China

The quality of a conversation goes beyond the individual quality of each reply, and instead emerges from how these combine into interactional patterns that give the conversation its distinctive overall &quot;shape&quot;. However, there is no robust automated method for comparing conversations in terms of their overall interactional dynamics. Such methods could enhance the analysis of conversational data and help evaluate conversational agents more holistically. In this work, we introduce a similarity measure for comparing conversations with respect to their dynamics. We design a validation framework for testing the robustness of the metric in capturing differences in conversation dynamics and for assessing its sensitivity to the topic of the conversations. Finally, to illustrate the measure&#39;s utility, we use it to analyze conversational dynamics in a large online community, bringing new insights into the role of situational power in conversations.

EMNLP 2025

A Similarity Measure for Comparing Conversational Dynamics

nlp tools for social analysis

computational social science

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields 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.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

The quality of a conversation goes beyond the individual quality of each reply, and instead emerges from how these combine into interactional patterns that give the conversation its distinctive overall "shape". However, there is no robust automated method for comparing conversations in terms of their overall interactional dynamics. Such methods could enhance the analysis of conversational data and help evaluate conversational agents more holistically. In this work, we introduce a similarity measure for comparing conversations with respect to their dynamics. We design a validation framework for testing the robustness of the metric in capturing differences in conversation dynamics and for assessing its sensitivity to the topic of the conversations. Finally, to illustrate the measure's utility, we use it to analyze conversational dynamics in a large online community, bringing new insights into the role of situational power in conversations.

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.

The hardware ecosystem is rapidly evolving, with increasing interest in translating low-level programs across different instruction set architectures (ISAs) in a quick, flexible, and correct way to enhance the portability and longevity of existing code. A particularly challenging class of this transpilation problem is translating between complex- (CISC) and reduced- (RISC) hardware architectures, due to fundamental differences in instruction complexity, memory models, and execution paradigms. In this work, we introduce GG (**G**uaranteed **G**uess), an ISA-centric transpilation pipeline that combines the translation power of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) with the rigor of established software testing constructs. Our method generates candidate translations using an LLM from one ISA to another, and embeds such translations within a software-testing framework to build quantifiable confidence in the translation. We evaluate our GG approach over two diverse datasets, enforce high code coverage (>98%) across unit tests, and achieve functional/semantic correctness of 99% on HumanEval programs and 49% on BringupBench programs, respectively. Further, we compare our approach to the state-of-the-art Rosetta 2 framework on Apple Silicon, showcasing 1.73times faster runtime performance, 1.47times better energy efficiency, and 2.41times better memory usage for our transpiled code, demonstrating the effectiveness of GG for real-world CISC-to-RISC translation tasks. We will open-source our codes, data, models, and benchmarks to establish a common foundation for ISA-level code translation research.

Guaranteed Guess: A Language Modeling Approach for CISC-to-RISC Transpilation with Testing Guarantees

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable versatility in adopting diverse personas. In this study, we examine how assigning a persona influences a model's reasoning on an objective task. Using activation patching, we take a first step toward understanding how key components of the model encode persona-specific information. Our findings reveal that the early Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) layers attend not only to the syntactic structure of the input but also process its semantic content. These layers transform persona tokens into richer representations, which are then used by the middle Multi-Head Attention (MHA) layers to shape the model's output. Additionally, we identify specific attention heads that disproportionately attend to racial and color-based identities.

Dissecting Persona-Driven Reasoning in Language Models via Activation Patching

Prompt tuning for Large Language Models (LLMs) is vulnerable to backdoor attacks. The mainstream methods achieve backdoor attacks through prompt tuning on rich training data. However, in real-world data-limited scenarios, these methods have difficulty capturing precise backdoor patterns, leading to weakened backdoor attack capabilities and significant side effects for the LLMs. To alleviate this problem, we propose a enhanced backdoor attacks through contrastive-enhanced machine unlearning in data-limited scenarios, called BCU. Specifically, BCU introduces a multi-objective machine unlearning method to capture precise backdoor patterns by forgetting the association between non-trigger data and the backdoor patterns, reducing side effects. Moreover, we design a contrastive learning strategy to enhance the capturing ability of backdoor patterns, achieving powerful backdoor attacks in data-limited scenarios. Experimental results on 6 NLP datasets and 4 LLMs show that BCU exhibits strong backdoor attack capabilities and slight side effects, whether the training data is rich or limited. Our findings highlight the more practical security risks of backdoor attacks against LLMs, necessitating further research for security purposes.

Forget the Unneeded: Backdooring Large Language Models via Contrastive-enhanced Machine Unlearning

Research on bias in Text-to-Image (T2I) models has primarily focused on demographic representation and stereotypical attributes, overlooking a fundamental question: how does grammatical gender influence visual representation across languages? We introduce a cross-linguistic benchmark examining words where grammatical gender contradicts stereotypical gender associations (e.g., "une sentinelle" - grammatically feminine in French but referring to the stereotypically masculine concept "guard"). Our dataset spans five gendered languages (French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian) and two gender-neutral control languages (English, Chinese), comprising 800 unique prompts that generated 28,800 images across three state-of-the-art T2I models. Our analysis reveals that grammatical gender dramatically influences image generation: masculine grammatical markers increase male representation to 73% on average (compared to 22% with gender-neutral English), while feminine grammatical markers increase female representation to 38% (compared to 28% in English). These effects vary systematically by language resource availability and model architecture, with high-resource languages showing stronger effects. Our findings establish that language structure itself, not just content, shapes AI-generated visual outputs, introducing a new dimension for understanding bias and fairness in multilingual, multimodal systems.

Beyond Content: How Grammatical Gender Shapes Visual Representation in Text-to-Image Models

Automated fact-checking aims to assess the truthfulness of textual claims based on relevant evidence. However, verifying complex claims that require multi-hop reasoning remains a significant challenge. We propose **GraphCheck**, a novel framework that transforms claims into entity-relationship graphs for structured and systematic verification. By explicitly modeling both explicit and latent entities and exploring multiple reasoning paths, GraphCheck improves verification robustness. While GraphCheck excels in complex scenarios, it may be unnecessarily elaborate for simpler claims. To address this, we introduce **DP-GraphCheck**, an adaptive variant that employs a lightweight strategy selector to dynamically choose between direct prompting and GraphCheck. This selective mechanism improves both accuracy and efficiency by applying the appropriate level of reasoning per claim. Experiments on the HOVER and EX-FEVER datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods, particularly on multi-hop claims. Moreover, the strategy selection mechanism in DP-GraphCheck generalizes well to other fact-checking pipelines, highlighting the versatility of our framework.

GraphCheck: Multipath Fact-Checking with Entity-Relationship Graphs

Political bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a growing concern for the responsible deployment of AI systems. Traditional audits often attempt to locate a model’s political position as a point estimate, masking the broader set of ideological boundaries that shape what a model is willing or unwilling to say. In this paper, we draw upon the concept of the Overton Window as a framework for mapping these boundaries: the range of political views that a given LLM will espouse, remain neutral on, or refuse to endorse. To uncover these windows, we apply an inquiry-based methodology that probes LLMs through task-driven prompts designed to elicit political stances indirectly. Using the Political Compass Test, we evaluate twenty-six LLMs from eight providers to reveal their distinct Overton Windows. While many models default to economically left and socially liberal positions, we show that their willingness to express or reject certain positions varies considerably, where DeepSeek models tend to be very restrictive in what they will discuss and Gemini models to be most expansive. Our findings demonstrate that Overton Windows offer a richer, more nuanced view of political bias in LLMs and provide a new lens for auditing their normative boundaries.

POW: Political Overton Windows of Large Language Models

Reference-free evaluation metrics for grammatical error correction (GEC) have achieved high correlation with human judgments. However, these metrics are not designed to evaluate adversarial systems that aim to obtain unjustifiably high scores. The existence of such systems undermine reliability of automatic evaluation, as it can mislead users in selecting appropriate GEC systems. In this study, we propose adversarial attack strategies for four reference-free metrics: SOME, Scribendi, IMPARA, and LLM-based metrics, and demonstrate that our adversarial systems outperform the current state-of-the-art. These findings highlight the need for more robust evaluation methods.

Reliability Crisis of Reference-free Metrics for Grammatical Error Correction

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly deployed in critical applications, raising urgent needs for robust safety benchmarking. We propose Jailbreak Distillation (JBDistill), a novel benchmark construction framework that "distills" jailbreak attacks into high-quality and easily-updatable safety benchmarks. JBDistill utilizes a small set of development models and existing jailbreak attack algorithms to create a candidate prompt pool, then employs prompt selection algorithms to identify an effective subset of prompts as safety benchmarks. JBDistill addresses challenges in existing safety evaluation: the use of consistent evaluation prompts across models ensures fair comparisons and reproducibility. It requires minimal human effort to rerun the JBDistill pipeline and produce updated benchmarks, alleviating concerns on saturation and contamination. Extensive experiments demonstrate our benchmarks generalize robustly to 13 diverse evaluation models held out from benchmark construction, including proprietary, specialized, and newer-generation LLMs, significantly outperforming existing safety benchmarks in effectiveness while maintaining high separability and diversity. Our framework thus provides an effective, sustainable, and adaptable solution for streamlining safety evaluation.

Jailbreak Distillation: Renewable Safety Benchmarking

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities, yet selecting the most reliable response from multiple LLMs remains a challenge, particularly in resource-constrained settings. Existing approaches often depend on costly external verifiers, human evaluators, or self-consistency techniques that require multiple samples from a single model. While multi-LLM systems produce more diverse responses than single models and thus have greater potential, they often underperform compared to single LLM self-consistency. In this work, we propose a calibrated log-likelihood-based selection framework to improve multi-LLM performance. Our approach leverages uncertainty estimation to identify the most confident response while minimizing inference costs. We show that our method outperforms majority voting and exceeds self-consistency performance when using a large number of model calls. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate improvements of approx. 4%, 3%, and 5% on GSM8K, MMLU, and ARC, respectively, when applying uncertainty-aware selection to multi-LLM systems.

Uncertainty-Aware Answer Selection for Improved Reasoning in Multi-LLM Systems

Detectors of LLM-generated text suffer from poor domain shifts generalization ability. Yet, reliable text detection methods in the wild are of paramount importance for plagiarism detection, integrity of the public discourse, and AI safety. Linguistic and domain confounders introduce spurious correlations, leading to poor out-of-distribution (OOD) performance. In this work we introduce the concept of confounding neurons, individual neurons within transformers-based detectors that encode dataset-specific biases rather than task-specific signals. Leveraging confounding neurons, we propose a novel post-hoc, neuron-level intervention framework to disentangle AI-generated text detection factors from data-specific biases. Through extensive experiments we prove its ability to effectively reduce topic-specific biases, enhancing the model’s ability to generalize across domains.

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