely on fixed slot values defined in the ontology allowing the system to adapt dynamically. We compare our approach with existing SOTA, and show that it provides up to 20% better Joint Goal Accuracy (JGA) over previous methods on datasets like MultiWOZ 2.1, with up to 90% fewer requests to the LLM API.

A Zero-Shot Open-Vocabulary Pipeline for Dialogue Understanding

Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems are designed to fulfill user requests through natural language interactions, yet existing systems often produce generic, monotonic responses that lack individuality and fail to adapt to users' personal attributes. To address this, we introduce PicPersona-TOD, a novel dataset that incorporates user images as part of the persona, enabling personalized responses tailored to user-specific factors such as age or emotional context. This is facilitated by first impressions, dialogue policy-guided prompting, and the use of external knowledge to reduce hallucinations. Human evaluations confirm that our dataset enhances user experience, with personalized responses contributing to a more engaging interaction. Additionally, we introduce a new NLG model, Pictor, which not only personalizes responses, but also demonstrates robust performance across unseen domains.

PicPersona-TOD : A Dataset for Personalizing Utterance Style in Task-Oriented Dialogue with Image Persona

Understanding user satisfaction with conversational systems, known as User Satisfaction Estimation (USE), is essential for assessing dialogue quality and enhancing user experiences. However, existing methods for USE face challenges due to limited understanding of underlying reasons for user dissatisfaction and the high costs of annotating user intentions. To address these challenges, we propose PRAISE (Plan and Retrieval Alignment for Interpretable Satisfaction Estimation), an interpretable framework for effective user satisfaction prediction. PRAISE operates through three key modules. The Strategy Planner develops strategies, which are natural language criteria for classifying user satisfaction. The Feature Retriever then incorporates knowledge on user satisfaction from Large Language Models (LLMs) and retrieves relevance features from utterances. Finally, the Score Analyzer evaluates strategy predictions and classifies user satisfaction. Experimental results demonstrate that PRAISE achieves state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarks for the USE task. Beyond its superior performance, PRAISE offers additional benefits. It enhances interpretability by providing instance-level explanations through effective alignment of utterances with strategies. Moreover, PRAISE operates more efficiently than existing approaches by eliminating the need for LLMs during the inference phase.

LLM-guided Plan and Retrieval: A Strategic Alignment for Interpretable User Satisfaction Estimation in Dialogue

Training conversational question-answering (QA) systems demands a substantial amount of in-domain data, which is often scarce in practice. A common solution to this challenge is to generate synthetic data. Traditional methods typically follow a top-down approach, where a large language model (LLM) generates multi-turn dialogues from a broad prompt. While this method produces coherent conversations, it offers limited fine-grained control over the content and is susceptible to hallucinations. We introduce a bottom-up conversation synthesis approach, where QA pairs are generated first and then combined into a coherent dialogue. This method offers greater control and precision by dividing the process into two distinct steps, enabling refined instructions and validations to be handled separately. Additionally, this structure allows the use of non-local models in stages that do not involve proprietary knowledge, enhancing the overall quality of the generated data. Both human and automated evaluations demonstrate that our approach produces more realistic and higher-quality dialogues compared to top-down methods.

Bottom-Up Synthesis of Knowledge-Grounded Task-Oriented Dialogues with Iteratively Self-Refined Prompts

Truthfulness (adherence to factual accuracy) and utility (satisfying human needs and instructions) are both fundamental aspects of Large Language Models, yet these goals often conflict (e.g., sell a car with known flaws), making it challenging to achieve both in real-world deployments. We propose AI-LieDar, a framework to study how LLM-based agents navigate these scenarios in an multi-turn interactive setting. We design a set of real-world scenarios where language agents are instructed to achieve goals that are in conflict with being truthful during a multi-turn conversation with simulated human agents. To evaluate the truthfulness at large scale, we develop a truthfulness detector inspired by psychological literature to assess the agents' responses. Our experiment demonstrates that all models are truthful less than 50% of the time, although truthfulness and goal achievement (utility) rates vary across models. We further test the steerability of LLMs towards truthfulness, finding that models can be directed to be deceptive, and even truth-steered models still lie. These findings reveal the complex nature of truthfulness in LLMs and underscore the importance of further research to ensure the safe and reliable deployment of LLMs and AI agents.

AI-LieDar : Examine the Trade-off Between Utility and Truthfulness in LLM Agents

This paper aims to efficiently enable large language models (LLMs) to use external knowledge and goal guidance in conversational recommender system (CRS) tasks. Advanced LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT) are limited in domain-specific CRS tasks for 1) generating grounded responses with recommendation-oriented knowledge, or 2) proactively leading the conversations through different dialogue goals. In this work, we first analyze those limitations through a comprehensive evaluation, showing the necessity of external knowledge and goal guidance which contribute significantly to the recommendation accuracy and language quality. In light of this finding, we propose a novel ChatCRS framework to decompose the complex CRS task into several sub-tasks through the implementation of 1) a knowledge retrieval agent using a tool-augmented approach to reason over external Knowledge Bases and 2) a goal-planning agent for dialogue goal prediction. Experimental results on two multi-goal CRS datasets reveal that ChatCRS sets new state-of-the-art benchmarks, improving language quality of informativeness by 17% and proactivity by 27%, and achieving a tenfold enhancement in recommendation accuracy.

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Q-FAKER: Query-free Hard Black-box Attack via Controlled Generation

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