China

This paper explores effective strategies for persuasive dialogue agents. Current approaches often rely on a limited set of predefined strategies, failing to capture the complexity of real-world persuasive interactions. 
To create more practically relevant strategies, we propose a cross-disciplinary approach drawing on social psychology, behavioral economics, and communication theory.
We validate our method through experiments on two distinct datasets: P4G, representing a specific, in-domain scenario, and DailyPersuasion, covering a wide variety of scenarios. Our approach achieves strong results across both of these datasets, demonstrating a significant improvement in persuasion success rates and suggesting promising generalizability. Notably, our method also excels in persuading individuals with initially low intent, addressing a critical challenge in persuasive AI.

EMNLP 2025

Enhancing Persuasive Dialogue Agents by Synthesizing Cross‑Disciplinary Communication Strategies

strategy design

persuasive dialogue

dialogue system

### 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. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- 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

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.

Code translation is a crucial activity in the software development and maintenance process, and researchers have recently begun to focus on using pre-trained large language models (LLMs) for code translation. However, existing LLMs only learn the contextual semantics of code during pre-training, neglecting executability information closely related to the execution state of the code, which results in unguaranteed code executability and unreliable automated code translation. To address this issue, we propose ExeCoder, an LLM specifically designed for code translation, aimed at utilizing executability representations such as functional semantics, syntax structures, and variable dependencies to enhance the capabilities of LLMs in code translation. To evaluate the effectiveness of ExeCoder, we manually enhanced the widely used benchmark TransCoder-test, resulting in a benchmark called TransCoder-test-X that serves LLMs. Evaluation of TransCoder-test-X indicates that ExeCoder achieves state-of-the-art performance in code translation, surpassing existing open-source code LLMs by over 10.88% to 38.78% and over 27.44% to 42.97% on two metrics, and even outperforms the renowned closed-source LLM GPT-4o. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ExeCoder

ExeCoder: Empowering Large Language Models with Executability Representation for Code Translation

Effective conversational search demands a deep understanding of user intent across multiple dialogue turns. Users frequently use abbreviations and shift topics in the middle of conversations, posing challenges for conventional retrievers. While query rewriting techniques improve clarity, they often incur significant computational cost due to additional autoregressive steps. Moreover, although LLM-based retrievers demonstrate strong performance, they are not explicitly optimized to track user intent in multi-turn settings, often failing under topic drift or contextual ambiguity. To address these limitations, we propose ContextualRetriever, a novel LLM-based retriever that directly incorporates conversational context into the retrieval process. Our approach introduces: (1) a context-aware embedding mechanism that highlights the current query within the dialogue history; (2) intent-guided supervision based on high-quality rewritten queries; and (3) a training strategy that preserves the generative capabilities of the base LLM. Extensive evaluations across multiple conversational search benchmarks demonstrate that ContextualRetriever significantly outperforms existing methods while incurring no additional inference overhead.

Learning Contextual Retrieval for Robust Conversational Search

The rapid growth of scientific literature demands efficient methods to organize and synthesize research findings. Existing taxonomy construction methods, leveraging unsupervised clustering or direct prompting of large language models (LLMs), often lack coherence and granularity. We propose a novel context-aware hierarchical taxonomy generation framework that integrates LLM-guided multi-aspect encoding with dynamic clustering. Our method leverages LLMs to identify key aspects of each paper (e.g., methodology, dataset, evaluation) and generates aspect-specific paper summaries, which are then encoded and clustered along each aspect to form a coherent hierarchy. In addition, we introduce a new evaluation benchmark of 156 expert-crafted taxonomies encompassing 11.6k papers, providing the first naturally annotated dataset for this task. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms prior approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance in taxonomy coherence, granularity, and interpretability.

Context-Aware Hierarchical Taxonomy Generation for Scientific Papers via LLM-Guided Multi-Aspect Clustering

The proliferation of memes on social media necessitates the capabilities of multimodal Large Language Models (mLLMs) to effectively understand multimodal harmfulness. Existing evaluation approaches predominantly focus on mLLMs' detection accuracy for binary classification tasks, which often fail to reflect the in-depth interpretive nuance of harmfulness across diverse contexts. In this paper, we propose MemeArena, an agent-based arena-style evaluation framework that provides a context-aware and unbiased assessment for mLLMs' understanding of multimodal harmfulness. Specifically, MemeArena simulates diverse interpretive contexts to formulate evaluation tasks that elicit perspective-specific analyses from mLLMs. By integrating varied viewpoints and reaching consensus among evaluators, it enables fair and unbiased comparisons of mLLMs’ abilities to interpret multimodal harmfulness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework effectively reduces the evaluation biases of judge agents, with judgment results closely aligning with human preferences, offering valuable insights into reliable and comprehensive mLLM evaluations in multimodal harmfulness understanding. Our code and data are publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MemeArena.

MemeArena: Automating Context-Aware Unbiased Evaluation of Harmfulness Understanding for Multimodal Large Language Models

Despite advancements in large language models (LLMs), non-factual responses still persist in fact-seeking question answering. Unlike extensive studies on post-hoc detection of these responses, this work studies non-factuality prediction (NFP), predicting whether an LLM will generate a non-factual response prior to the response generation. Previous NFP methods have shown LLMs' awareness of their knowledge, but they face challenges in terms of efficiency and transferability. In this work, we propose a lightweight model named Factuality Lens (FacLens), which effectively probes hidden representations of fact-seeking questions for the NFP task. Moreover, we discover that hidden question representations sourced from different LLMs exhibit similar NFP patterns, enabling the transferability of FacLens across different LLMs to reduce development costs. Extensive experiments highlight \model's superiority in both effectiveness and efficiency.

 FacLens: Transferable Probe for Foreseeing Non-Factuality in Fact-Seeking Question Answering of Large Language Models

Mixture of Experts (MoE) offers remarkable performance and computational efficiency by selectively activating subsets of model parameters. Traditionally, MoE models use homogeneous experts, each with identical capacity. However, varying complexity in input data necessitates experts with diverse capabilities, while homogeneous MoE hinders effective expert specialization and efficient parameter utilization. In this study, we propose a novel Heterogeneous Mixture of Experts (HMoE) framework, where experts differ in size and thus possess diverse capacities. This heterogeneity allows for more specialized experts to handle varying token complexities more effectively. To address the imbalance in expert activation, we propose a novel training objective that encourages the frequent activation of smaller experts, so as to improve computational efficiency and parameter utilization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HMoE achieves a lower loss rate with fewer activated parameters and outperforms conventional homogeneous MoE models on various pre-training evaluation benchmarks. Codes will be released upon acceptance.

HMoE: Heterogeneous Mixture of Experts for Language Modeling

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate incorrect or outdated information, especially in low-resource settings or when dealing with private data. To address this, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) uses external knowledge bases (KBs), but these can also suffer from inaccuracies. We introduce STACKFEED, a novel Structured Textual Actor-Critic Knowledge base editing with Feedback approach that iteratively refines the KB based on expert feedback using a multi-actor, centralized critic reinforcement learning framework. STACKFEED defines a ReACT actor agent on each document to perform structured edits based on document-specific targeted instructions. Experimental results showcase that STACKFEED significantly improves KB quality and performance of the RAG system. We evaluate STACKFEED on low-resource programming problems, modified Python packages, and factual question-answering tasks.

STACKFEED: Structured Textual Actor-Critic Knowledge base editing with FEEDback

High-quality doctor-patient dialogues are crucial for accurate Electronic Medical Record (EMR) generation. However, collecting large-scale real dialogues is costly and constrained by privacy regulations, while existing synthetic methods often yield rigid and medically inconsistent dialogues. We propose a scalable framework integrating (1) Intent Graph Planning for diverse clinical flows, (2) Dual-Agent Simulation for realistic doctor-patient interactions, and (3) Rule-Reward Quality Control combining explicit medical rules with a self-supervised reward model. Experiments across multiple clinical domains demonstrate that our synthesized dialogues significantly enhance realism, diversity, and downstream EMR quality, substantially reducing physician editing efforts. Our framework provides a practical and privacy-compliant solution for deploying robust clinical NLP systems.

High-Quality Medical Dialogue Synthesis for Improving EMR Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) can achieve enhanced complex problem-solving through test-time computing scaling, yet this often entails longer contexts and numerous reasoning token costs. 
In this paper, we propose an efficient test-time scaling method that trains LLMs on code-related reasoning trajectories, facilitating their reduction of excess thinking tokens while maintaining performance.
First, we create Z1-Code-Reasoning-107K, a curated dataset of simple and complex coding problems paired with their short and long solution trajectories. 
Second, we present a novel Shifted Thinking Window to mitigate overthinking overhead by removing context-delimiting tags (e.g., <think>…</think>) and capping reasoning tokens. 
Trained with long and short trajectory data and equipped with Shifted Thinking Window, our model, Z1-7B, demonstrates the ability to adjust its reasoning level as the complexity of problems and exhibits efficient test-time scaling across different reasoning tasks that matches R1-Distill-Qwen-7B performance with about 30\% of its average thinking tokens.
Notably, fine-tuned with only code trajectories, Z1-7B demonstrates generalization to broader reasoning tasks (47.5\% on GPQA Diamond). 
Our analysis of efficient reasoning elicitation also provides valuable insights for future research.

Z1: Efficient Test-time Scaling with Code

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been applied to reranking tasks in information retrieval, achieving strong performance. However, their high computational demands often hinder practical deployment.
Existing studies evaluate the efficiency of LLM-based rerankers using proxy metrics such as latency, the number of forward passes, input tokens, and output tokens. However, these metrics depend on hardware and running-time choices (\eg parallel or not, batch size, etc), as well as missing model-size effects, making it difficult to interpret and obscuring the evaluation of the efficiency-effectiveness tradeoff. 
To address this issue, we propose \ours, for LLM-based rerankers: ranking metrics per PetaFLOP (RPP) for relevance per compute and queries per PetaFLOP (QPP) for hardware-agnostic throughput. Companied with the new metrics, an interpretable FLOPs estimator is built to estimate the FLOPs of an LLM-based reranker even without running any experiments. Based on the proposed metrics, we conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate a wide range of LLM-based rerankers with different architecture, studying the efficiency-effectiveness trade-off and bringing this issue to the attention of the research community.

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