China

Slot filling is a crucial subtask in spoken language understanding (SLU), traditionally implemented as a cascade of speech recognition followed by one or more natural language understanding (NLU) components. The recent advent of speech-based large language models (speechLLMs), which integrate speech and textual foundation models, has opened new avenues for achieving speech understanding tasks in a more unified, generative, and instruction-following manner while promising data and compute efficiency with zero-shot abilities, generalizing to unseen slot labels. We address the slot filling task by creating an empirical upper bound for the task, identifying performance, robustness, and generalization gaps, and proposing improvements to the training data, architecture, and training strategies to bridge the gap. We show that each of these measures reduces the gap substantially, while highlighting practical challenges and providing empirical guidance and insights for harnessing these emerging models.

EMNLP 2025

SpeechLLMs for Large-scale Contextualized Zero-shot Slot Filling

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.

In customer-oriented industries, compliance-guaranteed chatbots are essential for delivering accurate, verifiable responses. Retrieval-based systems leverage a Match-and-Respond mechanism with predefined knowledge bases of human-verified question-answer (QA) pairs, providing hallucination-free responses. To effectively handle diverse customer inquiries, augmenting the knowledge base with similar questions that maintain semantic consistency and increase schematic diversity is crucial for improved query matching. In this paper, we define the Similar Question Generation (SQG) task for LLM training and inference, presenting context-aware methods for generating similar questions through a cost-efficient one-to-many paradigm. This approach facilitates broader semantic exploration and better alignment with the source question-answer pairs. We also propose combinatorial optimization techniques to construct in-context prompt demonstrations and to select an optimal subset of similar questions for knowledge base expansion. Experiments on a conversational QA-based SQG dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods in both quantitative and human evaluations. A 92\% user satisfaction rate in deployed chatbot systems, reflecting an 18\% relative improvement, further highlights the practical advantages of the proposed augmentation approach in ensuring compliance and enhancing customer service chatbot applications.

Augmenting Compliance Guaranteed Conversational AI: Context-Aware Knowledge Base Expansion with LLMs and Combinatorial Optimization

LLMs often fail to meet specialized needs of distinct user groups due to their one-size-fits-all approach, and there is limited understanding of what personalization each group expects.
To address this, we propose GPA a group-aware personalization framework that captures context-specific preference variations and steers LLMs accordingly.
Our approach involves: (1) Group-Aware Preference Extraction, which distills divergent preferences from real-world conversation logs into interpretable rubrics, and (2) Tailored Response Generation, using (a) GPA-CT, which adapts responses using learnt rubrics, and (b) GPA-FT, which finetunes models using rubric-guided synthetic data.
Automatic and Human evaluations confirm that GPA improves group alignment without compromising perfomance on standard instruction-following benchmarks.

Group Preference Alignment: Customizing LLM Responses from In-Situ Conversations Only When Needed

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4o and o1 have demonstrated strong performance on clinical natural language processing (NLP) tasks across multiple medical benchmarks. Nonetheless, two high-impact NLP tasks — structured tabular reporting from nurse dictations and medical order extraction from doctor-patient consultations — remain underexplored due to data scarcity and sensitivity, despite active industry efforts. Practical solutions to these real-world clinical tasks can significantly reduce the documentation burden on healthcare providers, allowing greater focus on patient care. In this paper, we investigate these two challenging tasks using private and open-source clinical datasets, evaluating the performance of both open- and closed-weight LLMs, and analyzing their respective strengths and limitations. Furthermore, we propose an agentic pipeline for generating realistic, non-sensitive nurse dictations, enabling structured extraction of clinical observations. To support further research in both areas, we release SYNUR and SIMORD, the first open-source datasets for nurse observation extraction and medical order extraction.

Empowering Healthcare Practitioners with Language Models: Structuring Speech Transcripts in Two Real-World Clinical Applications

Entity Linking (EL) has traditionally relied on large annotated datasets and extensive model fine-tuning. While recent few-shot methods leverage large language models (LLMs) through prompting to reduce training requirements, they often suffer from inefficiencies due to expensive LLM-based reasoning. ARTER (Adaptive Routing and Targeted Entity Reasoning) presents a structured pipeline that achieves high performance without deep fine-tuning by strategically combining candidate generation, context-based scoring, adaptive routing, and selective reasoning. ARTER computes a small set of complementary signals (both embedding and LLM-based) over the retrieved candidates to categorize contextual mentions into easy and hard cases. The cases are then handled by low-computational entity linker (e.g. ReFinED) and more expensive targeted LLM-based reasoning respectively. On standard benchmarks, ARTER outperforms ReFinED by up to +4.13\%, with an average gain of +2.47\% on 5 out of 6 datasets, and performs comparably to pipelines using LLM-based reasoning for all mentions, while being twice efficient in terms of the number of LLM tokens.

Leveraging the Power of Large Language Models in Entity Linking via Adaptive Routing and Targeted Reasoning

The ubiquity of payment networks generates vast transactional data encoding rich consumer and merchant behavioral patterns. Recent foundation models for transaction analysis process tabular data sequentially but rely on index-based representations for categorical merchant fields, causing substantial semantic information loss by converting rich textual data into discrete tokens. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can address this limitation through superior semantic understanding, their computational overhead challenges real-time financial deployment. We introduce a hybrid framework that uses LLM-generated embeddings as semantic initializations for lightweight transaction models, balancing interpretability with operational efficiency. Our approach employs multi-source data fusion to enrich merchant categorical fields and a one-word constraint principle for consistent embedding generation across LLM architectures. We systematically address data quality through noise filtering and context-aware enrichment. Experiments on large-scale transaction datasets demonstrate significant performance improvements across multiple transaction understanding tasks.

Enhancing Foundation Models in Transaction Understanding with LLM-based Sentence Embeddings

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate accurate and reliable responses that are grounded in retrieved context. However, LLMs often generate inconsistent outputs for semantically equivalent inputs, a problem exacerbated by limited consistency-focused data and the limitations of existing fine-tuning methods for improving consistency. We propose a new approach combining systematic synthetic data generation, triplet loss for better embeddings, and a novel layer-wise model merging approach. Using consistency-aware weights derived from intermediate layer activations, our method effectively integrates knowledge from specialized models. Experimental results how that our merged model significantly enhances output consistency, achieving approximately 47.5% improvement in response similarity over the baseline, thus offering a practical solution for increasing the the reliability of an industrial RAG system.

Harmonizing Diverse Models: A Layer-wise Merging Strategy for Consistent Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) hold significant promise for transforming digital health by enabling automated medical question answering. However, ensuring these models meet critical industry standards for factual accuracy, usefulness, and safety remains a challenge, especially for open-source solutions. We present a rigorous benchmarking framework via a dataset of over 1,000 health questions. We assess model performance across honesty, helpfulness, and harmlessness. Our results highlight trade-offs between factual reliability and safety among evaluated models---Mistral-7B, BioMistral-7B-DARE, and AlpaCare-13B. AlpaCare-13B achieves the highest accuracy (91.7%) and harmlessness (0.92), while domain-specific tuning in BioMistral-7B-DARE boosts safety (0.90) despite smaller scale. Few-shot prompting improves accuracy from 78% to 85%, and all models show reduced helpfulness on complex queries, highlighting challenges in clinical QA. Our code is available at: \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TTT-C21B/README.md}

Truth, Trust, and Trouble: Medical AI on the Edge

In a technology company, quality of customer service that involves providing
troubleshooting assistance and advice to customers is a crucial asset.
Often, insights from historical customer service data are used to make decisions related to future product offerings. In this paper, we address the challenging problem of automatic assignment of product names and software version labels to customer Service Requests (SRs) related to BLIND, a company in the networking domain.
We study the effectiveness of state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) in assigning the correct product name codes and software versions from several possible label options and their ``non-canonical'' mentions in the associated SR data. To this end, we frame the assignment as a multiple-choice question answering task instead of conventional prompts and devise, to our knowledge, a novel pipeline of employing a classifier for filtering inputs to the LLM for saving usage costs. On our experimental dataset based on real SRs, we are able to correctly identify product name and software version labels when they are mentioned with over 90% accuracy while cutting LLM costs by ~40-60% on average, thus providing a viable solution for practical deployment.

On Assigning Product and Software Codes to Customer Service Requests with Large Language Models

Despite recent advancements in Multilingual Information Retrieval (MLIR), a significant gap remains between research and practical deployment. Many studies assess MLIR performance in isolated settings, limiting their applicability to real-world scenarios.
In this work, we leverage the unique characteristics of the Quranic multilingual corpus to examine the optimal strategies to develop an ad-hoc IR system for the Islamic domain that is designed to satisfy users' information needs in multiple languages. 
We prepared eleven retrieval models employing four training approaches: monolingual, cross-lingual, translate-train-all, and a novel mixed method combining cross-lingual and monolingual techniques. 
Evaluation on an in-domain dataset demonstrates that the mixed approach achieves promising results across diverse retrieval scenarios. Furthermore, we provide a detailed analysis of how different training configurations affect the embedding space and their implications for multilingual retrieval effectiveness.
Finally, we discuss deployment considerations, emphasizing the cost-efficiency of deploying a single versatile, lightweight model for real-world MLIR applications.

Efficient and Versatile Model for Multilingual Information Retrieval of Islamic Text: Development and Deployment in Real-World Scenarios

Repetitive practice with isomorphic math problems is crucial for mathematics education. To automate the creation of such problems at scale, recent techniques using Large Language Models(LLM) have shown promise, yet they remain unsuitable for production environments due to their failure to ensure mathematical correctness and structural consistency. To bridge this gap, we introduce the task of Isomorphic Math Problem Generation (IMPG) and propose Computational Blueprints for Isomorphic Twins (CBIT) to tackle it. In this framework, the LLM authors a reusable program that generates problems, rather than the problem text itself. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CBIT achieves mathematical accuracy, structural consistency, and efficiency. Furthermore, problems generated via CBIT shows competitive performance against those from human experts when deployed in a real-world educational setting.

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Next from EMNLP 2025

Augmenting Compliance Guaranteed Conversational AI: Context-Aware Knowledge Base Expansion with LLMs and Combinatorial Optimization

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

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