China

The exposure of large language models (LLMs) to copyrighted material during pre-training raises concerns about unintentional copyright infringement post deployment. This has driven the development of &quot;copyright takedown&quot; methods—post-training approaches aimed at preventing models from generating content substantially similar to copyrighted ones. While current mitigation approaches are somewhat effective for average-case risks, we demonstrate that they overlook worst-case copyright risks exhibited by the existence of long, verbatim quotes from copyrighted sources. We propose BloomScrub, a remarkably simple yet highly effective inference-time approach that provides certified copyright takedown. Our method repeatedly interleaves quote detection with rewriting techniques to transform potentially infringing segments. By leveraging efficient data sketches (Bloom filters), our approach enables scalable copyright screening—even for large-scale real-world corpora. When quotes beyond a length threshold cannot be removed, the system can abstain from responding, offering certified risk reduction. Experimental results show that BloomScrub reduces infringement risk, preserves utility, and accommodates different levels of enforcement stringency with adaptive abstention. Our results suggest that lightweight, inference-time methods can be surprisingly effective for copyright prevention.

EMNLP 2025

Certified Mitigation of Worst-Case LLM Copyright Infringement

The exposure of large language models (LLMs) to copyrighted material during pre-training raises concerns about unintentional copyright infringement post deployment. This has driven the development of "copyright takedown" methods—post-training approaches aimed at preventing models from generating content substantially similar to copyrighted ones. While current mitigation approaches are somewhat effective for average-case risks, we demonstrate that they overlook worst-case copyright risks exhibited by the existence of long, verbatim quotes from copyrighted sources. We propose BloomScrub, a remarkably simple yet highly effective inference-time approach that provides certified copyright takedown. Our method repeatedly interleaves quote detection with rewriting techniques to transform potentially infringing segments. By leveraging efficient data sketches (Bloom filters), our approach enables scalable copyright screening—even for large-scale real-world corpora. When quotes beyond a length threshold cannot be removed, the system can abstain from responding, offering certified risk reduction. Experimental results show that BloomScrub reduces infringement risk, preserves utility, and accommodates different levels of enforcement stringency with adaptive abstention. Our results suggest that lightweight, inference-time methods can be surprisingly effective for copyright prevention.

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.

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) has emerged as a promising approach for detecting hallucinations and low-quality output of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, obtaining proper uncertainty scores is complicated by the conditional dependency between the generation steps of an autoregressive LLM, because it is hard to model it explicitly. Here, we propose to learn this dependency from attention-based features. In particular, we train a regression model that leverages LLM attention maps, probabilities on the current generation step, and recurrently computed uncertainty scores from previously generated tokens. To incorporate the recurrent features, we also suggest a two-staged training procedure. Our experimental evaluation on ten datasets and three LLMs shows that the proposed method is highly effective for selective generation, achieving substantial improvements over rivaling unsupervised and supervised approaches.

Unconditional Truthfulness: Learning Unconditional Uncertainty of Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the tendency to hallucinate, i.e., to sporadically generate false or fabricated information. This presents a major challenge, as hallucinations often appear highly convincing and users generally lack the tools to detect them. Uncertainty quantification (UQ) provides a framework for assessing the reliability of model outputs, aiding in the identification of potential hallucinations. In this work, we introduce pre-trained UQ heads: supervised auxiliary modules for LLMs that substantially enhance their ability to capture uncertainty compared to unsupervised UQ methods. Their strong performance stems from the powerful Transformer architecture in their design and informative features derived from LLM attention maps. Experimental evaluation shows that these heads are highly robust and achieve state-of-the-art performance in claim-level hallucination detection across both in-domain and out-of-domain prompts. Moreover, these modules demonstrate strong generalization to languages they were not explicitly trained on. We pre-train a collection of UQ heads for popular LLM series, including Mistral, Llama, and Gemma 2. We publicly release both the code and the pre-trained heads.

A Head to Predict and a Head to Question: Pre-trained Uncertainty Quantification Heads for Hallucination Detection in LLM Outputs

Meta4XNLI: A Cross-lingual Parallel Corpus for Metaphor Detection and Interpretation

As automatic metrics become increasingly stronger and widely adopted, the risk of unintentionally "gaming the metric'' during model development rises. This issue is caused by metric interference (MINT), i.e., the use of the same or related metrics for both model tuning and evaluation. MINT can misguide practitioners into being overoptimistic about the performance of their systems: as system outputs become a function of the interfering metric, their estimated quality loses correlation with human judgments. In this work, we analyze two common cases of MINT in machine translation-related tasks: filtering of training data, and decoding with quality signals. Importantly, we find that MINT strongly distorts instance-level metric scores, even when metrics are not directly optimized for—questioning the common strategy of leveraging a different, yet related metric for evaluation that is not used for tuning. To address this problem, we propose MINTAdjust, a method for more reliable evaluation under MINT. MINTAdjust takes as input scores of other metrics on outputs from models not subject to interference, and produces adjusted scores for the interfering metric. On the WMT24 MT shared task test set, MINTAdjust ranks translations and systems more accurately than state-of-the-art-metrics across a majority of language pairs, especially for high-quality systems. Furthermore, MINTAdjust outperforms AutoRank, the ensembling method used by the organizers.

Adding Chocolate to MINT: Mitigating Metric Interference in Machine Translation

We present BenCzechMark (BCM), the first comprehensive Czech language benchmark designed for large language models, offering diverse tasks, multiple task formats, and multiple evaluation metrics. Its duel scoring system is grounded in statistical significance theory and uses aggregation across tasks inspired by social preference theory. Our benchmark encompasses 50 challenging tasks, with corresponding test datasets, primarily in native Czech, with 14 newly collected ones. These tasks span 8 categories and cover diverse domains, including historical Czech news, essays from pupils or language learners, and spoken word.

Furthermore, we collect and clean BUT-Large Czech Collection, the largest publicly available clean Czech language corpus, and use it for (i) contamination analysis and (ii) continuous pretraining of the first Czech-centric 7B language model with Czech-specific tokenization. We use our model as a baseline for comparison with publicly available multilingual models. Lastly, we release and maintain a leaderboard with existing 50 model submissions, where new model submissions can be made at https://huggingface.co/spaces/CZLC/BenCzechMark.

A Czech-centric Multitask and Multimetric Benchmark for Large Language Models with Duel Scoring Mechanism

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enhances adaptability while reducing computational costs. However, fine-tuning can compromise safety alignment, even with benign data, increasing susceptibility to harmful outputs. Existing safety alignment methods struggle to capture complex parameter shifts, leading to suboptimal safety-utility trade-offs. To address this issue, we propose Safe Pruning LoRA (SPLoRA), a novel pruning-based approach that selectively removes LoRA layers that weaken safety alignment, improving safety while preserving performance. At its core, we introduce Empirical-DIEM (E-DIEM), a dimension-insensitive similarity metric that effectively detects safety misalignment in LoRA-adapted models. We conduct extensive experiments on LLMs fine-tuned with mixed of benign and malicious data, and purely benign datasets, evaluating SPLoRA across utility, safety, and reliability metrics. Results demonstrate that SPLoRA outperforms state-of-the-art safety alignment techniques, significantly reducing safety risks while maintaining or improving model performance and reliability. Additionally, SPLoRA reduces inference overhead, making it a scalable and efficient solution for deploying safer and more reliable LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/AoShuang92/SPLoRA.

Safe Pruning LoRA: Robust Distance-Guided Pruning for Safety Alignment in Adaptation of LLMs

Text anonymization is the process of removing or obfuscating information from textual data to protect the privacy of individuals. This process inherently involves a complex trade-off between privacy protection and information preservation, where stringent anonymization methods can significantly impact the text's utility for downstream applications. Evaluating the effectiveness of text anonymization proves challenging from both privacy and utility perspectives, as there is no universal benchmark that can comprehensively assess anonymization techniques across diverse, and sometimes contradictory contexts. We present Tau-Eval, an open-source framework for benchmarking text anonymization methods through the lens of privacy and utility task sensitivity. A Python library, code, documentation and tutorials are publicly available.

Tau-Eval: A Unified Evaluation Framework for Useful and Private Text Anonymization

This work introduces UnityAI-Guard, a framework for binary toxicity classification targeting low-resource Indian languages. While existing systems predominantly cater to high-resource languages, UnityAI-Guard addresses this critical gap by developing state-of-the-art models for identifying toxic content across diverse Brahmic/Indic scripts. Our approach achieves an impressive average F1-score of 84.23% across seven languages, leveraging a dataset of 567k training instances and 30k manually verified test instances. By advancing multilingual content moderation for linguistically diverse regions, UnityAI-Guard also provides public API access to foster broader adoption and application.

UnityAI Guard: Pioneering Toxicity Detection Across Low-Resource Indian Languages

We present SynthTextEval, a toolkit for conducting comprehensive evaluations of synthetic text. The fluency of large language model (LLM) outputs has made synthetic text potentially viable for numerous applications, such as reducing the risks of privacy violations in the development and deployment of AI systems in high-stakes domains. Realizing this potential, however, requires principled consistent evaluations of synthetic data across multiple dimensions: its utility in downstream systems, the fairness of these systems, the risk of privacy leakage, general distributional differences from the source text, and qualitative feedback from domain experts. SynthTextEval allows users to conduct evaluations along all of these dimensions over synthetic data that they upload or generate using the toolkit's generation module. While our toolkit can be run over any data, we highlight its functionality and effectiveness over datasets from two high-stakes domains: healthcare and law. By consolidating and standardizing evaluation metrics, we aim to improve the viability of synthetic text, and in-turn, privacy-preservation in AI development.

SynthTextEval: Synthetic Text Data Generation and Evaluation for High-Stakes Domains

Understanding when and how linguistic knowledge emerges during language model training remains a central challenge for interpretability. Most existing tools are post hoc, rely on scalar metrics, or require nontrivial integration effort, making comprehensive interpretability analysis difficult to deploy and maintain. We introduce TRACE, a modular toolkit for training and inference-time interpretability analysis of transformer models. It enables lightweight, in-training analysis of linguistic and representational signals, including features probing, intrinsic dimensionality, Hessian curvature, and output diagnostics. It integrates with ABSynth, a controllable synthetic corpus generator that provides structured annotations for precise evaluation of linguistic feature acquisition. Experiments with autoregressive transformers demonstrate that TRACE reveals developmental phenomena such as early syntactic emergence, delayed semantic acquisition, and representational compression, signals overlooked by traditional scalar metrics such as loss or accuracy. With minimal integration effort, the tool enables layer-wise diagnostics, convergence-based early stopping, and detection of structural errors, making transformer analysis interpretable, actionable, and reproducible.

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Unconditional Truthfulness: Learning Unconditional Uncertainty of Large Language Models

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