Kick off **ACL 2025** with an evening of networking, refreshments, and engaging conversations at our
**Welcome Reception!** This gathering is the perfect opportunity to connect with fellow attendees, reconnect
with colleagues, and immerse yourself in the vibrant natural language processing community before the
conference begins in full. 
Enjoy a relaxed atmosphere with light hors d’oeuvres and drinks as you meet researchers, practitioners,
and industry leaders from around the world. Whether you’re a first-time attendee or a returning participant,
this reception sets the stage for an inspiring and productive conference experience. 
**Important Information:** 
**Attendance is included for all Main Conference registrants.** If you are not registered for the Main Conference but would like to attend, you may add this event to your registration at the Registration Solution
Desk located on the lobby level. 
We look forward to welcoming you to **ACL 2025**!

ACL 2025 Welcome Reception

Welcome

**Title:** Rethinking Pretraining: Data and Architecture 
**Abstract:** Large language model training follows a standard pipeline: tokenization, pretraining, possibly mid-training, and post training or alignment. Despite its wild success, we understand relatively little about this recipe and are almost certainly missing many opportunities to improve it. In this talk, I will focus on three such cases. I’ll describe our work on data efficient post training (e.g. LIMA, ALMA, and s1) where we argue that nearly all advanced model capabilities ultimately come from the pretraining data, even if effective alignment is still essential for controlling model behavior. I will also describe new methods for extracting more signal from the pretraining data, including new hierarchical architectures for byte-level language models (e.g. BLT) that are both tokenizer-free and scale better than traditional BPE-based methods, especially in the long tail. Finally, I will discuss decentralized, modular training algorithms (e.g. BTM) that better isolate and control the influence of specific data on specific model components and behaviors. Together, these methods promise to simplify training and improve scaling, by centering and amplifying the influence of data in architecture design. 
[**Bio**](https://underline.io/speakers/40451-luke-zettlemoyer)

Keynote: Luke Zettlemoyer

Coffee Break

Include: Main, Demo and TACL/CL papers 
#### **Please see detailed schedule [here.](https://drive.google.com/file/d/10bhILLCSwndbzx3L7tj9lL34FJd37MN1/view?usp=sharing)**

Virtual Presentations 1

**Opening Keynote** [Lucia Specia](https://underline.io/speakers/11493-lucia-specia) 
**Title:** From Words to Worlds: NLP for Game Creation and Interaction 
**Abstract:** The gaming industry is a leading force in global entertainment, surpassing the size of the music and film industries combined. With over 3 billion people playing games, there’s bigger and bigger demand for fresh, high-quality, and immersive experiences. At the same time, user-generated games have become a core component of major gaming platforms, fostering creativity and diversification. These developments present significant opportunities for AI research and AI-driven tools designed to support gaming, from AAA studios to independent creators. In this talk, I will highlight some of these opportunities, focusing on three areas involving language: 1) Speech-driven animation, where we predict lip sync, expression, and head motion of a character from audio to animate photo-realistic characters; 2) Low-resource language code generation, where we build a code generation model for Verse, a new language designed specifically for programming interactive 3D worlds, games, and simulations; and 3) Safety of interactive NPCs at scale, where we design safety strategies to support the deployment of LLMs for speech to speech in-game (Fortnite) conversations between players and NPCs..

Industry 1

**In-person only** In this session, we'll introduce SomosNLP, the community dedicated to creating and sharing resources that enable and accelerate the development of NLP in Iberoamerican languages. In everyday language, Iberoamerica refers to the countries in the Americas where Spanish or Portuguese is spoken, and also includes Spain and Portugal. Our aim is to connect with individuals from the region, collaboratively exploring current challenges in the field. We're creating a dynamic space for sharing knowledge, learning from diverse experiences, and devising innovative solutions together. We would like you to support us in our mission! Speakers of less represented languages are especially welcome to join and contribute to this vibrant, multilingual dialogue. We can't wait to meet you!
Find updates and planned activities at https://somosnlp.org/conferencias/acl-2025

SomosNLP: The Iberoamerican NLP Community

Lunch Break (on own)

**In-person only** This event offers a space for LGBTQIA+ people and their allies to network in a safe and welcoming environment. There will be an introductory talk about the initiative "Queer in AI" and possibly one invited talk about queer-specific issues or related research. After that we will break up into thematic discussion groups. There will be snacks and non-alcoholic drinks.

Queer in AI Meet-Up

Ethics, Bias, and Fairness

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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