United States

We present a systematic analysis of module-level design choices in GraphRAG, a retrieval-augmented generation framework that integrates structured knowledge graphs into question answering. Focusing on triple extraction, community clustering, and report generation, we evaluate multiple strategies across two knowledge-intensive benchmarks. Our results show that high-quality triple extraction is critical, as the accuracy and coverage of the resulting knowledge graph can become a bottleneck for downstream reasoning. We also find that the granularity of fundamental knowledge units, as determined by community clustering, has a significant impact on downstream performance: achieving a balance between factual detail and topical coherence within each unit is important to enable precise and comprehensive retrieval and to facilitate effective multi-hop reasoning. In addition, simple template-based reporting outperforms LLM-based summarization in both accuracy and efficiency.
These findings provide practical guidance for the structure-aware design of retrieval-augmented systems.

ACL 2026

Dissecting GraphRAG: A Modular Analysis of Knowledge Structuring for Factoid Question Answering

## 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*

EMNLP 2025

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

technical paper

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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The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in complex reasoning, but methods like Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) often reinforce rather than correct biases. We identify this critical failure as bias reinforcement and propose a conceptual framework that decomposes it into two root causes: (1) the model’s initial static bias and (2) a self-reinforcing debate dynamic that systematically amplifies the most common, not necessarily correct, viewpoints. To address both causes, we propose DReaMAD (Diverse Reasoning via Multi-Agent Debate with Refined Prompt), a framework that first corrects static bias by eliciting strategic prior knowledge, then reshapes the debate dynamic by promoting diverse perspectives. To validate our approach, we introduce MetaNIM Arena, a new benchmark for adversarial strategic decision-making. Empirical results show that DReaMAD significantly improves decision accuracy and mitigates bias, establishing a more robust foundation for LLM-based reasoning.

From Belief Entrenchment to Robust Reasoning in LLM Agents

Linguistic steganography involves embedding secret messages within seemingly innocuous texts to enable covert communication. Provable security, which is a long-standing goal and key motivation, has been extended to language-model-based steganography. Previous provably secure approaches have achieved perfect imperceptibility, measured by zero Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, but at the expense of embedding capacity. In this paper, we attempt to directly use a classic entropy coding method (**range coding**) to achieve secure steganography, and then propose an efficient and provably secure linguistic steganographic method with a rotation mechanism. Experiments across various language models show that our method achieves around 100% entropy utilization (embedding efficiency) for embedding capacity, outperforming the existing baseline methods. Moreover, it achieves high embedding speeds (up to 1554.66 bits/s on GPT-2). The code is available at github.com/ryehr/RRC_steganography.

Efficient Provably Secure Linguistic Steganography via Range Coding

Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly advanced in recent years, scaling up in both parameter count and context length. However, as context windows extend from thousands to hundreds of thousands of tokens, attention computation becomes the dominant source of memory usage and runtime in decoding stages, severely limiting the efficiency and scalability of long-context LLMs. Sparse attention has emerged as a promising solution, reducing complexity by computing attention over only a subset of context tokens. However, the sparse attention for Multi-head Latent Attention(MLA) which is a variant of standard MHA is rarely studied. In this paper, we introduce RoPE-based Blockwise Sparse Attention (RoBSA), a method designed specifically for MLA during the decoding stage of model inference. RoBSA leverages the decoupled nature of RoPE within MLA to implement token selection in a blockwise manner. RoBSA is a lightweight, training-free, and layer-aware algorithm that can be integrated in a plug-and-play fashion. Our method significantly reduces end-to-end inference latency in the decoding stage by up to 2.55x with minimal accuracy loss compared to full attention in long-context scenarios for very large models.

RoBSA: RoPE-based Blockwise Sparse Multi-head Latent Attention

Recent theoretical advancement of information density in natural language has brought the following question on desk: To what degree does natural language exhibit periodicity pattern in its encoded information? We address this question by introducing a new method called AutoPeriod of Surprisal (APS). APS adopts a canonical periodicity detection algorithm and is able to identify any significant periods that exist in the surprisal sequence of a single document. By applying the algorithm to a set of corpora, we have obtained the following interesting results: Firstly, a considerable proportion of human language demonstrates a strong pattern of periodicity in information; Secondly, new periods that are outside the distributions of typical structural units in text (e.g., sentence boundaries, elementary discourse units, etc.) are found and further confirmed via harmonic regression modeling. We conclude that the periodicity of information in language is a joint outcome from both structured factors and other driving factors that take effect at longer distances. The advantages of our periodicity detection method and its potentials in LLM-generation detection are further discussed.

Identifying the Periodicity of Information in Natural Language

Defending large language models (LLMs) against jailbreak attacks is essential for their safe and reliable deployment. Existing defenses often rely on shallow pattern matching, which struggles to generalize to novel and unseen attack strategies. To address this challenge, we propose the Cognitive-Driven Defense (CDD) framework, which targets the underlying structure of jailbreak prompts by applying meta-operations, defined as basic manipulations that conceal harmful intent. CDD emulates human cognitive reasoning through a structured reasoning chain. It begins with a global perception of the prompt and follows with a localized analysis to uncover hidden manipulations. By applying supervised fine-tuning on this structured chain, the model learns to identify and reason about known manipulation patterns. To enhance generalization to unseen threats, an entropy-guided reinforcement learning algorithm (EG-GRPO) is introduced to encourage exploration of new types and variants of meta-operations. Experiments demonstrate that CDD can achieve state-of-the-art defense performance and exhibit strong generalization to unseen jailbreak attacks.

Beyond Surface-Level Detection: Towards Cognitive-Driven Defense Against Jailbreak Attacks via Meta-Operations Reasoning

Large reasoning models (LRMs) are typically trained using reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) to enhance their reasoning abilities. In this paradigm, policies are updated using both positive and negative self-generated rollouts, which correspond to distinct ***sample polarities***. In this paper, we provide a systematic investigation into how these sample polarities affect RLVR training dynamics and behaviors. We find that positive samples sharpen existing correct reasoning patterns, while negative samples encourage exploration of new reasoning paths. We further explore how adjusting the advantage values of positive and negative samples at both the polarity level and the token level affects RLVR training. Based on these insights, we propose an **A**daptive and **A**symmetric token-level **A**dvantage shaping method for **P**olicy **O**ptimization, namely **A3PO**, that more precisely allocates advantage signals to key tokens across different polarities. Experiments across five reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Rethinking Sample Polarity in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

A common goal in analyzing time series data is to understand how events cause observed variations. We study whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can infer natural language events associated with time series data.
We introduce an automated method for generating tasks that test a model's ability to reason about events associated with time series data based on sports data, and develop a new benchmarking method. In experiments spanning 18 LLMs, we prompt LLMs to infer unobserved events given time series data and observe surprising successes, even when providing minimal context. We then show that combining distillation with Reinforcement Learning (RL) can improve the performance for small language models to approach that of large proprietary reasoning models. All resources needed to reproduce our work are available: https://github.com/hartvigsen-group/GAMETime.

Inferring Events from Time Series using Language Models

Mitigating the detrimental effects of noisy labels on the training process has become increasingly critical, as obtaining entirely clean or human-annotated samples for large-scale pre-training tasks is often impractical. Nonetheless, existing noise mitigation methods often encounter limitations in practical applications due to their task-specific design, model dependency, and significant computational overhead. In this work, we exploit the properties of high-dimensional orthogonality to identify a robust and effective boundary in cone space for separating clean and noisy samples. Building on this, we propose One-Step Anti-noise (OSA), a model-agnostic noisy label mitigation paradigm that employs an estimator model and a scoring function to assess the noise level of input pairs through just one-step inference. We empirically validate the superiority of OSA, demonstrating its enhanced training robustness, improved task transferability, streamlined deployment, and reduced computational overhead across diverse benchmarks, models, and tasks. Our code is released at https://github.com/leolee99/OSA.

Debiased Orthogonal Boundary-Driven Efficient Noise Mitigation

Deception detection is of great significance for ensuring information security and conducting public opinion analysis, with personality factors and emotion cues playing a critical role. However, existing methods lack sample-level dynamic annotations for emotions and personality. In this paper, we propose an innovative multi-model multi-prompt annotation scheme and a strict label quality evaluation standard, and establish a multimodal joint detection dataset DDEP for deception, emotion, and personality. Meanwhile, we propose Rel-DDEP, an adaptive reliability-weighted fusion framework. Our framework quantifies uncertainty by mapping modal features to a high-dimensional Gaussian distribution space. It then performs reliability-weighted fusion and incorporates an alignment module and a sorting constraint module to achieve joint detection of deception, emotion, and personality. Experimental results on the MDPE and DDEP datasets show that our Rel-DDEP significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art baseline models in three tasks. The F1 score of the deception detection increases by 2.53%, that of the emotion detection increases by 2.66%, and that of the personality detection increases by 9.30%. The experiments fully verify the necessity of annotating dynamic emotion and personality labels for each sample and the effectiveness of reliability-weighted fusion.

Dynamic Emotion and Personality Profiling for Multimodal Deception Detection

The increasing reliance on data-driven research underscores the need for accessible datasets, particularly in the medical domain. However, raw datasets are frequently unavailable due to privacy constraints and ethical considerations, which complicates reproducibility, meta-analyses, and large-scale data-driven research. Text2Tabular addresses this challenge by reconstructing research datasets from scientific publications using advanced natural language processing and statistical modeling. Our key contributions include: (1) a unified framework combining Large Language Model driven information extraction with copula-based distribution modeling, (2) novel integration of statistical test results as distribution constraints through constrained Markov Chain Monte Carlo refinement, and (3) an own comprehensive benchmark comprising real scientific publications with corresponding raw datasets for evaluating our literature-based data reconstruction. Evaluation on both benchmark datasets and our curated collection demonstrates strong performance in Train-on-Synthetic-Test-on-Real (TSTR) evaluations, alongside accurate replication of descriptive statistics showing that Text2Tabular preserves the statistical properties and multivariate relationships of the original datasets. Text2Tabular facilitates scientific progress by enabling immediate access to realistic, domain-specific synthetic data, thus, improving data accessibility, and mitigating data scarcity in fields with limited real-world data.

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