China

Formulating information retrieval as a variant of generative modeling, specifically using autoregressive models to generate relevant identifiers for a given query, has recently attracted considerable attention. However, its application to personalized sticker retrieval remains largely unexplored and presents unique challenges: existing relevance-based generative retrieval methods typically lack personalization, leading to a mismatch between diverse user expectations and the retrieved results. To address this gap, we propose PEARL, a novel generative framework for personalized sticker retrieval, and make two key contributions: (i) To encode user-specific sticker preferences, we design a representation learning model to learn discriminative user representations. It is trained on three prediction tasks that leverage personal information and click history; and (ii) To generate stickers aligned with a user&#39;s query intent, we propose a novel intent-aware learning objective that prioritizes stickers associated with higher-ranked intents. Empirical results from both offline evaluations and online tests demonstrate that PEARL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

EMNLP 2025

A Generative Framework for Personalized Sticker Retrieval

Formulating information retrieval as a variant of generative modeling, specifically using autoregressive models to generate relevant identifiers for a given query, has recently attracted considerable attention. However, its application to personalized sticker retrieval remains largely unexplored and presents unique challenges: existing relevance-based generative retrieval methods typically lack personalization, leading to a mismatch between diverse user expectations and the retrieved results. To address this gap, we propose PEARL, a novel generative framework for personalized sticker retrieval, and make two key contributions: (i) To encode user-specific sticker preferences, we design a representation learning model to learn discriminative user representations. It is trained on three prediction tasks that leverage personal information and click history; and (ii) To generate stickers aligned with a user's query intent, we propose a novel intent-aware learning objective that prioritizes stickers associated with higher-ranked intents. Empirical results from both offline evaluations and online tests demonstrate that PEARL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

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.

We introduce BiMediX2, a bilingual (Arabic-English) Bio-Medical EXpert Large Multimodal Model that supports text-based and image-based medical interactions. It enables multi-turn conversation in Arabic and English and supports diverse medical imaging modalities, including radiology, CT, and histology. To train BiMediX2, we curate BiMed-V, an extensive Arabic-English bilingual healthcare dataset consisting of 1.6M samples of diverse medical interactions. This dataset supports a range of medical Large Language Model (LLM) and Large Multimodal Model (LMM) tasks, including multi-turn medical conversations, report generation, and visual question answering (VQA). We also introduce BiMed-MBench, the first Arabic-English medical LMM evaluation benchmark, verified by medical experts. BiMediX2 demonstrates excellent performance across multiple medical LLM and LMM benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results in medical VQA, report generation, and summarization. On BiMed-MBench, BiMediX2 outperforms existing methods by over 9% in English and more than 20% in Arabic evaluations. Additionally, it surpasses GPT-4 by approximately 9% in UPHILL factual accuracy evaluations and excels in various medical VQA, report generation, and report summarization tasks. Our trained models, instruction set, and source code will be made publicly available.

BiMediX2 : Bio-Medical EXpert LMM for Diverse Medical Modalities

Augmenting neural machine translation with external memory at decoding time, in the form of k-nearest neighbors machine translation (k-NN MT), is a well-established strategy for increasing translation performance. k-NN MT retrieves, at the token level, a set of tokens that occurred in the most similar contexts recorded in a prepared data store, using hidden state representations of translation contexts as vector lookup keys. One of the main disadvantages of this method is the high computational cost and memory requirements. Since an exhaustive search is not feasible in large data stores practitioners commonly use approximate k-NN lookup, yet even such algorithms are a bottleneck. In contrast to research directions seeking to accelerate k-NN MT by reducing data store size or the number of lookup calls, we pursue an orthogonal direction based on the performance properties of approximate k-NN lookup data structures. In particular, we propose encouraging angular dispersion of the neural hidden representations of contexts. We show that improving dispersion leads to better balance in the retrieval data structures, accelerating retrieval and slightly improving translations.

Angular Dispersion Accelerates k-Nearest Neighbors Machine Translation

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing through their remarkable capabilities in understanding and executing diverse tasks. While supervised fine-tuning, particularly in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) scenarios, has proven effective for enhancing task-specific performance, it often leads to catastrophic forgetting, where models lose their previously acquired knowledge and general capabilities. Existing solutions either require access to general instruction data or face limitations in preserving the model's original distribution. To overcome these limitations, we propose SelfAug, a novel self-distribution alignment method. By aligning distributions through the logits of input sequences, SelfAug preserves the model’s semantic distribution, thereby simultaneously mitigating catastrophic forgetting and improving downstream task performance. Through extensive experiments, we show that SelfAug achieves a better balance between downstream task learning and the retention of general capabilities compared to existing methods. Our comprehensive empirical analysis reveals a direct correlation between distribution shifts and the severity of catastrophic forgetting in RAG scenarios, particularly highlighting how the absence of RAG capabilities in general instruction tuning leads to significant distribution shifts during fine-tuning.

SelfAug: Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Distribution Self-Alignment

Keyword extraction involves identifying the most descriptive words in a document, allowing automatic categorisation and summarisation of large quantities of diverse textual data. Relying on the insight that real-world keyword detection often requires handling of diverse content, we propose a novel supervised keyword extraction approach based on the mixture of experts (MoE) technique. MoE uses a learnable routing sub-network to direct information to specialised experts, allowing them to specialise in distinct regions of the input space. SEKE, a mixture of Specialised Experts for supervised Keyword Extraction, uses DeBERTa as the backbone model and builds on the MoE framework, where experts attend to each token, by integrating it with a Long short-term memory (LSTM) network, to allow successful extraction even on smaller corpora, where specialisation is harder due to lack of training data. The MoE framework also provides an insight into inner workings of individual experts, enhancing the explainability of the approach. We benchmark SEKE on multiple English datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance compared to strong supervised and unsupervised baselines. Our analysis reveals that depending on data size and type, experts specialise in distinct syntactic and semantic components, such as punctuation, stopwords, parts-of-speech, or named entities. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SEKE_keyword_extraction-79FC.

SEKE: Specialised Experts for Keyword Extraction

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made significant strides in multimodal comprehension, thanks to extensive pre-training and fine-tuning on large-scale visual datasets. However, despite their robust textual safety mechanisms, they remain vulnerable to harmful visual inputs. Existing safeguards—typically relying on pre-filtering or fine-tuning—incur high costs and diminish overall utility. To address this critical vulnerability, we introduce SafeCLIP, a lightweight method that leverages LVLMs' inherent multimodal alignment for zero-shot toxic image detection. By projecting CLIP’s discarded CLS token into its text space and matching it with toxic descriptors, SafeCLIP detects harmful content without any architectural changes—adding minimal latency and enabling dynamic safety corrections during inference and fine-tuning. Experiments show that SafeCLIP achieves a 66.9% defense success rate with only 3.2% false positive rate and 7.2% overhead. In contrast, state-of-the-art methods achieve 52.9% success but have a 10.7% false positive rate and 210% overhead. Our work demonstrates that leveraging inherent multimodal alignment can yield efficient, low-cost LVLM safety. Code is available at \url{anonymous.4open.science/r/safeclip-2C01}.

Zero-Shot Defense Against Toxic Images via Inherent Multimodal Alignment in LVLMs

As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) advance, their large-scale architectures pose challenges for deployment in resource-constrained environments. In the age of large models, where energy efficiency, computational scalability, and environmental sustainability are paramount, the development of lightweight and high-performance models is critical for real-world applications. As such, we propose a lightweight MLLM framework for end-to-end visual question answering. Our proposed approach centres on BreezeCLIP, a compact yet powerful vision-language encoder optimised for efficient multimodal understanding. With only 1.2 billion parameters overall, our model significantly reduces computational cost while achieving performance comparable to standard-size MLLMs. Experiments conducted on multiple datasets further validate its effectiveness in balancing accuracy and efficiency. The modular and extensible design enables generalisation to broader multimodal tasks. The proposed lightweight vision-language framework is denoted as BcQLM (BreezeCLIP-enhanced Q-Gated Multimodal Language Model). It offers a promising path toward deployable MLLMs under practical hardware constraints.

BcQLM: Efficient Vision-Language Understanding with Distilled Q-Gated Cross-Modal Fusion

Haptic signals, from smartphone vibrations to virtual reality touch feedback, can effectively convey information and enhance realism, but designing signals that resonate meaningfully with users is challenging. To facilitate this, we introduce a multimodal dataset and task, of matching user descriptions to vibration haptic signals, and highlight two primary challenges: (1) lack of large haptic vibration datasets annotated with textual descriptions as collecting haptic descriptions is time-consuming, and (2) limited capability of existing tasks and models to describe vibration signals in text. To advance this area, we create HapticCap, the first fully human-annotated haptic-captioned dataset, containing 92,070 haptic-text pairs for user descriptions of sensory, emotional, and associative attributes of vibrations. Based on HapticCap, we propose the haptic-caption retrieval task and present the results of this task from a supervised contrastive learning framework that brings together text representations within specific categories and vibrations. Overall, the combination of language model T5 and audio model AST yields the best performance in the haptic-caption retrieval task, especially when separately trained for each description category.

HapticCap: A Multimodal Dataset and Task for Understanding User Experience of Vibration Haptic Signals

Large language models (LLMs) have recently achieved remarkable progress in sentence-level machine translation, but scaling to document-level machine translation (DocMT) remains challenging, particularly in modeling long-range dependencies and discourse phenomena across sentences and paragraphs. Document translations generated by LLMs often suffer from poor consistency, weak coherence, and omission errors. To address these issues, we propose SubDocTrans, a novel DocMT framework that enables LLMs to produce high-quality translations through plug-and-play, multi-granularity knowledge extraction and integration. SubDocTrans first performs topic segmentation to divide a document into coherent topic sub-documents. For each sub-document, both global and local knowledge are extracted including bilingual summary, theme, proper nouns, topics, and transition hint. We then incorporate this multi-granularity knowledge into the prompting strategy, to guide LLMs in producing consistent, coherent, and accurate translations. We conduct extensive experiments across various DocMT tasks, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, particularly in improving consistency and coherence, reducing omission errors, and mitigating hallucinations.

SubDocTrans: Enhancing Document-level Machine Translation with Plug-and-play Multi-granularity Knowledge Augmentation

Large language models (LLMs) encode vast amounts of world knowledge but remain static once trained, making timely integration of emerging facts prohibitively expensive via full retraining. Knowledge‐editing techniques have thus emerged to inject or overwrite specific facts into LLMs, yet they either over‐rely on superficial cues or incur complex, iterative pipelines that collapse under noisy, multi‐hop conditions. We introduce **Reason-KE**, an end‐to‐end reasoning-chain-based editing framework that steers a pretrained LLM through four structured stages—fact acknowledgment, relevance determination, selective application, and final reasoning—to filter distractors in a single pass. Trained on MQuAKE‐CF with up to four irrelevant facts, Reason-KE elevates Qwen2.5‐7B’s multi‐hop QA accuracy to 90.2\% (↑17.6 pp) while suffering merely 6.3\% drop under heavy distraction and <1\% when answers are leaked. Our quantitative analysis confirms Reason-KE’s resilience and efficiency, establishing a new state of the art for reliable LLM knowledge updates. The code will be released.

Robust Knowledge Editing via Explicit Reasoning Chains for Distractor-Resilient Multi-Hop QA

Dialogue summarization aims to distill the core meaning of a conversation into a concise text. This is crucial for reducing the complexity and noise inherent in dialogue-heavy applications. While recent approaches typically train language models to mimic human-written summaries, such supervision is costly and often results in outputs that lack task-specific focus limiting their effectiveness in downstream applications, such as medical tasks. In this paper, we propose QUARTZ, a framework for task-oriented utility-based dialogue summarization. QUARTZ starts by generating multiple summaries and task-oriented question-answer pairs from a dialogue in a zero-shot manner using a pool of large language models (LLMs). The quality of the generated summaries is evaluated by having LLMs answer task-related questions before (i) selecting the best candidate answers and (ii) identifying the most informative summary based on these answers. Finally, we fine-tune the best LLM on the selected summaries. When validated on multiple datasets, QUARTZ demonstrates its effectiveness by achieving competitive results in various zero-shot settings, rivaling fully-supervised State-of-the-Art (SotA) methods. Code will be released publicly.

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