China

LLM agents show promise for vulnerability testing. We however lack benchmarks to evaluate and compare solutions. AutoPenBench covers this need offering an open benchmark for the evaluation of vulnerability testing agents. It includes 33 tasks, ranging from introductory exercises to actual vulnerable systems. It supports MCP, enabling the comparison of agent capabilities. We introduce milestones per task, allowing the comparison of intermediate steps where agents struggle. To illustrate the use of AutoPenBench we evaluate autonomous and human-assisted agent architectures. The former achieves 21\% success rates, insufficient for production, while human-assisted agents reach 64\% success, indicating a viable industrial path. AutoPenBench is offered as open source and enables fair comparison of agents.

EMNLP 2025

AutoPenBench: A Vulnerability Testing Benchmark for Generative Agents

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 enterprise systems, tasks like API integration, ETL pipeline creation, customer record merging, and data consolidation rely on accurately aligning attributes that refer to the same real-world concept but differ across schemas. This semantic attribute alignment is critical for enabling schema unification, reporting, and analytics. The challenge is amplified in schema only settings where no instance data is available due to ambiguous names, inconsistent descriptions, and varied naming conventions.


We propose a hybrid, unsupervised framework that combines the contextual reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the stability of embedding-based similarity and schema grouping to address token limitations and hallucinations. Our method operates solely on metadata and scales to large schemas by grouping attributes and refining LLM outputs through embedding-based enhancement, justification filtering, and ranking. Experiments on real-world healthcare schemas show strong performance, highlighting the effectiveness of the framework in privacy-constrained scenarios.

Group, Embed and Reason: A Hybrid LLM and Embedding Framework for Semantic Attribute Alignment

Safety is a paramount concern in clinical chatbot applications, where inaccurate or harmful responses can lead to serious consequences. Existing methods—such as guardrails and tool-calling—often fall short in addressing the nuanced demands of the clinical domain. In this paper, we introduce TACOS(Taxonomy of Comprehensive Safety for Clinical Agents), a fine-grained, 21-class taxonomy that integrates safety filtering and tool selection into a single user intent classification step. TACOS covers a wide spectrum of clinical and non-clinical queries, explicitly modeling varying safety thresholds and external tool dependencies. To validate our framework, we curate a TACOS-annotated dataset and perform extensive experiments. Our results demonstrate the value of a new taxonomy specialized for clinical agent settings, and reveal valuable insights about train data distribution and pretrained knowledge of base models.

Taxonomy of Comprehensive Safety for Clinical Agents

Text-based telemedicine has become increasingly common, yet the quality of medical advice in doctor-patient interactions is often judged more on how advice is communicated rather than its clinical accuracy. To address this, we introduce Dr.Copilot, a multi-agent large language model (LLM) system that supports Romanian-speaking doctors by evaluating and enhancing the presentation quality of their written responses. Rather than assessing medical correctness, Dr.Copilot provides feedback along 17 interpretable axes. The system comprises of three LLM agents with prompts automatically optimized via DSPy. Designed with low-resource Romanian data and deployed using open-weight models, it delivers real-time specific feedback to doctors within a telemedicine platform. Empirical evaluations and live deployment with 41 doctors show measurable improvements in user reviews and response quality, marking one of the first real-world deployments of LLMs in Romanian medical settings.

Dr. Copilot: A Multi-Agent Prompt Optimized Assistant for Improving Patient-Doctor Communication in Romanian

We present CLARITY (Clinical Assistant for Routing, Inference, and Triage), an AI-driven platform designed to facilitate patient-to-specialist routing, clinical consultations, and severity assessment of patients' conditions. Its hybrid architecture combines a Finite State Machine (FSM) for structured dialogue flows with collaborative agents that employ Large Language Model (LLM) to analyze symptoms and prioritize referrals to appropriate specialists. Built on a modular microservices framework, CLARITY ensures safe, efficient, and robust performance, flexible and readily scalable to meet the demands of existing workflows and IT solutions in healthcare.


We report integration of our clinical assistant into a large-scale nation-wide inter-hospital IT platform, with over 55,000 content-rich user dialogues completed within the two months of deployment, 2,500 of which were expert-annotated for a consequent validation. The validation results show that CLARITY surpasses human-level performance in terms of the first-attempt routing precision, naturally requiring up to 3 times shorter duration of the consultation than with a human.

CLARITY: Clinical Assistant for Routing, Inference, and Triage

The lack of high-quality test collections challenges Information Retrieval (IR) in specialized domains. This work addresses this issue by comparing supervised classifiers against zero-shot Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated relevance annotation in the oil and gas industry, using human expert judgments as a benchmark. A supervised classifier, trained on limited expert data, outperforms LLMs, achieving an F1-score that surpasses even a second human annotator. The study also empirically confirms that LLMs are susceptible to unfairly prefer technologically similar retrieval systems. While LLMs lack precision in this context, a well-engineered classifier offers an accurate and practical path to scaling evaluation datasets within a human-in-the-loop framework that empowers, not replaces, human expertise.

Analysis of Automated Document Relevance Annotation for Information Retrieval in Oil and Gas Industry

Classifying contact center interactions into a large number of categories is critical for downstream analytics, but challenging due to high label cardinality, and cost constraints. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer flexibility for such tasks, existing methods degrade with increasing label space, showing significant inconsistencies and sensitivity to label ordering. We propose a scalable, cost-effective two-step retrieval-augmented classification framework, enhanced with a multi-view representation of labels. Our method significantly improves accuracy and consistency over baseline LLM approaches. Experiments across 4 private and 5 open datasets yield performance improvements of upto 14.6% while reducing inference cost by 60-91% compared to baseline approaches.


Scalable and Cost Effective High-Cardinality Classification with LLMs via Multi-View Label Representations and Retrieval Augmentation

We introduce an incremental summarization system for customer support agents that intelligently determines when to generate concise bullet notes during conversations, reducing agents' cognitive load and redundant review. Our approach combines a fine-tuned Mixtral-8×7B model for continuous note generation with a DeBERTa-based classifier to filter trivial content. Agent edits refine the online notes generation and regularly inform offline model retraining, closing the agent edits feedback loop. Deployed in production, our system achieved a 3\% reduction in case handling time compared to bulk summarization (with reductions of up to 9\% in highly complex cases), alongside high agent satisfaction ratings from surveys. These results demonstrate that incremental summarization with continuous feedback effectively enhances summary quality and agent productivity at scale.

Incremental Summarization for Customer Support via Progressive Note-Taking and Agent Feedback

We present a novel neurosymbolic framework for RDF-to-text generation, in which the model is “trained” through collaborative interactions among multiple LLM agents rather than traditional backpropagation. The LLM agents produce rule-based Python code for a generator for the given domain, based on RDF triples only, with no in-domain human reference texts. The resulting system is fully interpretable, requires no supervised training data, and generates text nearly instantaneously using only a single CPU. 
Our experiments on the WebNLG and OpenDialKG data show that outputs produced by our approach reduce hallucination, with only slight fluency penalties compared to finetuned or prompted language models.

LLM Agents Implement an NLG System from Scratch: Building Interpretable Rule-Based RDF-to-Text Generators

Every year, the European Union and its member states allocate millions of euros to fund various development initiatives. However, the increasing number of applications received for these programs often creates significant bottlenecks in evaluation processes, due to limited human capacity. In this work, we detail the real-world deployment of AI-assisted evaluation within the pipeline of two government initiatives: (i) corporate applications aimed at international business expansion, and (ii) citizen reimbursement claims for investments in energy-efficient home improvements. While these two cases involve distinct evaluation procedures, our findings confirm that AI effectively enhanced processing efficiency and reduced workload across both types of applications. Specifically, in the citizen reimbursement claims initiative, our solution increased reviewer productivity by 20.1%, while keeping a negligible false-positive rate based on our test set observations. These improvements resulted in an overall reduction of more than 2 months in the total evaluation time, illustrating the impact of AI-driven automation in large-scale evaluation workflows.

Leveraging LLMs to Streamline the Review of Public Funding Applications

Answering "Where is the X button?" with "It's next to the Y button" is unhelpful if the user knows neither location. Useful answers require obvious landmarks as a reference point. We address this by generating from a vehicle dashboard diagram a spatial knowledge graph (SKG) that shows the spatial relationship between a dashboard component and its nearby landmarks and using the SKG to help answer questions. We evaluate three distinct generation pipelines (Per-Attribute, Per-Component, and a Single-Shot baseline) to create the SKG using Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). On a new 65-vehicle dataset, we demonstrate that a decomposed Per-Component pipeline is the most effective strategy for generating a high-quality SKG; the graph produced by this method, when evaluated with a novel Significance score, identifies landmarks achieving 71.3% agreement with human annotators. This work enables downstream QA systems to provide more intuitive, landmark-based answers.

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Next from EMNLP 2025

Group, Embed and Reason: A Hybrid LLM and Embedding Framework for Semantic Attribute Alignment

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads