China

*The comparison between discriminative and generative classifiers has intrigued researchers since [Efron (1975)’s](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2285453) seminal analysis of logistic regression versus discriminant analysis. While early theoretical work established that generative classifiers exhibit lower sample complexity but higher asymptotic error in simple linear settings, these trade-offs remain unexplored in the transformer era. We present the first comprehensive evaluation of modern generative and discriminative architectures—Auto-regressive, Masked Language Modeling, Discrete Diffusion, and Encoders for text classification. Our study reveals that the classical ``two regimes&quot; phenomenon manifests distinctly across different architectures and training paradigms. Beyond accuracy, we analyze sample efficiency, calibration, noise robustness, and ordinality across diverse scenarios. Our findings offer practical guidance for selecting the most suitable modeling approach based on real-world constraints such as latency and data limitations.*

EMNLP 2025

Generative or Discriminative? Revisiting Text Classification in the Era of Transformers

discriminative classifier

discrete diffusion

generative classifier

masked language modeling

autoregressive models

text classification

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. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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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.

*The comparison between discriminative and generative classifiers has intrigued researchers since [Efron (1975)’s](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2285453) seminal analysis of logistic regression versus discriminant analysis. While early theoretical work established that generative classifiers exhibit lower sample complexity but higher asymptotic error in simple linear settings, these trade-offs remain unexplored in the transformer era. We present the first comprehensive evaluation of modern generative and discriminative architectures—Auto-regressive, Masked Language Modeling, Discrete Diffusion, and Encoders for text classification. Our study reveals that the classical ``two regimes" phenomenon manifests distinctly across different architectures and training paradigms. Beyond accuracy, we analyze sample efficiency, calibration, noise robustness, and ordinality across diverse scenarios. Our findings offer practical guidance for selecting the most suitable modeling approach based on real-world constraints such as latency and data limitations.*

poster

## 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*

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

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong mathematical reasoning abilities, even in visual contexts, with some models surpassing human performance on existing benchmarks. However, these benchmarks lack structured age categorization, clearly defined skill requirements, and—crucially—were not designed to assess human performance in international competitions. To address these limitations, we introduce MathGames, a new benchmark of 2,183 high-quality mathematical problems (both text-only and multimodal) in an open-ended format, sourced from an international mathematical games championships. Spanning seven age groups and a skill-based taxonomy, MathGames enables a structured evaluation of LLMs' mathematical and logical reasoning abilities. Our experiments reveal a substantial gap between state-of-the-art LLMs and human participants—even 11-year-olds consistently outperform some of the strongest models—highlighting the need for advancements. Further, our detailed error analysis offers valuable insights to guide future research. The data is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/math-games/.

Can Large Language Models Win the International Mathematical Games?

We introduce UniversalCEFR, a large-scale multilingual multidimensional dataset of texts annotated according to the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference) scale in 13 languages. To enable open research in both automated readability and language proficiency assessment, UniversalCEFR comprises 505,807 CEFR-labeled texts curated from educational and learner-oriented resources, standardized into a unified data format to support consistent processing, analysis, and modeling across tasks and languages. To demonstrate its utility, we conduct benchmark experiments using three modelling paradigms: a) linguistic feature-based classification, b) fine-tuning pre-trained LLMs, and c) descriptor-based prompting of instruction-tuned LLMs. Our results further support using linguistic features and fine-tuning pretrained models in multilingual CEFR level assessment. Overall, UniversalCEFR aims to establish best practices in data distribution in language proficiency research by standardising dataset formats and promoting their accessibility to the global research community.

UniversalCEFR: Enabling Open Multilingual Research on Language Proficiency Assessment

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled accurate image-based geolocation, raising serious concerns about location privacy risks in everyday social media posts. However, current benchmarks remain coarse-grained, linguistically biased, and lack multimodal and privacy-aware evaluations. To address these gaps, we present KoreaGEO Bench, the first benchmark designed for fine-grained, multimodal, and privacy-aware evaluation of VLM geolocation, using Korean street views as a rich case study. Our benchmark dataset comprises 1,080 high-resolution images sampled across four socio-spatial clusters and nine place types, enriched with multi-contextual annotations and two styles of Korean captions simulating real-world privacy exposure. We introduce a three-path evaluation protocol to assess ten mainstream VLMs under varying input modalities and analyze their accuracy, spatial bias, and reasoning behavior. Results reveal modality-driven shifts in localization precision and highlight structural prediction biases toward core cities. Ultimately, our work calls for a dual approach in geolocation benchmarking: alongside pursuing the breadth of global coverage, we urge the development of in-depth, localized benchmarks tailored to the unique socio-spatial characteristics of diverse regions to foster more responsible and equitable VLMs.

AI Knows Where You Are: Exposure, Bias, and Inference in Multimodal Geolocation with KoreaGEO

Personality is an important concept in psychology that reflects individual differences in thinking and behavior, and has significant applications across various fields. Most existing personality analysis methods address this issue at the bag level, treating the entire corpus gathered from one individual as a single unit for classification. However, this paradigm presents several challenges. From the data perspective, collecting a large corpus for each individual and performing comprehensive annotations pose significant difficulties in both data collection and labeling. On the application side, concentrating on classifying the entire corpus limits its applicability in more common single-instance scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a new task paradigm in text-based personality representation learning. Specifically, we construct a triplet personality trend comparison dataset to learn single-sentence personality embeddings with desirable metric properties. This approach removes the traditional constraints on data sources, facilitating dataset expansion, and can leverage the transfer capabilities of embeddings to easily adapt to various downstream tasks. Our experiments show that the learned embeddings significantly boost performance by a relative 10% across various applications, including personality detection, personality retrieval, and emotion translation prediction. Our dataset and code will be publically available.

Towards Transferable Personality Representation Learning based on Triplet Comparisons and Its Applications

In the era of evaluating large language models (LLMs), data contamination has become an increasingly prominent concern. To address this risk, LLM benchmarking has evolved from a *static* to a *dynamic* paradigm. In this work, we conduct an in-depth analysis of existing *static* and *dynamic* benchmarks for evaluating LLMs. We first examine methods that enhance *static* benchmarks and identify their inherent limitations. We then highlight a critical gap—the lack of standardized criteria for evaluating *dynamic* benchmarks. Based on this observation, we propose a series of optimal design principles for *dynamic* benchmarking and analyze the limitations of existing *dynamic* benchmarks. This survey provides a concise yet comprehensive overview of recent advancements in data contamination research, offering valuable insights and a clear guide for future research efforts. We maintain a GitHub repository to continuously collect both static and dynamic benchmarking methods for LLMs. The repository can be found at this link.

Benchmarking Large Language Models Under Data Contamination: A Survey from Static to Dynamic Evaluation

Recent LLMs have demonstrated promising ability in solving finance related problems. However, applying LLMs in real-world finance application remains challenging due to its high risk and high stakes property. This paper introduces FinTrust, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for evaluating the trustworthiness of LLMs in finance applications. Our benchmark focuses on a wide range alignment issues based on practical context and features fine-grained tasks for each dimension of trustworthiness evaluation. We assess eleven LLMs on FinTrust and find that proprietary models like GPT-4.1 outperforms in many tasks such as trustfulness while open-source models like DeepSeek-V3 have advantage in specific areas like industry-level fairness. For challenging task like fiduciary alignment and disclosure, all LLMs are not satisfying, showing a significant gap in the legal awareness of LLMs. We believe that FinTrust can be a valuable benchmark for LLMs' trustworthiness evaluation in finance domain.

FinTrust: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Trustworthiness Evaluation in Finance Domain

Existing reasoning datasets saturate and fail to test abstract, multi-step problems, especially pathfinding and complex rule constraint satisfaction. We introduce SPaRC (Spatial Pathfinding Reasoning Challenge), a dataset of 1,000 2D grid pathfinding puzzles to evaluate spatial and rule-based reasoning, requiring step-by-step planning with arithmetic and geometric rules. Humans achieve near-perfect accuracy (98.0%; 94.5% on hard puzzles), while the best reasoning models, such as o4-mini, struggle (15.8%; 1.1% on hard puzzles). Models often generate invalid paths (>50% of puzzles for o4-mini), and reasoning tokens reveal they make errors in navigation and spatial logic. Unlike humans, who take longer on hard puzzles, models fail to scale test-time compute with difficulty. Allowing models to make multiple solution attempts improves accuracy, suggesting potential for better spatial reasoning with improved training and efficient test-time scaling methods. SPaRC can be used as a window into models' spatial reasoning limitations and drive research toward new methods that excel in abstract, multi-step problem-solving.

SPaRC: A Spatial Pathfinding Reasoning Challenge

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable advancements in specialized fields such as finance, law, and medicine. However, in cybersecurity, we have noticed a lack of open-source datasets, with a particular lack of high-quality cybersecurity pretraining corpora, even though much research indicates that LLMs acquire their knowledge during pretraining. To address this, we present a comprehensive suite of datasets covering all major training stages, including pretraining, instruction fine-tuning, and reasoning distillation with cybersecurity-specific self-reflection data. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate their effectiveness on public cybersecurity benchmarks. In particular, continued pre-training on our dataset yields a **15.9%** improvement in the aggregate score, while reasoning distillation leads to a **15.8%** gain in security certification (CISSP). We will release all datasets and trained cybersecurity LLMs under the ODC-BY and MIT licenses to encourage further research in the community.

Primus: A Pioneering Collection of Open-Source Datasets for Cybersecurity LLM Training

Automatic evaluation of generative tasks with large language models faces challenges due to ambiguous criteria. Although automatic checklist generation is a potentially promising approach, its usefulness remains underexplored. We investigate whether checklists should be used for all questions or selectively, generate them via six methods, evaluate effectiveness across eight model sizes, and identify checklist items correlated with human evaluations. Through experiments on pairwise comparison and direct scoring tasks, we find that selective checklist use tends to improve evaluation performance in pairwise settings, while its benefits are less consistent in direct scoring. Our analysis also shows that even checklist items with low correlation to human scores often reflect human-written criteria, indicating potential inconsistencies in human evaluation. These findings highlight the need to more clearly define objective evaluation criteria to guide both human and automatic evaluations.

Are Checklists Really Useful for Automatic Evaluation of Generative Tasks?

Training data plays a crucial role in Large Language Models (LLM) scaling, yet high quality data is of limited supply. Synthetic data techniques offer a potential path toward sidestepping these limitations. We conduct a large-scale empirical investigation (>1000 LLMs with >100k GPU hours) using a unified protocol and scaling laws, comparing natural web data, diverse synthetic types (rephrased text, generated textbooks), and mixtures of natural and synthetic data. Specifically, we found pre-training on rephrased synthetic data textitalone is not faster than pre-training on natural web texts; while pre-training on 1/3 rephrased synthetic data mixed with 2/3 natural web texts can speed up 5-10x (to reach the same validation loss) at larger data budgets. Pre-training on textbook-style synthetic data textitalone results in notably higher loss on many downstream domains especially at small data budgets. ``Good'' ratios of synthetic data in training data mixtures depend on the model size and data budget, empirically converging to 30% for rephrased synthetic data. Larger generator models do not necessarily yield better pre-training data than 8B-param models. Our work demystifies synthetic data in pre-training, validates its conditional benefits, and offers practical guidance.

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