China

With the rise of Speech Large Language Models (SpeechLLMs), two dominant approaches have emerged for speech processing: discrete tokens and continuous features. Each approach has demonstrated strong capabilities in audio-related processing tasks. However, the performance gap between these two paradigms has not been thoroughly explored. To address this gap, we present a fair comparison of self-supervised learning (SSL)-based discrete and continuous features under the same experimental settings. We evaluate their performance across six spoken language understanding-related tasks using both small and large-scale LLMs (Qwen1.5-0.5B and Llama3.1-8B). We further conduct in-depth analyses, including efficient comparison, SSL layer analysis, LLM layer analysis, and robustness comparison. Our findings reveal that continuous features generally outperform discrete tokens in various tasks. Each speech processing method exhibits distinct characteristics and patterns in how it learns and processes speech information. We hope our results will provide valuable insights to advance spoken language understanding in SpeechLLMs.

EMNLP 2025

Speech Discrete Tokens or Continuous Features? A Comparative Analysis for Spoken Language Understanding in SpeechLLMs

discrete tokens

speechllms

llms

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) 
<html><button style="display: inline-flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; white-space: nowrap; border-radius: 9999px; font-weight: bold; background: #7c3aed; color: white; font-family: 'Space Grotesk', sans-serif; height: 40px; font-size: 16px; padding: 0 20px; border: none; cursor: pointer" onclick="window.open('https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing')">Conference Handbook</button></html>

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline - subject line "Welcome to ACL 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://2026.aclweb.org/registration/) first.

Registration Required

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) are increasingly used as evaluators in natural language generation tasks, offering advantages in scalability and interpretability over traditional evaluation methods. However, existing LLM-based evaluations often suffer from biases and misalignment, particularly in domain-specific tasks, due to limited functional understanding and knowledge gaps. To address these challenges, we first investigate the relationship between an LLM-based evaluator’s familiarity with the target task and its evaluation performance. We then introduce the Co-Eval framework, which leverages a criteria planner model and optimized machine metrics to enhance the scalability and fairness of LLM-based evaluation. Experimental results on both general and domain-specific tasks demonstrate that Co-Eval reduces biases, achieving up to a 0.4903 reduction in self-preference bias, and improves alignment with human preferences, with gains of up to 0.324 in Spearman correlation.

Co-Eval: Augmenting LLM-based Evaluation with Machine Metrics

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in simulating human social behavior and interactions, yet lack large-scale, systematically constructed benchmarks for evaluating their alignment with real-world social tendencies. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{SocioBench}, a comprehensive, cross-national, and cross-topic sociological benchmark derived from the \textit{International Social Survey Programme }(ISSP). It encompasses over 480,000 real respondent records from more than 30 countries, spanning 10 sociological issues, and over 40 detailed demographic attributes. Our experiments reveal notable variations in the accuracy and systematic biases in the responses of current mainstream open-source LLMs when simulating social attitudes across different topics and demographic groups.

SocioBench: Modeling Human Behavior in Sociological Surveys with Large Language Models

Vision-language models demand watermarking solutions that protect intellectual property without compromising multimodal coherence. Existing text watermarking methods disrupt visual-textual alignment through biased token selection and static strategies, leaving semantic-critical concepts vulnerable. We propose VLA-Mark, a vision-aligned framework that embeds detectable watermarks while preserving semantic fidelity through cross-modal coordination. Our approach integrates multiscale visual-textual alignment metrics, combining localized patch affinity, global semantic coherence, and contextual attention patterns, to guide watermark injection without model retraining. An entropy-sensitive mechanism dynamically balances watermark strength and semantic preservation, prioritizing visual grounding during low-uncertainty generation phases. Experiments show 7.4% lower PPL and 26.6% higher BLEU than conventional methods, with near-perfect detection (98.8% AUC). The framework demonstrates 96.1% attack resilience against attacks such as paraphrasing and synonym substitution, while maintaining text-visual consistency, establishing new standards for quality-preserving multimodal watermarking.

VLA-Mark: A cross modal watermark for large vision-language alignment models

Dehumanization, i.e., denying human qualities to individuals or groups, is a particularly harmful form of hate speech that can normalize violence against marginalized communities. Despite advances in NLP for detecting general hate speech, approaches to identifying dehumanizing language remain limited due to scarce annotated data and the subtle nature of such expressions. In this work, we systematically evaluate four state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) — Claude, GPT, Mistral, and Qwen — for dehumanization detection. Our results show that only one model—Claude—achieves strong performance (over 80% F₁) under an optimized configuration, while others, despite their capabilities, perform only moderately. Performance drops further when distinguishing dehumanization from related hate types such as derogation. We also identify systematic disparities across target groups: models tend to over-predict dehumanization for some identities (e.g., Gay men), while under-identifying it for others (e.g., Refugees). These findings motivate the need for systematic, group-level evaluation when applying pretrained language models to dehumanization detection tasks.

Beyond Hate Speech: NLP’s Challenges and Opportunities in Uncovering Dehumanizing Language

Trustworthiness in healthcare question-answering (QA) systems is important for ensuring patient safety, clinical effectiveness, and user confidence. As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into medical settings, the reliability of their responses directly influences clinical decision-making and patient outcomes. However, achieving comprehensive trustworthiness in medical QA poses significant challenges due to the inherent complexity of healthcare data, the critical nature of clinical scenarios, and the multifaceted dimensions of trustworthy AI. In this survey, we systematically examine six key dimensions of trustworthiness in medical QA, i.e., Factuality, Robustness, Fairness, Safety, Explainability, and Calibration. We review how each dimension is evaluated in existing LLM‐based medical QA systems. We compile and compare major benchmarks designed to assess these dimensions and analyze evaluation‐guided techniques that drive model improvements, such as retrieval‐augmented grounding, adversarial fine‐tuning, and safety alignment. Finally, we identify open challenges—such as scalable expert evaluation, integrated multi‐dimensional metrics, and real‐world deployment studies—and propose future research directions to advance the safe, reliable, and transparent deployment of LLM‐powered medical QA.

Trustworthy Medical Question Answering: An Evaluation-Centric Survey

Large language model (LLM)-driven multi-agent systems (MAS) are transforming how humans and AIs collaboratively generate ideas and artifacts. While existing surveys provide comprehensive overviews of MAS infrastructures, they largely overlook the dimension of \emph{creativity}, including how novel outputs are generated and evaluated, how creativity informs agent personas, and how creative workflows are coordinated. This is the first survey dedicated to creativity in MAS. We focus on text and image generation tasks, and present: (1) a taxonomy of agent proactivity and persona design; (2) an overview of generation techniques, including divergent exploration, iterative refinement, and collaborative synthesis, as well as relevant datasets and evaluation metrics; and (3) a discussion of key challenges, such as inconsistent evaluation standards, insufficient bias mitigation, coordination conflicts, and the lack of unified benchmarks. This survey offers a structured framework and roadmap for advancing the development, evaluation, and standardization of creative MAS.

Creativity in LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems: A Survey

Numerous datasets have been proposed to evaluate social bias in Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems. However, assessing bias within specific application domains remains challenging, as existing approaches often face limitations in scalability and domain adaptability. In this work, we introduce a domain-adaptive framework that utilizes prompting with Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically transform template-based bias datasets into domain-specific variants. We apply our method to two widely used benchmarks—\textit{Equity Evaluation Corpus} (EEC) and \textit{Identity Phrase Templates Test Set} (IPTTS)—adapting them to the Twitter and Wikipedia Talk data. Our results show that the adapted datasets yield bias estimates more closely aligned with real-world data. These findings highlight the potential of LLM-based prompting as a domain-sensitive approach for bias evaluation in NLP systems. \footnote{Our code and data are \href{https://tinyurl.com/EMNLPBiasDomainAdaptAnonym}{available online}.}

Adapting Bias Evaluation to Domain Contexts using Generative Models

Understanding user intentions in multi-turn dialogues is critical for conversational AI, yet existing approaches—relying on rigid slot-value structures or unstructured free-text—fail to fully capture conversational complexity. In this paper, we propose IntentionFrame, a semi-structured framework inspired by psychological and cognitive intention theories, which organizes conversational intents into four interrelated aspects: situation, emotion, action, and knowledge. This design not only retains interpretability but also provides LLMs with a rich context to accurately parse and respond to nuanced user inputs. To efficiently scale IntentionFrame annotations, we introduce a Weakly-supervised Reinforced Generation (WeRG) method that leverages a small set of high-quality human annotations in conjunction with abundant coarsely labeled data. By applying reinforcement learning to balance these diverse signals, WeRG aims to effectively generate reliable IntentionFrame annotations, which serve as essential grounding for downstream tasks—leading to substantial improvements in response generation and task completion. Our experiments, supported by both automatic metrics and human evaluations, show that integrating IntentionFrame with WeRG significantly improves LLMs’ conversational understanding and sets a new benchmark for intent analysis.

IntentionFrame: A Semi-Structured, Multi-Aspect Framework for Fine-Grained Conversational Intention Understanding

Controllable Dialogue Generation (CDG) enables chatbots to generate responses with desired attributes, and weighted decoding methods have achieved significant success in the CDG task. However, using a fixed constant value to manage the bias of attribute probabilities makes it challenging to find an ideal control strength that satisfies both controllability and fluency. To address this issue, we propose ECO decoding Entropy-based COntrol, which dynamically adjusts the control strength at each generation step according to the model’s entropy in both the language model and attribute classifier probability distributions. Experimental results on DailyDialog and MultiWOZ datasets show that our method achieves improved control accuracy while maintaining fluency and grammar, outperforming previous decoding methods across various models and settings. Furthermore, ECO decoding alleviates probability interpolation issues in multi-attribute generation, demonstrating its robust performance in both single and multi-attribute scenarios.

ECO Decoding: Entropy-Based Control for Controllability and Fluency in Controllable Dialogue Generation

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) aim to elicit user preferences via natural dialogue to provide suitable item recommendations. However, current CRSs often deviate from realistic human interactions by rapidly recommending items in brief sessions. This work addresses this gap by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate dialogue summaries from dialogue history and item recommendation information from item description. This approach enables the extraction of both explicit user statements and implicit preferences inferred from the dialogue context. We introduce a method using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to ensure dialogue summary and item recommendation information are rich in information crucial for effective recommendations. Experiments on two public datasets validate our method's effectiveness in fostering more natural and realistic conversational recommendation processes.

Downloads

Next from EMNLP 2025

Co-Eval: Augmenting LLM-based Evaluation with Machine Metrics

Similar lecture

Detecting Hallucinations in SpeechLLMs at Inference Time Using Attention Maps