Existing LLM-as-a-Judge approaches for evaluating text generation suffer from rating inconsistencies, with low agreement and high rating variance across different evaluator models. We attribute this to subjective evaluation criteria combined with Likert scale scoring in existing protocols. To address this issue, we introduce CheckEval, a checklist-based evaluation framework that improves rating reliability via decomposed binary questions. Through experiments with 12 evaluator models across multiple datasets, we first demonstrate that CheckEval strongly correlates with human judgments. More importantly, CheckEval dramatically improves the average agreement across evaluator models by 0.45 and reduces the score variance. CheckEval scores furthermore have the benefit of being more interpretable because it decomposes evaluation criteria into traceable binary decisions, allowing analyses of specific attributes driving quality judgments.

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on generating extensive intermediate reasoning units (e.g., tokens, sentences) to enhance final answer quality across a wide range of complex tasks. While this approach has proven effective, it inevitably increases substantial inference costs. Previous methods adopting token-level reduction without clear criteria result in poor performance compared to models trained with complete rationale. To address this challenge, we propose a novel sentence-level rationale reduction framework leveraging likelihood-based criteria, *verbosity*, to identify and remove redundant reasoning sentences. Unlike previous approaches, our method leverages *verbosity* to selectively remove redundant reasoning sentences while preserving reasoning capabilities. Our experimental results across various reasoning tasks demonstrate that our method improves performance by an average of 7.71% while reducing token generation by 19.87% compared to model trained with complete reasoning paths.

As LLMs are increasingly used in global conversational settings, concerns remain about their ability to handle complex sociocultural contexts. This study evaluates LLMs’ empathetic understanding in Korean—a high-context language—using a pragmatics-based Discourse Completion Task (DCT) focused on interpretive judgment rather than generation. We constructed a dataset varying relational hierarchy, intimacy, and emotional valence, and compared responses from proprietary and open-source LLMs to those of Korean speakers. Most LLMs showed over-empathizing tendencies and struggled with ambiguous relational cues. Neither model size nor Korean fine-tuning significantly improved performance. While humans reflected relational nuance and contextual awareness, LLMs relied on surface strategies. These findings underscore LLMs’ limits in socio-pragmatic reasoning and introduce a scalable, culturally flexible framework for evaluating socially-aware AI.

Recently, prompt-based fine-tuning has garnered considerable interest as a core technique for few-shot text classification task. This approach reformulates the fine-tuning objective to align with the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) objective. Leveraging unlabeled data, prompt-based self-training has shown greater effectiveness in binary and three-class classification. However, prompt-based self-training for multi-class classification has not been adequately investigated, despite its significant applicability to real-world scenarios. Moreover, extending current methods to multi-class classification suffers from the verbalizer that extracts the predicted value of manually pre-defined single label word for each class from MLM predictions. Consequently, we introduce a novel, efficient verbalizer structure, named Mapping-free Automatic Verbalizer (MAV). Comprising two fully connected layers, MAV serves as a trainable verbalizer that automatically extracts the requisite word features for classification by capitalizing on all available information from MLM predictions. Experimental results on five multi-class classification datasets indicate MAV’s superior self-training efficacy.

As the e-commerce market continues to expand and online transactions proliferate, customer reviews have emerged as a critical element in shaping the purchasing decisions of prospective buyers. Previous studies have endeavored to identify key aspects of customer reviews through the development of sentiment analysis models and topic models. However, extracting specific dissatisfaction factors remains a challenging task. In this study, we delineate the pain point detection problem and propose Painsight, an unsupervised framework for automatically extracting distinct dissatisfaction factors from customer reviews without relying on ground truth labels. Painsight employs pre-trained language models to construct sentiment analysis and topic models, leveraging attribution scores derived from model gradients to extract dissatisfaction factors. Upon application of the proposed methodology to customer review data spanning five product categories, we successfully identified and categorized dissatisfaction factors within each group, as well as isolated factors for each type. Notably, Painsight outperformed benchmark methods, achieving substantial performance enhancements and exceptional results in human evaluations.