China

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven growing interest in LLM-based agents for complex planning tasks. To avoid costly agent training, many studies adopted memory mechanism that enhances LLM with offline experiences or online trajectory analysis. However, existing works focus on single-granularity memory derived from dynamic environmental interactions, which are inherently constrained by the quality of the collected experiences. This limitation, in turn, constrain the diversity of knowledge and the flexibility of planning. We propose Coarse-to-Fine Grounded Memory (CFGM), a novel framework that grounds coarse-to-fine memories with LLM, thereby fully leverage them for flexible adaptation to diverse scenarios. CFGM grounds environmental information into coarse-grained focus points to guide experience collection in training tasks, followed by grounding of actionable hybrid-grained tips from each experience. At inference, CFGM retrieves task-relevant experiences and tips to support planning. When facing environmental anomalies, the LLM grounds the current situation into fine-grained key information, enabling flexible self-QA reflection and plan correction. Extensive experiments on AlfWorld, Webshop and ScienceWorld demonstrate that CFGM significantly outperforms competitive baselines and comprehensively optimizes memory-enhanced LLM Agent system.

EMNLP 2025

Coarse-to-Fine Grounded Memory for LLM Agent Planning

memory-augmented planning

llm agent

retrieval-augmented generation

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. 
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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.

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.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in solving math problems, and there is growing research on evaluating their robustness. Unlike previous studies that create problem variants by adding perturbations to a single problem, this paper focuses on the interaction between problems. Specifically, we combine two original problems with a logical connection to get a new math problem, and measure the LLMs' performance on it to evaluate its compositional generalization, which is an important and essential reasoning capability in human intelligence. The result of experiments that cover 14 different LLMs shows that even when the mathematical essence remains unchanged, a simple form of combination can significantly reduce the performance of LLMs, revealing the limitation of their generalization ability. Additionally, we propose an automated pipeline with 98.2% accuracy to assist in annotating datasets (1 manual, 2 synthetic). The extensive experiments conducted on these datasets further verify the conclusion and obtain some important findings. Finally, we analyze the impact of factors such as difficulty and length on LLMs performance, offering insights for future research.

From A and B to A+B: Can Large Language Models Solve Compositional Math Problems?

Process Reward Models (PRMs) have emerged as a promising solution to address the reasoning mistakes of large language models (LLMs). However, existing PRMs typically output evaluation scores directly, limiting both learning efficiency and evaluation accuracy, which is further exacerbated by the scarcity of annotated data. To address these issues, we propose Reasoning-Driven Process Reward Modeling (R-PRM), which leverages the reasoning ability to improve process-level evaluation. First, we leverage stronger LLMs to generate seed data from limited annotations, effectively activating reasoning capabilities and enabling comprehensive step-by-step evaluation. Second, we explore self-improvement of our PRM through preference optimization, without requiring additional annotated data. Third, we introduce inference-time scaling to fully harness our model's reasoning potential. Extensive experiments demonstrate R-PRM's effectiveness: on ProcessBench and PRMBench, it surpasses strong baselines by 13.9 and 8.5 F1 scores. When applied to guide mathematical reasoning, R-PRM achieves consistent accuracy improvements of over 8.6 points across six challenging datasets. Further analysis reveals that R-PRM exhibits more comprehensive evaluation and robust generalization capabilities, thereby highlighting significant potential.

R-PRM: Reasoning-Driven Process Reward Modeling

Avoiding the propagation of undue (binary) gender inferences and default masculine language remains a key challenge towards inclusive multilingual technologies, particularly when translating into languages with extensive gendered morphology. Gender-neutral translation (GNT) represents a linguistic strategy towards fairer communication across languages. However, research on GNT is limited to a few resources and language pairs. To address this gap, we introduce mGeNTE, an expert-curated resource, and use it to conduct the first systematic multilingual evaluation of inclusive translation with state-of-the-art instruction-following language models (LMs). Experiments on en-es/de/it/el reveal that while models can recognize when neutrality is appropriate, they cannot consistently produce neutral translations, limiting their usability. To probe this behavior, we enrich our evaluation with interpretability analyses that identify task-relevant features and offer initial insights into the internal dynamics of LM-based GNT.

Mind the Inclusivity Gap: Multilingual Gender-Neutral Translation Evaluation with mGeNTE

Cochrane produces systematic reviews whose abstracts are divided into seven standard sections. However, the plain language summaries (PLS) of Cochrane reviews do not adhere to the same structure, which has prevented researchers from training simplification models on paired abstract and PLS sections. In this work, we devise a two-step method to automatically divide PLS of Cochrane reviews into the same sections in which abstracts are divided. In the first step, we align each sentence in a PLS to a section in the parallel abstract if they cover similar content. In the second step, we classify the remaining sentences into sections based on the content of the PLS and what we learned from the first step. We manually divide 22 PLS into sections to evaluate our method. Upon execution of our method, we obtain the Cochrane-sections dataset, which consists of paired abstract and PLS sections in English for a total of 7.7K Cochrane reviews. Thus, our work yields references for the section-level simplification of biomedical abstracts.

Section-Level Simplification of Biomedical Abstracts

Recently, inference-time reasoning strategies have further improved the accuracy of large language models (LLMs), but their effectiveness on smaller models remains unclear. Based on the observation that conventional approaches often fail to improve performance in this context, we propose \textbf{C}ycle-\textbf{C}onsistency in \textbf{Q}uestion \textbf{A}nswering (CCQA), a novel reasoning method that can be effectively applied to SLMs. Inspired by cycle consistency, CCQA generates a question from each reasoning path and answer, evaluates each by its similarity to the original question, and then selects the candidate solution with the highest similarity score as the final response. Since conventional SLMs struggle to generate accurate questions from their own reasoning paths and answers, we employ a lightweight Flan-T5 model specialized for question generation to support this process efficiently. From the experimental results, it is verified that CCQA consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods across eight models on mathematical and commonsense reasoning benchmarks. Furthermore, our method establishes a new practical baseline for efficient reasoning in SLMs. Source code can be found at \url{https://github.com/ccqaofficial/ccqa_official.git}.

CCQA: Generating Question from Solution Can Improve Inference-Time Reasoning in SLMs

Text-Centric Visual Question Answering (TEC-VQA) is a critical research area that requires semantic interactions between objects and scene texts. However, most existing TEC-VQA benchmarks focus on high-resource languages like English and Chinese. Although few works expanding multilingual QA pairs in non-text-centric VQA datasets through translation, which encounters a substantial “visual-textual misalignment” problem when applied to TEC-VQA. Moreover, the open-source nature of these benchmarks and the broad sources of training data for MLLMs have inevitably led to benchmark contamination, resulting in unreliable evaluation results. To alleviate this issue, we propose a contamination-free and more challenging TEC-VQA benchmark called Text-Centric Visual Question Answering in Multilingual Chinese Minority Languages(TVQACML), which involves eight languages, including Standard Chinese, Korean, and six minority languages. TVQACML supports a wide range of tasks, such as Text Recognition, Scene Text-Centric VQA, Document-Oriented VQA, Key Information Extraction (KIE), and Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition (HMER), featuring 32,000 question-answer pairs across 8,000 images. Extensive experiments on TVQACML across multiple MLLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of evaluating the MLLMs and enhancing multilingual TEC-VQA performance with fine-tuning.

TVQACML: Benchmarking Text-Centric Visual Question Answering in Multilingual Chinese Minority Languages

Structured information extraction from scientific literature is crucial for capturing core concepts and emerging trends in specialized fields. While existing datasets aid model development, most focus on specific publication sections due to domain complexity and the high cost of annotating scientific texts. To address this limitation, we introduces SciNLP—a specialized benchmark for full-text entity and relation extraction in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain. The dataset comprises 60 manually annotated full-text NLP publications, covering 7,072 entities and 1,826 relations. Compared to existing research, SciNLP is the first dataset providing full-text annotations of entities and their relationships in the NLP domain. To validate the effectiveness of SciNLP, we conducted comparative experiments with similar datasets and evaluated the performance of state-of-the-art supervised models on this dataset. Results reveal varying extraction capabilities of existing models across academic texts of different lengths. Cross-comparisons with existing dataset show that SciNLP achieves significant performance improvements on certain baseline models. Using models trained on SciNLP, we implemented automatic construction of a fine-grained knowledge graph for the NLP domain. Our KG has an average node degree of 3.2 per entity, indicating rich semantic topological information that enhances downstream applications. The dataset is publicly available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SciNLP-47E5/.

SciNLP: A Domain-Specific Benchmark for Full-Text Scientific Entity and Relation Extraction in NLP

Identifying/retrieving relevant statutes and prior cases/precedents for a given legal case are common tasks exercised by legal practitioners. Researchers till date have addressed the two tasks independently, thus developing completely different datasets and models for each of the task, however, both retrieval tasks are inherently related, e.g., similar cases tend to cite similar statutes (due to similar factual situation). In this resource paper, we address this gap. We propose IL-PCSR (Indian Legal corpus for Prior Case and Statute Retrieval), which is a unique corpus that provides a common testbed for developing models for both the tasks (Statue Retrieval and Precedent Retrieval) that can exploit the dependence between the two. We experiment extensively with several baseline models on the tasks, including lexical models, semantic models and ensemble based on GNNs. Further, to exploit the dependence between the two tasks, we develop an LLM based re-ranking approach that gives the best performance.

IL-PCSR: Legal Corpus for Prior Case and Statute Retrieval

Although large language models have enhanced automated travel planning abilities, current systems remain misaligned with real-world scenarios. First, they assume users provide explicit queries, while in reality requirements are often implicit. Second, existing solutions ignore diverse environmental factors and user preferences, limiting the feasibility of plans. Third, systems can only generate plans with basic POI arrangements, failing to provide all-in-one plans with rich details. To mitigate these challenges, we construct a novel dataset RETAIL, which supports decision-making for implicit queries while covering explicit queries, both with and without revision needs. It also enables environmental awareness to ensure plan feasibility under real-world scenarios, while incorporating detailed POI information for all-in-one travel plans. Furthermore, we propose a topic-guided multi-agent framework, termed TGMA. Our experiments reveal that even the strongest existing model achieves merely a 1.0% pass rate, indicating real-world travel planning remains extremely challenging. In contrast, TGMA demonstrates substantially improved performance 2.72%, offering promising directions for real-world travel planning.

RETAIL: Towards Real-world Travel Planning for Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant advances across numerous vision-language tasks. Due to their strong performance in image-text alignment, MLLMs can effectively understand image-text pairs with clear meanings. However, effectively resolving the inherent ambiguities in natural language and visual contexts remains challenging. Existing multimodal benchmarks typically overlook linguistic and visual ambiguities, relying mainly on unimodal context for disambiguation and thus failing to exploit the mutual clarification potential between modalities. To bridge this gap, we introduce MUCAR, a novel and challenging benchmark designed explicitly for evaluating multimodal ambiguity resolution across multilingual and cross-modal scenarios. MUCAR includes: (1) a multilingual dataset where ambiguous textual expressions are uniquely resolved by corresponding visual contexts, and (2) a dual-ambiguity dataset that systematically pairs ambiguous images with ambiguous textual contexts, with each combination carefully constructed to yield a single, clear interpretation through mutual disambiguation. Extensive evaluations involving 19 state-of-the-art multimodal models—encompassing both open-source and proprietary architectures—reveal substantial gaps compared to human-level performance, highlighting the need for future research into more sophisticated cross-modal ambiguity comprehension methods, further pushing the boundaries of multimodal reasoning.

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