China

Temporal question-answer (QA) is an established method to assess temporal reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Expected answers are often numeric (e.g., dates or durations), yet the model responses are evaluated like regular text with exact match (EM), unable to distinguish small from large errors. In this investigative work, we frame temporal QA as a numerical estimation task to assess the shortcomings of EM. We introduce TempAnswerQA, a benchmark distilled from Test of Time and TempTabQA, where all questions require a numerical temporal answer, allowing us to evaluate models beyond EM. We used the forecasting metrics symmetric mean absolute percentage error (sMAPE) and mean absolute scaled error (MASE). With sMAPE, we found that error size and EM are decoupled. Models with low EM still had low sMAPE (both ~20%), and some models had high sMAPE despite high EM. Scaling errors by the deviance of the ground truth data with MASE reshuffles model rankings compared to EM, revealing gaps in models&#39; understanding of temporal domain knowledge, especially when trained with synthetic data. Lastly, the models&#39; most frequent error was to deviate by only ± 1 from the ground truth. sMAPE and MASE, unlike EM, adequately weight these errors. Our findings underscore the need for specialised metrics for temporal QA tasks.

EMNLP 2025

Time to Revisit Exact Match

temporal reasoning

large language models

evaluation

### Welcome!
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.

Temporal question-answer (QA) is an established method to assess temporal reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Expected answers are often numeric (e.g., dates or durations), yet the model responses are evaluated like regular text with exact match (EM), unable to distinguish small from large errors. In this investigative work, we frame temporal QA as a numerical estimation task to assess the shortcomings of EM. We introduce TempAnswerQA, a benchmark distilled from Test of Time and TempTabQA, where all questions require a numerical temporal answer, allowing us to evaluate models beyond EM. We used the forecasting metrics symmetric mean absolute percentage error (sMAPE) and mean absolute scaled error (MASE). With sMAPE, we found that error size and EM are decoupled. Models with low EM still had low sMAPE (both ~20%), and some models had high sMAPE despite high EM. Scaling errors by the deviance of the ground truth data with MASE reshuffles model rankings compared to EM, revealing gaps in models' understanding of temporal domain knowledge, especially when trained with synthetic data. Lastly, the models' most frequent error was to deviate by only ± 1 from the ground truth. sMAPE and MASE, unlike EM, adequately weight these errors. Our findings underscore the need for specialised metrics for temporal QA tasks.

poster

## 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*

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

We introduce **LongTableBench**, a benchmark for evaluating long-context reasoning over semi-structured tables across diverse formats, tasks, and domains. It comprises 5,950 QA instances spanning 7 table formats (e.g., Markdown, HTML, SQL), 18 domains, and input lengths up to 128K tokens, including multi-turn and multi-table settings. To ensure data quality, we combine symbolic supervision, cross-model validation, and human review. Evaluating 52 LLMs—including general-purpose, table-specific, and reasoning-enhanced models—reveals that only the strongest models maintain robust performance under increasing context lengths and format diversity. We further show that end-to-end models outperform compression-based approaches, especially on tasks requiring semantic integration. LongTableBench provides a rigorous, scalable testbed for advancing long-context tabular understanding and highlights key limitations in current LLMs' structural and reasoning capabilities.

LongTableBench: Benchmarking Long-Context Table Reasoning across Real-World Formats and Domains

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly tasked with analyzing legal texts and citing relevant statutes, yet their reliability is often compromised by general pre-training that ingests legal texts without specialized focus, obscuring the true depth of their legal knowledge. This paper introduces CLaw, a novel benchmark specifically engineered to meticulously evaluate LLMs on Chinese legal knowledge and its application in reasoning. CLaw comprises two key components: (1) a comprehensive, fine-grained corpus of all 306 Chinese national statutes, segmented to the subparagraph level and incorporating precise historical revision timesteps for rigorous recall evaluation (64,849 entries), and (2) a challenging set of 254 case-based reasoning instances derived from China Supreme Court curated materials to assess the practical application of legal knowledge. Our empirical evaluation reveals that most contemporary LLMs significantly struggle to faithfully reproduce legal provisions. As accurate retrieval and citation of legal provisions form the basis of legal reasoning, this deficiency critically undermines the reliability of their responses. We contend that achieving trustworthy legal reasoning in LLMs requires a robust synergy of accurate knowledge retrieval—potentially enhanced through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)—and strong general reasoning capabilities. This work provides an essential benchmark and critical insights for advancing domain-specific LLM reasoning, particularly within the complex legal sphere.

CLaw: Benchmarking Chinese Legal Knowledge in Large Language Models - A Fine-grained Corpus and Reasoning Analysis

Speculative decoding significantly accelerates language model inference by enabling a lightweight draft model to propose multiple tokens that a larger target model verifies simultaneously. However, applying this technique to vision-language models (VLMs) presents two fundamental challenges: small language models that could serve as efficient drafters lack the architectural components to process visual inputs, and their token predictions fail to match those of VLM target models that consider visual context. We introduce Multimodal Adaptation and Self-Data Distillation for Speculative Decoding of Vision-Language Models (MASSV), which transforms existing small language models into effective multimodal drafters through a two-phase approach. MASSV first connects the target VLM's vision encoder to the draft model via a lightweight trainable projector, then applies self-distilled visual instruction tuning using responses generated by the target VLM to align token predictions. Comprehensive experiments across the Qwen2.5-VL and Gemma3 model families demonstrate that MASSV increases accepted length by up to 30% and delivers end-to-end inference speedups of up to 1.46x compared to conventional text-only drafting baselines on visually-grounded tasks.

MASSV: Multimodal Adaptation and Self-Data Distillation for Speculative Decoding of Vision-Language Models

Legal claims refer to the plaintiff’s demands in a case and are essential to guiding judicial reasoning and case resolution. While many works have focused on improving the efficiency of legal professionals, the research on helping non-professionals (e.g., plaintiffs) remains unexplored. This paper explores the problem of legal claim generation based on the given case's facts. First, we construct ClaimGen-CN, the first dataset for Chinese legal claim generation task, from various real-world legal disputes. Additionally, we design an evaluation metric tailored for assessing the generated claims, which encompasses two essential dimensions: factuality and clarity. Building on this, we conduct a comprehensive zero-shot evaluation of state-of-the-art general and legal-domain large language models. Our findings highlight the limitations of the current models in factual precision and expressive clarity, pointing to the need for more targeted development in this domain. To encourage further exploration of this important task, we will make the dataset publicly available.

ClaimGen-CN: A Large-scale Chinese Dataset for Legal Claim Generation

Schemas are vital for ensuring data quality in the Semantic Web and natural language processing. Traditionally, their creation demands substantial involvement from knowledge engineers and domain experts. Leveraging the impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in related tasks like ontology engineering, we explore automatic schema generation using LLMs. To bridge the resource gap, we introduce two datasets: YAGO Schema and Wikidata EntitySchema, along with evaluation metrics. The LLM-based pipelines effectively utilize local and global information from knowledge graphs (KGs) to generate validating schemas in Shape Expressions (ShEx). Experiments demonstrate LLMs' strong potential in producing high-quality ShEx schemas, paving the way for scalable, automated schema generation for large KGs. Furthermore, our benchmark introduces a new challenge for structured generation, pushing the limits of LLMs on syntactically rich formalisms.

Schema Generation for Large Knowledge Graphs Using Large Language Models

We present a tendency of large language models (LLMs) to generate absurd patterns despite their clear inappropriateness in a simple task of identifying regularities in number series. Several approaches have been proposed to apply LLMs to complex real-world tasks, such as providing knowledge through retrieval-augmented generation and executing multi-step tasks using AI agent frameworks. However, these approaches rely on the logical consistency and self-coherence of LLMs, making it crucial to evaluate these aspects and consider potential countermeasures. To identify cases where LLMs fail to maintain logical consistency, we conducted an experiment in which LLMs were asked to explain the patterns in various integer sequences, ranging from arithmetic sequences to randomly generated integer series. While the models successfully identified correct patterns in arithmetic and geometric sequences, they frequently over-recognized patterns that were inconsistent with the given numbers when analyzing randomly generated series. This issue was observed even in multi-step reasoning models, including OpenAI o3, o4-mini, and Google Gemini 2.5 Flash Preview Thinking. This tendency to perceive non-existent patterns can be interpreted as the AI model equivalent of Idola Tribus and highlights potential limitations in their capability for applied tasks requiring logical reasoning, even when employing chain-of-thought reasoning mechanisms.

Idola Tribus of AI: Large Language Models tend to perceive order where none exists

Despite LLMs' excellent code creation capabilities, multilingual code generation remains extremely challenging. To address this, we intent to improve the multi-programming-lingual (MultiPL) performance of the base LLMs while retaining the most popular ones using restricted computational resources. We consider MultiPL to be a special case of multiple natural languages and propose a MultiPL extension of LLMs utilizing a hybrid mixture of experts (MoE), called MultiPL-MoE. Specifically, MultiPL-MoE combines two paired MoEs to optimize expert selection at both the token and segment levels. The **token-level MoE** is a standard upcycling MoE structure with a shared expert and a novel gate weight normalization approach that aids in the final fusion with the segment-level MoE. The **segment-level MoE** incorporates two innovative designs to better capture the syntactic structure and contextual patterns of programming languages: First, using a sliding window to partition the input token sequence into multiple segments; Then, adopting an expert-choice routing strategy that allows experts to select the top-k segments. The results of the experiment proved the effectiveness of MultiPL-MoE.

MultiPL-MoE: Multi-Programming-Lingual Extension of Large Language Models through Hybrid Mixture-of-Experts

Instruction tuning(IT) is an effective approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human intentions. There is ongoing discourse regarding the data quality for IT. As an effort to find the robust criteria of data quality for IT, we introduce LimaCost, a data quality measure that exhibits a strong correlation with model performance. LimaCost utilizes LIMA dataset, which effectiveness in IT has already been validated by several previous works. LimaCost then estimates the value of a given data by estimating how many LIMA data points might be needed to approximate its gradient. Our experiments reveal that LimaCost enables effective data selection that derive high alignment performance. We demonstrate that selecting data based on high LimaCost proves to be more effective than existing data selection strategies.

LimaCost: Data Valuation for Instruction Tuning of Large Language Models

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely adopted to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) on Text-to-SQL tasks. However, existing methods often rely on execution-based or LLM-based Bradley–Terry reward models. The former suffers from high execution latency caused by repeated database calls, whereas the latter imposes substantial GPU memory overhead, both of which significantly hinder the efficiency and scalability of RL pipelines. To this end, we propose a novel reward model framework for RL-based Text-to-SQL named Graph-Reward-SQL, which employs the GMNScore outcome reward model. We leverage SQL graph representations to provide accurate reward signals while significantly reducing time cost and GPU memory usage. Building on this foundation, we further introduce StepRTM, a stepwise reward model that provides intermediate supervision over Common Table Expression (CTE) subqueries. This encourages both functional correctness and readability of SQL. Extensive comparative and ablation experiments on standard benchmarks, including Spider and BIRD, demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing reward m

Graph-Reward-SQL: Execution-Free Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQL via Graph Matching and Stepwise Reward

Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated the ability to generate long chains of thought (LongCoT) before arriving at a final conclusion. Despite remarkable breakthroughs in complex reasoning capabilities, LongCoT still faces challenges such as redundancy and logical incoherence. To address these issues, we aim to equip large language models (LLMs) with rigorous and concise logical reasoning capabilities. In this work, we propose Logic-Thinker, a neural-symbolic reasoning framework that employs symbolic solvers to precisely solve problems and transforms their internal solving processes into concise and rigorous chains of thought, referred to as ThinkerCoT. Our experimental results demonstrate that Logic-Thinker achieves state-of-the-art performance in logical reasoning problems. Additionally, LLMs fine-tuned with ThinkerCoT outperform models distilled from QwQ32B on logic reasoning tasks, achieving an overall accuracy improvement of 3.6% while reducing token output by 73%-91%. Furthermore, ThinkerCoT enhances the comprehensive reasoning capabilities of LLMs, as evidenced by performance improvements on reasoning benchmarks such as GPQA and AIME.

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Next from EMNLP 2025

LongTableBench: Benchmarking Long-Context Table Reasoning across Real-World Formats and Domains

Similar lecture

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