Austria

Large Language Models (LLMs) augmented with external tools have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex problem solving. Existing efforts for tool utilization typically involve an LLM agent that contains instructions on using the description of the available tools to determine and call the tools required to solve the problem. Inference Scaling techniques, such as chain-of-thought and tree-of-thought reasoning, are commonly used but require significant computational overhead and rendering such methods impractical in real-world applications. In this work, we recognize and formalize the critical role of instructions provided in agent prompts and tool descriptions---collectively referred to as context---and show that incomplete context is one of the reasons for this computational overhead. To fill this efficiency gap, we propose an optimization framework that jointly refines both the instructions provided in the agent prompt and tool description, enhancing their interaction. Experiments on StableToolBench and RestBench demonstrate that our optimized agents achieve superior efficiency while maintaining effectiveness. Our findings underscore the critical role of context optimization in improving LLM agents for tool utilization, paving the way for more responsive and cost-effective LLM agents.

ACL 2025

A Joint Optimization Framework for Enhancing Efficiency of Tool Utilization in LLM Agents

verbalized optimization

tool utilization

llm agents

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

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.* 
[Read more](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GI_hvOpjswAuYdUTromfeDiPpCcqidwg/view?usp=sharing)

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Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

The ability of Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to categorize text into multiple classes has motivated their use in online content moderation tasks, such as hate speech and fake news detection. However, there is limited understanding of how or why these methods make such decisions, or why certain content is moderated in the first place. To investigate the hidden mechanisms behind content moderation, we explore multiple directions: 1) training classifiers to reverse-engineer content moderation decisions across countries; 2) explaining content moderation decisions by analyzing Shapley values and LLM-guided explanations. Our primary focus is on content moderation decisions made across countries, using pre-existing corpora sampled from the Twitter Stream Grab. Our experiments reveal interesting patterns in censored posts, both across countries and over time. Through human evaluations of LLM-generated explanations across three LLMs, we assess the effectiveness of using LLMs in content moderation. Finally, we discuss potential future directions, as well as the limitations and ethical considerations of this work.

Revealing Hidden Mechanisms of Cross-Country Content Moderation with Natural Language Processing

This paper introduces Unilogit, a novel self-distillation method for machine unlearning in Large Language Models. Unilogit addresses the challenge of selectively forgetting specific information while maintaining overall model utility, a critical task in compliance with data privacy regulations like GDPR. Unlike prior methods that rely on static hyperparameters or starting model outputs, Unilogit dynamically adjusts target logits to achieve a uniform probability for the target token, leveraging the current model's outputs for more accurate self-distillation targets. This approach not only eliminates the need for additional hyperparameters but also enhances the model's ability to approximate the golden targets. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and an in-house e-commerce dataset demonstrate Unilogit's superior performance in balancing forget and retain objectives, outperforming state-of-the-art methods such as NPO and UnDIAL. Our analysis further reveals Unilogit's robustness across various scenarios, highlighting its practical applicability and effectiveness in achieving efficacious machine unlearning.

Unilogit: Robust Machine Unlearning for LLMs Using Uniform-Target Self-Distillation

Several studies showed that Large Language Models (LLMs) can answer medical questions correctly, even outperforming the average human score in some medical exams. However, to our knowledge, no study has been conducted to assess the ability of language models to validate existing or generated medical text for correctness and consistency. In this paper, we introduce MEDEC, the first publicly available benchmark for medical error detection and correction in clinical notes, covering five types of errors (Diagnosis, Management, Treatment, Pharmacotherapy, and Causal Organism). MEDEC consists of 3,848 clinical texts, including 488 clinical notes from three US hospital systems that were not previously seen by any LLM. The dataset has been used in a shared task to evaluate seventeen participating systems. In this paper, we describe the data creation methods and we evaluate recent LLMs (e.g., o1-preview, GPT-4, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 2.0 Flash, and DeepSeek-R1) for the tasks of detecting and correcting medical errors requiring both medical knowledge and reasoning capabilities. We also conducted a comparative study where two medical doctors performed the same task on the MEDEC test set. The results showed that MEDEC is a sufficiently challenging benchmark to assess the ability of models to validate existing or generated notes and to correct medical errors. We also found that although recent LLMs have a good performance in error detection and correction, they are still outperformed by medical doctors in these tasks. We discuss the potential factors behind this gap, the insights from our experiments, the limitations of current evaluation metrics, and share potential pointers for future research.

MEDEC: A Benchmark for Medical Error Detection and Correction in Clinical Notes

Conventional bag-of-words approaches for topic modeling, like latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), struggle with literary text. Literature challenges lexical methods because narrative language focuses on immersive sensory details instead of abstractive description or exposition: writers are advised to *show, don't tell*. We propose Retell, a simple, accessible topic modeling approach for literature. Here, we prompt resource-efficient, generative language models (LMs) to *tell* what passages *show*, thereby translating narratives' surface forms into higher-level concepts and themes. By running LDA on LMs' retellings of passages, we can obtain more precise and informative topics than by running LDA alone or by directly asking LMs to list topics. To investigate the potential of our method for cultural analytics, we compare our method's outputs to expert-guided annotations in a case study on racial/cultural identity in high school English language arts books.

Tell, Don't Show: Leveraging Language Models' Abstractive Retellings to Model Literary Themes

Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities with core Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. The effectiveness of LMs for highly specialized knowledge-intensive tasks in finance remains difficult to assess due to major gaps in the methodologies of existing evaluation frameworks, which have caused an erroneous belief in a far lower bound of LMs' performance on common Finance NLP (FinNLP) tasks. To demonstrate the potential of LMs for these FinNLP tasks, we present the first holistic benchmarking suite for Financial Language Model Evaluation (FLaME). We are the first research paper to comprehensively study LMs against 'reasoning-reinforced' LMs, with an empirical study of 23 foundation LMs over 20 core NLP tasks in finance. We open-source our framework software along with all data and results.

Financial Language Model Evaluation (FLaME)

Safety reasoning is a recent paradigm where LLMs reason over safety policies before generating responses, thereby mitigating limitations in existing safety measures such as over-refusal and jailbreak vulnerabilities. However, implementing this paradigm is challenging due to the resource-intensive process of creating high-quality policy-embedded chain-of-thought (CoT) datasets while ensuring reasoning remains accurate and free from hallucinations or policy conflicts. To tackle this, we propose AIDSAFE: Agentic Iterative Deliberation for Safety Reasoning, a novel data generation recipe that leverages multi-agent deliberation to iteratively expand reasoning on safety policies. A data refiner stage in AIDSAFE ensures high-quality outputs by eliminating repetitive, redundant, and deceptive thoughts. AIDSAFE-generated CoTs provide a strong foundation for supervised fine-tuning (SFT)-based safety training. Additionally, to address the need of preference data in alignment stages, such as DPO training, we introduce a supplemental recipe that uses belief augmentation to create distinct selected and rejected CoT samples. Our evaluations demonstrate that AIDSAFE-generated CoTs achieve superior policy adherence and reasoning quality. Consequently, we show that fine-tuning open-source LLMs on these CoTs can significantly improve safety generalization and jailbreak robustness while maintaining acceptable utility and over-refusal accuracy.

Towards Safety Reasoning in LLMs: AI-agentic Deliberation for Policy-embedded CoT Data Creation

Improvements in large language models have led to increasing optimism that they can serve as reliable evaluators of natural language generation outputs. In this paper, we challenge this optimism by thoroughly re-evaluating five state-of-the-art factuality metrics on a collection of 11 datasets for summarization, retrieval-augmented generation, and question answering. We find that these evaluators are inconsistent with each other and often misestimate system-level performance, both of which can lead to a variety of pitfalls. We further show that these metrics exhibit biases against highly paraphrased outputs and outputs that draw upon faraway parts of the source documents. We urge users of these factuality metrics to proceed with caution and manually validate the reliability of these metrics in their domain of interest before proceeding.

Verify with Caution: The Pitfalls of Relying on Imperfect Factuality Metrics

Evaluating reference tables qualitatively and quantitatively is a challenging problem, as traditional metrics often fail to capture the nuanced discrepancies in both structure and content. To mitigate this, we first introduce a methodical rubric that combines multi-level structural descriptors with fine-grained contextual quantification, laying a robust foundation for comprehensive table comparisons. Building on this, we propose **TabXEval**, an eXhaustive and eXplainable two-phase evaluation framework that initially aligns reference tables structurally via TabAlign and subsequently conducts a systematic semantic and syntactic comparison using TabCompare. This approach not only clarifies the evaluation process but also pinpoints subtle discrepancies that conventional methods overlook. To validate our framework, we present **TabXBench**, a diverse, multi-domain benchmark featuring realistic table perturbations and human-annotated assessments. Finally, we provide a systematic analysis of existing evaluation methods through sensitivity-specificity trade-offs and demonstrate the qualitative and quantitative effectiveness of **TabXEval** on text-to-table generation tasks, paving the way for future innovations in explainable table evaluation.

TabXEval: Why this is a Bad Table? An eXhaustive Rubric for Table Evaluation

Large Language Models (LLMs) recently achieved great success in medical text summarization by simply using in-context learning. However, these recent efforts do not perform fine-grained evaluations under difficult settings where LLMs might fail. They typically report performance scores over the entire dataset. Through our benchmarking study, we show that LLMs show a significant performance drop for data points with high concentration of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words or with high novelty. Vocabulary adaptation is an intuitive solution to this vocabulary mismatch issue where the LLM vocabulary gets updated with certain expert domain (here, medical) words or subwords. An interesting finding from our study is that Llama-3.1, even with a vocabulary size of around 128K tokens, still faces _over-fragmentation_ issue with medical words. To that end, we show vocabulary adaptation helps improve the LLM summarization performance even in difficult settings. Through extensive experimentation of multiple vocabulary adaptation strategies, two continual pretraining strategies, and three benchmark medical summarization datasets, we gain valuable insights into the role of vocabulary adaptation strategies for customizing LLMs to the medical domain. We also performed a human evaluation study with medical experts where they found that vocabulary adaptation results in more relevant and faithful summaries. Our codebase is made publicly available at https://github.com/gb-kgp/LLM-MedicalSummarization-Benchmark.

Evaluation of LLMs in Medical Text Summarization: The Role of Vocabulary Adaptation in High OOV Settings

Writing is inherently iterative, each revision enhancing information representation. One revision may contain many edits. Examination of the intentions behind edits provides valuable insights into an editor’s expertise, the dynamics of collaborative writing, and the evolution of a document. Current research on edit intentions lacks a comprehensive edit intention taxonomy (EIT) that spans multiple application domains. As a result, researchers often create new EITs tailored to specific needs, a process that is both time-consuming and costly. To address this gap, we propose UniT, a Unified edit intention Taxonomy that integrates existing EITs encompassing a wide range of edit intentions. We examine the lineage relationship and the construction of 24 EITs. They together have 232 categories across various domains. During the literature survey and integration process, we identify challenges such as one-to-many category matches, incomplete definitions, and varying hierarchical structures. We propose solutions for resolving these issues. Finally, our evaluation shows that our UniT achieves higher inter-annotator agreement scores compared to existing EITs and is applicable to a large set of application domains.

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