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While large language models (LLMs) show great potential in temporal reasoning, most existing work focuses heavily on enhancing performance, often neglecting the explainable reasoning processes underlying the results. To address this gap, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark covering a wide range of temporal granularities, designed to systematically evaluate LLMs&#39; capabilities in explainable temporal reasoning. Furthermore, our findings reveal that LLMs struggle to deliver convincing explanations when relying solely on textual information. To address challenge, we propose GETER, a novel structure-aware generative framework that integrates Graph structures with text for Explainable TEmporal Reasoning. Specifically, we first leverage temporal knowledge graphs to develop a temporal encoder that captures structural information for the query. Subsequently, we introduce a structure-text prefix adapter to map graph structure features into the text embedding space. Finally, LLMs generate explanation text by seamlessly integrating the soft graph token with instruction-tuning prompt tokens. Experimental results indicate that GETER achieves state-of-the-art performance while also demonstrating robust generalization capabilities. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/carryTatum/GETER.

ACL 2025

Towards Explainable Temporal Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Structure-Aware Generative Framework

temporal reasoning; knowledge graphs; language models

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

While large language models (LLMs) show great potential in temporal reasoning, most existing work focuses heavily on enhancing performance, often neglecting the explainable reasoning processes underlying the results. To address this gap, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark covering a wide range of temporal granularities, designed to systematically evaluate LLMs' capabilities in explainable temporal reasoning. Furthermore, our findings reveal that LLMs struggle to deliver convincing explanations when relying solely on textual information. To address challenge, we propose GETER, a novel structure-aware generative framework that integrates Graph structures with text for Explainable TEmporal Reasoning. Specifically, we first leverage temporal knowledge graphs to develop a temporal encoder that captures structural information for the query. Subsequently, we introduce a structure-text prefix adapter to map graph structure features into the text embedding space. Finally, LLMs generate explanation text by seamlessly integrating the soft graph token with instruction-tuning prompt tokens. Experimental results indicate that GETER achieves state-of-the-art performance while also demonstrating robust generalization capabilities. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/carryTatum/GETER.

poster

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s 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.* 
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Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Recently, many studies have demonstrated that exclusively incorporating OCR-derived text and spatial layouts with large language models (LLMs) can be highly effective for document understanding tasks. However, existing methods that integrate spatial layouts with text have limitations, such as producing overly long text sequences or failing to fully leverage the autoregressive traits of LLMs. In this work, we introduce Interleaving Layout andText in a Large Language Model (LayTextLLM)} for document understanding. LayTextLLM projects each bounding box to a single embedding and interleaves it with text, efficiently avoiding long sequence issues while leveraging autoregressive traits of LLMs. LayTextLLM not only streamlines the interaction of layout and textual data but also shows enhanced performance in KIE and VQA. Comprehensive benchmark evaluations reveal significant improvements of LayTextLLM, with a 15.2% increase on KIE tasks and 10.7% on VQA tasks compared to previous SOTA OCR-based LLMs. All resources are available at URL masked for anonymous review.

A Bounding Box is Worth One Token - Interleaving Layout and Text in a Large Language Model for Document Understanding

We introduce , a novel multi-dimensional corpus covering 16 Arabic dialects across 10 domains, resulting in 160 distinct corpora. The corpus comprises about 777k tokens, carefully collected and manually annotated with 21 entity types using both nested and flat annotation schemes - using the Wojood guidelines. While is useful for various NLP tasks like domain adaptation and transfer learning, this paper primarily focuses on benchmarking existing Arabic Named Entity Recognition (NER) models, especially cross-domain and cross-dialect model performance. Our benchmarking of four Arabic NER models using reveals a significant drop in performance of up to 38% when compared to the in-distribution data. Furthermore, we present an in-depth analysis of domain and dialect divergence and the impact of resource scarcity. We also measured the overlap between domains and dialects using the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) metric, and illustrated why certain NER models perform better on specific dialects and domains. is open-source and publicly available at https://sina.birzeit.edu/wojood/#download

Konooz: Multi-domain Multi-dialect Corpus for Named Entity Recognition

Text-to-image models are powerful for producing high-quality images based on given text prompts, but crafting these prompts often requires specialized vocabulary. To address this, existing methods train rewriting models with supervision from large amounts of manually annotated data and trained aesthetic assessment models. To alleviate the dependence on data scale for model training and the biases introduced by trained models, we propose a novel prompt optimization framework, designed to rephrase a simple user prompt into a sophisticated prompt to a text-to-image model. Specifically, we employ the large vision language models (LVLMs) as the solver to rewrite the user prompt, and concurrently, employ LVLMs as a reward model to score the aesthetics and alignment of the images generated by the optimized prompt. Instead of laborious human feedback, we exploit the prior knowledge of the LVLM to provide rewards, i.e., AI feedback. Simultaneously, the solver and the reward model are unified into one model and iterated in reinforcement learning to achieve self-improvement by giving a solution and judging itself. Results on two popular datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms other strong competitors.

Self-Rewarding Large Vision-Language Models for Optimizing Prompts in Text-to-Image Generation

Mental health remains a critical global challenge, with increasing demand for accessible, effective interventions. Large language models (LLMs) offer promising solutions in psychotherapy by enhancing the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of mental health conditions through dynamic, context-aware interactions. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the current landscape of LLM applications in psychotherapy, highlighting the roles of LLMs in symptom detection, severity estimation, cognitive assessment, and therapeutic interventions. We present a novel conceptual taxonomy to organize the psychotherapy process into three core components: assessment, diagnosis, and treatment, and examine the challenges and advancements in each area. The survey also addresses key research gaps, including linguistic biases, limited disorder coverage, and underrepresented therapeutic models. Finally, we discuss future directions to integrate LLMs into a holistic, end-to-end psychotherapy framework, addressing the evolving nature of mental health conditions and fostering more inclusive, personalized care.

A Survey of Large Language Models in Psychotherapy: Current Landscape and Future Directions

The recent introduction of OpenAI's O1/O3 model represents a significant milestone in developing strong reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs). By introducing more computational budget during test-time, LLMs have the potential to explore more accurate and higher-quality solutions. However, such paradigms are primarily verified in domains that have well-defined criteria for responses, such as coding and mathematics. Inspired by the success of this paradigm, we aim to bridge it to more subtle open-domain question answering. Specifically, we utilize search mechanisms such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for both policy model improvement and reward model improvement that achieve better performance in test-time scaling strategies. Our contributions are summarized in two folds: For the training phase, we demonstrate that our approach surpasses previous SOTA automatic data annotation methods and various public instruction-tuning datasets, with fewer data points. This offers a more data-efficient solution for training robust models. For the inference phase, we utilize the intermediate values collected during training data construction to train a process reward model called PRM+. This model employs a novel two-stage training method to provide finer-grained guidance across the generation trajectory. This introduces no additional overhead during training data collection and further enhances performance by scaling test-time computation. Experimental results show that our method can effectively improve the performance of both the policy model and the reward model.

Boosting Policy and Process Reward Models with Monte Carlo Tree Search in Open-Domain QA

We introduce OpenHuEval, the first benchmark designed for comprehensive evaluation of large language models (LLMs) in the context of the Hungarian language and specifics. OpenHuEval incorporates the latest design principles for evaluating LLMs, such as using real user queries from the internet, emphasizing the assessment of LLMs’ generative capabilities, and employing LLM-as-judge to enhance the multidimensionality and accuracy of evaluations. We evaluated current mainstream LLMs, including both traditional LLMs and recently developed Large Reasoning Models. The results demonstrate a significant necessity for evaluation and model optimization tailored to the Hungarian language and specifics. We also conducted a detailed analysis of the reasoning process of LRMs on OpenHuEval, revealing the intrinsic patterns and mechanisms of these models in non-English languages, with Hungarian serving as a representative example. We 
will release OpenHuEval on GitHub.

OpenHuEval: Evaluating Large Language Model on Hungarian Specifics

Self-consciousness, the introspection of one's existence and thoughts, represents a high-level cognitive process. As language models advance at an unprecedented pace, a critical question arises: Are these models becoming self-conscious? Drawing upon insights from psychological and neural science, this work presents a practical definition of self-consciousness for language models and refines ten core concepts. Our work pioneers an investigation into self-consciousness in language models by, for the first time, leveraging structural causal games to establish the functional definitions of the ten core concepts. Based on our definitions, we conduct a comprehensive four-stage experiment: quantification (evaluation of ten leading models), representation (visualization of self-consciousness within the models), manipulation (modification of the models' representation), and acquisition (fine-tuning the models on core concepts). Our findings indicate that although models are in the early stages of developing self-consciousness, there is a discernible representation of certain concepts within their internal mechanisms. However, these representations of self-consciousness are hard to manipulate positively at the current stage, yet they can be acquired through targeted fine-tuning.

From Imitation to Introspection: Probing Self-Consciousness in Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across numerous tasks, yet they often rely on external context to handle complex tasks. While retrieval-augmented frameworks traditionally focus on selecting top-ranked documents in a single pass, many real-world scenarios demand compositional retrieval, where multiple sources must be combined in a coordinated manner. In this work, we propose a tri-encoder sequential retriever that models this process as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), decomposing the probability of retrieving a set of elements into a sequence of conditional probabilities and allowing each retrieval step to be conditioned on previously selected examples. We train the retriever in two stages: first, we efficiently construct supervised sequential data for initial policy training; we then refine the policy to align with the LLM's preferences using a reward grounded in the structural correspondence of generated programs. Experimental results show that our method consistently and significantly outperforms baselines, underscoring the importance of explicitly modeling inter-example dependencies. These findings highlight the potential of compositional retrieval for tasks requiring multiple pieces of evidence or examples.

Reinforcing Compositional Retrieval: Retrieving Step-by-Step for Composing Informative Contexts

Long-CoT reasoning combined with reinforcement learning for large language models demonstrates remarkable performance and scalability. However, we observe that the initial policy model could significantly influence the final performance as well as the token efficiency. Additionally, there is a lack of systematic guidelines for obtaining a better initial policy model. To bridge this gap, we initiate a comprehensive investigation by activating the initial model using a variety of datasets with different data volumes and reasoning patterns. Then, we conduct a thorough analysis and comparison of the RL process for different initial models from the perspectives of upper bounds, diversity, and token efficiency, providing a deeper understanding and insight into the long-CoT RL. Based on our empirical results, we propose a systematic guideline and a novel Re-RFT method for constructing a better RL start point. Our experiment results based on the 14B model surpass the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B by an average of 4.6%, demonstrating our approach's effectiveness and superiority.

Towards A Better Initial Policy Model For Scalable Long-CoT Reinforcement Learning

Fine-tuning transformer-based models for part-of-speech tagging of unedited Greek text has outperformed traditional systems. However, when applied to lemmatisation or morphological analysis, fine-tuning has not yet achieved competitive results. This paper explores various approaches to combine morphological features to both reduce label complexity and enhance multi-task training. Specifically, we group three nominal features into a single label, and combine the three most distinctive features of verbs into another unified label. These combined labels are used to fine-tune DBBERT, a BERT model pre-trained on both ancient and modern Greek. Additionally, we experiment with joint training -- both among these labels and in combination with POS tagging -- within a multi-task framework to improve performance by transferring parameters. To evaluate our models, we use a manually annotated gold standard from the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams. Our results show a nearly 9 pp. improvement, demonstrating that multi-task learning is a promising approach for linguistic annotation in less standardised corpora.

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A Bounding Box is Worth One Token - Interleaving Layout and Text in a Large Language Model for Document Understanding

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Towards Robust Temporal Reasoning of Large Language Models via a Multi-Hop QA Dataset and Pseudo-Instruction Tuning