Austria

Digital education has gained popularity in the last decade, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. With the improving capabilities of large language models to reason and communicate with users, envisioning intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) that can facilitate self-learning is not very far-fetched. One integral component to fulfill this vision is the ability to give accurate and effective feedback via hints to scaffold the learning process. In this survey article, we present a comprehensive review of prior research on hint generation, aiming to bridge the gap between research in education and cognitive science, and research in AI and Natural Language Processing. Informed by our findings, we propose a formal definition of the hint generation task, and discuss the roadmap of building an effective hint generation system aligned with the formal definition, including open challenges, future directions and ethical considerations.

ACL 2025

Navigating the Landscape of Hint Generation Research: From the Past to the Future

automatic hint generation

ai for education

intelligent tutoring systems

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
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ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

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)

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has recently become a very popular task for Large Language Models (LLMs). Evaluating them on multi-turn RAG conversations, where the system is asked to generate a response to a question in the context of a preceding conversation is an important and often overlooked task with several additional challenges. We present MTRAG: an end-to-end human-generated multi-turn RAG benchmark that reflects several real-world properties across diverse dimensions for evaluating the full RAG pipeline. MTRAG contains 110 conversations averaging 7.7 turns each across four domains for a total of 842 tasks. We also explore automation paths via synthetic data and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation. Our human and automatic evaluations show that even state-of-the-art LLM RAG systems struggle on MTRAG. We demonstrate the need for strong retrieval and generation systems that can handle later turns, unanswerable questions, non-standalone questions, and multiple domains. MTRAG is available at https://github.com/ibm/mt-rag-benchmark.

MTRAG: A Multi-Turn Conversational Benchmark for Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have spurred interest in designing LLM-based agents for tasks that involve interaction with human and artificial agents. This paper addresses a key aspect in the design of such agents: predicting human decisions in off-policy evaluation (OPE).
We focus on language-based persuasion games, where an expert aims to influence the decision-maker through verbal messages.
In our OPE framework, the prediction model is trained on human interaction data collected from encounters with one set of expert agents, and its performance is evaluated on interactions with a different set of experts.
Using a dedicated application, we collected a dataset of 87K decisions from humans playing a repeated decision-making game with artificial agents.
To enhance off-policy performance, we propose a simulation technique involving interactions across the entire agent space and simulated decision-makers. Our learning strategy yields significant OPE gains, e.g., improving prediction accuracy in the top 15\% challenging cases by 7.1%.

Human Choice Prediction in Language-Based Persuasion Games: Simulation-Based Off-Policy Evaluation

Instruction tuning enhances large language models (LLMs) by aligning them with human preferences across diverse tasks. Traditional approaches to create instruction tuning datasets face serious challenges for low-resource languages due to their dependence on data annotation. This work introduces a novel method, Multilingual Reverse Instructions (MURI), which generates high-quality instruction tuning datasets for low-resource languages without requiring human annotators or pre-existing multilingual models. Utilizing reverse instructions and a translation pipeline, MURI produces instruction-output pairs from existing human-written texts in low-resource languages. This method ensures cultural relevance and diversity by sourcing texts from different native domains and applying filters to eliminate inappropriate content. Our dataset, MURI-IT, includes more than 2 million instruction-output pairs across 200 languages. Evaluation by native speakers and fine-tuning experiments with mT5 models demonstrate the approach's effectiveness for both NLU and open-ended generation. We publicly release datasets and models at https://github.com/akoksal/muri.

MURI: High-Quality Instruction Tuning Datasets for Low-Resource Languages via Reverse Instructions

Literary translation remains one of the most challenging frontiers in machine translation due to the complexity of capturing figurative language, cultural nuances, and unique stylistic elements. In this work, we introduce TransAgents, a novel multi-agent framework that simulates the roles and collaborative practices of a human translation company, including a CEO, Senior Editor, Junior Editor, Translator, Localization Specialist, and Proofreader. The translation process is divided into two stages: a preparation stage where the team is assembled and comprehensive translation guidelines are drafted, and an execution stage that involves sequential translation, localization, proofreading, and a final quality check. Furthermore, we propose two innovative evaluation strategies: Monolingual Human Preference (MHP), which evaluates translations based solely on target language quality and cultural appropriateness, and Bilingual LLM Preference (BLP), which leverages large language models like gpt-4 for direct text comparison. Although TransAgents achieves lower d-BLEU scores, due to the limited diversity of references, its translations are significantly better than those of other baselines and are preferred by both human evaluators and LLMs over traditional human references and gpt-4 translations. Our findings highlight the potential of multi-agent collaboration in enhancing translation quality, particularly for longer texts.

(Perhaps) Beyond Human Translation: Harnessing Multi-Agent Collaboration for Translating Ultra-Long Literary Texts

Recent decoder-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) generally use subword tokenizers. However, adding character-level perturbations drastically changes the delimitation of texts by the tokenizers, leading to the vulnerability of PLMs. This study proposes a method of continual pre-training to convert decoder-based PLMs with subword tokenizers into perturbation-robust few-shot in-context learners. Our method continually trains decoder-based PLMs to predict the next tokens conditioning on artificially created character-level noisy texts. Since decoder-based language models are auto-regressive, we skip noised words from the target optimization. In addition, to maintain the same word prediction performance under noisy text as clean text, our method employs word distribution matching between the original PLMs and training models. We conducted experiments on various subword-based PLMs, including GPT2, Pythia, Mistral, Gemma2, and Llama3, ranging from 1B to 8B parameters. The results show that our method consistently improves downstream task performance for texts containing artificial noise and actual typos or spelling errors with few-shot in-context learning settings.

Continual Pre-training on Character-Level Noisy Texts Makes Decoder-based Language Models Robust Few-shot Learners

Vision Language Models (VLMs) extend remarkable capabilities of text-only large language models and vision-only models, being able to learn from and process multi-modal vision-text input. While modern VLMs perform well on a number of standard image classification and image-text matching tasks, they still struggle with a number of crucial vision-language (VL) reasoning abilities such as counting and spatial reasoning. Moreover, while they might be very brittle to small variations in instructions and/or evaluation protocols, existing benchmarks fail to evaluate their robustness (or rather the lack of it). In order to couple challenging VL scenarios with comprehensive robustness evaluation, we introduce DARE, Diverse Visual Question Answering with Robustness Evaluation, a carefully created and curated multiple-choice VQA benchmark. DARE evaluates VLM performance on five diverse categories and includes four robustness-oriented evaluations based on the variations of: prompts, the subsets of answer options, the output format and the number of correct answers. Among a spectrum of other findings, we report that state-of-the-art VLMs still struggle with questions in most categories and are unable to consistently deliver their peak performance across the tested robustness evaluations. Consequently, our work calls for the systematic addition of robustness evaluations in future VLM research.

DARE: Diverse Visual Question Answering with Robustness Evaluation

Lay summaries for scientific documents typically include explanations to help readers grasp sophisticated concepts or arguments. However, current automatic summarization methods do not explicitly model explanations, which makes it difficult to align the proportion of explanatory content with human-written summaries. In this paper, we present a plan-based approach that leverages discourse frameworks to organize summary generation and guide explanatory sentences by prompting responses to the plan. Specifically, we propose two discourse-driven planning strategies, where the plan is conditioned as part of the input or part of the output prefix, respectively. Empirical experiments on three lay summarization datasets show that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of summary quality, and it enhances model robustness, controllability and mitigates hallucination.

Explanatory Summarization with Discourse-Driven Planning

We introduce MPLSandbox, an out-of-the-box multi-programming language sandbox designed to provide unified and comprehensive feedback from compiler and analysis tools for Large Language Models (LLMs). It can automatically identify the programming language of the code, compiling and executing it within an isolated sub-sandbox to ensure safety and stability. In addition, MPLSandbox integrates both traditional and LLM-based code analysis tools, providing a comprehensive analysis of generated code. It also can be effortlessly integrated into the training and deployment of LLMs to improve the quality and correctness of generated code. It also helps researchers streamline their workflows for various LLM-based code-related tasks, reducing the development cost. To validate the effectiveness of MPLSandbox, we conduct extensive experiments by integrating it into several training and deployment scenarios, and employing it to optimize workflows for a wide range of downstream code tasks. Our goal is to enhance researcher productivity on LLM-based code tasks by simplifying and automating workflows through delegation to MPLSandbox.

Multi-Programming Language Sandbox for LLMs

Accurately answering climate science questions requires scientific literature and climate data. Interpreting climate literature and data, however, presents inherent challenges, such as interpreting uncertainties, determining relevant climate factors and drivers, and dealing with the sheer volume of data. My Climate CoPilot is a platform that assists climate experts, such as farmer advisors, mitigate and adapt to projected climate impacts by answering questions grounded in evidence. It emphasises transparency, user privacy, and low-resource use, and provides automatic evaluation. Fifty domain experts have carefully evaluated every aspect of My Climate CoPilot and based on their interactions and feedback, the system continues to evolve. To date, we have received 2180 question-answer pairs with an 82% positive rating from the experts.

My Climate CoPilot: A Question Answering System for Climate Adaptation in Agriculture

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a vital resource for investigative journalists using geolocation verification. However, existing tools such as Overpass Turbo require familiarity with complex query languages, creating barriers for non-technical users. We present SPOT, an open source natural language interface that makes OSM's rich, tag-based geographic data more accessible through intuitive scene descriptions. SPOT interprets user inputs as structured representations of geographic object configurations using fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs), with results being displayed in an interactive map interface. While more general geospatial search tasks are conceivable, SPOT is specifically designed for use in investigative journalism, addressing real-world challenges such as hallucinations in model output, inconsistencies in OSM tagging, and the noisy nature of user input. It combines a novel synthetic data pipeline with a semantic bundling system to enable robust, accurate query generation. To our knowledge, SPOT is the first system to achieve reliable natural language access to OSM data at this level of accuracy. By lowering the technical barrier to spatial verification, SPOT contributes a practical tool to the broader efforts to support fact-checking and combat disinformation.

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Next from ACL 2025

MTRAG: A Multi-Turn Conversational Benchmark for Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems

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