China

Large Language Models (LLMs) are catalyzing a paradigm shift in scientific discovery, evolving from task-specific automation tools into increasingly autonomous agents and fundamentally redefining research processes and human-AI collaboration. This survey systematically charts this burgeoning field, placing a central focus on the changing roles and escalating capabilities of LLMs in science. Through the lens of the scientific method, we introduce a foundational three-level taxonomy—Tool, Analyst, and Scientist—to delineate their escalating autonomy and evolving responsibilities within the research lifecycle. We further identify pivotal challenges and future research trajectories such as robotic automation, self-improvement, and ethical governance. Overall, this survey provides a conceptual architecture and strategic foresight to navigate and shape the future of AI-driven scientific discovery, fostering both rapid innovation and responsible advancement.

EMNLP 2025

From Automation to Autonomy: A Survey on Large Language Models in Scientific Discovery

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.

Non-monotonic reasoning (NMR) refers to the fact that conclusions may be invalidated by new information. It is widely used in daily life and legal reasoning. An NMR task usually has multiple extensions, which are sets of plausible conclusions. There are two reasoning modes -- skeptical and credulous reasoning, depending on whether to believe facts in all extensions or any one extension. Despite some preliminary works exploring NMR abilities of LLMs, the multi-extension NMR capabilities of LLMs remain underexplored. In this paper, we synthesize a multi-extension NMR dataset MultiLogicNMR, and construct two variants of the dataset with more extensions or text diversity. We propose a neural-symbolic framework MultiLogicNMRer for multi-extension NMR. Experimental evaluation with the datasets show that LLMs still face significant challenges in NMR abilities, and reveal the effectiveness of our neural-symbolic framework, with an average accuracy gain of about 15\% compared to prompt-based methods, and even outperforming some fine-tuning methods. All the code and data are publicly available\footnote{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NMRer-C5B3 }.

MultiLogicNMR(er): A Benchmark and Neural-Symbolic Framework for Non-monotonic Reasoning with Multiple Extensions

In this paper, we propose a novel, automatic tree-based evaluation metric for LLM-generated step-by-step assembly instructions, that more accurately reflects spatiotemporal aspects of construction than traditional metrics such as BLEU and BERT similarity scores. We apply our proposed metric to the domain of sewing instructions, and show that our metric better correlates with manually-annotated error counts, demonstrating our metric's superiority for evaluating the spatiotemporal soundness of sewing instructions. Further experiments show that our metric is more robust than traditional approaches against artificially-constructed counterfactual examples that are specifically constructed to confound metrics that rely on textual similarity.

Evaluating Spatiotemporal Consistency in Automatically Generated Sewing Instructions

Although the power of LLM tool-use agents has ignited a flurry of recent research in this area, the curation of tool-use training data remains an open problemtextemdashespecially for online RL training. Existing approaches to synthetic tool-use data generation tend to be non-interactive and/or non-compositional. We introduce RandomWorld, a pipeline for the procedural generation of interactive tools and compositional tool-use data. We show that models tuned via SFT and RL on synthetic RandomWorld data improve on a range of tool-use benchmarks, and set the new SoTA for two metrics on the NESTFUL dataset. Further experiments show that downstream performance scales with the amount of RandomWorld-generated training data, opening up the possibility of further improvement through the use of entirely synthetic data.

Procedural Environment Generation for Tool-Use Agents

Despite Bengali being among the most spoken languages bearing cultural importance and richness, the NLP endeavors on it, remain relatively limited. Figures of Speech (FoS) not only contribute to the phonetic and semantic nuances of a language, but they also exhibit aesthetics, expression, and creativity in literature. To our knowledge, in this paper, we present the first ever Bengali figures of speech classification dataset, **BengFoS**, on works of six renowned poets of Bengali literature. We deploy state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) to this dataset in the zero-shot setup, thereafter fine-tuning the best performing models, and finally dissect them for language model probing. This reveals novel insights on the intrinsic behavior of two open-source LLMs (Llama and DeepSeek) in FoS detection. **Though we have limited ourselves to Bengali, the experimental framework can be reproduced for English as well as for other low-resource languages**.

Can LLMs be Literary Companions?: Analysing LLMs on Bengali Figures of Speech Identification

When leveraging large language models (LLMs) for multiple-choice question answering (MCQA), no convention exists regarding how the space following the last colon should be tokenized. We highlight this as an example for unclean LLM evaluation that complicates both NLP research and model use in an interdisciplinary context: we observe accuracy differences of up to 6% due to this (seemingly irrelevant) tokenization variation as well as reshuffled model rankings – a practical concern for leaderboards reliant on this prompt style. Surprisingly, we are able to recommend one specific strategy – tokenizing the space *together* with the answer letter – as we observe consistent and statistically significant performance improvements. Additionally, it improves model calibration. Our findings underscore the importance of careful evaluation design and highlight the need for standardized, transparent evaluation protocols to ensure reliable and comparable results.

Mind the Gap: A Closer Look at Tokenization for Multiple-Choice Question Answering with LLMs

Prompt sensitivity, referring to the phenomenon where minor variations in phrasing lead to significant changes in large language model (LLM) performance, has been widely accepted as a core limitation of LLMs. In this work, we revisit this issue and ask: Is the widely reported high prompt sensitivity truly an inherent weakness of LLMs, or is it largely an artifact of evaluation processes? To answer this question, we systematically evaluate 7 LLMs (e.g., GPT and Gemini family) across 6 benchmarks, including both multiple-choice and open-ended tasks on 12 diverse prompt templates. We find that much of the prompt sensitivity stems from heuristic evaluation methods, including log-likelihood scoring and rigid answer matching, which often overlook semantically correct responses expressed through alternative phrasings, such as synonyms or paraphrases. When we adopt LLM-as-judge evaluations, we observe a substantial reduction in performance variance and a consistently higher correlation in model rankings across prompts. Our findings suggest that modern LLMs are more robust to prompt templates than previously believed, and that prompt sensitivity may be more an artifact of evaluation than a flaw in the models.

Flaw or Artifact? Rethinking Prompt Sensitivity in Evaluating LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) can exhibit biases in reasoning capabilities due to linguistic modality, performing better on tasks in one language versus another, even with similar content. Most previous works evaluate this through reasoning tasks where reliance on strategies or knowledge can ensure success, such as in commonsense or math tasks. However, abstract reasoning is vital to reasoning for everyday life, where people apply "out-of-the-box thinking" to identify and use patterns for solutions, without a reliance on formulaic approaches. Comparatively, little work has evaluated linguistic biases in this task type. In this paper, we propose a task inspired by the New York Times Connections: GlobalGroup, that evaluates models in an abstract reasoning task across several languages. We constructed a game benchmark with five linguistic backgrounds – English, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic – in both the native language and an English translation for comparison. We also proposed game difficulty measurements to evaluate models on games with similar difficulty, enabling a more controlled comparison, which is particularly important in reasoning evaluations. Through experimentation, we find English modalities largely lead to better performance in this abstract reasoning task, and performance disparities between open- and closed-source models.

Think Globally, Group Locally: Evaluating LLMs Using Multi-Lingual Word Grouping Games

Mathematical reasoning remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs), despite progress in prompting techniques such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT). We present **Chain of Mathematically Annotated Thought (CoMAT)**, which enhances reasoning through two stages: *Symbolic Conversion* (converting natural language queries into symbolic form) and *Reasoning Execution* (deriving answers from symbolic representations). CoMAT operates entirely with a single LLM and without external solvers. Across four LLMs, CoMAT outperforms traditional CoT on six out of seven benchmarks, achieving gains of 4.48% on MMLU-Redux (MATH) and 4.58% on GaoKao MCQ. In addition to improved performance, CoMAT ensures faithfulness and verifiability, offering a transparent reasoning process for complex mathematical tasks.

CoMAT: Chain of Mathematically Annotated Thought Improves Mathematical Reasoning

Promises made by politicians, corporate leaders, and public figures have a significant impact on public perception, trust, and institutional reputation. However, the complexity and volume of such commitments, coupled with difficulties in verifying their fulfillment, necessitate innovative methods for assessing their credibility. This paper introduces the concept of Promise Verification, a systematic approach involving steps such as promise identification, evidence assessment, and the evaluation of timing for verification. We propose the first multilingual dataset, ML-Promise, which includes English, French, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, aimed at facilitating in-depth verification of promises, particularly in the context of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reports. Given the growing emphasis on corporate environmental contributions, this dataset addresses the challenge of evaluating corporate promises, especially in light of practices like greenwashing. Our findings also explore textual and image-based baselines, with promising results from retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches. This work aims to foster further discourse on the accountability of public commitments across multiple languages and domains.

ML-Promise: A Multilingual Dataset for Corporate Promise Verification

Zero-shot Event Detection (ED), the task of identifying event mentions in natural language text without any training data, is critical for document understanding in specialized domains. Understanding the complex event ontology, extracting domain-specific triggers from the passage, and structuring them appropriately overloads and limits the utility of Large Language Models (LLMs) for zero-shot ED. To this end, we propose DiCoRe, a divergent-convergent reasoning framework that decouples the task of ED using Dreamer and Grounder. Dreamer encourages divergent reasoning through open-ended event discovery, which helps to boost event coverage. Conversely, Grounder introduces convergent reasoning to align the free-form predictions with the task-specific instructions using finite-state machine guided constrained decoding. Additionally, an LLM-Judge verifies the final outputs to ensure high precision. Through extensive experiments on six datasets across five domains and nine LLMs, we demonstrate how DiCoRe consistently outperforms prior zero-shot, transfer-learning, and reasoning baselines, achieving 4–7% average F1 gains over the best baseline -- establishing DiCoRe as a strong zero-shot ED framework.

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MultiLogicNMR(er): A Benchmark and Neural-Symbolic Framework for Non-monotonic Reasoning with Multiple Extensions

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