China

Recent advances in LLM-based recommendation have shown promising results, yet their generalization across domains remains limited due to the mismatch between language pretraining objectives and the recommendation task. Existing methods primarily rely on language-level knowledge transfer, failing to model the sequential dependencies among item-level recommendation—an essential factor for effective recommendation. To address this limitation, we propose RecBase, a domain-agnostic foundational model pretrained with a recommendation-oriented objective. RecBase leverages a large-scale, heterogeneous, cross-domain corpus with unified textual representations and feature mappings to enhance cross-domain generalization. To further align item semantics across domains, we introduce a unified item tokenizer that encodes items into hierarchical concept identifiers, enabling structured representation and efficient vocabulary sharing. The model is trained using an autoregressive objective to capture complex item-level sequential patterns. Experiments on eight real-world datasets show that RecBase, with only 1.5B parameters, consistently outperforms LLM-based baselines with up to 7B parameters in zero-shot and cross-domain recommendation scenarios. Code and pretrained checkpoints are included in the supplementary material.

EMNLP 2025

RecBase: Generative Foundation Model Pretraining for Zero-Shot Recommendation

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.

Real-world vision-language applications demand varying levels of perceptual granularity. However, most existing visual large language models (VLLMs), such as LLaVA, pre-assume a fixed resolution for downstream tasks, which leads to subpar performance. To address this problem, we first conduct a comprehensive and pioneering investigation into the resolution preferences of different vision-language tasks, revealing a correlation between resolution preferences with (1) image complexity, and (2) uncertainty variance of the VLLM at different image input resolutions. Building on this insight, we propose an empirical formula to determine the optimal resolution for a given vision-language task, accounting for these two factors as the zeroth-order and first-order terms in the Taylor expansion on a given image input. Second, based on rigorous experiments, we propose a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning technique to extend the visual input resolution of pre-trained VLLMs to the identified optimal resolution. Extensive experiments on various vision-language tasks validate the effectiveness of our method.

Task-Aware Resolution Optimization for Visual Large Language Models

The integration of knowledge graphs (KGs) with large language models (LLMs) offers significant potential to improve the retrieval phase of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. In this study, we propose KG-CQR, a novel framework for Contextual Query Retrieval (CQR) that enhances the retrieval phase by enriching the contextual representation of complex input queries using a corpus-centric KG. Unlike existing methods that primarily address corpus-level context loss, KG-CQR focuses on query enrichment through structured relation representations, extracting and completing relevant KG subgraphs to generate semantically rich query contexts. Comprising subgraph extraction, completion, and contextual generation modules, KG-CQR operates as a model-agnostic pipeline, ensuring scalability across LLMs of varying sizes without additional training. Experimental results on RAGBench and MultiHop-RAG datasets demonstrate KG-CQR's superior performance, achieving a 4-6% improvement in mAP and a 2-3% improvement in Recall@25 over strong baseline models. Furthermore, evaluations on challenging RAG tasks such as multi-hop question answering show that, by incorporating KG-CQR, the performance consistently outperforms the existing baseline in terms of retrieval effectiveness

KG-CQR: Leveraging Structured Relation Representations in Knowledge Graphs for Contextual Query Retrieval

The advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs) have spurred a growing interest in their application to Named Entity Recognition (NER) methods. However, existing datasets are primarily designed for traditional machine learning methods and are often inadequate for LLM-based methods, in terms of corpus selection and overall dataset design logic. Moreover, the prevalent fixed and relatively coarse-grained entity categorization in existing datasets fails to adequately assess the superior generalization and contextual understanding capabilities of LLM-based methods, thereby hindering a comprehensive demonstration of their broad application prospects. To address these limitations, we propose DynamicNER, the first NER dataset designed for LLM-based methods with dynamic categorization, introducing various entity types and entity type lists for the same entity in different context, leveraging the generalization of LLM-based NER better. The dataset is also multilingual and multi-granular, covering 8 languages and 155 entity types, with corpora spanning a diverse range of specialized domains. Furthermore, we also introduce CascadeNER, a novel NER method based on a two-stage strategy and lightweight LLMs, achieving higher accuracy on fine-grained while requiring fewer computational resources. Experiments show that DynamicNER serves as a robust and effective benchmark for LLM-based NER methods. Furthermore, we also conduct analysis for traditional methods and LLM-based methods on our dataset. Our code and dataset are openly available.

DynamicNER: A Dynamic, Multilingual, and Fine-Grained Dataset for LLM-based Named Entity Recognition

Enhancing the mathematical reasoning capabilities of LLMs has garnered significant attention in both the mathematical and computer science communities. Recent works have made substantial progress in both Natural Language (NL) reasoning and Formal Language (FL) reasoning by leveraging the potential of pure Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods on base models. However, RL approaches struggle to impart new capabilities not presented in the base model, highlighting the need to integrate more knowledge like FL into NL math reasoning effectively. Yet, this integration is challenging due to inherent disparities in problem structure and reasoning format between NL and FL. To address these challenges, we introduce **NL-FL HybridReasoning**, an end-to-end framework designed to incorporate the FL expert into NL math problem-solving. To bridge the NL and FL input format gap, we propose the NL-FL Problem Alignment method, which reformulates the Question-Answering (QA) problems in NL as existence theorems in FL. Subsequently, the Mixed Problem Input technique we provide enables the FL reasoner to handle both QA and existence problems concurrently. Lastly, we mitigate the NL and FL output format gap in reasoning through an LLM-based Answer Extraction mechanism. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the **HybridReasoning** framework achieves **89.80%** and **84.34%** accuracy rates on the MATH-500 and the AMC benchmarks, surpassing the NL baseline by 4.60% and 4.82%, respectively. Notably, some problems resolved by our framework remain unsolved by the NL baseline model even under a larger number of trials. Our code will be open-sourced soon.

Let's Reason Formally: Natural-Formal Hybrid Reasoning Enhances LLM's Math Capability

The protection of cyber Intellectual Property (IP) such as web content is an increasingly critical concern. The rise of large language models (LLMs) with online retrieval capabilities enables convenient access to information but often undermines the rights of original content creators. As users increasingly rely on LLM-generated responses, they gradually diminish direct engagement with original information sources, which will significantly reduce the incentives for IP creators to contribute, and lead to a saturating cyberspace with more AI-generated content. In response, we propose a novel defense framework that empowers web content creators to safeguard their web-based IP from unauthorized LLM real-time extraction and redistribution by leveraging the semantic understanding capability of LLMs themselves. Our method follows principled motivations and effectively addresses an intractable black-box optimization problem. Real-world experiments demonstrated that our methods improve defense success rates from 2.5% to 88.6% on different LLMs, outperforming traditional defenses such as configuration-based restrictions.

Web Intellectual Property at Risk: Preventing Unauthorized Real-Time Retrieval by Large Language Models

Scientific information extraction (SciIE) has primarily relied on entity-relation extraction in narrow domains, limiting its applicability to interdisciplinary research and struggling to capture the necessary context of scientific information, often resulting in fragmented or conflicting statements. In this paper, we introduce SciEvent, a novel multi-domain benchmark of scientific abstracts annotated via a unified event extraction (EE) schema designed to enable structured and context-aware understanding of scientific content. It includes 500 abstracts across five research domains, with manual annotations of event segments, triggers, and fine-grained arguments. We define SciIE as a multi-stage EE pipeline: (1) segmenting abstracts into core scientific activities—textitbackground, textitmethods, textitresults, and textitconclusions; and (2) extracting the corresponding triggers and arguments. Experiments with fine-tuned EE models, large language models (LLMs), and human annotators reveal a performance gap, with current models struggling in domains such as sociology and humanities. SciEvent serves as a challenging benchmark and a step toward generalizable, multi-domain SciIE.

SciEvent: Benchmarking Multi-domain Scientific Event Extraction

Knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) aims to answer natural language questions using knowledge graphs. Recent research leverages large language models (LLMs) to enhance KGQA reasoning, but faces limitations: retrieval-based methods are constrained by the quality of retrieved information, while agent-based methods rely heavily on proprietary LLMs. To address these limitations, we propose Retrieval-Judgment-Exploration (RJE), a framework that retrieves refined reasoning paths, evaluates their sufficiency, and conditionally explores additional evidence. Moreover, RJE introduces specialized auxiliary modules enabling small-sized LLMs to perform effectively: Reasoning Path Ranking, Question Decomposition, and Retriever-assisted Exploration. Experiments show that our approach with proprietary LLMs (such as GPT-4o-mini) outperforms existing baselines while enabling small open-source LLMs (such as 3B and 8B parameters) to achieve competitive results without fine-tuning LLMs. Additionally, RJE substantially reduces the number of LLM calls and token usage compared to agent-based methods, yielding significant efficiency improvements. Our code will be available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RJE-55CE.

RJE: A Retrieval-Judgment-Exploration Framework for Efficient Knowledge Graph Question Answering with LLMs

To reduce hallucinations in large language models (LLMs), researchers are increasingly investigating reasoning methods that integrate LLMs with external knowledge graphs (KGs). Existing approaches either map an LLM-generated query graph onto the KG or let the LLM traverse the entire graph; the former is fragile because noisy query graphs derail retrieval, whereas the latter is inefficient due to entity-level reasoning over large graphs. In order to tackle these problems, we propose **SAFE** (**S**chema-Driven **A**pproximate Distance Join **F**or **E**fficient Knowledge Graph Querying), a framework that leverages schema graphs for robust query graph generation and efficient KG retrieval. SAFE introduces two key ideas: (1) an Approximate Distance Join (ADJ) algorithm that refines LLM-generated pseudo query graphs by flexibly aligning them with the KG’s structure; and (2) exploiting a compact schema graph to perform ADJ efficiently, reducing overhead and improving retrieval accuracy. Extensive experiments on WebQSP, CWQ and GrailQA demonstrate that SAFE outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and efficiency, providing a robust and scalable solution to overcome the inherent limitations of LLM-based knowledge retrieval.

SAFE: Schema-Driven Approximate Distance Join for Efficient Knowledge Graph Querying

Two major domain specialization approaches for Large Language Models (LLMs), fine-tuning and In-Context Learning (ICL), have been compared across various domains. While prior research has examined the similarities and differences between these approaches in task-specific capabilities, less is known about how they affect the feature of the generated text itself. To address this research gap, we conducted an experimental study using Accounting Audit Procedure Generation (AAPG) task, a highly specialized task requiring expert accounting knowledge. This task provides a practical testbed for a multi-perspective analysis of domain specialization due to its technical complexity and the large gap between general and domain expert knowledge. The results show consistent differences in output characteristics across models when comparing fine-tuning, ICL, and their hybrid approaches.

Multi-perspective Analysis of Large Language Model Domain Specialization: An Experiment in Accounting Audit Procedures Generation

Deep neural networks have emerged as a powerful technique for learning representations from user-item interaction data in collaborative filtering (CF) for recommender systems. However, many existing methods heavily rely on unique user and item IDs, which restricts their performance in zero-shot learning scenarios. Inspired by the success of language models (LMs) and their robust generalization capabilities, we pose the question: How can we leverage LMs to enhance recommender systems? In this study, we propose EasyRec, an effective approach that integrates text-based semantic understanding with collaborative signals. EasyRec employs a text-behavior alignment framework, combining contrastive learning with collaborative language model tuning to ensure strong alignment between the text-enhanced semantic space and collaborative behavior information. Extensive empirical evaluations across diverse real-world datasets demonstrate that EasyRec significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models, particularly in challenging text-based zero-shot recommendation. Furthermore, this study highlights the potential of integrating EasyRec as a plug-and-play component into text-enhanced collaborative filtering frameworks, thereby empowering existing recommender systems to improve recommendation performance and adapt to evolving user preferences. To ensure the reproducibility of our results, we have made our model implementation available anonymously at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EasyRec-4420.

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Task-Aware Resolution Optimization for Visual Large Language Models

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