Ruoxuan Li
Author directory2026
You Shouldn’t Have Asked: A Pragmatics-Inspired Taxonomy for Evaluating LLM Refusals
Ruoxuan Li | Pinqiao Wang | Sheng Li | Cameron Robert Jones
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Ruoxuan Li | Pinqiao Wang | Sheng Li | Cameron Robert Jones
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Refusals are often treated as face-threatening acts in pragmatics because they can challenge the requester’s socially claimed self-image. Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trained to refuse unsafe and inappropriate requests, and these refusals may harm users when models fail to manage this interactional cost properly. While existing work has mainly approached LLM non-compliance as a safety-alignment outcome, it does not provide a way to evaluate whether LLMs refuse appropriately across different harmful contexts. To study this question, we propose (to our knowledge) the first taxonomy of LLM refusals that is grounded in pragmatic theory. Applying this taxonomy to responses from 16 modern LLMs across 14 harm categories, we find that although models differ in how they refuse, their refusals are overall explicit and strongly morally evaluative, with interactional repair occurring mainly through offering or providing safer alternatives instead of interpersonal facework. This pattern is especially consequential in sensitive harm contexts, where overuse of negative framing may make users feel shamed or provoked, undermining the purpose of safe non-compliance. We therefore call for alignment evaluation that considers not only whether models refuse harmful requests, but also whether they refuse in ways that are contextually adaptive and socially accountable for the interactional consequences of saying no.
2025
LLM-based Business Process Models Generation from Textual Descriptions
Xiaoxuan Li | Lin Ni | Xin Wang | Tang Yitong | Ruoxuan Li | Jiamou Liu | Zhongsheng Wang
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Xiaoxuan Li | Lin Ni | Xin Wang | Tang Yitong | Ruoxuan Li | Jiamou Liu | Zhongsheng Wang
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Business process modeling has traditionally depended on manual efforts or rigid rule-based techniques, limiting scalability and flexibility. Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) enables automatic generation of process models from text, yet a systematic evaluation remains lacking. This paper explores the ability of LLMs to produce structurally and semantically valid business process workflows using five approaches: zero-shot, zero-shot CoT, few-shot, few-shot CoT, and fine-tuning. We assess performance under increasing control-flow complexity (e.g., nested gateways, parallel branches) using the MaD dataset, and introduce a masked-input setting to test semantic robustness. Results show that while fine-tuning achieves the best accuracy, few-shot CoT excels in handling complex logic and incomplete inputs. These findings reveal the strengths and limits of LLMs in process modeling and offer practical guidance for enterprise Business Process Management (BPM) automation.