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Emotional Support Conversation requires not only affective expression but also grounded instrumental support to provide trustworthy guidance. However, existing ESC systems and benchmarks largely focus on affective support in text-only settings, overlooking how external tools can enable factual grounding and reduce hallucination in multi-turn emotional support. We introduce **TEA-Bench**, the first interactive benchmark for evaluating tool-augmented agents in ESC, featuring realistic emotional scenarios, an MCP-style tool environment, and process-level metrics that jointly assess the quality and factual grounding of emotional support. Experiments on nine LLMs show that tool augmentation generally improves emotional support quality and reduces hallucination, but the gains are strongly capacity-dependent: stronger models use tools more selectively and effectively, while weaker models benefit only marginally. We further release **TEA-Dialog**, a dataset of tool-enhanced ESC dialogues, and find that supervised fine-tuning improves in-distribution support but generalizes poorly. Our results underscore the importance of tool use in building reliable emotional support agents.

ACL 2026

TEA-Bench: A Systematic Benchmarking of Tool-enhanced Emotional Support Dialogue Agent

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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

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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.

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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 rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) is reshaping multimodel models, with speech synthesis being a prominent application. However, existing approaches often underutilize the linguistic intelligence of these models, typically failing to leverage their powerful instruction-following capabilities. This limitation hinders the model's ability to follow text instructions for controllable Text-to-Speech~(TTS). To address this, we propose a new paradigm inspired by operationalism that decouples instruction understanding from speech generation. We introduce BatonVoice, a framework where an LLM acts as a conductor, understanding user instructions and generating a textual plan -- explicit vocal features (e.g., pitch, energy). A separate TTS model, the orchestra, then generates the speech from these features. To realize this component, we develop BatonTTS, a TTS model trained specifically for this task. Our experiments demonstrate that BatonVoice achieves strong performance in controllable and emotional speech synthesis, outperforming strong open- and closed-source baselines. Notably, our approach enables remarkable zero-shot cross-lingual generalization, accurately applying feature control abilities to languages unseen during post-training. This demonstrates that objectifying speech into textual vocal features can more effectively unlock the linguistic intelligence of LLMs.

BatonVoice: An Operationalist Framework for Enhancing Controllable Speech Synthesis with Linguistic Intelligence from LLMs

Diffusion models have introduced a generative paradigm for Named Entity Recognition (NER), formulating the task as refining entity
spans from noise. While promising, our analysis on the ACE2004 dataset reveals a limitation when training with Exponential Moving
Average (EMA): the model performance often peaks at a single inference step (γ = 1) and plateaus or degrades with additional steps. This
suggests that under standard stable training configurations, the model may function primarily as a one-step generator rather than
leveraging the iterative refinement capability characteristic of diffusion models. To address this, we propose an Initializer-Restorer
approach. Instead of initializing the reverse process from random Gaussian noise, we utilize a preliminary set of candidate spans
generated by a standard NER model (e.g., BERT or GLiNER). This allows the diffusion model to start from an informed, diverse prior,
enabling effective iterative restoration. We investigate different training strategies for the restorer and find that a hybrid strategy mixing
ground truth and noisy predictions is essential. Experiments on ACE2004, GENIA, and CleanCoNLL show that our approach improves
performance over the baseline, particularly when multiple restoration steps are employed. For instance, on CleanCoNLL, our method
achieves an F1 score of 94.70%, compared to 93.79% for the baseline. Our code is available at https://github.com/longtrieu-ai/
Initializer-Restorer-NER.

Reviving Iterative Refinement in Diffusion-based NER with an Initializer-Restorer Approach

Task oriented dialog systems often rely on static exploration strategies that do not adapt to dynamic dialog contexts, leading to inefficient exploration and suboptimal performance. We propose DyBBT, a novel dialog policy learning framework that formalizes the exploration challenge through a structured cognitive state space $\mathcal{C}$ that captures dialog progression, user uncertainty, and slot dependency. DyBBT proposes a bandit-inspired meta-controller that dynamically switches between a fast intuitive inference (System 1) and a slow deliberative reasoner (System 2) based on real-time cognitive states and visitation counts. Extensive experiments on single- and multi-domain benchmarks show that DyBBT achieves SOTA performance in success rate, efficiency, and generalization, with human evaluations confirming that its decisions are well-aligned with expert judgment.

DyBBT: Dynamic Balance via Bandit-inspired Targeting for Dialog Policy with Cognitive Dual Systems

High-quality scientific data is critical for advancing LLMs, yet academic literature remains largely underutilized. This work addresses the fundamental question: How can we systematically unlock scientific data's value for pre-training? First, we construct a large-scale raw scientific corpus but identify a critical Learnability Gap, revealing that direct pre-training yields negligible gains. To bridge this, we develop a multi-stage pipeline featuring content cleaning and pedagogical augmentation, resulting in SciPedia, a 900B-token corpus. Finally, we establish a controlled verification framework: we develop SciPedia-Eval benchmark and conduct 600B tokens of continued pre-training (CPT) starting from transparent base models (3B/7B) trained from scratch. Compared to a CPT baseline trained with general-purpose data, our approach with SciPedia data boosts average performance by +2.12 (3B) and +2.95 (7B), reaching +5.60 and +8.40 on in-domain tasks. This setup further allows us to derive empirical guidelines for data composition and model configurations.

SciPedia: Unlocking the Value of Scientific Data for Pre-training

Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved impressive progress in multimodal mathematical reasoning. Yet, how
much visual information truly contributes to reasoning remains unclear. Existing benchmarks report strong overall performance but seldom isolate the role of the image modality, leaving open whether VLMs genuinely leverage visual understanding or merely depend on linguistic priors. To address this, we present MathSight, a university-level multimodal mathematical reasoning benchmark designed to disentangle and quantify the effect of visual input. Each problem includes multiple visual variants—original, hand-drawn, photocaptured—and a text-only condition for controlled comparison. Experiments on state-of-the-art VLMs reveal a consistent trend: the contribution of visual information diminishes with increasing problem difficulty. Remarkably, Qwen3-VL without any image input surpasses both its multimodal variants and GPT-5, underscoring the need for benchmarks like MathSight to advance genuine vision-grounded reasoning in future models. The project page is available at https://cnu-bot-group.github.io/MathSight/.

MathSight: A Benchmark Exploring Have Vision-Language Models Really Seen in University-Level Mathematical Reasoning?

Evaluating the alignment between textual prompts and generated images is critical for ensuring the reliability and usability of text-to-image (T2I) models. However, most existing evaluation methods rely on coarse-grained metrics or static Question Answering (QA) pipelines, which lack fine-grained interpretability and struggle to reflect human preferences. To address this, we propose $\textbf{REVEALER}$, a reinforcement-guided visual reasoning framework for element-level text-to-image alignment evaluation. 
Adopting a structured $''grounding–reasoning–conclusion''$ paradigm, our method enables Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to explicitly localize semantic elements and derive interpretable alignment judgments. We optimize the model via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) using a multi-dimensional reward function that targets format compliance, localization precision, and alignment accuracy.
Extensive experiments confirm that REVEALER achieves state-of-the-art results across four benchmarks. Notably, on EvalMuse-40K, it surpasses the strong proprietary Gemini 3 Pro and Training-based baselines with absolute accuracy gains of $\textbf{+4.2\%}$ and $\textbf{+13.3\%}$, respectively. 
Ablation studies further demonstrate the efficacy of our method, contributing a cumulative $\textbf{19.6\%}$ improvement over the base model.

REVEALER: Reinforcement-Guided Visual Reasoning for Element-Level Text-Image Alignment Evaluation

The UniDive 2025 Morphosyntactic Parsing (MSP) shared task introduces a representation unifying dependency structure, morphological features, and unrealized arguments. Unlike Universal Dependencies, MSP encodes abstract nodes (e.g., dropped subjects, implicit pronouns) as labels projected onto content words, which standard UD parsers cannot model. We present a multilingual, typology-aware joint system integrating word-type prediction, content-only parsing, morphological tagging, and an abstract-node component within a single architecture. The model combines the baseline joint framework with typology-conditioned adapters and progressive weighting for abstract supervision. On the MSP test set, our model outperforms the leading submission by 3.23 percentage points in MSLAS, 3.35 in LAS, and 1.78 in FEATS macro F1, demonstrating the effectiveness of typology-sensitive multi-task learning in MSP.

Typology-Aware Multilingual Morphosyntactic Parsing with Joint Abstract Node Modeling

The quality of pre-training data critically impacts the capabilities of large language models. Existing pipelines rely on expert-crafted heuristic rules, which primarily operate at the sample level and are based on coarse statistical indicators, thus lacking content-aware, fine-grained noise detection. While recent generative approaches, e.g., ProX-C, enable token-level refinement, their reliance on synthesizing Python code incurs prohibitive computational cost at scale and can introduce hallucinations into the refined data. To overcome these limitations, we propose Selecting over Tokens (SelecT), a novel framework that reframes data refinement as a highly efficient token classification task. SelecT classifies each token as either informative or noisy and subsequently removes the latter. This design achieves fine-grained data optimization while avoiding the inefficiency of generation, ensuring scalability. When evaluated on diverse downstream benchmarks, the model trained on SelecT-refined corpora, on average, outperforms the one trained on raw data by over 2\% and exceeds the best heuristic baselines by more than 1\% while preserving 17\% more tokens than the latter. Furthermore, SelecT achieves higher average performance than the generative ProX-C across all experimental settings, and is 2.5x faster at inference, even with twice the parameters. Our results establish SelecT as an effective, efficient, and scalable solution for pre-training data optimization.

SELECting over Tokens: Curating Pre-training Data at Scale via Token Classification

Address intelligence in e-commerce demands accurate geocoding and proactive defect detection under strict sub-$50$~ms latency constraints. These tasks are inherently coupled: precise spatial grounding provides a strong prior for defect propensity, yet prior approaches optimize them independently. While generative LLMs offer rich semantic representations, they lack spatial inductive bias and fail to meet real-time serving requirements. We introduce GeoGround, a multi-task learning framework that jointly models coordinate grounding and address defect detection. The model combines a hierarchical spatial grounding objective with Focal Loss for defect classification, using uncertainty-based task weighting to balance optimization under severe class imbalance. To strengthen supervision, we curate a large-scale noisy address dataset using LLM-assisted data construction, augmenting the training corpus with signals that are costly to obtain manually. GeoGround achieves 5.86$\times$ gains in address defect detection precision and up to 4.86$\times$ improvements in location prediction accuracy over strong encoder baselines, while remaining 75$\times$ more efficient than decoder LLMs such as Qwen2-1.5B. A two-week online A/B test in a large-scale delivery pipeline confirms real-world impact, yielding a 50 bps uplift in defect detection, a 40 bps gain in location prediction, and an estimated operational savings of \$3.09M annually.

GeoGround: Uncertainty-Weighted Multi-Task Learning for Geo-Alignment and Address Defect Detection

Short-video platforms now present tappable search entries beneath the video player, making it effortless for users to shift from passively watching to actively searching for information. Prior work on bottom-bar query generation conditions on titles and OCR to generate a single query per forward pass, constrains decoding with a trie, and evaluates against a single reference using edit-distance–style supervision—making it difficult to cover the diverse intents a video can trigger and to credit semantically equivalent query variants. Motivated by these limitations, we propose four complementary improvements. First, we reformulate the task as one-shot list generation, producing multiple distinct queries per video, and build multi-query ground truth from exposure and CTR logs. Second, we redesign offline evaluation with $\operatorname{CTR\text{-}HungF1}$, a CTR-weighted set-matching metric via optimal assignment over token-level F1 score. Third, we enrich context with a video-to-video-to-query (V2V2Q) RAG pipeline to provide behavior-grounded background knowledge. Finally, we apply thinking-free RLVR with deterministic format checks and $\operatorname{CTR\text{-}HungF1}$ rewards to train a compact LLM without reward models or CoT distillation. The resulting system yields strong offline and online improvements, and has been deployed on Kuaishou to serve hundreds of millions of users daily.

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BatonVoice: An Operationalist Framework for Enhancing Controllable Speech Synthesis with Linguistic Intelligence from LLMs

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