China

Understanding the core dimensions of conceptual semantics is fundamental to uncovering how meaning is organized in language and the brain. Existing approaches often rely on predefined semantic dimensions that offer only broad representations, overlooking finer conceptual distinctions. This paper proposes a novel framework to investigate the subdimensions underlying coarse-grained semantic dimensions. Specifically, we introduce a textbfDisentangled textbfContinuous textbfSemantic textbfRepresentation textbfModel (textbfDCSRM) that decomposes word embeddings from large language models into multiple sub-embeddings, each encoding specific semantic information. Using these subembeddings, we identify a set of interpretable semantic subdimensions. To assess their neural plausibility, we apply voxel-wise encoding models to map these subdimensions to brain activation. Our work offers a more fine-grained interpretable semantic subdimensions of conceptual meaning. Further analyses reveal that semantic dimensions are structured according to distinct principles, with polarity emerging as a key factor driving their decomposition into subdimensions. The neural correlates of the identified subdimensions support their cognitive and neuroscientific plausibility.

EMNLP 2025

Discovering Semantic Subdimensions through Disentangled Conceptual Representations

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.

Peer review is central to academic publishing, but the growing volume of submissions is straining the process. This motivates the development of computational approaches to support peer review. While each review is tailored to a specific paper, reviewers often make assessments according to certain aspects such as Novelty, which reflect the values of the research community. This alignment creates opportunities for standardizing the reviewing process, improving quality control, and enabling computational support. While prior work has demonstrated the potential of aspect analysis for peer review assistance, the notion of aspect remains poorly formalized. Existing approaches often derive aspects from review forms and guidelines, yet data-driven methods for aspect identification are underexplored. To address this gap, our work takes a bottom-up approach: we propose an operational definition of aspect and develop a data-driven schema for deriving aspects from a corpus of peer reviews. We introduce a dataset of peer reviews augmented with aspects and show how it can be used for community-level review analysis. We further show how the choice of aspects can impact downstream applications, such as LLM-generated review detection. Our results lay a foundation for a principled and data-driven investigation of review aspects, and pave the path for new applications of NLP to support peer review.

Identifying Aspects in Peer Reviews

In the era of prosperity of large language models (LLMs), hallucination remains a serious issue hindering LLMs' expansion and reliability. Predicting the presence (and absence) of certain knowledge in LLMs could aid the hallucination avoidance. However, the token-based generation mode of LLM is different from the knowledge storage structure in the form of triples, which makes it difficult to accurately evaluate the knowledge boundary of LLM. We approach this problem from a novel perspective and, for the first time, introduce the concept of {\em token knowledge} in large language models. Consequently, we propose a token knowledge dataset construction method and use the intermediate states during inference to train probes. This allows us to predict if a specific token will appear in the LLM’s generated sequence, without even generating a single token. Our approach unlocks the model's latent potential, enhancing its accuracy in assessing token knowledge from about 60% to over 90%, with strong out-of-distribution generalization by training on just a few dozen prompts. Finally, we apply KEGT to enhance a state-of-the-art knowledge boundary detection method, achieving improved performance while reducing computational time by over 90%. Furthermore, KEGT enables prevention of hallucinations in certain cases by leveraging its guidance in the token-level knowledge semantic space. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/KEGT.

Token Knowledge: A New Perspective For Knowledge in Large Language Models

Recent studies have explored integrating large langucage models (LLMs) into recommendation systems but face several challenges, including training-induced bias and bottlenecks from serialized architecture.To effectively address these issues, we propose a Query-to-Recommendation, a parallel recommendation framework that decouples LLMs from candidate pre-selection and instead enables direct retrieval over the entire item pool. Our framework connects LLMs and recommendation models in a parallel manner, allowing each component to independently utilize its strengths without interfering with the other. In this framework, LLMs are utilized to generate feature-enriched item descriptions and personalized user queries, allowing for capturing diverse preferences and enabling rich semantic matching in a zero-shot manner. To effectively combine the complementary strengths of LLM and collaborative signals, we introduce an adaptive reranking strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate an improvement in performance up to 57%, while also improving the novelty and diversity of recommendations.

Rethinking LLM-Based Recommendations: A Personalized Query-Driven Parallel Integration

We introduce TR-MTEB, the first large-scale, task-diverse benchmark designed to evaluate sentence embedding models for Turkish. Covering six core tasks as classification, clustering, pair classification, retrieval, bitext mining, and semantic textual similarity, TR-MTEB incorporates 26 high-quality datasets, including native and translated resources. To complement this benchmark, we construct a corpus of 34.2 million weakly supervised Turkish sentence pairs and train two Turkish-specific embedding models using contrastive pretraining and supervised fine-tuning. Evaluation results show that our models, despite being trained on limited resources, achieve competitive performance across most tasks and significantly improve upon baseline monolingual models. All datasets, models, and evaluation pipelines are publicly released to facilitate further research in Turkish natural language processing and low-resource benchmarking.

TR-MTEB: A Comprehensive Benchmark and Embedding Model Suite for Turkish Sentence Representations

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in specialized tasks, including medical problem-solving. However, most studies predominantly focus on English-language contexts. This study introduces a novel benchmark dataset based on Polish medical licensing and specialization exams (LEK, LDEK, PES). The dataset, sourced from publicly available materials provided by the Medical Examination Center and the Chief Medical Chamber, includes Polish medical exam questions, along with a subset of parallel Polish-English corpora professionally translated for foreign candidates. By structuring a benchmark from these exam questions, we evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs, spanning general-purpose, domain-specific, and Polish-specific models, and compare their performance with that of human medical students and doctors. Our analysis shows that while models like GPT-4o achieve near-human performance, challenges persist in cross-lingual translation and domain-specific understanding. These findings highlight disparities in model performance across languages and medical specialties, emphasizing the limitations and ethical considerations of deploying LLMs in clinical practice.

Polish-English medical knowledge transfer: A new benchmark and results

Despite the state-of-the-art performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), these models often suffer from hallucinations, which can undermine their performance in critical applications. In this work, we propose SAFE, a novel framework for detecting and mitigating hallucinations by leveraging Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs). While hallucination detection techniques and SAEs have been explored independently, their synergistic application in a comprehensive system, particularly for hallucination-aware query enrichment, has not been fully investigated. To validate the effectiveness of SAFE, we evaluate it on two models with available SAEs across four diverse cross-domain datasets designed to assess hallucination problems. Empirical results demonstrate that SAFE consistently improves query generation accuracy and mitigates hallucinations across all datasets, achieving accuracy improvements of up to 29.45%.

SAFE: A Sparse Autoencoder-Based Framework for Robust Query Enrichment and Hallucination Mitigation in LLMs

Since the middle of the 20th century, a fierce battle is being fought between symbolic and continuous approaches to language and cognition. The success of deep learning models, and LLMs in particular, has been alternatively taken as showing that the continuous camp has won, or dismissed as an irrelevant engineering development. However, in this position paper I argue that deep learning models for language actually represent a synthesis between the two traditions. This is because 1) deep learning architectures allow for both continuous/distributed and symbolic/discrete-like representations and computations; 2) models trained on language make use this flexibility. In particular, I review recent research in mechanistic interpretability that showcases how a substantial part of morphosyntactic knowledge is encoded in a near-discrete fashion in LLMs. This line of research suggests that different behaviors arise in an emergent fashion, and models flexibly alternate between the two modes (and everything in between) as needed. This is possibly one of the main reasons for their wild success; and it is also what makes them particularly interesting for the study of language and cognition. Is it time for peace?

LLMs as a synthesis between symbolic and distributed approaches to language

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved significant progress in tasks like visual question answering and document understanding. However, their potential to comprehend embodied environments and navigate within them remains underexplored. In this work, we first study the challenge of open-vocabulary object navigation by introducing DivScene, a large-scale dataset with 4,614 houses across 81 scene types and 5,707 kinds of target objects. Our dataset provides a much greater diversity of target objects and scene types than existing datasets, enabling a comprehensive task evaluation. We evaluated various methods with LVLMs and LLMs on our dataset and found that current models still fall short of open-vocab object navigation ability. Then, we fine-tuned LVLMs to predict the next action with CoT explanations. We observe that LVLM's navigation ability can be improved substantially with only BFS-generated shortest paths without any human supervision, surpassing GPT-4o by over 20% in success rates.

DivScene: Towards Open-Vocabulary Object Navigation with Large Vision Language Models in Diverse Scenes

We investigate whether Transformer-based language models, trained solely on Hangul text, can learn the semantics of Sino-Korean (SK) morphemes, which are fundamental to Korean vocabulary. Using BERT_BASE and fastText, we conduct controlled experiments with target words and their “real” vs. “fake” neighbors—pairs that share a Hangul syllable representing the same SK morpheme vs. those that share only the Hangul syllable. Our results show that while both models—especially BERT—distinguish real and fake pairs to some extent, their performance is primarily driven by the frequency of each experimental word rather than a true understanding of SK morphemes. These findings highlight the limits of distributional learning for morpheme-level understanding and emphasize the need for explicit morphological modeling or Hanja-aware strategies to improve semantic representation in Korean language models.

Beyond Distribution: Investigating Language Models' Understanding of Sino-Korean Morphemes

Metadata extraction is essential for cataloging and preserving datasets, enabling effective research discovery and reproducibility, especially given the current exponential growth in scientific research. While Masader \cite{alyafeai2021masader} laid the groundwork for extracting a wide range of metadata attributes from Arabic NLP datasets' scholarly articles, it relies heavily on manual annotation. In this paper, we present MOLE, a framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically extract metadata attributes from scientific papers covering datasets of languages other than Arabic. Our schema-driven methodology processes entire documents across multiple input formats and incorporates robust validation mechanisms for consistent output. Additionally, we introduce a new benchmark to evaluate the research progress on this task. Through systematic analysis of context length, few-shot learning, and web browsing integration, we demonstrate that modern LLMs show promising results in automating this task, highlighting the need for further future work improvements to ensure consistent and reliable performance.

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