China

Conventional retrieval-augmented generation(RAG) systems employ rigid retrieval strategies that create: (1) knowledge blind spots across domain boundaries, (2) reasoning fragmentation when processing interdependent concepts, and (3) contradictions from conflicting evidence sources. Motivated by these limitations, we introduce PathwiseRAG, which addresses these challenges through: intent-aware strategy selection to eliminate blind spots, dynamic reasoning networks that capture sub-problem interdependencies to overcome fragmentation, and parallel path exploration with adaptive refinement to resolve conflicts. The framework models query intent across semantic and reasoning dimensions, constructs a directed acyclic graph of interconnected sub-problems, and explores multiple reasoning trajectories while continuously adapting to emerging evidence. Evaluation across challenging benchmarks demonstrates significant improvements over state-of-the-art RAG systems, with average accuracy gains of 4.9% and up to 6.9% on complex queries, establishing a new paradigm for knowledge-intensive reasoning by transforming static retrieval into dynamic, multi-dimensional exploration.

EMNLP 2025

PathwiseRAG: Multi-Dimensional Exploration and Integration Framework

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.

In an era where misinformation spreads freely, fact-checking (FC) plays a crucial role in verifying claims and promoting reliable information. While automated fact-checking (AFC) has advanced significantly, existing systems remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that manipulate or generate claims, evidence, or claim-evidence pairs. These attacks can distort the truth, mislead decision-makers, and ultimately undermine the reliability of FC models. Despite growing research interest in adversarial attacks against AFC systems, a comprehensive, holistic overview of key challenges remains lacking. These challenges include understanding attack strategies, assessing the resilience of current models, and identifying ways to enhance robustness. This survey provides the first in-depth review of adversarial attacks targeting FC, categorizing existing attack methodologies and evaluating their impact on AFC systems. Additionally, we examine recent advancements in adversary-aware defenses and highlight open research questions that require further exploration. Our findings underscore the urgent need for resilient FC frameworks capable of withstanding adversarial manipulations in pursuit of preserving high verification accuracy.

Adversarial Attacks Against Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey

Multi-hop question answering faces substantial challenges due to data sparsity, which increases the likelihood of language models learning spurious patterns. To address this issue, prior research has focused on diversifying question generation through content planning and varied expression. However, these approaches often emphasize generating simple questions and neglect the integration of essential knowledge, such as relevant sentences within documents. This paper introduces the **Knowledge Composition Sampling (KCS)**, an innovative framework designed to expand the diversity of generated multi-hop questions by sampling varied knowledge compositions within a given context. KCS models the knowledge composition selection as a sentence-level conditional prediction task and utilizes a probabilistic contrastive loss to predict the next most relevant piece of knowledge. During inference, we employ a stochastic decoding strategy to effectively balance accuracy and diversity. Compared to competitive baselines, our KCS improves the average accuracy of knowledge composition selection by 3.9%, and its application for data augmentation yields improvements on HotpotQA and 2WikiMultihopQA.

KCS: Diversify Multi-hop Question Generation with Knowledge Composition Sampling

Entity alignment (EA), critical for knowledge graph (KG) integration, identifies equivalent entities across different KGs. Traditional methods often face challenges in semantic understanding and scalability. The rise of language models (LMs), particularly large language models (LLMs), has provided powerful new strategies. This paper systematically reviews LM-driven EA methods, proposing a novel taxonomy that categorizes methods in three key stages: data preparation, feature embedding, and alignment. We further summarize key benchmarks, evaluation metrics, and discuss future directions. This paper aims to provide researchers and practitioners with a clear and comprehensive understanding of how language models reshape the field of entity alignment.

How do Language Models Reshape Entity Alignment? A Survey of LM-Driven EA Methods: Advances, Benchmarks, and Future

Molecule and text representation learning has gained increasing interest due to its potential for enhancing the understanding of chemical information. However, existing models often struggle to capture subtle differences between molecules and their descriptions, as they lack the ability to learn fine-grained alignments between molecular substructures and chemical phrases. To address this limitation, we introduce MolBridge, a novel molecule–text learning framework based on substructure-aware alignments. Specifically, we augment the original molecule–description pairs with additional alignment signals derived from molecular substructures and chemical phrases. To effectively learn from these enriched alignments, MolBridge employs substructure-aware contrastive learning, coupled with a self-refinement mechanism that filters out noisy alignment signals. Experimental results show that MolBridge effectively captures fine-grained correspondences and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on a wide range of molecular benchmarks, highlighting the significance of substructure-aware alignment in molecule-text learning.

Bridging the Gap Between Molecule and Textual Descriptions via Substructure-aware Alignment

While large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, LLMs exhibit a limited understanding of commonsense reasoning due to the necessity of implicit knowledge that is rarely expressed in text. Recently, retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs) have enhanced their commonsense reasoning ability by incorporating background knowledge from external corpora. However, previous RALMs overlook the implicit nature of commonsense knowledge, potentially resulting in the retrieved documents not directly containing information needed to answer questions. In this paper, we propose Retrieval-augmented knowledge Connection, ReConnect, which transforms indirectly relevant documents into a direct explanation to answer the given question. To this end, we extract relevant knowledge from various retrieved document subsets and aggregate them into a direct explanation. Experimental results show that ReConnect outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines, achieving improvements of +2.2% and +4.6% average accuracy on in-domain (ID) and out-of-domain (OOD) benchmarks, respectively.

Connecting the Knowledge Dots: Retrieval-augmented Knowledge Connection for Commonsense Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated near-human performance in summarization tasks based on traditional metrics such as ROUGE and BERTScore. However, these metrics do not adequately capture critical aspects of summarization quality, such as factual accuracy, particularly for long narratives (>100K tokens). Recent advances, such as LLM-as-a-Judge, address the limitations of metrics based on lexical similarity but still exhibit factual inconsistencies, especially in understanding character relationships and states. In this work, we introduce NarrativeFactScore (NFS), the first “Agent-as-a-Judge” framework that evaluates and refines factuality in narrative summarization. By leveraging a Character Knowledge Graph (CKG) extracted from input narrative, NarrativeFactScore evaluates the factuality and provides actionable guidance for refinement, such as identifying missing or erroneous facts. Our experimental results demonstrate that constructing the CKG enables reasoning with 1/3 of the factuality computation used in prior approach, and achieve three times higher correlation with human judgments. Furthermore, refinement with actionable guidance improves the quality of the summary.\footnote{\href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NFS-1240}{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NFS-1240}}

Agent-as-Judge for Factual Summarization of Long Narratives

The decompose-then-verify strategy for verification of Large Language Model (LLM) generations decomposes claims that are then independently verified. Decontextualization augments text (claims) to ensure it can be verified outside of the original context, enabling reliable verification. While decomposition and decontextualization have been explored independently, their interactions in a complete system have not been investigated. Their conflicting purposes can create tensions: decomposition isolates atomic facts while decontextualization inserts relevant information. Furthermore, a decontextualized subclaim presents a challenge to the verification step: what part of the augmented text should be verified as it now contains multiple atomic facts? We conduct an evaluation of different decomposition, decontextualization, and verification strategies and find that the choice of strategy matters in the resulting factuality scores. Additionally, we introduce DnDScore, a decontextualization aware verification method that validates subclaims in the context of contextual information.

DnDScore: Decontextualization and Decomposition for Factuality Verification in Long-Form Text Generation

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) hold great promise for automating complex financial analysis. To comprehensively evaluate their capabilities, we introduce VisFinEval, the first large‐scale Chinese benchmark that spans the full front‐middle‐back office lifecycle of financial tasks. VisFinEval comprises 15,848 annotated question–answer pairs drawn from eight common financial image modalities (e.g., K-line charts, financial statements, official seals), organized into three hierarchical scenario depths: Financial Knowledge & Data Analysis, Financial Analysis & Decision Support, and Financial Risk Control & Asset Optimization. We evaluate 21 state-of-the-art MLLMs in a zero-shot setting. The top model, Qwen-VL-max, achieves an overall accuracy of 76.3%, outperforming non-expert humans but trailing financial experts by over 14 percentage points. Our error analysis uncovers six recurring failure modes—including cross-modal misalignment, hallucinations, and lapses in business-process reasoning—that highlight critical avenues for future research. VisFinEval aims to accelerate the development of robust, domain-tailored MLLMs capable of seamlessly integrating textual and visual financial information. The data and the code are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/VisFinEval-626E.

VisFinEval: A Scenario-Driven Chinese Multimodal Benchmark for Holistic Financial Understanding

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on question-answering (QA) tasks because of their superior capabilities in natural language understanding and generation. However, LLM-based QA struggles with complex QA tasks due to poor reasoning capacity, outdated knowledge, and hallucinations. Several recent works synthesize LLMs and knowledge graphs (KGs) for QA to address the above challenges. In this survey, we propose a new structured taxonomy that categorizes the methodology of synthesizing LLMs and KGs for QA according to the categories of QA and the KG's role when integrating with LLMs. We systematically survey state-of-the-art methods in synthesizing LLMs and KGs for QA and compare and analyze these approaches in terms of strength, limitations, and KG requirements. We then align the approaches with QA and discuss how these approaches address the main challenges of different complex QA. Finally, we summarize the advancements, evaluation metrics, and benchmark datasets and highlight open challenges and opportunities.

Large Language Models Meet Knowledge Graphs for Question Answering: Synthesis and Opportunities

Item (question) difficulties play a crucial role in educational assessments, enabling accurate and efficient assessment of student abilities and personalization to maximize learning outcomes. Traditionally, estimating item difficulties can be costly, requiring real students to respond to items, followed by fitting an item response theory (IRT) model to get item difficulty estimates. This approach cannot be applied to the cold-start setting for previously unseen items either. In this work, we present SMART (Simulated Students Aligned with IRT), a novel method for aligning simulated students with instructed ability, which can then be used in simulations to predict the difficulty of open-ended items. We achieve this alignment using direct preference optimization (DPO), where we form preference pairs based on how likely responses are under a ground-truth IRT model. We perform a simulation by generating thousands of responses, evaluating them with an LLM-based scoring model, and fit the resulting data to an IRT model to obtain item difficulty estimates. Through extensive experiments on a real-world student response dataset, we show that SMART outperforms other item difficulty prediction methods by leveraging its improved ability alignment.

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Adversarial Attacks Against Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey

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