United States

Knowledge components (KCs) are key to assessing student knowledge levels on fine-grained skills and driving personalization and feedback. However, crafting KCs and tagging them for problems, traditionally performed by human domain experts, is highly labor-intensive. Prior work has studied automated KC generation only for multiple-choice questions but not open-ended ones. We bridge this gap and present an automated, large language model (LLM)-based pipeline for KC generation and tagging for open-ended programming problems. We also develop an LLM-based knowledge tracing (KT) framework to leverage these LLM-generated KCs. We conduct extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations on two real-world student code submission datasets. Results show that our KT method outperforms existing ones and LLM-generated KCs outperform human-written KCs on future student response prediction. We also investigate how these KCs enable us to analyze student learning curves and conduct human evaluation with course instructors to further verify the quality of KC-problem tagging.

ACL 2026

Automated Knowledge Component Generation and Interpretable Knowledge Tracing in Coding Problems

## 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.

poster

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.

Modern automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have been observed to function better for certain speaker groups (SGs) than others, despite recent gains in overall performance. One potential impediment to progress towards fairer ASR is a more nuanced understanding of the types of modeling errors that speech encoder models make, and in particular the difference between the structure of embeddings for high-performance and low-performance SGs. This paper proposes a framework typifying two types of error that can occur in modeling phonemes in ASR systems: random error/high variance in phoneme embedding, vs systematic error/embedding bias. We find that training phoneme classification probes only on a single, typically disadvantaged SG, sometimes improves performance for that SG, which is evidence for the existence of SG-level bias in phoneme embeddings. On the other hand, we find that speakers and SGs with higher levels of phoneme variance are the same as those with worse phoneme prediction accuracy. We conclude that both types of error are present in phoneme embeddings and both are candidate causes for SG-level unfairness in ASR, though random error is likely a greater hindrance to fairness than systematic error. Furthermore, we find that finetuning encoder models using a fairness-enhancing algorithm (domain enhancing and adversarial training) changes neither the benefits of in-domain phoneme classification probe training, nor measured levels of random embedding error.

Identifying and typifying demographic unfairness in phoneme-level embeddings of self-supervised speech recognition models

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit systematic biases across demographic groups. Auditing is proposed as an accountability tool for black-box LLM applications, but suffers from resource-intensive query access. We conceptualise auditing as uncertainty estimation over a target fairness metric and introduce BAFA, the Bounded Active Fairness Auditor for query-efficient auditing of black-box LLMs. BAFA maintains a version space of surrogate models consistent with queried scores and computes uncertainty intervals for fairness metrics (e.g., $\Delta$ AUC) via constrained empirical risk minimisation. Active query selection narrows these intervals to reduce estimation error. We evaluate BAFA on two standard fairness dataset case studies: CivilComments and Bias-in-Bios, comparing against stratified sampling, power sampling, and ablations. BAFA achieves target error thresholds with up to 40$\times$ fewer queries than stratified sampling (e.g., 144 vs 5,956 queries at $\varepsilon=0.02$ for CivilComments) for tight thresholds, demonstrates substantially better performance over time, and shows lower variance across runs. These results suggest that active sampling can reduce resources needed for independent fairness auditing with LLMs, supporting continuous model evaluations.

Audit Me If You Can: Query-Efficient Active Fairness Auditing of Black-Box LLMs

Despite recent advances in safety alignment, large language models (LLMs) remain highly susceptible to adversarial attacks, while the internal mechanisms behind such vulnerabilities are still poorly understood. Existing gradient-based attribution methods offer valuable interpretability for analyzing information storage and processing in LLMs. However, they are inapplicable to adversarial attacks, which typically occur in open-ended generation settings without fixed ground-truth outputs. To address these challenges, we propose a novel similarity-based gradient attribution method to identify key neurons sensitive to adversarial behaviors in open-ended generation tasks. The detected neurons, termed targeted neurons, play a critical role in safety training. Building on this neuron-level perspective, we uncover two key neuronal patterns: (i) universal neurons that are consistently exploited across multiple attack strategies, and (ii) interference neurons that hinder safety improvements when fine-tuned indiscriminately, providing mechanistic insights into the interpretability of adversarial vulnerabilities. Inspired by these findings, we propose a neuron-level defense strategy, Targeted Neuron Tuning (TNT), which selectively fine-tunes the identified targeted neurons for specific attacks. Experimental evaluations across multiple LLM architectures and scales demonstrate that TNT substantially improves model robustness against a wide range of jailbreak attacks, achieving safe rates exceeding 90% and even approaching 100%, while preserving general task performance, enabling precise and robust safety interventions. Warning: This paper contains example data that may be harmful.

 Neuronal Insights into LLM Attacks: Targeted Neuron Tuning for Precise and Robust Vulnerability Patching

Text revision is a core process in document creation, capturing how authors iteratively refine, reorganize, and improve written content. With the increasing availability of large-scale revision histories from platforms such as Wikipedia and arXiv, NLP research has begun to move beyond modeling what changes are made to understanding why they are made, i.e., the underlying edit intentions. To our knowledge, this is the first survey that synthesizes text revision research through the lens of edit intentions, providing a unified view of datasets, taxonomies, identification methods, and applications. We review prior work across the full revision workflow, including revision corpus construction, edit intention taxonomy design, and edit intention identification. We further categorize representative datasets and methods, summarize downstream applications such as writing assistance and document edit summarization, and highlight key open research directions.

 Making Revisions Understandable: A Survey of Edit Intentions, Methods, and Applications

Chart-to-table translation converts chart images into structured tabular data. Accurate translation is crucial for Multimodal Language Modal (MLM) to answer complex queries. We observe imbalances in the number of images across different aspects of the y-axis information in public chart datasets. Such imbalances can introduce unintended biases, causing uneven MLM performance. Previous works have not systematically examined these biases. To address this gap, we propose a new framework, FairChart2Table, for analyzing y-axis-related bias on five state-of-the-art models.

Key Findings: (1) There are significant y-axis biases related to the digit length of the major tick values, the number of major ticks, the range of values, and the tick value format (e.g., abbreviation or scientific format). (2) The number of legends/entities in chart images impacts MLM performance. (3) Prompting MLM with y-axis information can significantly enhance the performance for some MLMs.

Assessing Y-Axis Influence: Bias in Multimodal Language Models on Chart-to-Table Translation

This paper offers a call to action. We urge our colleagues in the research community to play a greater role in the articulation of our findings to the public. To illustrate the stakes we present a case study on the initial stages of an LLM-based machine translation application's deployment in a real-world context: a text-2-911 system advertising capabilities in 55 languages for use in emergencies in which it may be difficult to call operators directly. We identify a number of common misconceptions about technologies such as these, concluding with a set of concrete recommendations and best practices for stakeholders at every stage of the development and deployment pipeline. While the advancement of scientific research often lies in solving the "hard" problems, we argue it is often the "easy" ones--- problems for which the latest technology is often unnecessary--- that are most overlooked.

LLMs in the Real World: Evaluating “AI” in Emergency Contexts

Recently, watermarking has attracted growing attention as a practical technique for source attribution of machine-generated text. However, most prior work studies watermarking under benign prompts, while its behavior under jailbreaking prompts remains underexplored. This gap matters because jailbreaking can bypass safety policies and shift the generation regime, raising concerns that watermarking may interact with model alignment under attack. To address this gap, we evaluate six watermarking methods on four LLMs across two jailbreak benchmarks and three settings: Static, AutoDAN, and DSN. We find that watermarking can inflate judge-based attack success rate, denoted ASR, under jailbreaking, with the largest effects appearing in biased schemes that perturb logits. At the same time, these ASR increases often do not reflect higher harmful-goal compliance when measured by StrongREJECT or by human judgments. This suggests that ASR-only evaluations can be brittle to decoding perturbations and may overestimate harmful-goal compliance, motivating complementary goal-compliance metrics (e.g., StrongREJECT) and human evaluations.

Measuring Watermarking under Jailbreaking: ASR Inflation and Goal-Compliance Mismatch

Suicide memes are memes used to express suicide-related thoughts or comment on suicide-related issues. Suicide memes are increasingly common on social media, yet remain poorly understood and potentially harmful. There is an urgent need to better understand their characteristics and to develop appropriate content moderation strategies that limits users' exposure to potentially harmful content. Currently, the absence of annotated datasets of suicide memes remains a key barrier to developing and evaluating automated moderation approaches. In this paper, we introduce FigSIM, the first dataset designed for fine-grained analysis of suicide memes. The dataset consists of 1049 memes, each annotated for (1) fine-grained suicide severity levels, (2) figurative phenomena (e.g. metaphors), and (3) suicide-related content (e.g. suicide method depiction). We benchmark 16 unimodal and multimodal models across three tasks: figurative language, suicide severity, and suicide-related content detection. Overall, FigSIM demonstrates that suicide memes pose unique challenges for both modeling and content moderation. Analysis revealed biases, such as underprediction of higher suicide severity levels, especially for figurative memes.

FigSIM: A Dataset for Fine-grained Suicide Severity and Figurative Language in Suicide Memes

Natural Language Recommendation (NLRec) generates item suggestions based on the relevance between user-issued NL requests and NL item description passages. Existing NLRec approaches often use Dense Retrieval (DR) to compute item relevance scores from aggregation of inner products between user request embeddings and relevant passage embeddings. However, DR views the request as the sole relevance label, thus leading to a unimodal scoring function centered on the query embedding that is often a weak proxy for query relevance. To better capture the potential multimodal distribution of the relevance scoring function that may arise from complex NLRec data, we propose **GPR-LLM** that uses Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) with LLM relevance judgments for a subset of candidate passages. Experiments on four NLRec datasets and two LLM backbones demonstrate that GPR-LLM with an RBF kernel, capable of modeling multimodal relevance scoring functions, consistently outperforms simpler unimodal kernels (dot product, cosine similarity), as well as baseline methods including DR, cross-encoder, and pointwise LLM-based relevance scoring by up to 65%. Overall, GPR-LLM provides an efficient and effective approach to NLRec within a minimal LLM labeling budget.

Multimodal Item Scoring for Natural Language Recommendation via Gaussian Process Regression with LLM Relevance Judgments

Automatic evaluation metrics are essential for building multilingual translation systems. The common practice of evaluating these systems is averaging metric scores across languages, yet this is suspicious since metrics may suffer from cross-lingual scoring bias, where translations of equal quality receive different scores across languages. This problem has not been systematically studied because no benchmark exists that provides parallel-quality instances across languages, and expert annotation is not realistic. In this work, we propose XQ-MEval, a semi-automatically built dataset covering nine translation directions, to benchmark translation metrics. Specifically, we inject MQM-defined errors into gold translations automatically, filter them by native speakers for reliability, and merge errors to generate pseudo translations with controllable quality. These pseudo translations are then paired with corresponding sources and references to form triplets used in assessing the qualities of translation metrics. Using XQ-MEval, our experiments on nine representative metrics reveal the inconsistency between averaging and human judgment and provide the first empirical evidence of cross-lingual scoring bias. Finally, we propose a normalization strategy derived from XQ-MEval that aligns score distributions across languages, improving the fairness and reliability of multilingual metric evaluation.

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