pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MEDAL: A Framework for Benchmarking LLMs as Multilingual Open-Domain Chatbots and Dialogue Evaluators
Authors: John Mendonça, Alon Lavie, Isabel Trancoso
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Chatbot, Dialogue Evaluation

As the capabilities of chatbots and their underlying LLMs continue to dramatically improve, evaluating their performance has increasingly become a major blocker to their further development. A major challenge is the available benchmarking datasets, which are largely static, outdated, and lacking in multilingual coverage, limiting their ability to capture subtle linguistic and cultural variations. This paper introduces MEDAL, an automated multi-agent framework for generating, evaluating, and curating more representative and diverse open-domain dialogue evaluation benchmarks. Our approach leverages several state-of-the-art LLMs to generate user-chatbot multilingual dialogues, conditioned on varied seed contexts. A strong LLM (GPT-4.1) is then used for a multidimensional analysis of the performance of the chatbots, uncovering noticeable cross-lingual performance differences. Guided by this large-scale evaluation, we curate a new meta-evaluation multilingual benchmark and human-annotate samples with nuanced quality judgments. This benchmark is then used to assess the ability of several reasoning and non-reasoning LLMs to act as evaluators of open-domain dialogues. We find that current LLMs struggle to detect nuanced issues, particularly those involving empathy and reasoning.
Can Large Language Models Match the Conclusions of Systematic Reviews?
Authors: Christopher Polzak, Alejandro Lozano, Min Woo Sun, James Burgess, Yuhui Zhang, Kevin Wu, Serena Yeung-Levy
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

Systematic reviews (SR), in which experts summarize and analyze evidence across individual studies to provide insights on a specialized topic, are a cornerstone for evidence-based clinical decision-making, research, and policy. Given the exponential growth of scientific articles, there is growing interest in using large language models (LLMs) to automate SR generation. However, the ability of LLMs to critically assess evidence and reason across multiple documents to provide recommendations at the same proficiency as domain experts remains poorly characterized. We therefore ask: Can LLMs match the conclusions of systematic reviews written by clinical experts when given access to the same studies? To explore this question, we present MedEvidence, a benchmark pairing findings from 100 SRs with the studies they are based on. We benchmark 24 LLMs on MedEvidence, including reasoning, non-reasoning, medical specialist, and models across varying sizes (from 7B-700B). Through our systematic evaluation, we find that reasoning does not necessarily improve performance, larger models do not consistently yield greater gains, and knowledge-based fine-tuning degrades accuracy on MedEvidence. Instead, most models exhibit similar behavior: performance tends to degrade as token length increases, their responses show overconfidence, and, contrary to human experts, all models show a lack of scientific skepticism toward low-quality findings. These results suggest that more work is still required before LLMs can reliably match the observations from expert-conducted SRs, even though these systems are already deployed and being used by clinicians. We release our codebase and benchmark to the broader research community to further investigate LLM-based SR systems.
Towards a More Generalized Approach in Open Relation Extraction
Authors: Qing Wang, Yuepei Li, Qiao Qiao, Kang Zhou, Qi Li
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Relation, Relation Classification, Relation Extraction

Open Relation Extraction (OpenRE) seeks to identify and extract novel relational facts between named entities from unlabeled data without pre-defined relation schemas. Traditional OpenRE methods typically assume that the unlabeled data consists solely of novel relations or is pre-divided into known and novel instances. However, in real-world scenarios, novel relations are arbitrarily distributed. In this paper, we propose a generalized OpenRE setting that considers unlabeled data as a mixture of both known and novel instances. To address this, we propose MixORE, a two-phase framework that integrates relation classification and clustering to jointly learn known and novel relations. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that MixORE consistently outperforms competitive baselines in known relation classification and novel relation clustering. Our findings contribute to the advancement of generalized OpenRE research and real-world applications.
Self-Critique and Refinement for Faithful Natural Language Explanations
Authors: Yingming Wang, Pepa Atanasova
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00

With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), natural language explanations (NLEs) have become increasingly important for understanding model predictions. However, these explanations often fail to faithfully represent the model's actual reasoning process. While existing work has demonstrated that LLMs can self-critique and refine their initial outputs for various tasks, this capability remains unexplored for improving explanation faithfulness. To address this gap, we introduce Self-critique and Refinement for Natural Language Explanations (SR-NLE), a framework that enables models to improve the faithfulness of their own explanations -- specifically, post-hoc NLEs -- through an iterative critique and refinement process without external supervision. Our framework leverages different feedback mechanisms to guide the refinement process, including natural language self-feedback and, notably, a novel feedback approach based on feature attribution that highlights important input words. Our experiments across three datasets and four state-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate that SR-NLE significantly reduces unfaithfulness rates, with our best method achieving an average unfaithfulness rate of 36.02%, compared to 54.81% for baseline -- an absolute reduction of 18.79%. These findings reveal that the investigated LLMs can indeed refine their explanations to better reflect their actual reasoning process, requiring only appropriate guidance through feedback without additional training or fine-tuning.
What Has Been Lost with Synthetic Evaluation?
Authors: Alexander Gill, Abhilasha Ravichander, Ana Marasović
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Negation, Reading Comprehension, valid

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for data generation. However, creating evaluation benchmarks raises the bar for this emerging paradigm. Benchmarks must target specific phenomena, penalize exploiting shortcuts, and be challenging. Through two case studies, we investigate whether LLMs can meet these demands by generating reasoning over-text benchmarks and comparing them to those created through careful crowdsourcing. Specifically, we evaluate both the validity and difficulty of LLM-generated versions of two high-quality reading comprehension datasets: CondaQA, which evaluates reasoning about negation, and DROP, which targets reasoning about quantities. We find that prompting LLMs can produce variants of these datasets that are often valid according to the annotation guidelines, at a fraction of the cost of the original crowdsourcing effort. However, we show that they are less challenging for LLMs than their human-authored counterparts. This finding sheds light on what may have been lost by generating evaluation data with LLMs, and calls for critically reassessing the immediate use of this increasingly prevalent approach to benchmark creation.
LiTEx: A Linguistic Taxonomy of Explanations for Understanding Within-Label Variation in Natural Language Inference
Authors: Pingjun Hong, Beiduo Chen, Siyao Peng, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Barbara Plank
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Explanation Generation, Natural Language Inference

There is increasing evidence of Human Label Variation (HLV) in Natural Language Inference (NLI), where annotators assign different labels to the same premise-hypothesis pair. However, within-label variation--cases where annotators agree on the same label but provide divergent reasoning--poses an additional and mostly overlooked challenge. Several NLI datasets contain highlighted words in the NLI item as explanations, but the same spans on the NLI item can be highlighted for different reasons, as evidenced by free-text explanations, which offer a window into annotators' reasoning. To systematically understand this problem and gain insight into the rationales behind NLI labels, we introduce LITEX, a linguistically-informed taxonomy for categorizing free-text explanations. Using this taxonomy, we annotate a subset of the e-SNLI dataset, validate the taxonomy's reliability, and analyze how it aligns with NLI labels, highlights, and explanations. We further assess the taxonomy's usefulness in explanation generation, demonstrating that conditioning generation on LITEX yields explanations that are linguistically closer to human explanations than those generated using only labels or highlights. Our approach thus not only captures within-label variation but also shows how taxonomy-guided generation for reasoning can bridge the gap between human and model explanations more effectively than existing strategies.
GateNLP at SemEval-2025 Task 10: Hierarchical Three-Step Prompting for Multilingual Narrative Classification
Authors: Iknoor Singh, Carolina Scarton, Kalina Bontcheva
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Misinformation

The proliferation of online news and the increasing spread of misinformation necessitate robust methods for automatic data analysis. Narrative classification is emerging as a important task, since identifying what is being said online is critical for fact-checkers, policy markers and other professionals working on information studies. This paper presents our approach to SemEval 2025 Task 10 Subtask 2, which aims to classify news articles into a pre-defined two-level taxonomy of main narratives and sub-narratives across multiple languages. We propose Hierarchical Three-Step Prompting (H3Prompt) for multilingual narrative classification. Our methodology follows a three-step Large Language Model (LLM) prompting strategy, where the model first categorises an article into one of two domains (Ukraine-Russia War or Climate Change), then identifies the most relevant main narratives, and finally assigns sub-narratives. Our approach secured the top position on the English test set among 28 competing teams worldwide. The code is available at https://github.com/GateNLP/H3Prompt.
When Models Reason in Your Language: Controlling Thinking Trace Language Comes at the Cost of Accuracy
Authors: Jirui Qi, Shan Chen, Zidi Xiong, Raquel Fernández, Danielle S. Bitterman, Arianna Bisazza
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00

Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) with thinking traces have shown strong performance on English reasoning tasks. However, their ability to think in other languages is less studied. This capability is as important as answer accuracy for real world applications because users may find the reasoning trace useful for oversight only when it is expressed in their own language. We comprehensively evaluate two leading families of LRMs on our XReasoning benchmark and find that even the most advanced models often revert to English or produce fragmented reasoning in other languages, revealing a substantial gap in multilingual reasoning. Prompt based interventions that force models to reason in the users language improve readability and oversight but reduce answer accuracy, exposing an important trade off. We further show that targeted post training on just 100 examples mitigates this mismatch, though some accuracy loss remains. Our results highlight the limited multilingual reasoning capabilities of current LRMs and outline directions for future work. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Betswish/mCoT-XReasoning.
Talent or Luck? Evaluating Attribution Bias in Large Language Models
Authors: Chahat Raj, Mahika Banerjee, Aylin Caliskan, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Ziwei Zhu
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

When a student fails an exam, do we tend to blame their effort or the test's difficulty? Attribution, defined as how reasons are assigned to event outcomes, shapes perceptions, reinforces stereotypes, and influences decisions. Attribution Theory in social psychology explains how humans assign responsibility for events using implicit cognition, attributing causes to internal (e.g., effort, ability) or external (e.g., task difficulty, luck) factors. LLMs' attribution of event outcomes based on demographics carries important fairness implications. Most works exploring social biases in LLMs focus on surface-level associations or isolated stereotypes. This work proposes a cognitively grounded bias evaluation framework to identify how models' reasoning disparities channelize biases toward demographic groups.
ER-REASON: A Benchmark Dataset for LLM-Based Clinical Reasoning in the Emergency Room
Authors: Nikita Mehandru, Niloufar Golchini, David Bamman, Travis Zack, Melanie F. Molina, Ahmed Alaa
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Medical Question Answering, Question Answering

Large language models (LLMs) have been extensively evaluated on medical question answering tasks based on licensing exams. However, real-world evaluations often depend on costly human annotators, and existing benchmarks tend to focus on isolated tasks that rarely capture the clinical reasoning or full workflow underlying medical decisions. In this paper, we introduce ER-Reason, a benchmark designed to evaluate LLM-based clinical reasoning and decision-making in the emergency room (ER)--a high-stakes setting where clinicians make rapid, consequential decisions across diverse patient presentations and medical specialties under time pressure. ER-Reason includes data from 3,984 patients, encompassing 25,174 de-identified longitudinal clinical notes spanning discharge summaries, progress notes, history and physical exams, consults, echocardiography reports, imaging notes, and ER provider documentation. The benchmark includes evaluation tasks that span key stages of the ER workflow: triage intake, initial assessment, treatment selection, disposition planning, and final diagnosis--each structured to reflect core clinical reasoning processes such as differential diagnosis via rule-out reasoning. We also collected 72 full physician-authored rationales explaining reasoning processes that mimic the teaching process used in residency training, and are typically absent from ER documentation. Evaluations of state-of-the-art LLMs on ER-Reason reveal a gap between LLM-generated and clinician-authored clinical reasoning for ER decisions, highlighting the need for future research to bridge this divide.
Structured Memory Mechanisms for Stable Context Representation in Large Language Models
Authors: Yue Xing, Tao Yang, Yijiashun Qi, Minggu Wei, Yu Cheng, Honghui Xin
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Text Generation

This paper addresses the limitations of large language models in understanding long-term context. It proposes a model architecture equipped with a long-term memory mechanism to improve the retention and retrieval of semantic information across paragraphs and dialogue turns. The model integrates explicit memory units, gated writing mechanisms, and attention-based reading modules. A forgetting function is introduced to enable dynamic updates of memory content, enhancing the model's ability to manage historical information. To further improve the effectiveness of memory operations, the study designs a joint training objective. This combines the main task loss with constraints on memory writing and forgetting. It guides the model to learn better memory strategies during task execution. Systematic evaluation across multiple subtasks shows that the model achieves clear advantages in text generation consistency, stability in multi-turn question answering, and accuracy in cross-context reasoning. In particular, the model demonstrates strong semantic retention and contextual coherence in long-text tasks and complex question answering scenarios. It effectively mitigates the context loss and semantic drift problems commonly faced by traditional language models when handling long-term dependencies. The experiments also include analysis of different memory structures, capacity sizes, and control strategies. These results further confirm the critical role of memory mechanisms in language understanding. They demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach in both architectural design and performance outcomes.
Improving QA Efficiency with DistilBERT: Fine-Tuning and Inference on mobile Intel CPUs
Authors: Ngeyen Yinkfu
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, CPU, Data Augmentation, Question Answering

This study presents an efficient transformer-based question-answering (QA) model optimized for deployment on a 13th Gen Intel i7-1355U CPU, using the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) v1.1. Leveraging exploratory data analysis, data augmentation, and fine-tuning of a DistilBERT architecture, the model achieves a validation F1 score of 0.6536 with an average inference time of 0.1208 seconds per question. Compared to a rule-based baseline (F1: 0.3124) and full BERT-based models, our approach offers a favorable trade-off between accuracy and computational efficiency. This makes it well-suited for real-time applications on resource-constrained systems. The study includes systematic evaluation of data augmentation strategies and hyperparameter configurations, providing practical insights into optimizing transformer models for CPU-based inference.
WorkForceAgent-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLM-based Web Agents via Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yuchen Zhuang, Di Jin, Jiaao Chen, Wenqi Shi, Hanrui Wang, Chao Zhang
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs)-empowered web agents enables automating complex, real-time web navigation tasks in enterprise environments. However, existing web agents relying on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often struggle with generalization and robustness due to insufficient reasoning capabilities when handling the inherently dynamic nature of web interactions. In this study, we introduce WorkForceAgent-R1, an LLM-based web agent trained using a rule-based R1-style reinforcement learning framework designed explicitly to enhance single-step reasoning and planning for business-oriented web navigation tasks. We employ a structured reward function that evaluates both adherence to output formats and correctness of actions, enabling WorkForceAgent-R1 to implicitly learn robust intermediate reasoning without explicit annotations or extensive expert demonstrations. Extensive experiments on the WorkArena benchmark demonstrate that WorkForceAgent-R1 substantially outperforms SFT baselines by 10.26-16.59%, achieving competitive performance relative to proprietary LLM-based agents (gpt-4o) in workplace-oriented web navigation tasks.
OWL: Probing Cross-Lingual Recall of Memorized Texts via World Literature
Authors: Alisha Srivastava, Emir Korukluoglu, Minh Nhat Le, Duyen Tran, Chau Minh Pham, Marzena Karpinska, Mohit Iyyer
Date: 2025-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Memorization

Large language models (LLMs) are known to memorize and recall English text from their pretraining data. However, the extent to which this ability generalizes to non-English languages or transfers across languages remains unclear. This paper investigates multilingual and cross-lingual memorization in LLMs, probing if memorized content in one language (e.g., English) can be recalled when presented in translation. To do so, we introduce OWL, a dataset of 31.5K aligned excerpts from 20 books in ten languages, including English originals, official translations (Vietnamese, Spanish, Turkish), and new translations in six low-resource languages (Sesotho, Yoruba, Maithili, Malagasy, Setswana, Tahitian). We evaluate memorization across model families and sizes through three tasks: (1) direct probing, which asks the model to identify a book's title and author; (2) name cloze, which requires predicting masked character names; and (3) prefix probing, which involves generating continuations. We find that LLMs consistently recall content across languages, even for texts without direct translation in pretraining data. GPT-4o, for example, identifies authors and titles 69% of the time and masked entities 6% of the time in newly translated excerpts. Perturbations (e.g., masking characters, shuffling words) modestly reduce direct probing accuracy (7% drop for shuffled official translations). Our results highlight the extent of cross-lingual memorization and provide insights on the differences between the models.
StrucSum: Graph-Structured Reasoning for Long Document Extractive Summarization with LLMs
Authors: Haohan Yuan, Sukhwa Hong, Haopeng Zhang
Date: 2025-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Extractive Summarization, Sentence

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in zero-shot summarization, but often struggle to model document structure and identify salient information in long texts. In this work, we introduce StrucSum, a training-free prompting framework that enhances LLM reasoning through sentence-level graph structures. StrucSum injects structural signals into prompts via three targeted strategies: Neighbor-Aware Prompting (NAP) for local context, Centrality-Aware Prompting (CAP) for importance estimation, and Centrality-Guided Masking (CGM) for efficient input reduction. Experiments on ArXiv, PubMed, and Multi-News demonstrate that StrucSum consistently improves both summary quality and factual consistency over unsupervised baselines and vanilla prompting. Notably, on ArXiv, it boosts FactCC and SummaC by 19.2 and 9.7 points, indicating stronger alignment between summaries and source content. These findings suggest that structure-aware prompting is a simple yet effective approach for zero-shot extractive summarization with LLMs, without any training or task-specific tuning.
LLMs for Argument Mining: Detection, Extraction, and Relationship Classification of pre-defined Arguments in Online Comments
Authors: Matteo Guida, Yulia Otmakhova, Eduard Hovy, Lea Frermann
Date: 2025-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Argument Mining

Automated large-scale analysis of public discussions around contested issues like abortion requires detecting and understanding the use of arguments. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in language processing tasks, their performance in mining topic-specific, pre-defined arguments in online comments remains underexplored. We evaluate four state-of-the-art LLMs on three argument mining tasks using datasets comprising over 2,000 opinion comments across six polarizing topics. Quantitative evaluation suggests an overall strong performance across the three tasks, especially for large and fine-tuned LLMs, albeit at a significant environmental cost. However, a detailed error analysis revealed systematic shortcomings on long and nuanced comments and emotionally charged language, raising concerns for downstream applications like content moderation or opinion analysis. Our results highlight both the promise and current limitations of LLMs for automated argument analysis in online comments.