China

Self-supervised speech models can be trained to efficiently recognize spoken words in naturalistic, noisy environments. However, we do not understand the types of linguistic representations these models use to accomplish this task. To address this question, we study how S3M variants optimized for word recognition represent phonological and morphological phenomena in frequent English noun and verb inflections. We find that their representations exhibit a global linear geometry which can be used to link English nouns and verbs to their regular inflected forms. This geometric structure does not directly track phonological or morphological units. Instead, it tracks the regular distributional relationships linking many word pairs in the English lexicon—often, but not always, due to morphological inflection. These findings point to candidate representational strategies that may support human spoken word recognition, challenging the presumed necessity of distinct linguistic representations of phonology and morphology.

EMNLP 2025

Emergent morpho-phonological representations in self-supervised speech models

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 powerful tools with profound societal impacts, yet their ability to generate responses to diverse and uncontrolled inputs leaves them vulnerable to adversarial attacks. While existing defenses often struggle to generalize across varying attack types, recent advancements in representation engineering offer promising alternatives. In this work, we propose a defense framework that formulates model defense as a contrastive representation learning (CRL) problem. Our method finetunes a model using a triplet-based loss combined with adversarial hard negative mining to encourage separation between benign and harmful representations. Our experimental results across multiple models demonstrate that our approach outperforms prior representation engineering-based defenses, improving robustness against both input-level and embedding-space attacks without compromising standard performance.

Improving Large Language Model Safety with Contrastive Representation Learning

Temporal Domain Generalization (TDG) aim at generalizing across temporal distribution shifts, e.g., lexical change over time, by predicting future models. Due to the prohibitive full model prediction cost on large-scale scenarios, recent TDG works only predict the classifier, but this limits generalization potential by failing to adjust other model components. To address this, we propose Temporal Experts Averaging (TEA), a novel TDG framework based on weight averaging that adjusts the entire model to maximize generalization potential while maintaining minimal computational overhead when scaling to large-scale datasets and models. Our theoretical analysis of weight averaging for TDG guided us to develop two steps that enhance generalization to future domains. First, we create expert models with functional diversity yet parameter similarity by fine-tuning a domain-agnostic base model on individual temporal domains while constraining weight changes. Second, we optimize the bias-variance tradeoff through adaptive averaging coefficients derived from modeling temporal weight trajectories in a principal component subspace and weighting experts based on their projected proximity to future domains in the subspace. Extensive experiments across 7 TDG benchmarks, 5 models, and 2 TDG settings reports TEA outperforms prior TDG methods by up to 69% while being up to 60x more efficient.

Scaling Up Temporal Domain Generalization via Temporal Experts Averaging

Clinical notes contain rich patient information, such as diagnoses or medications, making them valuable for *patient representation learning*. Recent advances in large language models have further improved the ability to extract meaningful representations from clinical texts. However, clinical notes are often missing—for example, 35\% of patients in real-world datasets lack them. In such cases, representations can be learned from other modalities such as structured data, chest X-rays, or radiology reports. Yet the availability of these modalities is influenced by clinical decision-making and varies across patients, resulting in modality missing-not-at-random (*MMNAR*) patterns. We propose a *causal representation learning* framework that leverages observed data and informative missingness in multimodal clinical records. It consists of: (1) a MMNAR-aware modality fusion module using large language models and other encoders to capture both patient health and reasons for missing data in representation learning; (2) a representation balancing module that improves generalization across missingness patterns, inspired by causal machine learning; and (3) a multitask prediction model, fine-tuned for each modality pattern using a rectifier to correct residual bias. On the MIMIC-IV dataset, our approach significantly outperforms recent baselines: AUC/APR increases by 16.83\%/27.21\% for hospital readmission, and by 6.86\%/10.15\% for ICU admission. Subgroup analyses confirm the value of modeling MMNAR for robust and generalizable clinical NLP.

Causal Representation Learning from Multimodal Clinical Records under Non-Random Modality Missingness

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant progress in Open-domain question answering (ODQA), yet most evaluations focus on English and assume locale-invariant answers across languages. This assumption neglects the cultural and regional variations that affect question understanding and answer, leading to biased evaluation in multilingual benchmarks. To address these limitations, we introduce XLQA, a novel benchmark explicitly designed for locale-sensitive multilingual ODQA. XLQA contains 3,000 English seed questions expanded to eight languages, with careful filtering for semantic consistency and human-verified annotations distinguishing locale-invariant and locale-sensitive cases. Our evaluation of five state-of-the-art multilingual LLMs reveals notable failures on locale-sensitive questions, exposing gaps between English and other languages due to a lack of locale-grounding knowledge. We provide a systematic framework and scalable methodology for assessing multilingual QA under diverse cultural contexts, offering a critical resource to advance real-world applicability of multilingual ODQA systems. Our findings suggest that disparities in training data distribution contribute to differences in both linguistic competence and locale-awareness across models.

XLQA: A Benchmark for Locale-Aware Multilingual Open-Domain Question Answering

As large language models (LLMs) integrate to society, understanding its awareness of context is fundamental to ensure safety and alignment. Past research has focused on situational awareness to examine the LLMs ability to recognize itself and circumstances but the ability to recognizing the conversational partner is overlooked. In this study, we introduce interlocutor awareness, the ability of LLMs to recognize and adapt to the identity and capabilities of their conversational partners, and present the first systematic evaluation of this phenomenon. Specifically, we first assess the capability of LLMs to infer the identity of their interlocutor across three tasks: mathematical reasoning, code completion, and conversational inference. Subsequently, we evaluate behavioral adaptation through interlocutor awareness---where LLMs modify their behavior based on who they are interacting with---along two dimensions: collaborative adaptation assessing whether ``sender'' models tailor their explanations within controlled math-solving frameworks, and adversarial tactics, which examine how knowledge of the interlocutor's identity influences a model's success at jailbreak. Our evaluation demonstrates that LLMs reliably identify same-family peers and tend to adapt their behavior based on the identity of their interaction partner. While our findings highlight the potential benefits of interlocutor awareness for optimizing multi-LLM collaboration, they also reveal novel risks related to AI safety and control.

Agent-to-Agent Theory of Mind: Testing Interlocutor Awareness among Large Language Models

Retrieval of previously fact-checked claims is a well-established task, whose automation can assist professional fact-checkers in the initial steps of information verification. Previous works have mostly tackled the task monolingually, i.e., having both the input and the retrieved claims in the same language. However, especially for languages with a limited availability of fact-checks and in case of global narratives, such as pandemics, wars, or international politics, it is crucial to be able to retrieve claims across languages. In this work, we examine strategies to improve the multilingual and crosslingual performance, namely selection of negative examples (in the supervised) and re-ranking (in the unsupervised setting). We evaluate all approaches on a dataset containing posts and claims in 47 languages (283 language combinations). We observe that the best results are obtained by using LLM-based re-ranking, followed by fine-tuning with negative examples sampled using a sentence similarity-based strategy. Most importantly, we show that crosslinguality is a setup with its own unique characteristics compared to the multilingual setup.

Multilingual vs Crosslingual Retrieval of Fact-Checked Claims: A Tale of Two Approaches

In the age of misinformation, hallucination---the tendency of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate non-factual or unfaithful responses---represents the main risk for their global utility. Despite LLMs becoming increasingly multilingual, the vast majority of research on detecting and quantifying LLM hallucination are (a) English-centric and (b) focus on machine translation (MT) and summarization, tasks that are less common ``in the wild'' than open information seeking. In contrast, we aim to quantify the extent of LLM hallucination across languages in knowledge-intensive long-form question answering (LFQA). To this end, we train a multilingual hallucination detection model and conduct a large-scale study across 30 languages and 6 open-source LLM families. We start from an English hallucination detection dataset and rely on MT to translate-train a detection model. We also manually annotate gold data for five high-resource languages; we then demonstrate, for these languages, that the estimates of hallucination rates are similar between silver (LLM-generated) and gold test sets, validating the use of silver data for estimating hallucination rates for other languages. For the final rates estimation, we build open-domain QA dataset for 30 languages with LLM-generated prompts and Wikipedia articles as references. Our analysis shows that LLMs, in absolute terms, hallucinate more tokens in high-resource languages due to longer responses, but that the actual hallucination rates (i.e., normalized for length) seems uncorrelated with the sizes of languages' digital footprints. We also find that smaller LLMs hallucinate more, and significantly, LLMs with broader language support display higher hallucination rates.

How Much Do LLMs Hallucinate across Languages? On Realistic Multilingual Estimation of LLM Hallucination

Instructing language models with user intent requires large instruction datasets, which are only available for a limited set of languages. In this paper, we explore alternatives to conventional instruction adaptation pipelines in low-resource scenarios. We assume a realistic scenario for low-resource languages, where only the following are available: corpora in the target language, existing open-weight multilingual base and instructed backbone LLMs, and synthetically generated instructions sampled from the instructed backbone. We present a comprehensive set of experiments for Basque that systematically study different combinations of these components evaluated on benchmarks and human preferences from 1680 participants. Our conclusions show that target language corpora are essential, with synthetic instructions yielding robust models, and, most importantly, that using as backbone an instruction-tuned model outperforms using a base non-instructed model, and improved results when scaling up. Using Llama 3.1 instruct 70B as backbone our model comes near frontier models of much larger sizes for Basque, without using any Basque data apart from the 1.2B word corpora. We release code, models, instruction datasets, and human preferences to support full reproducibility in future research on low-resource language adaptation.

Instructing Large Language Models for Low-Resource Languages: A Systematic Study for Basque

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated impressive performances across diverse domains. However, how safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) benefits from enhanced reasoning capabilities against jailbreak queries remains unexplored. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose Reasoning-to-Defend (R2D), a novel training paradigm that integrates a safety-aware reasoning mechanism into LLMs' generation. This enables self-evaluation at each step of the reasoning process, forming safety pivot tokens as indicators of the safety status of responses. Furthermore, in order to improve the accuracy of predicting pivot tokens, we propose Contrastive Pivot Optimization (CPO), which enhances the model's perception of the safety status of given dialogues. LLMs dynamically adjust their response strategies during reasoning, significantly enhancing their safety capabilities defending jailbreak attacks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that R2D effectively mitigates various attacks and improves overall safety, while maintaining the original performances. This highlights the substantial potential of safety-aware reasoning in improving robustness of LRMs and LLMs against various jailbreaks.

Reasoning-to-Defend: Safety-Aware Reasoning Can Defend Large Language Models from Jailbreaking

Extremely low-resource languages, especially those written in rare scripts, remain largely unsupported by large language models (LLMs). This is due in part to compounding factors such as the lack of training data. This paper delivers the first comprehensive analysis of whether LLMs can acquire such languages purely via in-context learning (ICL), with or without auxiliary alignment signals, and how these methods compare to parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). We systematically evaluate 20 under-represented languages across three state-of-the-art multilingual LLMs. Our findings highlight the limitation of PEFT when both language and its script are extremely under-represented by the LLM. In contrast, zero-shot ICL with language alignment is impressively effective on extremely low-resource languages, while few-shot ICL or PEFT is more beneficial for languages relatively better represented by LLMs. For LLM practitioners working on extremely low-resource languages, we summarise guidelines grounded by our results on adapting LLMs to low-resource languages, e.g., avoiding fine-tuning a multilingual model on languages of unseen scripts.

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Improving Large Language Model Safety with Contrastive Representation Learning

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