China

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated an impressive ability to retrieve and summarize complex information, but their reliability under conflicting contexts remains poorly understood. We introduce an adversarial extension of the Needle-in-a-Haystack framework where three mutually exclusive “needles” are embedded into long documents. By systematically manipulating factors such as position, repetition, layout, and domain relevance, we evaluate how LLMs handle contradictions. We find that models almost always fail to signal uncertainty and instead confidently select a single alternative, exhibiting strong and consistent biases toward repetition, recency, and specific surface form. We further analyze if these patterns are shared within a model family and size, as well as perform both probability-based and generation-based retrieval. Our framework highlights critical limitations in current LLMs’ robustness to contradiction, revealing potential shortcomings in RAG systems&#39; ability to handle noisy or manipulated inputs, and pose challenges for deployment in high-stakes applications.

EMNLP 2025

Conflicting Needles in a Haystack: How LLMs behave when faced with contradictory information

evaluation of llms

llms

biases

information retrieval

robustness

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
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*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated an impressive ability to retrieve and summarize complex information, but their reliability under conflicting contexts remains poorly understood. We introduce an adversarial extension of the Needle-in-a-Haystack framework where three mutually exclusive “needles” are embedded into long documents. By systematically manipulating factors such as position, repetition, layout, and domain relevance, we evaluate how LLMs handle contradictions. We find that models almost always fail to signal uncertainty and instead confidently select a single alternative, exhibiting strong and consistent biases toward repetition, recency, and specific surface form. We further analyze if these patterns are shared within a model family and size, as well as perform both probability-based and generation-based retrieval. Our framework highlights critical limitations in current LLMs’ robustness to contradiction, revealing potential shortcomings in RAG systems' ability to handle noisy or manipulated inputs, and pose challenges for deployment in high-stakes applications.

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.

Whitespace is a critical component of poetic form, reflecting both adherence to standardized forms and rebellion against those forms. Each poem's whitespace distribution reflects the artistic choices of the poet and is an integral semantic and spatial feature of the poem. Yet, despite the popularity of poetry as both a long-standing art form and as a generation task for large language models (LLMs), whitespace has not received sufficient attention from the NLP community. Using a corpus of 19k English-language published poems from Poetry Foundation, we investigate how 4k poets have used whitespace in their works. We release a subset of 2.8k public-domain poems with preserved formatting to facilitate further research in this area. We compare whitespace usage in the published poems to (1) 48k LLM-generated poems, and (2) 12k unpublished poems posted in an online community, r/OCPoetry. We also explore whitespace usage across time periods, poetic forms, and data sources. Additionally, we find that different text processing methods can result in significantly different representations of whitespace in poetry data, motivating us to use these poems and whitespace patterns to discuss implications for the scraping, processing, and tokenizing strategies used to assemble pretraining datasets for LLMs.

so much depends / upon / a whitespace: Why Whitespace Matters for Poets and LLMs

Speaker attribution from speech transcripts is the task of identifying a speaker from the transcript of their speech based on patterns in their language use. This task is especially useful when the audio is unavailable (e.g. deleted) or unreliable (e.g. anonymized speech). Prior work in this area has primarily focused on the feasibility of attributing speakers using transcripts produced by human annotators. However, in real-world settings, one often only has more errorful transcripts produced by automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. In this paper, we conduct what is, to our knowledge, the first comprehensive study of the impact of automatic transcription on speaker attribution performance. In particular, we study the extent to which speaker attribution performance degrades in the face of transcription errors, as well as how properties of the ASR system impact attribution. We find that attribution is surprisingly resilient to word-level transcription errors, and that the objective of recovering the true transcript is minimally correlated with attribution performance. Overall, our findings suggest that speaker attribution on more errorful transcripts produced by ASR is as good, if not better, than attribution based on human-transcribed data, possibly because ASR transcription errors can capture speaker-specific features revealing of speaker identity.

The Impact of Automatic Speech Transcription on Speaker Attribution

We present PresentAgent, a multimodal agent that transforms long-form documents into narrated presentation videos. While existing approaches are limited to generating static slides or text summaries, our method advances beyond these limitations by producing fully synchronized visual and spoken content that closely mimics human-style presentations. To achieve this integration, PresentAgent employs a modular pipeline that systematically segments the input document, plans and renders slide-style visual frames, generates contextual spoken narration with large language models and Text-to-Speech models, and seamlessly composes the final video with precise audio-visual alignment. Given the complexity of evaluating such multimodal outputs, we introduce PresentEval, a unified assessment framework powered by Vision-Language Models that comprehensively scores videos across three critical dimensions: content fidelity, visual clarity, and audience comprehension through prompt-based evaluation. Our experimental validation on a curated dataset of 30 document–presentation pairs demonstrates that PresentAgent approaches human-level quality across all evaluation metrics. These results highlight the significant potential of controllable multimodal agents in transforming static textual materials into dynamic, effective, and accessible presentation formats.

PresentAgent: Multimodal Agent for Presentation Video Generation

We present ROBoto2, an open-source, web-based platform for large language model (LLM)-assisted risk of bias (ROB) assessment of clinical trials. ROBoto2 streamlines the traditionally labor-intensive ROB v2 (ROB2) annotation process via an interactive interface that combines PDF parsing, retrieval-augmented LLM prompting, and human-in-the-loop review. Users can upload clinical trial reports, receive preliminary answers and supporting evidence for ROB2 signaling questions, and provide real-time feedback or corrections to system suggestions. ROBoto2 is publicly available at https://roboto2.vercel.app/, with code and data released to foster reproducibility and adoption. We construct and release a dataset of 521 pediatric clinical trial reports (10035 signaling questions with 1202 evidence passages), annotated using both manually and LLM-assisted methods, serving as a benchmark and enabling future research. Using this dataset, we benchmark ROB2 performance for 4 LLMs and provide an analysis into current model capabilities and ongoing challenges in automating this critical aspect of systematic review.

ROBOTO2: An Interactive System and Dataset for LLM-assisted Clinical Trial Risk of Bias Assessment

The peer review process is fundamental to scientific progress, determining which papers meet the quality standards for publication. Yet, the rapid growth of scholarly production and increasing specialization in knowledge areas strain traditional scientific feedback mechanisms. In light of this, we introduce Generative Agent Reviewers (GAR), leveraging LLM-empowered agents to simulate faithful peer reviewers. To enable generative reviewers, we design an architecture that extends a large language model with memory capabilities and equips agents with reviewer personas derived from historical data. Our experiments demonstrate that GAR performs comparably to human reviewers in providing detailed feedback and predicting paper outcomes. Beyond mere performance comparison, we conduct insightful experiments, such as evaluating the impact of reviewer expertise and examining fairness in reviews. By offering early expert-level feedback, typically restricted to a limited group of researchers, GAR democratizes access to transparent and in-depth evaluation.

Generative Reviewer Agents: Scalable Simulacra of Peer Review

Modeling human behavior in urban environments is fundamental for social science, behavioral studies, and urban planning. Prior work often rely on rigid, hand-crafted rules, limiting their ability to simulate nuanced intentions, plans, and adaptive behaviors. Addressing these challenges, we envision an urban simulator (CitySim), capitalizing on breakthroughs in human-level intelligence exhibited by large language models. In CitySim, agents generate realistic daily schedules using a recursive value-driven approach that balances mandatory activities, personal habits, and situational factors. To enable long-term, lifelike simulations, we endow agents with beliefs, long-term goals, and spatial memory for navigation. CitySim exhibits closer alignment with real humans than prior work, both at micro and macro levels. Additionally, we conduct insightful experiments by modeling tens of thousands of agents and evaluating their collective behaviors under various real-world scenarios, including estimating crowd density, predicting place popularity, and assessing well-being. Our results highlight CitySim as a scalable, flexible testbed for understanding and forecasting urban phenomena.

CitySim: Modeling Urban Behaviors and City Dynamics with Large-Scale LLM-Driven Agent Simulation

With the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), numerous use cases have arisen in the medical field, particularly in generating summaries for consultation transcriptions and extensive medical reports. A major concern is that these summaries may omit critical information from the original input, potentially jeopardizing the decision-making process. This issue of omission is distinct from hallucination, which involves generating incorrect or fabricated facts. To address omissions, this paper introduces a dataset designed to evaluate such issues and proposes a frugal approach called EmbedKDECheck for detecting omissions in LLM-generated texts. The dataset, created in French, has been validated by medical experts to ensure it accurately represents real-world scenarios in the medical field. The objective is to develop a reference-free (black-box) method that can evaluate the reliability of summaries or reports without requiring significant computational resources, relying only on input and output. Unlike methods that rely on embeddings derived from the LLM itself, our approach uses embeddings generated by a third-party, lightweight NLP model based on a combination of FastText and Word2Vec. These embeddings are then combined with anomaly detection models to identify omissions effectively, making the method well-suited for resource-constrained environments. EmbedKDECheck was benchmarked against black-box state-of-the-art frameworks and models, including SelfCheckGPT, ChainPoll, and G-Eval, which leverage GPT. Results demonstrated its satisfactory performance in detecting omissions in LLM-generated summaries. This work advances frugal methodologies for evaluating the reliability of LLM-generated texts, with significant potential to improve the safety and accuracy of medical decision support systems in surgery and other healthcare domains.

Detecting Omissions in LLM-Generated Medical Summaries

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in natural language processing tasks but often fall short in maintaining factual accuracy, particularly in knowledge-intensive domains like healthcare. This study introduces LEAF: Learning and Evaluation Augmented by Fact-Checking, a novel framework aimed at improving the factual reliability of LLMs in medical question answering (QA). LEAF comprises three key contributions: (1) the \textbf{Retrieval-Augmented Factuality Evaluator (RAFE)}, a robust fact-checking system using open-source LLMs and domain-specific retrieval corpora to evaluate response accuracy; (2) \textbf{Fact-Check-then-RAG}, an enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation method that incorporates fact-checking to guide retrieval without requiring parameter updates; and (3) \textbf{Learning from Fact Check via Self-Training}, a strategy to improve LLM performance through supervised fine-tuning or preference-based learning, using fact-checking results as pseudo-labels. Experimental results show that RAFE outperforms Factcheck-GPT in detecting inaccuracies, Fact-Check-then-RAG effectively corrects errors, and Learning from Fact Check improves performance without labeled data. These findings suggest LEAF as a scalable and robust solution for low-resource settings.

LEAF: Learning and Evaluation Augmented by Fact-Checking to Improve Factualness in Large Language Models

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have boosted performance across a broad spectrum of natural‑language tasks, yet no single model excels uniformly across domains. Sending each query to the most suitable model mitigates this limitation, but deciding among *all* available LLMs for each query is prohibitively expensive. Both the accuracy and the latency can improve if the decision space for the model choice is first narrowed, followed by selecting the suitable model for the given query.
We introduce Select-then-Route (StR), a two‑stage framework that first *selects* a small, task‑appropriate pool of LLMs and then *routes* each query within that pool through an adaptive cascade. StR first employs a lightweight, *taxonomy‑guided selector* that maps each query to models proven proficient for its semantic class (e.g., reasoning, code, summarisation). Within the selected pool, a *confidence‑based cascade* begins with the cheapest model and escalates only when a multi‑judge agreement test signals low reliability.
Across six public benchmarks of various domains, StR improves the end‑to‑end accuracy from 91.7% (best single model) to 94.3% while reducing inference cost by 4X. Because both the taxonomy and multi-judge evaluation thresholds are tunable, StR exposes a smooth cost–accuracy frontier, enabling users to dial in the trade‑off that best fits their latency and budget constraints.

Select-then-Route : Taxonomy guided Routing for LLMs

Enterprises today are increasingly encouraged to adopt dedicated vector databases for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) in large language model applications.
We propose that, instead, organizations should leverage existing relational databases for retrieval, which many have already deployed, minimizing additional complexity in their software stacks.
To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, we present QuackIR, an information retrieval (IR) toolkit built on relational database management systems (RDBMSs), with integrations in DuckDB, SQLite, and PostgreSQL. 
Using QuackIR, we benchmark the sparse and dense retrieval capabilities of these popular RDBMSs and demonstrate that their effectiveness is comparable to baselines from established IR toolkits. 
Our results highlight the potential of relational databases as a simpler alternative compared to vector stores for RAG scenarios due to their established widespread usage.

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so much depends / upon / a whitespace: Why Whitespace Matters for Poets and LLMs

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Multilingual Needle in a Haystack: Investigating Long-Context Behavior of Multilingual Large Language Models