China

In natural languages, frequency and compositionality exhibit an inverse relationship: the most frequent words often resist regular patterns, developing idiosyncratic forms. This phenomenon, exemplified by irregular verbs, raises a compelling question: do artificial communication systems follow similar principles? Through systematic experiments with neural network agents in a referential game setting, and by manipulating input frequency through Zipfian distributions, we investigate if these systems mirror the irregular verbs phenomenon, where messages referring to frequent objects develop less compositional structure than messages referring to rare ones. We establish that compositionality is not an inherent property of the frequency itself and provide compelling evidence that limited data exposure, facilitated through frequency distributions, serves as a fundamental driver for the emergence of compositional structure in communication systems, offering insights into the cognitive and computational pressures that shape linguistic systems.

EMNLP 2025

Frequency &amp; Compositionality in Emergent Communication

frequency

emergent communication

compositionality

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
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ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Frequency & Compositionality in Emergent Communication

technical paper

## 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." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

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

Model merging enables powerful capabilities in neural networks without requiring additional training. In this paper, we introduce a novel perspective on model merging by leveraging the fundamental mechanisms of neural network representation. Our approach is motivated by the linear representation hypothesis, which states that neural networks encode information through linear combinations of feature vectors. We propose a method that superposes task-specific features from individual models into a merged model. Our approach specifically targets linear transformation matrices, which are crucial for feature activation and extraction in deep networks. By formulating the merging process as a linear system, we can preserve output feature directions from individual models and create merged models that effectively maintain multi-task capabilities compared to existing methods. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks and models demonstrate that our method outperforms existing techniques.

Superpose Task-specific Features for Model Merging

Humans have the ability to utilize visual cues, such as lip movements and visual scenes, to enhance auditory perception, particularly in noisy environments. However, current Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) or Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) models often struggle in noisy scenarios. To solve this task, we propose a model that improves transcription by correlating noise sources to visual cues. Unlike works that rely on lip motion and require the speaker's visibility, we exploit broader visual information from the environment. This allows our model to naturally filter speech from noise and improve transcription, much like humans do in noisy scenarios. Our method re-purposes pretrained speech and visual encoders, linking them with multi-headed attention. This approach enables the transcription of speech and the prediction of noise labels in video inputs. We introduce a scalable pipeline to develop audio-visual datasets, where visual cues correlate to noise in the audio. We show significant improvements over existing audio-only models in noisy scenarios. Results also highlight that visual cues play a vital role in improved transcription accuracy

Visual-Aware Speech Recognition for Noisy Scenarios

Evaluating statement autoformalization, translating natural language mathematics into formal languages like Lean 4, remains a significant challenge, with few metrics, datasets, and standards to robustly measure progress. In this work, we present a comprehensive approach combining improved metrics, robust benchmarks, and systematic evaluation, to fill this gap. First, we introduce BEq+, an automated metric that correlates strongly with human judgment, along with ProofNetVerif, a new dataset for assessing the quality of evaluation metrics, containing 3,752 annotated examples. Second, we develop two new autoformalization benchmarks: ProofNet#, a corrected version of ProofNet, and RLM25, with 619 new pairs of research-level mathematics from six formalization projects. Through systematic experimentation across these benchmarks, we find that current techniques can achieve up to 45.1% accuracy on undergraduate mathematics but struggle with research-level content without proper context. Our work establishes a reliable foundation for evaluating and advancing autoformalization systems.

Reliable Evaluation and Benchmarks for Statement Autoformalization

Language Model (LM)-based Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems often generate hallucinated speech that deviates from input text. Existing mitigation strategies either demand excessive training resources or introduce significant inference latency. In this paper, we propose GFlOwNet-guided distribution AlignmenT (GOAT) for LM-based TTS, a post-training framework that mitigates hallucinations without relying on massive resources or inference cost. Specifically, we first conduct an uncertainty analysis, revealing a strong positive correlation between hallucination and model uncertainty. Based on this, we reformulate TTS generation as a trajectory flow optimization problem and introduce an enhanced Subtrajectory Balance objective together with a sharpened internal reward as target distribution. We further integrate reward temperature decay and learning rate optimization for stability and performance balance. Extensive experiments show that GOAT reduce over 50\% character error rates on challenging test cases and lowering uncertainty by up to 58\%, demonstrating its strong generalization ability and effectiveness.

Mitigating Hallucinations in LM-Based TTS Models via Distribution Alignment Using GFlowNets

With the widespread deployment of generative language models, concerns about safety issues have continuously grown. High-quality fine-tuning data generated from red teaming plays a crucial role in the model's safety. Recently, automated red teaming approaches have been proposed to create test cases. However, these approaches, which rely on open-ended generation, encounter issues related to inefficiency and low attack success rates. In this work, we introduce a black-box approach that ingeniously exploits the unique properties of the nullspace to disentangle and regulate the crucial success information within test cases. Our study provides a brand-new perspective for automated red team research. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms baseline methods regarding the attack success rate. The generated test cases also excel in aspects of diversity and fluency.

Nullspace Disentanglement for Red Teaming Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable similarity to neural activity in the human language network. However, the key properties of language underlying this alignment---and how brain-like representations emerge and change across training---remain unclear. We here benchmark 34 training checkpoints spanning 300B tokens across 8 different model sizes to analyze how brain alignment relates to linguistic competence. Specifically, we find that brain alignment tracks the development of formal linguistic competence---i.e., knowledge of linguistic rules---more closely than functional linguistic competence. While functional competence, which involves world knowledge and reasoning, continues to develop throughout training, its relationship with brain alignment is weaker, suggesting that the human language network primarily encodes formal linguistic structure rather than broader cognitive functions. Notably, we find that the correlation between next-word prediction, behavioral alignment, and brain alignment fades once models surpass human language proficiency. We further show that model size is not a reliable predictor of brain alignment when controlling for the number of features. Finally, using the largest set of rigorous neural language benchmarks to date, we show that language brain alignment benchmarks remain unsaturated, highlighting opportunities for improving future models. Taken together, our findings suggest that the human language network is best modeled by formal, rather than functional, aspects of language.

From Language to Cognition: How LLMs Outgrow the Human Language Network

Effective human communication in social settings is contingent on recognizing subtle cues, such as intents or implications. Without such cues, NLP models risk missing social signals, instead relying on surface patterns. We introduce SOCIAL SCAFFOLDS, an automated framework for facilitating generalization across social reasoning tasks by generating rationales that make these social cues explicit. Grounded in narrative modeling principles, we generate task-agnostic rationales that capture different perspectives, i.e., that of the speaker, the listener, and the general world-view. Our experimental suite showcases that providing rationales as augmentations aids task performance for both supervised fine-tuning and in-context learning paradigms. Notably, providing all three rationale types significantly improves cross-task performance in 44% of cases, and inferred speaker intent in 31.3% of cases. We conduct statistical and ablation analyses that show how rationales complement the input text and are used effectively by models.

SOCIAL SCAFFOLDS: A Generalization Framework for Social Understanding Tasks

Large Language Models (LLMs) are intended to reflect human linguistic competencies. But humans have access to a broad and embodied context, which is key in detecting and resolving linguistic ambiguities, even in isolated text spans. A foundational case of semantic ambiguity is found in the task coreference resolution: how is a pronoun related to an earlier person mention? This skill is implicit in every downstream task, and the presence of ambiguity at this level can alter performance significantly. We show that LLMs can achieve good performance with minimal prompting in both coreference disambiguation and the detection of ambiguity in coreference, however, they cannot do both at the same time. We present the Correct-Detect trade-off: though models have both capabilities and deploy them implicitly, successful performance balancing these two abilities remains elusive.

 Correct-Detect: Balancing Performance and Ambiguity Through the Lens of Coreference Resolution in LLMs

Which components in transformer language models are responsible for discourse understanding? We hypothesize that sparse computational graphs, termed as *discursive circuits* control how models process discourse relations. Unlike simpler tasks, discourse relations involve longer spans and complex reasoning. To make circuit discovery feasible, we introduce a task called Completion under Discourse Relation (CuDR), where a model completes a discourse given a specified relation. To support this task, we construct a corpus of minimal contrastive pairs tailored for activation patching in circuit discovery. Experiments show that sparse circuits (approx 0.2\% of a full GPT-2 model) recover discourse understanding in the English PDTB-based CuDR task. These circuits generalize well to unseen discourse frameworks such as RST and SDRT. Further analysis shows lower layers capture linguistic features such as lexical semantics and coreference, while upper layers encode discourse-level abstractions. Feature utility is consistent across frameworks (e.g., coreference supports Expansion-like relations).

Discursive Circuits: How Do Language Models Understand Discourse Relations?

Conversational agents powered by large language models (LLMs) are rapidly becoming integral to our daily interactions, generating unprecedented amounts of conversational data. Such datasets offer a powerful lens into societal interests, trending topics, and collective concerns. Yet existing approaches typically treat these interactions as independent, missing critical insights that could emerge from aggregating and reasoning across large-scale conversation logs. In this paper, we introduce Aggregative Question Answering, a novel task requiring models to reason explicitly over thousands of user-chatbot interactions to answer aggregational queries, such as identifying emerging concerns among specific demographics. To enable research in this direction, we construct a benchmark, WildChat-AQA, comprising 6,027 aggregative questions derived from 182,330 real-world chatbot conversations. Experiments show that existing methods either struggle to reason effectively or incur prohibitive computational costs, underscoring the need for new approaches capable of extracting collective insights from large-scale conversational data.

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Superpose Task-specific Features for Model Merging

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