Austria

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising results on a range of reasoning benchmarks—particularly in formal logic, mathematical tasks, and Chain-of-Thought prompting—less is known about their capabilities in unconstrained natural language reasoning. Argumentative reasoning, a form of reasoning naturally expressed in language and central to everyday discourse, presents unique challenges for LLMs due to its reliance on context, implicit assumptions, and value judgments. This paper addresses a gap in the study of reasoning in LLMs by presenting the first large-scale evaluation of their unconstrained natural language reasoning capabilities based on natural language argumentation. The paper offers three contributions: (i) the formalisation of a new strategy designed to evaluate argumentative reasoning in LLMs: argument-component selection; (ii) the creation of the Argument Reasoning Tasks (ART) dataset, a new benchmark for argument-component selection based on argument structures for natural language reasoning; and (iii) an extensive experimental analysis involving four different models, demonstrating the limitations of LLMs on natural language reasoning tasks.

ACL 2025

Natural Language Reasoning in Large Language Models: Analysis and Evaluation

natural language reasoning

reasoning

argumentation

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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.

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### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s 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.* 
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Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

The detection of texts generated by LLMs has quickly become an important research problem. Many supervised and zero-shot detectors have already been proposed, yet their effectiveness and precision remain disputed. Current research therefore focuses on making detectors robust against domain shifts and on building corresponding benchmarks. In this paper, we show that the actual limitations hindering progress in LLM detection lie elsewhere: LLM detection is often implicitly modeled as an authorship attribution task, while its true nature is that of authorship verification. We systematically analyze the current research with respect to this misunderstanding, conduct an in-depth comparative analysis of the benchmarks, and validate our claim using state-of-the-art LLM detectors. Our contributions open the realm of authorship analysis technology for understanding and tackling the problem of LLM detection.

The Two Paradigms of LLM Detection: Authorship Attribution versus Authorship Verification

Humblebragging is a phenomenon where individuals present self-promotional statements under the guise of modesty or complaints. For example, a statement like, "Ugh, I can't believe I got promoted to lead the entire team. So stressful!", subtly highlights an achievement while pretending to be complaining. Detecting humblebragging is important for machines to better understand the nuances of human language, especially in tasks like sentiment analysis and intent recognition. However, this topic has not yet been studied in computational linguistics. For the first time, we introduce the task of automatically detecting humblebragging in text. We formalize the task by proposing a 4-tuple definition of humblebragging and evaluate machine learning, deep learning, and large language models (LLMs) on this task, comparing their performance with humans. We also create and release a dataset called HB24, containing 3,340 humblebrags generated using GPT-4o. Our experiments show that detecting humblebragging is non-trivial, even for humans. Our best model achieves an F1-score of 0.88. This work lays the foundation for further exploration of this nuanced linguistic phenomenon and its integration into broader natural language understanding systems.

"My life is miserable, have to sign 500 autographs everyday": Exposing Humblebragging, the Brags in Disguise

Scientific question answering (SQA) is an important task aimed at answering questions based on papers. However, current SQA datasets have limited reasoning types and neglect the relevance between tables and text, creating a significant gap with real scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a QA benchmark for scientific tables and text with diverse reasoning types (SCITAT). To cover more reasoning types, we summarize various reasoning types from real-world questions. To reason on both tables and text, we require the questions to incorporate tables and text as much as possible. Based on SCITAT, we propose a baseline (CAR), which combines various reasoning methods to address different reasoning types and process tables and text at the same time. CAR brings average improvements of 4.1% over other baselines on SCITAT, validating its effectiveness. Error analysis reveals the challenges of SCITAT, such as complex numerical calculations and domain knowledge.

SCITAT: A Question Answering Benchmark for Scientific Tables and Text Covering Diverse Reasoning Types

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong capabilities in in-context learning, but verifying the correctness of their generated responses remains a challenge. Prior work has explored attribution at the sentence level, but these methods fall short when users seek attribution for specific keywords within the response, such as numbers, years, or names. To address this limitation, we propose TokenShapley, a novel token-level attribution method that combines Shapley value-based data attribution with KNN-based retrieval techniques inspired by recent advances in KNN-augmented LLMs. By leveraging a precomputed datastore for contextual retrieval and computing Shapley values to quantify token importance, TokenShapley provides a fine-grained data attribution approach. Extensive evaluations on four benchmarks show that TokenShapley outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in token-level attribution, achieving a 11–23% improvement.

TokenShapley: Token Level Context Attribution with Shapley Value

Generative models are capable of producing human-expert level content across a variety of topics and domains. As the impact of generative models grows, it is necessary to develop statistical methods to understand collections of available models. These methods are particularly important in settings where the user may not have access to information related to a model's pre-training data, weights, or other relevant model-level covariates. In this paper we extend recent results on representations of black-box generative models to model-level statistical inference tasks. We demonstrate that the model-level representations are effective for multiple inference tasks.

Statistical inference on black-box generative models in the data kernel perspective space

We evaluate how well Large Language Models (LLMs) latently recall and compose facts to answer multi-hop queries like "In the year Scarlett Johansson was born, the Summer Olympics were hosted in the country of". One major challenge in such evaluation is that LLMs may have developed shortcuts by encountering the head entity "Scarlett Johansson" and the answer entity "United States" in the same training sequences or merely guess the answer based on frequency-based priors. To prevent shortcuts, we exclude test queries where the head and answer entities might have co-appeared during training. Through careful selection of relations and facts and systematic removal of cases where models might guess answers or exploit partial matches, we construct an evaluation dataset SOCRATES (ShOrtCut-fRee lATent rEaSoning). We observe that LLMs demonstrate promising latent multi-hop reasoning abilities without exploiting shortcuts, but only for certain types of queries. For queries requiring latent recall of countries as the intermediate answer, the best models achieve 80% latent composability, but this drops to just 5% for the recall of years. Comparisons with Chain-of-Thought highlight a significant gap between the ability of models to reason latently versus explicitly. Analysis reveals that latent representations of the intermediate answer are constructed more often in queries with higher latent composability, and shows the emergence of latent multi-hop reasoning during pretraining.

Do Large Language Models Perform Latent Multi-Hop Reasoning without Exploiting Shortcuts?

Climate change adaptation requires the understanding of disruptive weather impacts on society, where large language models (LLMs) might be applicable. However, their effectiveness is under-explored due to the difficulty of high-quality corpus collection and the lack of available benchmarks. The climate-related events stored in regional newspapers record how communities adapted and recovered from disasters. However, the processing of the original corpus is non-trivial. In this study, we first develop a disruptive weather impact dataset with a four-stage well-crafted construction pipeline. Then, we propose WXImpactBench, the first benchmark for evaluating the capacity of LLMs on disruptive weather impacts. The benchmark involves two evaluation tasks, multi-label classification and ranking-based question answering. Extensive experiments on evaluating a set of LLMs provide first-hand analysis of the challenges in developing disruptive weather impact understanding and climate change adaptation systems. The constructed dataset and the code for the evaluation framework are available to help society protect against vulnerabilities from disasters.

WXImpactBench: A Disruptive Weather Impact Understanding Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models

The rapid development of LLMs has sparked extensive research into their factual knowledge. Current works find that LLMs fall short on questions around low-frequency entities. However, such proofs are unreliable since the questions can differ not only in entity frequency but also in difficulty themselves. So we introduce **ComparisonQA** benchmark, containing **283K** abstract questions, each instantiated by a pair of high-frequency and low-frequency entities. It ensures a controllable comparison to study the role of knowledge frequency in the performance of LLMs. Because the difference between such a pair is only the entity with different frequencies. 
In addition, we use both correctness and uncertainty to develop a two-round method to evaluate LLMs' knowledge robustness. It aims to avoid possible semantic shortcuts which is a serious problem of current QA study. Experiments reveal that LLMs, including GPT-4o, exhibit particularly low robustness regarding low-frequency knowledge. 
Besides, we find that uncertainty can be used to effectively identify high-quality and shortcut-free questions while maintaining the data size. Based on this, we propose an automatic method to select such questions to form a subset called **ComparisonQA-Hard**, containing only hard low-frequency questions.

ComparisonQA: Evaluating Factuality Robustness of LLMs Through Knowledge Frequency Control and Uncertainty

Uncertainty quantification in Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) methods is crucial for ensuring the reliability of downstream applications. A recent work applies conformal prediction to KGE methods, providing uncertainty estimates by generating a set of answers that is guaranteed to include the true answer with a predefined confidence level. However, existing methods provide probabilistic guarantees averaged over a reference set of queries and answers (marginal coverage guarantee). In high-stakes applications such as medical diagnosis, a stronger guarantee is often required: the predicted sets must provide consistent coverage per query (conditional coverage guarantee). We propose CondKGCP, a novel method that approximates predicate-conditional coverage guarantees while maintaining compact prediction sets. CondKGCP merges predicates with similar vector representations and augments calibration with rank information. We prove the theoretical guarantees and demonstrate empirical effectiveness of CondKGCP by comprehensive evaluations.

Predicate-Conditional Conformalized Answer Sets for Knowledge Graph Embeddings

We present Autonomous Data Selection (AutoDS), a method that leverages base language models as zero-shot "generative classifiers" to automatically curate high-quality mathematical texts. Unlike prior approaches that require human annotations or training a dedicated data filter, AutoDS relies solely on a model’s logits to determine whether a given passage is mathematically informative and educational. By integrating AutoDS into a continual pretraining pipeline, we substantially boost downstream performance on challenging math benchmarks (MATH, GSM8K, and BBH) while using far fewer tokens than previous methods. Empirically, our approach achieves roughly a twofold improvement in pretraining token efficiency over strong baselines, underscoring the potential of self-directed data selection in enhancing mathematical reasoning. We will release our curated dataset to facilitate future research in automated domain-specific data curation.

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The Two Paradigms of LLM Detection: Authorship Attribution versus Authorship Verification

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