ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Non-Emotion-Centric Empathetic Dialogue Generation (2025)

Previous work on empathetic response generation mainly focused on utilizing the speaker`s emotions to generate responses. However, the performance of identifying fine-grained emotions is limited, introducing cascading errors to empathetic response generation. Moreover, due to the conflict between the information in the dialogue history and the recognized emotions, previous work often generated general and uninformative responses. To address the above issues, we propose a novel framework NEC (Non-Emotion-Centric empathetic dialogue generation) based on contrastive learning and context-sensitive entity and social commonsense, in which the frequent replies and sentences with incorrect emotions are punished through contrastive learning, thereby improving the empathy, diversity and information of the responses. The experimental results demonstrate that our NEC enhances the quality of empathetic generation and generates more diverse responses in comparison with the state-of-the-art baselines.The code will be available at https://github.com/huangfu170/NEC-empchat
Aligning Retrieval with Reader Needs: Reader-Centered Passage Selection for Open-Domain Question Answering (2025)

Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) systems often struggle with the quality of retrieved passages, which may contain conflicting information and be misaligned with the reader`s needs. Existing retrieval methods aim to gather relevant passages but often fail to prioritize consistent and useful information for the reader. In this paper, we introduce a novel Reader-Centered Passage Selection (R-CPS) method, which enhances the performance of the retrieve-then-read pipeline by re-ranking and clustering passages from the reader`s perspective. Our method re-ranks passages based on the reader`s prediction probability distribution and clusters passages according to the predicted answers, prioritizing more useful and relevant passages to the top and reducing inconsistent information. Experiments on ODQA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving the quality of evidence passages under zero-shot settings.
Con-ReCall: Detecting Pre-training Data in LLMs via Contrastive Decoding (2025)

The training data in large language models is key to their success, but it also presents privacy and security risks, as it may contain sensitive information. Detecting pre-training data is crucial for mitigating these concerns. Existing methods typically analyze target text in isolation or solely with non-member contexts, overlooking potential insights from simultaneously considering both member and non-member contexts. While previous work suggested that member contexts provide little information due to the minor distributional shift they induce, our analysis reveals that these subtle shifts can be effectively leveraged when contrasted with non-member contexts. In this paper, we propose Con-ReCall, a novel approach that leverages the asymmetric distributional shifts induced by member and non-member contexts through contrastive decoding, amplifying subtle differences to enhance membership inference. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that Con-ReCall achieves state-of-the-art performance on the WikiMIA benchmark and is robust against various text manipulation techniques.
Citation Amnesia: On The Recency Bias of NLP and Other Academic Fields (2025)

This study examines the tendency to cite older work across 20 fields of study over 43 years (1980{--}2023). We put NLP`s propensity to cite older work in the context of these 20 other fields to analyze whether NLP shows similar temporal citation patterns to them over time or whether differences can be observed. Our analysis, based on a dataset of {\textasciitilde}240 million papers, reveals a broader scientific trend: many fields have markedly declined in citing older works (e.g., psychology, computer science). The trend is strongest in NLP and ML research (-12.8{\%} and -5.5{\%} in citation age from previous peaks). Our results suggest that citing more recent works is not directly driven by the growth in publication rates (-3.4{\%} across fields; -5.2{\%} in humanities; -5.5{\%} in formal sciences) {---} even when controlling for an increase in the volume of papers. Our findings raise questions about the scientific community`s engagement with past literature, particularly for NLP, and the potential consequences of neglecting older but relevant research. The data and a demo showcasing our results are publicly available.
Low-Resource Fast Text Classification Based on Intra-Class and Inter-Class Distance Calculation (2025)

In recent years, text classification methods based on neural networks and pre-trained models have gained increasing attention and demonstrated excellent performance. However, these methods still have some limitations in practical applications: (1) They typically focus only on the matching similarity between sentences. However, there exists implicit high-value information both within sentences of the same class and across different classes, which is very crucial for classification tasks. (2) Existing methods such as pre-trained language models and graph-based approaches often consume substantial memory for training and text-graph construction. (3) Although some low-resource methods can achieve good performance, they often suffer from excessively long processing times. To address these challenges, we propose a low-resource and fast text classification model called LFTC. Our approach begins by constructing a compressor list for each class to fully mine the regularity information within intra-class data. We then remove redundant information irrelevant to the target classification to reduce processing time. Finally, we compute the similarity distance between text pairs for classification. We evaluate LFTC on 9 publicly available benchmark datasets, and the results demonstrate significant improvements in performance and processing time, especially under limited computational and data resources, highlighting its superior advantages.
Monte Carlo Tree Search Based Prompt Autogeneration for Jailbreak Attacks against LLMs (2025)

Jailbreak attacks craft specific prompts or append adversarial suffixes to prompts, thereby inducing language models to generate harmful or unethical content and bypassing the model`s safety guardrails. With the recent blossom of large language models (LLMs), there`s a growing focus on jailbreak attacks to probe their safety. While current white-box attacks typically focus on meticulously identifying adversarial suffixes for specific models, their effectiveness and efficiency diminish when applied to different LLMs. In this paper, we propose a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) based Prompt Auto-generation (MPA) method to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of attacks across various models. MPA automatically searches for and generates adversarial suffixes for valid jailbreak attacks. Specifically, we first identify a series of action candidates that could potentially trick LLMs into providing harmful responses. To streamline the exploration of adversarial suffixes, we design a prior confidence probability for each MCTS node. We then iteratively auto-generate adversarial prompts using the MCTS framework. Extensive experiments on multiple open-source models (like Llama, Gemma, and Mistral) and closed-source models (such as ChatGPT) show that our proposed MPA surpasses existing methods in search efficiency as well as attack effectiveness. The codes are available at https://github.com/KDEGroup/MPA.
LogiGraph: Logical Reasoning with Contrastive Learning and Lightweight Graph Networks (2025)

Logical reasoning is a crucial factor in machine reading comprehension tasks (MRC). Existing methods suffer from the balance between semantic and explicit logical relation representations, in which some emphasize contextual semantics, while others pay more attention to explicit logical features. Additionally, previous methods utilize graph convolutional networks (GCN) for node updates, still exhibiting some shortcomings. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a logical reasoning method with contrastive learning and lightweight graph networks (LogiGraph). Our method focuses on the \textit{lightweight} aspect of the GCN, which greatly improves the shortcomings of the GCN, and employs conjunction and punctuation marks as two types of edges to construct a dual graph. Besides, we combine contrastive learning with graph reasoning, which changes the logical expression`s content as the negative sample of the original context, enabling the model to capture negative logical relationships and improving generalization ability. We conduct extensive experiments on two public datasets, ReClor and LogiQA. Experimental results demonstrate that LogiGraph can achieve state-of-the-art performance on both datasets.
Explaining Relationships Among Research Papers (2025)

The rapid pace of research publications makes it challenging for researchers to stay up to date. There is a growing need for automatically generated, concise literature reviews to help researchers quickly identify papers relevant to their interests. Prior work over the past decade has focused on summarizing individual research papers, typically in the context of citation generation, while the relationships among multiple papers have largely been overlooked. Existing approaches primarily generate standalone citation sentences without addressing the need for expository and transition sentences to explain the relationships among multiple citations. In this work, we propose a feature-based, LLM-prompting approach to generate richer citation texts and simultaneously capture the complex relationships among multiple papers. Our expert evaluation reveals a strong correlation between human preference and integrative writing styles, indicating that readers favor high-level, abstract citations with transition sentences that weave them into a coherent narrative.
From Generalist to Specialist: A Survey of Large Language Models for Chemistry (2025)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly transformed our daily life and established a new paradigm in natural language processing (NLP). However, the predominant pretraining of LLMs on extensive web-based texts remains insufficient for advanced scientific discovery, particularly in chemistry. The scarcity of specialized chemistry data, coupled with the complexity of multi-modal data such as 2D graph, 3D structure and spectrum, present distinct challenges. Although several studies have reviewed Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) in chemistry, there is a conspicuous absence of a systematic survey specifically focused on chemistry-oriented LLMs. In this paper, we outline methodologies for incorporating domain-specific chemistry knowledge and multi-modal information into LLMs, we also conceptualize chemistry LLMs as agents using chemistry tools and investigate their potential to accelerate scientific research. Additionally, we conclude the existing benchmarks to evaluate chemistry ability of LLMs. Finally, we critically examine the current challenges and identify promising directions for future research. Through this comprehensive survey, we aim to assist researchers in staying at the forefront of developments in chemistry LLMs and to inspire innovative applications in the field.
Latent Space Interpretation for Stylistic Analysis and Explainable Authorship Attribution (2025)

Recent state-of-the-art authorship attribution methods learn authorship representations of text in a latent, uninterpretable space, which hinders their usability in real-world applications. We propose a novel approach for interpreting learned embeddings by identifying representative points in the latent space and leveraging large language models to generate informative natural language descriptions of the writing style associated with each point. We evaluate the alignment between our interpretable and latent spaces and demonstrate superior prediction agreement over baseline methods. Additionally, we conduct a human evaluation to assess the quality of these style descriptions and validate their utility in explaining the latent space. Finally, we show that human performance on the challenging authorship attribution task improves by +20{\%} on average when aided with explanations from our method.
Read Before Grounding: Scene Knowledge Visual Grounding via Multi-step Parsing (2025)

Visual grounding (VG) is an important task in vision and language that involves understanding the mutual relationship between query terms and images. However, existing VG datasets typically use simple and intuitive textual descriptions, with limited attribute and spatial information between images and text. Recently, the Scene Knowledge Visual Grounding (SK-VG) task has been introduced, which constructs VG datasets using visual knowledge and relational referential expressions. Due to the length of textual visual knowledge and the complexity of the referential relationships between entities, previous models have struggled with this task. Therefore, we propose ReadVG, a zero-shot, plug-and-play method that leverages the robust language understanding capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to transform long visual knowledge texts into concise, information-dense visual descriptions. To improve the accuracy of target localisation, we employ a multi-step parsing algorithm that can progressively extract the query targets and their features from the visual knowledge and relational referencing expressions, thereby assisting multimodal models to more accurately localise the target for grounding purposes. Extensive experiments and case studies show that our approach can significantly improve the performance of multimodal grounding models.
Cross-Refine: Improving Natural Language Explanation Generation by Learning in Tandem (2025)

Natural language explanations (NLEs) are vital for elucidating the reasoning behind large language model (LLM) decisions. Many techniques have been developed to generate NLEs using LLMs. However, like humans, LLMs might not always produce optimal NLEs on first attempt. Inspired by human learning processes, we introduce Cross-Refine, which employs role modeling by deploying two LLMs as generator and critic, respectively. The generator outputs a first NLE and then refines this initial explanation using feedback and suggestions provided by the critic. Cross-Refine does not require any supervised training data or additional training. We validate Cross-Refine across three NLP tasks using three state-of-the-art open-source LLMs through automatic and human evaluation. We select Self-Refine (Madaan et al., 2023) as the baseline, which only utilizes self-feedback to refine the explanations. Our findings from automatic evaluation and a user study indicate that Cross-Refine outperforms Self-Refine. Meanwhile, Cross-Refine can perform effectively with less powerful LLMs, whereas Self-Refine only yields strong results with ChatGPT. Additionally, we conduct an ablation study to assess the importance of feedback and suggestions. Both of them play an important role in refining explanations. We further evaluate Cross-Refine on a bilingual dataset in English and German.
BiLD: Bi-directional Logits Difference Loss for Large Language Model Distillation (2025)

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional capabilities across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, such impressive performance often comes with the trade-off of an increased parameter size, posing significant challenges for widespread deployment. Knowledge distillation (KD) provides a solution by transferring knowledge from a large teacher model to a smaller student model. In this paper, we explore the task-specific distillation of LLMs at the logit level. Our investigation reveals that the logits of fine-tuned LLMs exhibit a more extreme long-tail distribution than those from vision models, with hidden {\textquotedblleft}noise{\textquotedblright} in the long tail affecting distillation performance. Furthermore, existing logits distillation methods often struggle to effectively utilize the internal ranking information from the logits. To address these, we propose the Bi-directional Logits Difference (BiLD) loss. The BiLD loss filters out the long-tail noise by utilizing only top-k teacher and student logits, and leverages the internal logits ranking information by constructing logits differences. To evaluate BiLD loss, we conduct comprehensive experiments on 13 datasets using two types of LLMs. Our results show that the BiLD loss, with only the top-8 logits, outperforms supervised fine-tuning (SFT), vanilla KL loss, and five other distillation methods from both NLP and CV fields.
Too Late to Train, Too Early To Use? A Study on Necessity and Viability of Low-Resource Bengali LLMs (2025)

Each new generation of English-oriented Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibits enhanced cross-lingual transfer capabilities and significantly outperforms older LLMs on low-resource languages. This prompts the question: Is there a need for LLMs dedicated to a particular low-resource language? We aim to explore this question for Bengali, a low-to-moderate resource Indo-Aryan language native to the Bengal region of South Asia. We compare the performance of open-weight and closed-source LLMs such as LLaMA-3 and GPT-4 against fine-tuned encoder-decoder models across a diverse set of Bengali downstream tasks, including translation, summarization, paraphrasing, question-answering, and natural language inference. Our findings reveal that while LLMs generally excel in reasoning tasks, their performance in tasks requiring Bengali script generation is inconsistent. Key challenges include inefficient tokenization of Bengali script by existing LLMs, leading to increased computational costs and potential performance degradation. Additionally, we highlight biases in machine-translated datasets commonly used for Bengali NLP tasks. We conclude that there is a significant need for a Bengali-oriented LLM, but the field currently lacks the high-quality pretraining and instruction-tuning datasets necessary to develop a highly effective model.
Do language models practice what they preach? Examining language ideologies about gendered language reform encoded in LLMs (2025)

We study language ideologies in text produced by LLMs through a case study on English gendered language reform (related to role nouns like congressperson/-woman/-man, and singular they). First, we find political bias: when asked to use language that is {\textquotedblleft}correct{\textquotedblright} or {\textquotedblleft}natural{\textquotedblright}, LLMs use language most similarly to when asked to align with conservative (vs. progressive) values. This shows how LLMs' metalinguistic preferences can implicitly communicate the language ideologies of a particular political group, even in seemingly non-political contexts. Second, we find LLMs exhibit internal inconsistency: LLMs use gender-neutral variants more often when more explicit metalinguistic context is provided. This shows how the language ideologies expressed in text produced by LLMs can vary, which may be unexpected to users. We discuss the broader implications of these findings for value alignment.
T-MES: Trait-Aware Mix-of-Experts Representation Learning for Multi-trait Essay Scoring (2025)

In current research on automatic essay scoring, related work tends to focus more on evaluating the overall quality or a single trait of prompt-specific essays. However, when scoring essays in an educational context, it is essential not only to consider the overall score but also to provide feedback on various aspects of the writing. This helps students clearly identify areas for improvement, enabling them to engage in targeted practice. Although many methods have been proposed to address the scoring issue, they still suffer from insufficient learning of trait representations and overlook the diversity and correlations between trait scores in the scoring process. To address this problem, we propose a novel multi-trait essay scoring method based on Trait-Aware Mix-of-Experts Representation Learning. Our method obtains trait-specific essay representations using a Mix-of-Experts scoring architecture. Furthermore, based on this scoring architecture, we propose a diversified trait-expert method to learn distinguishable expert weights. And to facilitate multi-trait scoring, we introduce two trait correlation learning strategies that achieve learning the correlations among traits. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and compared to existing methods, it achieves a further improvement in computational efficiency.
A Graph Interaction Framework on Relevance for Multimodal Named Entity Recognition with Multiple Images (2025)

Posts containing multiple images have significant research potential in Multimodal Named Entity Recognition nowadays. The previous methods determine whether the images are related to named entities in the text through similarity computation, such as using CLIP. However, it is not effective in some cases and not conducive to task transfer, especially in multi-image scenarios. To address the issue, we propose a graph interaction framework on relevance (GIFR) for Multimodal Named Entity Recognition with multiple images. For humans, they have the abilities to distinguish whether an image is relevant to named entities, but human capabilities are difficult to model. Therefore, we propose using reinforcement learning based on human preference to integrate human abilities into the model to determine whether an image-text pair is relevant, which is referred to as relevance. To better leverage relevance, we construct a heterogeneous graph and introduce graph transformer to enable information interaction. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.
Mining Word Boundaries from Speech-Text Parallel Data for Cross-domain Chinese Word Segmentation (2025)

Inspired by early research on exploring naturally annotated data for Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS), and also by recent research on integration of speech and text processing, this work for the first time proposes to explicitly mine word boundaries from parallel speech-text data. We employ the Montreal Forced Aligner (MFA) toolkit to perform character-level alignment on speech-text data, giving pauses as candidate word boundaries. Based on detailed analysis of collected pauses, we propose an effective probability-based strategy for filtering unreliable word boundaries. To more effectively utilize word boundaries as extra training data, we also propose a robust complete-then-train (CTT) strategy. We conduct cross-domain CWS experiments on two target domains, i.e., ZX and AISHELL2. We have annotated about 1K sentences as the evaluation data of AISHELL2. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
RoBGuard: Enhancing LLMs to Assess Risk of Bias in Clinical Trial Documents (2025)

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are rigorous clinical studies crucial for reliable decision-making, but their credibility can be compromised by bias. The Cochrane Risk of Bias tool (RoB 2) assesses this risk, yet manual assessments are time-consuming and labor-intensive. Previous approaches have employed Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate this process. However, they typically focus on manually crafted prompts and a restricted set of simple questions, limiting their accuracy and generalizability. Inspired by the human bias assessment process, we propose RoBGuard, a novel framework for enhancing LLMs to assess the risk of bias in RCTs. Specifically, RoBGuard integrates medical knowledge-enhanced question reformulation, multimodal document parsing, and multi-expert collaboration to ensure both completeness and accuracy. Additionally, to address the lack of suitable datasets, we introduce two new datasets: RoB-Item and RoB-Domain. Experimental results demonstrate RoBGuard`s effectiveness on the RoB-Item dataset, outperforming existing methods.