China

Personally identifiable information (PII) anonymization is a high-stakes task that poses a barrier to many open-science data sharing initiatives. While PII identification has made large strides in recent years, in practice, error thresholds and the recall/precision trade-off still limit the uptake of these anonymization pipelines. We present PIIvot, a lighter-weight framework for PII anonymization that leverages knowledge of the data context to simplify the PII detection problem. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we also contribute QATD_2k, the largest open-source real-world tutoring dataset of its kind, to support the demand for quality educational dialogue data.

EMNLP 2025

PIIvot: A Lightweight NLP Anonymization Framework for Question-Anchored Tutoring Dialogues

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 models (LLMs) are known to perpetuate stereotypes and exhibit biases. Various strategies have been proposed to mitigate these biases, but most work studies biases as a black-box problem without considering how concepts are represented within the model. We adapt techniques from representation engineering to study how the concept of "gender" is represented within LLMs. We introduce a new method that extracts concept representations via probability weighting without labeled data and efficiently selects a steering vector for measuring and manipulating the model's representation. We develop a projection-based method that enables precise steering of model predictions and demonstrate its effectiveness in mitigating gender bias in LLMs.

Unsupervised Concept Vector Extraction for Bias Control in LLMs

News articles often describe the same real-world event in strikingly different ways, shaping perception through framing rather than factual disagreement. However, traditional computational framing approaches often rely on coarse-grained topic classification, limiting their ability to capture subtle, event-level differences in how the same occurrences are presented across sources. We introduce Framing-divergent Event Coreference (FrECo), a novel task that identifies pairs of event mentions referring to the same underlying occurrence but differing in framing across documents to provide a event-centric lens for computational framing analysis. To support this task, we construct the high-agreement and diverse FrECo corpus. We evaluate the FrECo task on the corpus through supervised and preference-based tuning of large language models, providing strong baseline performance. To scale beyond the annotated data, we develop a bootstrapped mining pipeline that iteratively expands the training set with high-confidence FrECo pairs. Our approach enables scalable, interpretable analysis of how media frame the same events differently, offering a new lens for contrastive framing analysis at the event level.

Seeing the Same Story Differently: Framing‑Divergent Event Coreference for Computational Framing Analysis

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to perform new tasks using only a few demonstrations. However, in Named Entity Recognition (NER), existing ICL methods typically rely on task-agnostic semantic similarity for demonstration retrieval, which often yields less relevant examples and leads to inferior results. We introduce DEER, a training-free ICL approach that enables LLMs to make more informed entity predictions through the use of label-grounded statistics. DEER leverages token-level statistics from training labels to identify tokens most informative for entity recognition, enabling entity-focused demonstrations. It further uses these statistics to detect and refine error-prone tokens through a targeted reflection step. Evaluated on five NER datasets across four LLMs, DEER consistently outperforms existing ICL methods and achieves performance comparable to supervised fine-tuning. Further analyses demonstrate that DEER improves example retrieval, remains effective on both seen and unseen entities, and exhibits strong robustness in low-resource settings.

LLMs are Better Than You Think: Label-Guided In-Context Learning for Named Entity Recognition

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in complex multimodal tasks. While MLLMs excel at visual perception and reasoning in third-person and egocentric videos, they are prone to hallucinations, generating coherent yet inaccurate responses. We present EGOILLUSION, a first benchmark to evaluate MLLM hallucinations in egocentric videos. EGOILLUSION comprises 1,400 videos paired with 8,000 human-annotated open and closed-ended questions designed to trigger hallucinations in both visual and auditory cues in egocentric videos. Evaluations across ten MLLMs reveal significant challenges, including powerful models like GPT-4o and Gemini, achieving only 59% accuracy. EGOILLUSION lays the foundation in developing robust benchmarks to evaluate the effectiveness of MLLMs and spurs the development of better egocentric MLLMs with reduced hallucination rates. Our benchmark will be open-sourced for reproducibility

EGOILLUSION: Benchmarking Hallucinations in Egocentric Video Understanding

The rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) has empowered omni models to act as voice assistants capable of understanding spoken dialogues. These models can process multimodal inputs beyond text, such as speech and visual data, enabling more context-aware interactions. However, current benchmarks fall short in comprehensively evaluating how well these models generate context-aware responses, particularly when it comes to implicitly understanding fine-grained speech characteristics, such as pitch, emotion, timbre, and volume or the environmental acoustic context such as background sounds. Additionally, they inadequately assess the ability of models to align paralinguistic cues with complementary visual signals to inform their responses. To address these gaps, we introduce MultiVox, the first omni voice assistant benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of voice assistants to integrate spoken and visual cues including paralinguistic speech features for truly multimodal understanding. Specifically, MultiVox includes 1000 human-annotated and recorded speech dialogues that encompass diverse paralinguistic features and a range of visual cues such as images and videos. Our evaluation on 9 state-of-the-art models reveals that, although humans excel at these tasks, current models consistently struggle to produce contextually grounded responses. Our benchmark will be open-sourced.

MULTIVOX: A Benchmark for Evaluating Voice Assistants for Multimodal Interactions

With the growing adoption of machine learning models in critical domains, techniques for explaining differences between models have become essential for trust, debugging, and informed deployment. Previous approaches address this by identifying input transformations that cause divergent predictions or by learning joint surrogate models to align and contrast behaviors. These methods often require access to training data and do not produce natural language explanations. In this paper, we introduce SLED, a framework that generates faithful natural language explanations of when and how two ML models converge or diverge in their predictions. SLED first uses gradient-based optimization to synthesize input samples that highlight divergence and convergence patterns, and then leverages a large language model (LLM) to generate explanations grounded in these synthetic samples. Across both text-based (3 tasks, 7 models) and structured (10 tasks, 4 models) classification tasks, we show that SLED explanations are 18--24% more faithful than the strongest baselines. User studies also indicate that SLED explanations achieve a real-world simulatability of 63.5%. Importantly, SLED requires minimal access to training data and generalizes well to real-world samples, enabling transparent and data-efficient model comparison.

Explaining Differences Between Model Pairs in Natural Language through Sample Learning

Understanding causal language in informal discourse is a core yet underexplored challenge in NLP. Existing datasets largely focus on explicit causality in structured text, providing limited support for detecting implicit causal expressions, particularly those found in informal, user-generated social media posts. We introduce CausalTalk, a multi-level dataset of five years of Reddit posts (2020–2024) discussing public health related to the COVID-19 pandemic, among which 10,120 posts are annotated across four causal tasks: (1) binary causal classification, (2) explicit vs. implicit causality, (3) cause–effect span extraction, and (4) causal gist generation. Annotations comprise both gold-standard labels created by domain experts and silver-standard labels generated by GPT-4o and verified by human annotators.CausalTalk bridges fine-grained causal detection and gist-based reasoning over informal text. It enables benchmarking across both discriminative and generative models, and provides a rich resource for studying causal reasoning in social media contexts.

A Multi-Level Benchmark for Causal Language Understanding in Social Media Discourse

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely deployed in diverse scenarios, the extent to which they could tacitly spread misinformation emerges as a critical safety concern. Current research primarily evaluates LLMs on explicit false statements, overlooking how misinformation often manifests subtly as unchallenged premises in real-world interactions. We curated EchoMist, the first comprehensive benchmark for implicit misinformation, where false assumptions are embedded in the query to LLMs. EchoMist targets circulated, harmful, and ever-evolving implicit misinformation from diverse sources, including realistic human-AI conversations and social media interactions. Through extensive empirical studies on 15 state-of-the-art LLMs, we find that current models perform alarmingly poorly on this task, often failing to detect false premises and generating counterfactual explanations. We also investigate two mitigation methods, i.e., Self-Alert and RAG, to enhance LLMs' capability to counter implicit misinformation. Our findings indicate that EchoMist remains a persistent challenge and underscore the critical need to safeguard against the risk of implicit misinformation.

How to Protect Yourself from 5G Radiation? Investigating LLM Responses to Implicit Misinformation

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful analytical tool in mechanistic interpretability for large language models (LLMs), with growing success in applications beyond interpretability. Building on this momentum, we present a novel approach that leverages SAEs to enhance the general in-context learning (ICL) performance of LLMs. Specifically, we introduce Feature Detection through Prompt Variation (FDPV), which leverages the SAE’s remarkable ability to capture subtle differences between prompts, enabling efficient feature selection for downstream steering. In addition, we propose a novel steering method tailored to ICL—Selective In-Context Steering (SISTER)—grounded in recent insights from ICL research that LLMs utilize label words as key anchors. Our method yields a 3.5% average performance improvement across diverse text classification tasks and exhibits greater robustness to hyperparameter variations compared to standard steering approaches.

Toward Efficient Sparse Autoencoder-Guided Steering for Improved In-Context Learning in Large Language Models

Evaluating the ability of large language models (LLMs) to process lengthy contexts is critical, especially for retrieving query-relevant information embedded within them. We introduce Sequential-NIAH, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the capability of LLMs to extract sequential information items (known as \emph{needles}) from long contexts. The benchmark includes three needle generation pipelines: synthetic-temporal, real-temporal, and real-logical orders, with context lengths ranging from 8K to 128K, which comprises 14,000 samples (2,000 for testing). To facilitate the evaluation of this benchmark, we trained an evaluation model that assesses the correctness of LLM responses by comparing their completeness and sequential consistency against the ground truth, which provides a more reliable evaluation metric than GPT-4 or Claude. We conducted experiments on six well-known LLMs, revealing that even the best-performing model achieved a maximum accuracy of only 63.5% on test set of this benchmark. Further analysis highlights the growing challenges posed by increasing the context length or the number of needles, underscoring substantial room for improvement of LLMs. Additionally, noise analysis validates the reliability and challenge of the benchmark, making Sequential-NIAH an important reference for advancing research on long text information extraction capabilities of LLMs.

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Unsupervised Concept Vector Extraction for Bias Control in LLMs

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