Austria

Data pruning—selecting small but impactful subsets—offers a promising way to efficiently scale NLP model training. However, existing methods often involve many different design choices, which have not been systematically studied. This limits future developments. In this work, we decompose data pruning into two key components: data representation and selection algorithm, and systematically analyze their influence on selected instances. Our theoretical and empirical results highlight the crucial role of representations: better representations, e.g., training gradients, generally lead to better selected instances, regardless of the chosen selection algorithm. Furthermore, different selection algorithms excel in different settings, and none consistently outperform the others. Moreover, the selection algorithms do not always align with their intended objectives: for example, algorithms designed for the same objective can select drastically different instances, highlighting the need for careful evaluation.

ACL 2025

Disentangling the Roles of Representation and Selection in Data Pruning

data influence

data pruning

attribution

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

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EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

poster

### 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)

Ensuring contextual faithfulness in retrieval-augmented large language models (LLMs) is crucial for building trustworthy information-seeking systems, particularly in long-form question-answering (LFQA) scenarios. In this work, we identify a salient correlation between LFQA faithfulness and retrieval heads, a set of attention heads responsible for retrieving contextual information. Leveraging this insight, we propose RHIO, a framework designed to teach LLMs to explicitly discriminate between faithful and unfaithful generations. RHIO first augments unfaithful samples that simulate realistic model-intrinsic errors by selectively masking retrieval heads. Then, these samples are incorporated into joint training, enabling the model to distinguish unfaithful outputs from faithful ones conditioned on control tokens. Furthermore, these control tokens are leveraged to self-induce contrastive outputs, amplifying their difference through contrastive decoding. Additionally, to facilitate the evaluation of contextual faithfulness, we also introduce GroundBench, a comprehensive benchmark compiled from five existing LFQA datasets. Extensive experimental results on GroundBench demonstrate that RHIO significantly improves faithfulness, even outperforming GPT-4o.

Improving Contextual Faithfulness of Large Language Models via Retrieval Heads-Induced Optimization

As a bridge between natural texts and information systems like structured storage, statistical analysis, retrieving, and recommendation, the text-to-table task has received widespread attention recently. Existing researches have gone through a paradigm shift from traditional bottom-up IE (Information Extraction) to top-down LLMs-based question answering with RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). Furthermore, these methods mainly adopt end-to-end models or use multi-stage pipelines to extract text content based on static table structures. However, they neglect to deal with precise inner-document evidence extraction and dynamic information such as multiple entities and events, which can not be defined in static table head format and are very common in natural texts.

To address this issue, we propose a two-stage dynamic content extraction agent framework called TST (Text-Schema-Table), which uses type recognition methods to extract context evidences with the conduction of domain schema sequentially. Based on the evidence, firstly we quantify the total instances of each dynamic object and then extract them with ordered numerical prompts. Through extensive comparisons with existing methods across different datasets, our extraction framework exhibits state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Our codes are available at \url{https://github.com/jiangpw41/TST}.

TST: A Schema-Based Top-Down and Dynamic-Aware Agent of Text-to-Table Tasks

LLMs' performance on complex tasks is still unsatisfactory. A key issue is that presently LLMs learn in a data-driven schema, while the instructions about these complex tasks are both scarce and hard to collect or construct. On the contrary, a prominent phenomenon is that LLMs can learn rather fast on simpler tasks with adequate prior knowledge captured during pretraining stage. Thus, if the prerequisite and mechanism of such rapid generalization could be elucidated, it could enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the LLM's ability to learn complex tasks. Thus, in this paper, we employ a gradient-based method, to dissect the process that the SFT process adapts LLMs to downstream tasks via the perspective of attention patterns. We find that: (1) LLMs selectively activate task-specific attention heads during SFT; (2) activation patterns for complex tasks are combinations of basic task patterns; and (3) changes in a few parameters can significantly impact activation patterns after SFT on a small number of samples.Based on these insights, experiments are conducted to actually enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of SFT.

Analyzing the Rapid Generalization of SFT via the Perspective of Attention Head Activation Patterns

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant advancements in error handling. Current error-handling works are performed in a passive manner, with explicit error-handling instructions. However, in real-world scenarios, explicit error-handling instructions are usually unavailable. In this paper, our work identifies this challenge as how to conduct proactive error handling without explicit error handling instructions. To promote further research, this work introduces a new benchmark, termed Mis-prompt, consisting of four evaluation tasks, an error category taxonomy, and a new evaluation dataset. Furthermore, this work analyzes current LLMs' performance on the benchmark, and the experimental results reveal that current LLMs show poor performance on proactive error handling, and SFT on error handling instances improves LLMs' proactive error handling capabilities. The dataset will be publicly available.

Mis-prompt: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Proactive Error Handling

Recent advancements in probing Large Language Models (LLMs) have explored their latent potential as personalized travel planning agents, though this remains a rather nascent field. Existing benchmarks, such as TravelPlanner and TravelPlanner+, rely on semi-synthetic data as well ignoring several key components of travel planning, limiting their real-world applicability. Therefore, we introduce TripCraft, a spatio-temporally coherent travel planning dataset incorporating real-world constraints, including public transit schedules, public events, varied attraction categories, and user personas for enhanced personalization. Our dataset enables more detailed trip itinerary generation (including duration spent at each point of interest based on users' persona, transit between two points of interest, etc.) while ensuring spatio-temporal consistency. Further, we propose novel evaluation metrics (temporal meal score, attraction score, spatial score, ordering score, and persona score) to assess LLM-generated plans across temporal, spatial, sequential, and personal dimensions, overcoming the limitations of commonsense and hard constraint metrics. Interestingly, our parameter-informed setting significantly enhances meal scheduling, improving performance from 61% to 80% in the 7-day scenario- as quantified by a 19% gain in our temporal meal score. Moreover, TripCraft serves as a high-quality benchmark for advancing personalized LLM-driven travel planning.

TripCraft: A Benchmark for Spatio-Temporally Fine Grained Travel Planning

Attributed Question Answering (AQA) has attracted wide attention, but there are still several limitations in evaluating the attributions, including lacking fine-grained attribution categories, relying on manual annotations, and failing to compare attributions with only subtle differences. To bridge these gaps, we introduce Complex Attributed Question Answering (CAQA), a large-scale benchmark containing comprehensive attribution categories, automatically generated using Knowledge Graphs (KGs), and complex attribution scenarios. We have conducted extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of CAQA, including the benchmarking of 25 automatic evaluators, their comparison with human evaluators, the testing of LLM evaluators fine-tuned by CAQA and so on. These experiments also lead to a series of important findings that can benefit the future research of AQA.

Can LLMs Evaluate Complex Attribution in QA? Automatic Benchmarking using Knowledge Graphs

Despite the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs), their length-controllable text generation (LCTG) ability remains below expectations, posing a major limitation for practical applications. Existing methods mainly focus on end-to-end training to reinforce adherence to length constraints. However, the lack of decomposition and targeted enhancement of LCTG sub-abilities restricts further progress. To bridge this gap, we conduct a bottom-up decomposition of LCTG sub-abilities with human patterns as reference and perform a detailed error analysis. On this basis, we propose MarkerGen, a simple-yet-effective plug-and-play approach that: (1) mitigates LLM fundamental deficiencies via external tool integration; (2) conducts explicit length modeling with dynamically inserted markers; (3) employs a three-stage generation scheme to better align length constraints while maintaining content quality. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MarkerGen significantly improves LCTG across various settings, exhibiting outstanding effectiveness and generalizability.

From Sub-Ability Diagnosis to Human-Aligned Generation: Bridging the Gap for Text Length Control via MarkerGen

Despite the great potential of large language models~(LLMs) in machine comprehension, it is still disturbing to fully count on them in real-world scenarios. This is probably because there is no rational explanation for whether the comprehension process of LLMs is aligned with that of experts. In this paper, we propose SCOP to carefully examine how LLMs perform during the comprehension process from a cognitive view. Specifically, it is equipped with a systematical definition of five requisite skills during the comprehension process, a strict framework to construct testing data for these skills, and a detailed analysis of advanced open-sourced and closed-sourced LLMs using the testing data. With SCOP, we find that it is still challenging for LLMs to perform an expert-level comprehension process. Even so, we notice that LLMs share some similarities with experts, e.g., performing better at comprehending local information than global information. Further analysis reveals that LLMs can be somewhat unreliable --- they might reach correct answers through flawed comprehension processes. Based on SCOP, we suggest that one direction for improving LLMs is to focus more on the comprehension process, ensuring all comprehension skills are thoroughly developed during training.

SCOP: Evaluating the Comprehension Process of Large Language Models from a Cognitive View

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in formal theorem proving, but their token-level processing often fails to capture the inherent hierarchical nature of mathematical proofs. We introduce \textbf{Hierarchical Attention}, a regularization method that aligns LLMs' attention mechanisms with mathematical reasoning structures. Our approach establishes a five-level hierarchy from foundational elements to high-level concepts, ensuring structured information flow in proof generation. Experiments demonstrate that our method improves proof success rates by 2.05% on miniF2F and 1.69% on ProofNet while reducing proof complexity by 23.81% and 16.50% respectively. The code and models will be available.

Hierarchical Attention Generates Better Proofs

Self-critique mechanisms significantly improve the performance of language models in complex reasoning tasks by giving them the ability to correct errors, conduct induction and deduction, and switch thinking insights. However, synthetic data methods often require human-introduced errors or sampling of the model's reasoning results from the previous moment, and the current output distribution of the model cannot be obtained, makes the data for critique and reasoning face the problem of distribution shifts. In this work, we propose an on-policy reinforcement learning framework to synchronize the reasoning and critique capabilities of language models. To alleviate reward hacking caused by outcome-based supervision, we design a deliberate reward framework for different purposes. The reward framework not only supervises the model reasoning process based on the results, but also uses Monte Carlo sampling to give appropriate rewards to the critique content according to the success rate of the model's correction after critique. In addition, we introduce a rule-based reward function to impose penalties on the model when it generates hallucinatory critiques. When our approach is applied to the DeepSeek-Math-7B-Base and Qwen2.5-7B-Base models, model performance improves 5.40 and 3.66 points, respectively, compared to the best baseline approach. This validates the significant advantages of our method in improving model's reasoning and self-critique capability. Code will be made available at https://github.com/rbao2018/SCOP

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Improving Contextual Faithfulness of Large Language Models via Retrieval Heads-Induced Optimization

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