GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Multilingual Needle in a Haystack: Investigating Long-Context Behavior of Multilingual Large Language Models
Authors: Amey Hengle; Prasoon Bajpai; Soham Dan; Tanmoy Chakraborty
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: While recent large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable abilities in responding to queries in diverse languages, their ability to handle long multilingual contexts is unexplored. As such, a systematic evaluation of the long-context capabilities of LLMs in multilingual settings is crucial, specifically in the context of information retrieval. To address this gap, we introduce the MultiLingual Needle-in-a-Haystack (MLNeedle) test, designed to assess a model’s ability to retrieve relevant information (the needle) from a collection of multilingual distractor texts (the haystack). This test serves as an extension of the multilingual question-answering task, encompassing both monolingual and cross-lingual retrieval. We evaluate four state-of-the-art LLMs on MLNeedle. Our findings reveal that model performance can vary significantly with language and needle position. Specifically, we observe that model performance is the lowest when the needle is (i) in a language outside the English language family, and (ii) located in the middle of the input context. Furthermore, although some models claim a context size of 8k tokens or greater, none demonstrate satisfactory cross-lingual retrieval performance as the context length increases. Our analysis provides key insights into the long-context behavior of LLMs in multilingual settings to guide future evaluation protocols. To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the multilingual long-context behavior of LLMs.
Verify-in-the-Graph: Entity Disambiguation Enhancement for Complex Claim Verification with Interactive Graph Representation
Authors: Hoang Pham; Thanh-Do Nguyen; Khac-Hoai Nam Bui
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Claim verification is a long-standing and challenging task that demands not only high accuracy but also explainability and thoroughness of the verification process. This task becomes an emerging research issue in the era of large language models (LLMs) since real-world claims are often complex, featuring intricate semantic structures or obfuscated entities. Traditional approaches typically address this by decomposing claims into sub-claims and querying a knowledge base to resolve hidden or ambiguous entities. However, the absence of effective disambiguation strategies for these entities can compromise the entire verification process. To address these challenges, we propose Verify-in-the-Graph (VeGraph), a novel framework leveraging the reasoning and comprehension abilities of LLM agents. VeGraph operates in three phases: (1) Graph Representation - an input claim is decomposed into structured triplets, forming a graph-based representation that integrates both structured and unstructured information; (2) Entity Disambiguation -VeGraph iteratively interacts with the knowledge base to resolve ambiguous entities within the graph for deeper sub-claim verification; and (3) Verification - remaining triplets are verified to complete the fact-checking process. Experiments using Meta-Llama-3-70B (instruct version) show that VeGraph achieves competitive performance compared to baselines across benchmarks (HoVer and FEVEROUS), effectively addressing claim verification challenges. Our source code and data are available for further exploitation.
Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models for Heterophilic Graphs
Authors: Yuxia Wu; Shujie Li; Yuan Fang; Chuan Shi
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have presented significant opportunities to enhance various machine learning applications, including graph neural networks (GNNs). By leveraging the vast open-world knowledge within LLMs, we can more effectively interpret and utilize textual data to better characterize heterophilic graphs, where neighboring nodes often have different labels. However, existing approaches for heterophilic graphs overlook the rich textual data associated with nodes, which could unlock deeper insights into their heterophilic contexts. In this work, we explore the potential of LLMs for modeling heterophilic graphs and propose a novel two-stage framework: LLM-enhanced edge discriminator and LLM-guided edge reweighting. In the first stage, we fine-tune the LLM to better identify homophilic and heterophilic edges based on the textual content of their nodes. In the second stage, we adaptively manage message propagation in GNNs for different edge types based on node features, structures, and heterophilic or homophilic characteristics. To cope with the computational demands when deploying LLMs in practical scenarios, we further explore model distillation techniques to fine-tune smaller, more efficient models that maintain competitive performance. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our framework, demonstrating the feasibility of using LLMs to enhance node classification on heterophilic graphs.
Exploiting Edited Large Language Models as General Scientific Optimizers
Authors: Qitan Lv; Tianyu Liu; Hong Wang
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been widely adopted in mathematical optimization in scientific scenarios for their extensive knowledge and advanced reasoning capabilities. Existing methods mainly focus on utilizing LLMs to solve optimization problems in a prompt-based manner, which takes observational feedback as additional textual descriptions. However, due to LLM’s **high sensitivity to the prompts** and **tendency to get lost in lengthy prompts**, these methods struggle to effectively utilize the observational feedback from each optimization step, which severely hinders the applications for real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a conceptually simple and general bi-level optimization method, namely **G**eneral **S**cientific **O**ptimizers (GSO).Specifically, GSO first utilizes inner-level simulators as experimental platforms to evaluate the current solution and provide observational feedback. Then, LLMs serve as knowledgeable and versatile scientists, generating new solutions by refining potential errors from the feedback as the outer-level optimization.Finally, simulations together with the expert knowledge in LLMs are jointly updated with bi-level interactions via model editing.Extensive experiments show that GSO consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods using *six* different LLM backbone on *seven* different tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness and a wide range of applications.
DIRAS: Efficient LLM Annotation of Document Relevance for Retrieval Augmented Generation
Authors: Jingwei Ni; Tobias Schimanski; Meihong Lin; Mrinmaya Sachan; Elliott Ash; Markus Leippold
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely employed to ground responses to queries on domain-specific documents. But do RAG implementations leave out important information when answering queries that need an integrated analysis of information (e.g., Tell me good news in the stock market today.)? To address these concerns, RAG developers need to annotate information retrieval (IR) data for their domain of interest, which is challenging because (1) domain-specific queries usually need nuanced definitions of relevance beyond shallow semantic relevance; and (2) human or GPT-4 annotation is costly and cannot cover all (query, document) pairs (i.e., annotation selection bias), thus harming the effectiveness in evaluating IR recall. To address these challenges, we propose DIRAS (**D**omain-specific **I**nformation **R**etrieval **A**nnotation with **S**calability), a manual-annotation-free schema that fine-tunes open-sourced LLMs to consider nuanced relevance definition and annotate (partial) relevance labels with calibrated relevance scores. Extensive evaluation shows that DIRAS enables smaller (8B) LLMs to achieve GPT-4-level performance on annotating and ranking unseen (query, document) pairs, and is helpful for real-world RAG development.
Hello Again! LLM-powered Personalized Agent for Long-term Dialogue
Authors: Hao Li; Chenghao Yang; An Zhang; Yang Deng; Xiang Wang; Tat-Seng Chua
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Open-domain dialogue systems have seen remarkable advancements with the development of large language models (LLMs). Nonetheless, most existing dialogue systems predominantly focus on brief single-session interactions, neglecting the real-world demands for long-term companionship and personalized interactions with chatbots. Crucial to addressing this real-world need are event summary and persona management, which enable reasoning for appropriate long-term dialogue responses. Recent progress in the human-like cognitive and reasoning capabilities of LLMs suggests that LLM-based agents could significantly enhance automated perception, decision-making, and problem-solving. In response to this potential, we introduce a model-agnostic framework, the Long-term Dialogue Agent (LD-Agent), which incorporates three independently tunable modules dedicated to event perception, persona extraction, and response generation. For the event memory module, long and short-term memory banks are employed to separately focus on historical and ongoing sessions, while a topic-based retrieval mechanism is introduced to enhance the accuracy of memory retrieval. Furthermore, the persona module conducts dynamic persona modeling for both users and agents. The integration of retrieved memories and extracted personas is subsequently fed into the generator to induce appropriate responses. The effectiveness, generality, and cross-domain capabilities of LD-Agent are empirically demonstrated across various illustrative benchmarks, models, and tasks. The code is released at https://github.com/leolee99/LD-Agent.
My LLM might Mimic AAE - But When Should It?
Authors: Sandra Camille Sandoval; Christabel Acquaye; Kwesi Adu Cobbina; Mohammad Nayeem Teli; Hal Daumé Iii
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: We examine the representation of African American English (AAE) in large language models (LLMs), exploring (a) the perceptions Black Americans have of how effective these technologies are at producing authentic AAE, and (b) in what contexts Black Americans find this desirable. Through both a survey of Black Americans (n= 104) and annotation of LLM-produced AAE by Black Americans (n= 228), we find that Black Americans favor choice and autonomy in determining when AAE is appropriate in LLM output. They tend to prefer that LLMs default to communicating in Mainstream U.S. English in formal settings, with greater interest in AAE production in less formal settings. When LLMs were appropriately prompted and provided in context examples, our participants found their outputs to have a level of AAE authenticity on par with transcripts of Black American speech. Select code and data for our project can be found here: https://github.com/smelliecat/AAEMime.git
High-Dimension Human Value Representation in Large Language Models
Authors: Samuel Cahyawijaya; Delong Chen; Yejin Bang; Leila Khalatbari; Bryan Wilie; Ziwei Ji; Etsuko Ishii; Pascale Fung
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: The widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various tasks and fields has necessitated the alignment of these models with human values and preferences. Given various approaches of human value alignment, such as Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), constitutional learning, and safety fine-tuning etc., there is an urgent need to understand the scope and nature of human values injected into these LLMs before their deployment and adoption. We propose UniVar, a high-dimensional neural representation of symbolic human value distributions in LLMs, orthogonal to model architecture and training data. This is a continuous and scalable representation, self-supervised from the value-relevant output of 8 LLMs and evaluated on 15 open-source and commercial LLMs. Through UniVar, we visualize and explore how LLMs prioritize different values in 25 languages and cultures, shedding light on the complex interplay between human values and language modeling.
Not all Hallucinations are Good to Throw Away When it Comes to Legal Abstractive Summarization
Authors: Nihed Bendahman; Karen Pinel-Sauvagnat; Gilles Hubert; Mokhtar Boumedyen Billami
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Automatic summarization of legal documents requires a thorough understanding of their specificities, mainly with respect to the vocabulary used by legal experts. Indeed, the latter rely heavily on their external knowledge when writing summaries, in order to contextualize the main entities of the source document. This leads to reference summaries containing many abstractions, that sota models struggle to generate. In this paper, we propose an entity-driven approach aiming at learning the model to generate factual hallucinations, as close as possible to the abstractions of the reference summaries. We evaluated our approach on two different datasets, with legal documents in English and French. Results show that our approach allows to reduce non-factual hallucinations and maximize both summary coverage and factual hallucinations at entity-level. Moreover, the overall quality of summaries is also improved, showing that guiding summarization with entities is a valuable solution for legal documents summarization.
Query-focused Referentiability Learning for Zero-shot Retrieval
Authors: Jaeyoung Kim; Dohyeon Lee; Seung-won Hwang
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Dense passage retrieval enhances Information Retrieval (IR) by encoding queries and passages into representation space. However, passage representations often fail to be referenced by their gold queries under domain shifts, revealing a weakness in representation space. One desirable concept for representations is ”argmaxable”. Being argmaxable ensures that no representations are theoretically excluded from selection due to geometric constraints. To be argmaxable, a notable approach is to increase isotropy, where representations are evenly spread out in all directions. These findings, while desirable also for IR, focus on passage representation and not on query, making it challenging to directly apply their findings to IR. In contrast, we introduce a novel query-focused concept of ”referentiable” tailored for IR tasks, which ensures that passage representations are referenced by their gold queries. Building on this, we propose Learning Referentiable Representation (LRR), and two strategic metrics, Self-P and Self-Q, quantifying how the representations are referentiable. Our experiments compare three dense model versions: Naive, Isotropic, and Referentiable, demonstrating that LRR leads to enhanced zero-shot performance, surpassing existing naive and isotropic versions.
A Novel Computational Modeling Foundation for Automatic Coherence Assessment
Authors: Aviya Maimon
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Coherence is an essential property of well-written texts, that refers to the way textual units relate to one another. In the era of generative AI, coherence assessment is essential for many NLP tasks such as summarization, long-form question-answering, and more.Current NLP approaches for modeling coherence often rely on a proxy task, specifically, sentence reordering. However, such an approach may not capture the full range of factors contributing to coherence.To remedy this, in this work we employ the formal linguistic definition by Reinhart:1980 of what makes a discourse coherent, consisting of three conditions, cohesion, consistency and relevance, and formalize these conditions as respective computational tasks, which are in turn jointly trained. We evaluate this modeling approach on two human-rated coherence benchmarks: one of automatically-generated stories and one of real-world texts.Our experiments show that jointly training on the proposed tasks leads to better performance on each task compared with task-specific models, and to better performance on assessing coherence overall.Our proposed computational framework thus paves the way for a more advanced, broad-coverage coherence assessment.
Token-based Decision Criteria Are Suboptimal in In-context Learning
Authors: Hakaze Cho; Yoshihiro Sakai; Mariko Kato; Kenshiro Tanaka; Akira Ishii; Naoya Inoue
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: In-Context Learning (ICL) typically utilizes classification criteria from output probabilities of manually selected label tokens. However, we argue that such token-based classification criteria lead to suboptimal decision boundaries, despite delicate calibrations through translation and constrained rotation applied. To address this problem, we propose Hidden Calibration, which renounces token probabilities and uses the nearest centroid classifier on the LM’s last hidden states. In detail, we assign the label of the nearest centroid previously estimated from a calibration set to the test sample as the predicted label. Our experiments on 6 models and 10 classification datasets indicate that Hidden Calibration consistently outperforms current token-based baselines by about 20%~50%, achieving a strong state-of-the-art in ICL. Our further analysis demonstrates that Hidden Calibration finds better classification criteria with less inter-class overlap, and LMs provide linearly separable intra-class clusters with the help of demonstrations, which supports Hidden Calibration and gives new insights into the principle of ICL. Our official code implementation can be found at https://github.com/hc495/Hidden_Calibration.
CSEval: Towards Automated, Multi-Dimensional, and Reference-Free Counterspeech Evaluation using Auto-Calibrated LLMs
Authors: Amey Hengle; Aswini Kumar Padhi; Anil Bandhakavi; Tanmoy Chakraborty
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Counterspeech has emerged as a popular and effective strategy for combating online hate speech, sparking growing research interest in automating its generation using language models. However, the field still lacks standardised evaluation protocols and reliable automated evaluation metrics that align with human judgement. Current automatic evaluation methods, primarily based on similarity metrics, do not effectively capture the complex and independent attributes of counterspeech quality, such as contextual relevance, aggressiveness, or argumentative coherence. This has led to an increased dependency on labor-intensive human evaluations to assess automated counter-speech generation methods. To address these challenges, we introduce ‘CSEval‘, a novel dataset and framework for evaluating counterspeech quality across four dimensions: *contextual-relevance*, *aggressiveness*, *argument-coherence*, and *suitableness*. Furthermore, we propose *Auto-Calibrated COT for Counterspeech Evaluation* (‘Auto-CSEval‘), a prompt-based method with auto-calibrated chain-of-thoughts (CoT) for scoring counterspeech using large language models. Our experiments show that ‘Auto-CSEval‘ outperforms traditional metrics like ROUGE, METEOR, and BertScore in correlating with human judgement, indicating a significant improvement in automated counterspeech evaluation.
Multilingual Machine Translation with Open Large Language Models at Practical Scale: An Empirical Study
Authors: Menglong Cui; Pengzhi Gao; Wei Liu; Jian Luan; Bin Wang
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown continuously improving multilingual capabilities, and even small-scale open-source models have demonstrated rapid performance enhancement. In this paper, we systematically explore the abilities of open LLMs with less than ten billion parameters to handle multilingual machine translation (MT) tasks. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on six popular LLMs and find that models like Gemma2-9B exhibit impressive multilingual translation capabilities. We then introduce the Parallel-First Monolingual-Second (PFMS) data mixing strategy in the continual pretraining stage to further enhance the MT performance and present GemmaX2-28, a 9B model achieving top-tier multilingual translation performance across 28 languages. Specifically, GemmaX2-28 consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models such as TowerInstruct and X-ALMA and achieves competitive performance with Google Translate and GPT-4-turbo.
RAG LLMs are Not Safer: A Safety Analysis of Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models
Authors: Bang An; Shiyue Zhang; Mark Dredze
Venue: NAACL 2025 (Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Efforts to ensure the safety of large language models (LLMs) include safety fine-tuning, evaluation, and red teaming.However, despite the widespread use of the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, AI safety work focuses on standard LLMs, which means we know little about how RAG use cases change a model’s safety profile. We conduct a detailed comparative analysis of RAG and non-RAG frameworks with eleven LLMs. We find that RAG can make models less safe and change their safety profile. We explore the causes of this change and find that even combinations of safe models with safe documents can cause unsafe generations. In addition, we evaluate some existing red teaming methods for RAG settings and show that they are less effective than when used for non-RAG settings. Our work highlights the need for safety research and red-teaming methods specifically tailored for RAG LLMs.