China

NLP models often rely on human-labeled data for training and evaluation. Many approaches crowdsource this data from a large number of annotators with varying skills, backgrounds, and motivations, resulting in conflicting annotations. These conflicts have traditionally been resolved by aggregation methods that assume disagreements are errors. Recent work has argued that for many tasks annotators may have genuine disagreements and that variation should be treated as signal rather than noise. However, few models separate signal and noise in annotator disagreement. In this work, we introduce NUTMEG, a new Bayesian model that incorporates information about annotator backgrounds to remove noisy annotations from human-labeled training data while preserving systematic disagreements. Using synthetic data, we show that NUTMEG is more effective at recovering ground-truth from annotations with systematic disagreement than traditional aggregation methods. We provide further analysis characterizing how differences in subpopulation sizes, rates of disagreement, and rates of spam affect the performance of our model. Finally, we demonstrate that downstream models trained on NUTMEG-aggregated data significantly outperform models trained on data from traditionally aggregation methods. Our results highlight the importance of accounting for both annotator competence and systematic disagreements when training on human-labeled data.

EMNLP 2025

NUTMEG: Separating Signal From Noise in Annotator Disagreement

model bias/fairness mitigation

model bias/fairness evaluation

evaluation methodologies

annotator disagreement

evaluation

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."<br>

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

[**Link to Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1johU5QqVVYO4RfH7QcIORr7qrVBdzdwC/view?usp=sharing)





<br>

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are commonly tuned with supervised finetuning on ReAct-style expert trajectories or preference optimization over pairwise rollouts. Most of these methods focus on imitating specific expert behaviors or promoting chosen reasoning thoughts and actions over rejected ones. However, without reasoning and comparing over alternatives actions, LLM agents finetuned with these methods may over-commit towards seemingly plausible but suboptimal actions due to limited action space exploration. To address this, in this paper we propose Self-taught ActioN Deliberation (SAND) framework, enabling LLM agents to explicitly deliberate over candidate actions before committing to one. To tackle the challenges of when and what to deliberate given large action space and step-level action evaluation, we incorporate self-consistency action sampling and execution-guided action critique to help synthesize step-wise action deliberation thoughts using the base model of the LLM agent. In an iterative manner, the deliberation trajectories are then used to finetune the LLM agent itself. Evaluating on two representative interactive agent tasks, SAND achieves an average 20% improvement over initial supervised finetuning and also outperforms state-of-the-art agent tuning approaches.

SAND: Boosting LLM Agents with Self-Taught Action Deliberation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have displayed astonishing abilities in various tasks, especially in text generation, classification, question answering, etc. However, the reasoning ability of LLMs still faces many debates, especially in math reasoning. The inherent ambiguity of Natural Language (NL) limits LLMs' ability to perform verifiable reasoning, making the answers lack coherence and trustworthy support. To tackle the above challenges, we propose a novel framework named FANS: Formal ANswer Selection for LLM Natural Language Math Reasoning Using Lean4. It is a pioneering framework that utilizes Lean4 to enhance LLMs' NL math reasoning ability. In particular, given an NL math question and LLM-generated answers, FANS first translates it into Lean4 theorem statements. Then it invokes another Lean4 prover LLM to produce proofs, and finally verifies the proofs by Lean4 compiler. Answers are selected based on the verifications. It enhances LLMs' NL math ability in providing a computer-verifiable solution for its correct answer and proposes an alternative method for answer selection beyond the reward model based ones. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FANS with an improvement of nearly 2% across several math benchmarks, and even higher further based on reward models or in subfields such as algebra and number theory that Lean4 is better at.

FANS: Formal Answer Selection for LLM Natural Language Math Reasoning Using Lean4

Systems that answer questions by reviewing the scientific literature are becoming increasingly feasible. To draw reliable conclusions, these systems should take into account the quality of available evidence from different studies, placing more weight on studies that use a valid methodology. We present a benchmark for measuring the methodological strength of biomedical papers, drawing on the risk-of-bias framework used for systematic reviews. Derived from over 500 biomedical studies, the three benchmark tasks encompass expert reviewers' judgments of studies' research methodologies, including the assessments of risk of bias within these studies. The benchmark contains a human-validated annotation pipeline for fine-grained alignment of reviewers' judgments with research paper sentences. Our analyses show that a system's reasoning and retrieval capabilities impact its risk-of-bias assessment. The dataset is available at https://github.com/RoBBR-Benchmark/RoBBR.

Measuring Risk of Bias in Biomedical Reports: The RoBBR Benchmark

Neural surrogate models are powerful and efficient tools in data mining. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code-related tasks. To this end, a novel application of LLMs emerges---using LLMs as surrogate models for code execution prediction. Given LLMs' unique ability to understand and process diverse programs, they present a promising direction for building general-purpose surrogate models. To systematically investigate this capability, we introduce SURGE, a comprehensive benchmark with 1160 problems covering 8 key aspects: multi-language programming tasks, competition-level programming problems, repository-level code analysis, high-cost scientific computing, time-complexity-intensive algorithms, buggy code analysis, programs dependent on specific compilers or execution environments, and formal mathematical proof verification. Through extensive analysis of 21 open-source and proprietary LLMs, we examine scaling laws, data efficiency, and predictive accuracy. Our findings reveal important insights about the feasibility of LLMs as efficient surrogates for computational processes.

Surge: On the Potential of Large Language Models as General-Purpose Surrogate Code Executors

Large language models excel at instruction-following in English, but their performance in low-resource languages like Thai remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks often rely on translations, missing cultural and domain-specific nuances needed for real-world use. We present WangchanThaiInstruct, a human-authored Thai dataset for evaluation and instruction tuning, covering four professional domains and seven task types. Created through a multi-stage quality control process with annotators, domain experts, and AI researchers, WangchanThaiInstruct supports two studies: (1) a zero-shot evaluation showing performance gaps on culturally and professionally specific tasks, and (2) an instruction tuning study with ablations isolating the effect of native supervision. Models fine-tuned on WangchanThaiInstruct outperform those using translated data in both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks. These findings underscore the need for culturally and professionally grounded instruction data to improve LLM alignment in low-resource, linguistically diverse settings.

WangchanThaiInstruct: An instruction-following Dataset for Culture-Aware, Multitask, and Multi-domain Evaluation in Thai

Memes have emerged as a popular form of multimodal online communication, where their interpretation heavily depends on the specific context in which they appear. Current approaches predominantly focus on isolated meme analysis, either for harmful content detection or standalone interpretation, overlooking a fundamental challenge: the same meme can express different intents depending on its conversational context. This oversight creates an evaluation gap: although humans intuitively recognize how context shapes meme interpretation, Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) can hardly understand context-dependent meme intent. To address this critical limitation, we introduce MemeReaCon, a novel benchmark specifically designed to evaluate how LVLMs understand memes in their original context. We collected memes from five different Reddit communities, keeping each meme's image, the post text, and user comments together. We carefully labeled how the text and meme work together, what the poster intended, how the meme is structured, and how the community responded. Our tests with leading LVLMs show a clear weakness: models either fail to interpret critical information in the contexts, or overly focus on visual details while overlooking communicative purpose. MemeReaCon thus serves both as a diagnostic tool exposing current limitations and as a challenging benchmark to drive development toward more sophisticated LVLMs of the context-aware understanding.

MemeReaCon: Probing Contextual Meme Understanding in Large Vision-Language Models

Low-resource language understanding is challenging, even for large language models (LLMs). An epitome of this problem is the CompRehensive lIterary chineSe readIng comprehenSion (CRISIS), whose difficulties include limited linguistic data, long input, and insight-required questions. Besides the compelling necessity of providing a larger dataset for CRISIS, excessive information, order bias, and entangled conundrums still haunt the CRISIS solutions. Thus, we present the eVIdence cuRation with opTion shUffling and Abstract meaning representation-based cLauses segmenting (VIRTUAL) procedure for CRISIS, with the largest dataset. While the dataset is also named CRISIS, it results from a three-phase construction process, including question selection, data cleaning, and a silver-standard data augmentation step, which augments translations, celebrity profiles, government jobs, reign mottos, and dynasty to CRISIS. The six steps of VIRTUAL include embedding, shuffling, abstract beaning representation based option segmenting, evidence extracting, solving, and voting. Notably, the evidence extraction algorithm facilitates literary Chinese evidence sentences, translated evidence sentences, and annotations of keywords with a similarity-based ranking strategy. While CRISIS congregates understanding-required questions from seven sources, the experiments on CRISIS substantiate the effectiveness of VIRTUAL, with a 7 percent hike in accuracy compared with the baseline. Interestingly, both non-LLMs and LLMs have order bias, and abstract beaning representation based option segmenting is constructive for CRISIS.

A Comprehensive Literary Chinese Reading Comprehension Dataset with an Evidence Curation Based Solution

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become integral to daily life, especially advancing as intelligent assistants through on-device deployment on smartphones. However, existing LLM evaluation benchmarks predominantly focus on objective tasks like mathematics and coding in English, which do not necessarily reflect the practical use cases of on-device LLMs in real-world mobile scenarios, especially for Chinese users. To address these gaps, we introduce SmartBench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of on-device LLMs in Chinese mobile contexts. We analyze functionalities provided by representative smartphone manufacturers and divide them into five categories: text summarization, text Q\&A, information extraction, content creation, and notification management, further detailed into 20 specific tasks. For each task, we construct high-quality datasets comprising 50 to 200 question-answer pairs that reflect everyday mobile interactions, and we develop automated evaluation criteria tailored for these tasks. We conduct comprehensive evaluations of on-device LLMs and MLLMs using SmartBench and also assess their performance after quantized deployment on real smartphone NPUs. Our contributions provide a standardized framework for evaluating on-device LLMs in Chinese, promoting further development and optimization in this critical area. Code and data will be available.

SmartBench: Is Your LLM Truly a Good Chinese Smartphone Assistant?

Figure-to-Text (F2T) tasks aim to convert structured figure information into natural language text, serving as a bridge between visual perception and language understanding. However, existing evaluation methods remain limited: 1) Reference-based methods can only capture shallow semantic similarities and rely on costly labeled reference text; 2) Reference-free methods depend on multimodal large language models, which suffer from low efficiency and instruction sensitivity; 3) Existing methods provide only sample-level evaluations, lacking interpretability and alignment with expert-level multi-dimensional evaluation criteria. Accordingly, we propose F2TEval, a five-dimensional reference-free evaluation method aligned with expert criteria, covering faithfulness, comprehensiveness, conciseness, logicality, and analysis, to support fine-grained evaluation. We design a lightweight mixture-of-experts model that incorporates independent scoring heads and applies the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion to optimize the disentanglement of scoring representations across dimensions. Furthermore, we construct F2TBench8K, a human-annotated benchmark dataset covering 21 chart types and 35 application domains, to support research on F2T evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate our model’s superior performance and efficiency, outperforming Gemini-2.0 and Claude-3.5 with only 0.9B parameters.

F2TEval: Human-Aligned Multi-Dimensional Evaluation for Figure-to-Text Task

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) plays a vital role in the financial domain, powering applications such as real-time market analysis, trend forecasting, and interest rate computation. However, most existing RAG research in finance focuses predominantly on textual data, overlooking the rich visual content in financial documents, resulting in the loss of key analytical insights. To bridge this gap, we present FinRAGBench-V, a comprehensive visual RAG benchmark tailored for finance. This benchmark effectively integrates multimodal data and provides visual citation to ensure traceability. It includes a bilingual retrieval corpus with 60,780 Chinese and 51,219 English pages, along with a high-quality, human-annotated question-answering (QA) dataset spanning heterogeneous data types and seven question categories. Moreover, we introduce RGenCite, an RAG baseline that seamlessly integrates visual citation with generation. Furthermore, we propose an automatic citation evaluation method to systematically assess the visual citation capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Extensive experiments on RGenCite underscore the challenging nature of FinRAGBench-V, providing valuable insights for the development of multimodal RAG systems in finance.

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