China

The utilization of conversational AI systems by leveraging Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques to solve customer problems
has been on the rise with the rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the absence of a company-specific dedicated knowledge base is a major barrier to the integration of conversational AI systems in contact centers. To this end, we introduce AI Knowledge Assist, a system that extracts knowledge in the form of question-answer (QA) pairs from historical customer‑agent conversations to automatically build a knowledge base. Fine‑tuning a lightweight LLM on internal data demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, outperforming larger closed-source LLMs. More specifically, empirical evaluation on 20 companies demonstrates that the proposed AI Knowledge Assist system that leverages the LLaMA-3.1-8B model eliminates the cold‑start gap in contact centers by achieving above 90\% accuracy in answering information‑seeking questions. This enables immediate deployment of RAG-powered chatbots.

EMNLP 2025

AI Knowledge Assist: An Automated Approach for the Creation of Knowledge Bases for Conversational AI Agents

knowledge assist

large language models

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

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." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

Collaborative filtering (CF) is widely adopted in industrial recommender systems (RecSys) for modeling user-item interactions across numerous applications, but often struggles with cold-start and data-sparse scenarios. Recent advancements in pre-trained large language models (LLMs) with rich semantic knowledge, offer promising solutions to these challenges. However, deploying LLMs at scale is hindered by their significant computational demands and latency. In this paper, we propose a novel and scalable LLM-RecSys framework, LLMInit, designed to integrate pretrained LLM embeddings into CF models through selective initialization strategies. Specifically, we identify the embedding collapse issue observed when CF models scale and match the large embedding sizes in LLMs and avoid the problem by introducing efficient sampling methods, including, random, uniform, and variance-based selections. Comprehensive experiments conducted on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that LLMInit significantly improves recommendation performance while maintaining low computational costs, offering a practical and scalable solution for industrial applications. To facilitate industry adoption and promote future research, we provide open-source access to our implementation at https://github.com/DavidZWZ/LLMInit.

LLMInit: A Free Lunch from Large Language Models for Selective Initialization of Recommendation

Effective product schema modeling is fundamental to e-commerce success, enabling accurate product discovery and superior customer experience. However, traditional manual schema modeling processes are severely bottlenecked, producing fewer tens of attributes per month—insufficient for modern e-commerce platforms managing thousands of product types. This paper introduces AttributeForge, the first framework to automate end-to-end product schema modeling using Large Language Models (LLMs). Our key innovation lies in orchestrating 43 specialized LLM agents through strategic workflow patterns to handle the complex interdependencies in schema generation. The framework incorporates two novel components: MC2-Eval, a comprehensive validation system that assesses schemas against technical, business, and customer experience requirements; and AutoFix, an intelligent mechanism that automatically corrects modeling defects through iterative refinement. Deployed in production, AttributeForge achieves an 88X increase in modeling throughput while delivering superior quality—a 59.83\% Good-to-Good conversion rate compared to 37.50\% for manual approaches. This significant improvement in both speed and quality enables e-commerce platforms to rapidly adapt their product schemas to evolving market needs.

AttributeForge: An Agentic LLM Framework for Automated Product Schema Modeling

In this work, we present the first embedding model specifically designed for Industry 4.0 applications, targeting the semantics of industrial asset operations. Given natural language tasks related to specific assets, our model retrieves relevant items and generalizes to queries involving similar assets, such as identifying sensors relevant to an asset’s failure mode. We systematically construct nine asset-specific datasets using an expert-validated knowledge base reflecting real operational scenarios. To ensure contextually rich embeddings, we augment queries with Large Language Models, generating concise entity descriptions that capture domain-specific nuances. Across five embedding models ranging from BERT (110M) to gte-Qwen (7B), we observe substantial in-domain gains: \textbf{HIT@1 +54.2\%, MAP@100 +50.1\%, NDCG@10 +54.7\%} on average. Ablation studies reveal that (a) LLM-based query augmentation significantly improves embedding quality; (b) contrastive objectives without in-batch negatives are more effective for tasks with many relevant items; and (c) balancing positives and negatives in batches is essential. We experimented out-of-domain tasks using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline.
\textbf{We open-source implementation and experiments.}

Generalized Embedding Models for Industry 4.0 Applications

Routing incoming queries to the most cost-effective LLM while maintaining response quality poses a fundamental challenge in optimizing performance-cost trade-offs for large-scale commercial systems.
We present IPR---a quality-constrained Intelligent Prompt Routing framework that dynamically selects optimal models based on predicted response quality and user-specified tolerance levels.
IPR introduces three key innovations: (1) a modular architecture with lightweight quality estimators trained on 1.5M prompts annotated with calibrated quality scores, enabling fine-grained quality prediction across model families; (2) a user-controlled routing mechanism with tolerance parameter τ in [0,1] that provides explicit control over quality-cost trade-offs; and (3) an extensible design using frozen encoders with model-specific adapters, reducing new model integration from days to hours. 
To rigorously train and evaluate IPR, we curate an industrial-level dataset IPRBench, a comprehensive benchmark containing 1.5 million examples with response quality annotations across 11 LLM candidates.
Deployed on a major cloud platform, IPR achieves 43.9\% cost reduction while maintaining quality parity with the strongest model in the Claude family and processes requests with sub-150ms latency.

IPR: Intelligent Prompt Routing with User-Controlled Quality-Cost Trade-offs

Interpreting visual scenes with high-level reasoning is essential for many real-world applications—from autonomous systems to content moderation—but training and maintaining Vision-Language Models (VLMs) remains resource-intensive and opaque. In this work, we present CAPSTONE, a lightweight and modular framework designed for industrial settings. Instead of relying on multimodal training or fine-tuning large models, CAPSTONE transforms outputs from off-the-shelf vision models into structured text prompts that can be interpreted by a frozen Large Language Model (LLM). This plug-and-play architecture enables reasoning over visual input without access to raw pixels, dramatically reducing computational cost and complexity. On the POPE dataset, our system—using a 7B LLM—outperforms several fully trained VLMs in zero-shot evaluations, demonstrating strong generalization without retraining. CAPSTONE offers a scalable and interpretable alternative for companies looking to integrate visual reasoning capabilities without the burden of full-scale VLM pipelines.

CAPSTONE: Composable Attribute‑Prompted Scene Translation for Zero‑Shot Vision–Language Reasoning

In the domain of text-to-image generative models, biases inherent in training datasets often propagate into generated content, posing significant ethical challenges, particularly in socially sensitive contexts. We introduce FairCoT, a novel framework that enhances fairness in text-to-image models through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning within multimodal generative large language models. FairCoT employs iterative CoT refinement to systematically mitigate biases, and dynamically adjusts textual prompts in real time, ensuring diverse and equitable representation in generated images. By integrating iterative reasoning processes, FairCoT addresses the limitations of zero-shot CoT in sensitive scenarios, balancing creativity with ethical responsibility. Experimental evaluations across popular text-to-image systems—including DALL-E and various Stable Diffusion variants—demonstrate that FairCoT significantly enhances fairness and diversity without sacrificing image quality or semantic fidelity. By combining robust reasoning, lightweight deployment, and extensibility to multiple models, FairCoT represents a promising step toward more socially responsible and transparent AI-driven content generation.

FairCoT: Enhancing Fairness in Text-to-Image Generation via Chain of Thought Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit social biases inherited from their training data. While existing benchmarks evaluate bias by term-based mode through direct term associations between demographic terms and bias terms, LLMs have become increasingly adept at avoiding biased responses, leading to seemingly low levels of bias. However, biases persist in subtler, contextually hidden forms that traditional benchmarks fail to capture. We introduce the Description-based Bias Benchmark (DBB), a novel dataset designed to assess bias at the semantic level that bias concepts are hidden within naturalistic, subtly framed contexts in real-world scenarios rather than superficial terms. We analyze six state-of-the-art LLMs, revealing that while models reduce bias in response at the term level, they continue to reinforce biases in nuanced settings. Data, code, and results are available at \url{https://github.com/JP-25/Description-based-Bias-Benchmark}.

What's Not Said Still Hurts: A Description-Based Evaluation Framework for Measuring Social Bias in LLMs

We introduce SQLSpace, a human-interpretable, generalizable, compact representation for text-to-SQL examples, where natural language questions are translated to executable SQL queries. This representation is derived semi-automatically with minimal human intervention. We demonstrate its utility in evaluation by closely analyzing (i) the composition of widely-used benchmarks and (ii) model performance at a granular level beyond overall accuracy scores. Our analyses not only reveal example subsets that challenge all models, including those with strongest overall performance, but more importantly, specific example classes where smaller, cheaper models perform comparably to frontier models. Finally, we show a practical application of SQLSpace at inference time, using our representation to predict which natural language questions will likely yield incorrect SQL from a text-to-SQL model, and rewriting such questions to improve accuracy.

SQLSpace: A Representation Space for Text-to-SQL to Discover and Mitigate Robustness Gaps

Effective disaster management requires timely access to accurate and contextually relevant information. Existing Information Retrieval (IR) benchmarks, however, focus primarily on general or specialized domains, such as medicine or finance, neglecting the unique linguistic complexity and diverse information needs encountered in disaster management scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce DisastIR, the first comprehensive IR evaluation benchmark specifically tailored for disaster management. DisastIR comprises 9,600 diverse user queries and more than 1.3 million labeled query-passage pairs, covering 48 distinct retrieval tasks derived from six search intents and eight general disaster categories that include 301 specific event types. Our evaluations of 30 state-of-the-art retrieval models demonstrate significant performance variances across tasks, with no single model excelling universally. Furthermore, comparative analyses reveal significant performance gaps between general-domain and disaster management-specific tasks, highlighting the necessity of disaster management-specific benchmarks for guiding IR model selection to support effective decision-making in disaster management scenarios. All source codes and DisastIR are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Disaster_IR/.

DisastIR: A Comprehensive Information Retrieval Benchmark for Disaster Management

Large Language Models (LLMs) are expected to provide helpful and harmless responses, yet they often exhibit \textit{sycophancy}—conforming to user beliefs regardless of factual accuracy or ethical soundness. Prior research on sycophancy has primarily focused on single-turn factual correctness, overlooking the dynamics of real-world interactions. In this work, we introduce \textbf{SYCON Bench} (\textbf{SY}cophantic \textbf{CON}formity benchmark), a novel evaluation suite that assesses sycophantic behavior in multi-turn, free-form conversational settings. Our benchmark measures how quickly a model conforms to the user (\textit{Turn of Flip}) and how frequently it shifts its stance under sustained user pressure (\textit{Number of Flip}). Applying \textsc{SYCON Bench} to 17 LLMs across three real-world scenarios, we find that sycophancy remains a prevalent failure mode. Our analysis shows that alignment tuning amplifies sycophantic behavior, whereas model scaling and reasoning optimization strengthen the model's ability to resist undesirable user views. Reasoning models generally outperform instruction-tuned models but often fail when they over-index on logical exposition instead of directly addressing the user's underlying beliefs. Finally, we evaluate four additional prompting strategies and demonstrate that adopting a third-person perspective reduces sycophancy by up to 63.8% in debate scenario.

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