China

Creating high-quality, large-scale datasets for large language models (LLMs) often relies on resource-intensive, GPU-accelerated models for quality filtering, making the process time-consuming and costly. This dependence on GPUs limits accessibility for organizations lacking significant computational infrastructure. To address this issue, we introduce the Lightweight, Purpose-driven (LP) Data Pipeline, a framework that operates entirely on CPUs to streamline the processes of dataset extraction, filtering, and curation. Based on our four core principles, the LP Data Pipeline significantly reduces preparation time and cost while maintaining high data quality. Importantly, our pipeline enables the creation of purpose-driven datasets tailored to specific domains and languages, enhancing the applicability of LLMs in specialized contexts. We anticipate that our pipeline will lower the barriers to LLM development, enabling a wide range of organizations to access LLMs more easily.

EMNLP 2025

LP Data Pipeline: Lightweight, Purpose-driven Data Pipeline for Large Language 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.

Talent search is a cornerstone of modern recruitment systems, yet existing approaches often struggle to capture nuanced job-specific preferences, model recruiter behavior at a fine-grained level, and mitigate noise from subjective human judgments. We present a novel framework that enhances talent search effectiveness and delivers substantial business value through two key innovations: (i) leveraging LLMs to extract fine-grained recruitment signals from job descriptions and historical hiring data, and (ii) employing a role-aware multi-gate MoE network to capture behavioral differences across recruiter roles. To further reduce noise, we introduce a multi-task learning module that jointly optimizes click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate (CVR), and resume matching relevance. Experiments on real-world recruitment data and online A/B testing show relative AUC gains of 1.70% (CTR) and 5.97% (CVR), and a 17.29% lift in click-through conversion rate. These improvements reduce dependence on external sourcing channels, enabling an estimated annual cost saving of millions of CNY.

Enhancing Talent Search Ranking with Role-Aware Expert Mixtures and LLM-based Fine-Grained Job Descriptions

The reliability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in real-world settings is often undermined by sensitivity to irrelevant or distracting visual context, an aspect not captured by existing evaluation metrics. We introduce the Patch Context Robustness Index (PCRI), the first systematic and interpretable score for quantifying MLLM robustness to variations in visual context granularity, measuring performance changes between localized image patches and full-image input.


Applying PCRI to 19 state-of-the-art MLLMs across 15 vision-language benchmarks, we find that most leading models remain brittle to background noise, with only a few, such as InternVL2-26B and Qwen2VL-72B, demonstrating consistent robustness across tasks. PCRI analysis also highlights how different model architectures handle and integrate visual context, offering actionable diagnostic insight for both researchers and practitioners.


PCRI enables rigorous comparison of context robustness, supporting principled model selection and guiding the development of future architectures and training strategies for robust, real-world deployment.

PCRI: Measuring Context Robustness in Multimodal Models for Enterprise Applications

We present a novel approach to conversational agent evaluation using Persona-driven User Simulations based on Large Language Models (LLMs). Our methodology first uses LLMs to generate diverse customer personas, which are then used to configure a single LLM-based user simulator. This simulator evaluates SalesBot 2.0, a proactive conversational sales agent. We introduce a dataset of these personas, along with corresponding goals and conversation scenarios, enabling comprehensive testing across different customer types with varying assertiveness levels and precision of needs. Our evaluation framework assesses both the simulator's adherence to persona instructions and the bot's performance across multiple dimensions, combining human annotation with LLM-as-a-judge assessments using commercial and open-source models. Results demonstrate that our LLM-based simulator effectively emulates nuanced customer roles, and that cross-selling strategies can be implemented with minimal impact on customer satisfaction, varying by customer type.

Evaluating Conversational Agents with Persona-driven User Simulations based on Large Language Models: A Sales Bot Case Study

Online shoppers often initiate their journey with only a vague idea of what they need, forcing them to iterate over search results until they eventually discover a suitable product. We formulate this scenario as product demand clarification: starting from an ambiguous query, an agent must iteratively ask clarifying questions, progressively refine the user's intent, and retrieve increasingly relevant items. To tackle this challenge, we present **ProductAgent**, a fully autonomous conversational information-seeking agent that couples large language models with a set of domain-specific tools. ProductAgent maintains a structured memory of the dialogue, summarizes candidate products into concise feature statistics, generates strategic clarification questions, and performs retrieval over hybrid (symbolic + dense) indices in a closed decision loop. To measure real–world effectiveness, we further introduce **PROCLARE**, a PROduct CLArifying REtrieval benchmark that pairs ProductAgent with an LLM-driven user simulator, thereby enabling large-scale and reproducible evaluation without human annotation. On 2,000 automatically generated sessions, retrieval metrics improve monotonically with the number of turns, validating that ProductAgent captures and refines user intent through dialogue.

ProductAgent: Benchmarking Conversational Product Search Agent with Asking Clarification Questions

Chinese Spelling Correction (CSC) aims to detect and correct spelling errors in given sentences. 
Recently, multi-domain CSC has gradually attracted the attention of researchers because it is more practicable.
In this paper, we focus on the key flaw of the CSC model when adapting to multi-domain scenarios: the tendency to forget previously acquired knowledge upon learning new domain-specific knowledge (i.e., **catastrophic forgetting**).
To address this, we propose a novel model-agnostic **M**ulti-stage **K**nowledge **T**ransfer (**MKT**) framework with an evolving teacher model and dynamic distillation weights for knowledge transfer in each domain, rather than focusing solely on new domain knowledge.
It deserves to be mentioned that we are the first to apply continual learning methods to the multi-domain CSC task. 
Experiments. prove our method's effectiveness over traditional approaches, highlighting the importance of overcoming catastrophic forgetting to enhance model performance.

MKT: A Multi-Stage Knowledge Transfer Framework to Mitigate Catastrophic Forgetting in Multi-Domain Chinese Spelling Correction

This paper presents Ryt AI, an LLM-native agentic framework that powers Ryt Bank to enable customers to execute core financial transactions through natural language conversation. This represents the first global regulator-approved deployment worldwide where conversational AI functions as the primary banking interface, in contrast to prior assistants that have been limited to advisory or support roles. Built entirely in-house, Ryt AI is powered by ILMU, a closed-source LLM developed internally, and replaces rigid multi-screen workflows with a single dialogue orchestrated by four LLM-powered agents (Guardrails, Intent, Payment, and FAQ). Each agent attaches a task-specific LoRA adapter to ILMU, which is hosted within the bank's infrastructure to ensure consistent behavior with minimal overhead. Deterministic guardrails, human-in-the-loop confirmation, and a stateless audit architecture provide defense-in-depth for security and compliance. The result is Banking Done Right: demonstrating that regulator-approved natural-language interfaces can reliably support core financial operations under strict governance.

Banking Done Right: Redefining Retail Banking with Language-Centric AI

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with backpropagation--even for a subset of parameters such as LoRA--can be much more memory-consuming than inference and is often deemed impractical for resource-constrained mobile devices. Alternative methods, such as zeroth-order optimization (ZO), can greatly reduce the memory footprint but come at the cost of significantly slower model convergence (10× to 100× more steps than backpropagation). We propose a memory-efficient implementation of backpropagation (MeBP) on mobile devices that allows flexible trade-offs between memory usage and compute time, while converging faster and achieving better performance than the ZO baseline. We verify the effectiveness of MeBP on an iPhone 15 Pro Max and show that various LLMs, ranging from 0.5B to 4B parameters, can be fine-tuned using less than 1GB of memory.

Memory-Efficient Backpropagation for Fine-Tuning LLMs on Resource-Constrained Mobile Devices

Running Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices is constrained by high compute and memory demands—posing a barrier for real-time applications in industries like healthcare, education, and embedded systems. Current solutions such as quantization, pruning, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) offer only partial optimizations and often compromise on speed or accuracy.


We introduce HOLA, an end-to-end optimization framework for efficient LLM deployment. Internally, it leverages Hierarchical Speculative Decoding (HSD) for faster inference without quality loss. Externally, AdaComp-RAG adjusts retrieval complexity based on context needs. Together with Lo-Bi, which blends structured pruning (LoRA) and quantization, HOLA delivers significant gains: +17.6% EMA on GSM8K, +10.5% MCA on ARC, and reduced latency and memory on edge devices like Jetson Nano—proving both scalable and production-ready. Our code is available at: \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HOLA_Codebase-FB1E/README.md}

LLMs on a Budget? Say HOLA

E-commerce ad platforms enforce content policies and review created ads before publication, with casing requirements playing a critical role in maintaining readability and brand consistency. Existing NER-based transformer models have been widely used for casing correction, but they process characters independently in a classification-based manner, failing to capture sentence level contextual dependencies, making them less reliable when handling unseen or ad-specific terms, e.g., brand names. LLMs like ChatGPT offer better generalization to proper nouns, but they are expensive and have high latency. Besides, generative model can suffer from hallucination. To address these challenges, we propose a two-stage approach: (1) an LLM-based Agent leveraging Chain-of-Actions (CoA) to enforce casing policies while accurately handling ads-specific terms, such as brand names, and (2) a lightweight generative model that preserves the LLM Agent's knowledge while significantly reducing latency and costs. We design a novel in-context decoding strategy, which avoids hallucinations. Our approach outperforms NER-based methods and achieves near-LLM Agent performance, making it a scalable and efficient solution for real-world ad compliance automation.

Learning from LLM Agents: In-Context Generative Models for Text Casing in E-Commerce Ads

We report on experiments on information extraction (IE) from EU Acquis, the European Union law. We introduce a new IE task of Information Provision Activity Requirement Extraction, which focuses on the identification of text fragments which introduce an obligation to provide information and extraction of structured information therefrom on the key entities involved and temporal modalities. We compare various technologies for this task, including, knowledge-, classical ML-, transformer-, and generative AI-based approaches on a benchmark corpus specifically created for this study.

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Next from EMNLP 2025

Enhancing Talent Search Ranking with Role-Aware Expert Mixtures and LLM-based Fine-Grained Job Descriptions

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads