China

Cognitive science offers rich theories of learning and communication, yet these are often difficult to operationalize at scale. We demonstrate how natural language processing can bridge this gap by applying psycholinguistic theories of discourse to real-world educational data. We investigate linguistic alignment - the convergence of conversational partners’ word choice, grammar, and meaning - as a measure of interactive alignment. Using a longitudinal dataset of real-world tutoring interactions and associated student test scores, we examine (1) the extent of alignment, (2) role-based patterns among tutors and students, and (3) the relationship between alignment and learning outcomes. We find that both tutors and students exhibit lexical, syntactic, and semantic alignment, with tutors aligning more strongly overall. Crucially, lexical alignment predicts student learning gains. As a lightweight, interpretable, metric, linguistic alignment offers practical applications in intelligent tutoring systems, educator dashboards, and tutor training.

EMNLP 2025

Linguistic Alignment Predicts Learning in Small Group Tutoring Sessions

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.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks but often propagate societal biases from their training data, leading to discriminatory outputs. These biases are amplified by the models' self-attention mechanisms, which disproportionately emphasize biased correlations with sensitive tokens, like "he" or "she", reflecting the sensitive attributes such as gender and race. To address this issue, we propose a novel fine-tuning method, called Cross-Attention-based Weight Decay (CrAWD), which modifies the LLM architecture to mitigate bias. CrAWD introduces a cross-attention mechanism between an input sequence and a sensitive token sequence, enabling the model to identify and selectively decay the attention weights of tokens associated with sensitive tokens. This reduces the influence of biased association on the model's generation while maintaining task performance. Evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed CrAWD method. Notably, our method can handle multiple sensitive attributes by adjusting the sensitive token sequence, and it does not require full knowledge of sensitive tokens presented in the dataset, underscoring CrAWD's versatility in promoting fair LLMs across various applications.

Fine-tuning LLMs with Cross-Attention-based Weight Decay for Bias Mitigation

Responsible use of Authorship Verification (AV) systems not only requires high accuracy but also interpretable solutions. More importantly, for systems to be used to make decisions with real-world consequences requires the model's prediction to be explainable using interpretable features that can be traced to the original texts. Neural methods achieve high accuracies, but their representations lack direct interpretability. Furthermore, LLM predictions cannot be explained faithfully -- if there is an explanation given for a prediction, it doesn't represent the reasoning process behind the model's prediction. In this paper, we introduce Residualized Similarity (RS), a novel method that supplements systems using interpretable features with a neural network to improve their performance while maintaining interpretability. Authorship verification is fundamentally a similarity task, where the goal is to measure how alike two documents are. The key idea is to use the neural network to predict a residual similarity, i.e. the error in the similarity predicted by the interpretable system. Our evaluation across four datasets shows that not only can we match the performance of state-of-the-art authorship verification models, but we can show how and to what degree the final prediction is faithful and interpretable.

Residualized Similarity for Faithfully Explainable Authorship Verification

Academic question answering (QA) in heterogeneous scholarly networks presents unique challenges requiring both structural understanding and interpretable reasoning. While graph neural networks (GNNs) capture structured graph information and large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong capabilities in semantic comprehension, current approaches lack integration at the reasoning level. We propose HetGCoT, a framework enabling LLMs to effectively leverage and learn information from graphs to reason interpretable academic QA results. Our framework introduces three technical contributions: (1) a framework that transforms heterogeneous graph structural information into LLM-processable reasoning chains, (2) an adaptive metapath selection mechanism identifying relevant subgraphs for specific queries, and (3) a multi-step reasoning strategy systematically incorporating graph contexts into the reasoning process. Experiments on OpenAlex and DBLP datasets show our approach outperforms all sota baselines. The framework demonstrates adaptability across different LLM architectures and applicability to various scholarly question answering tasks.

HetGCoT: Heterogeneous Graph-Enhanced Chain-of-Thought LLM Reasoning for Academic Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as promising tools for knowledge tracing due to their strong reasoning and generalization abilities. While recent LLM-based KT methods have introduced new prompt formats, they struggle to reflect the histories of example learners within a single prompt during in-context learning (ICL), leading to limited scalability and high computational cost under token constraints. In this work, we present \textit{LLM-based Option weighted Knowledge Tracing (LOKT)}, a simple yet effective LLM-based knowledge tracing framework that encodes the interaction histories of example learners in context as \textit{textual categorical option weights (TCOW)}. These are semantic labels (e.g., “inadequate”) assigned to the options selected by learners when answering questions helping understand LLM. Experiments on multiple-choice datasets show that LOKT outperforms existing LLM-based KT models in both warm-start and few-shot settings. Moreover, LOKT enables scalable and cost-efficient inference, performing strongly even under strict token constraints. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LOKT_model-3233

Not All Options Are Created Equal: Textual Option Weighting for Token-Efficient LLM-Based Knowledge Tracing

In-context learning (ICL) in Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown remarkable performance across various tasks without requiring fine-tuning. However, recent studies have highlighted the risk of private data leakage through the prompt in ICL, especially when LLMs are exposed to malicious attacks. While differential privacy (DP) provides strong privacy guarantees, it often significantly reduces the utility of in-context learning (ICL). To address this challenge, we incorporate task-related public data into the ICL framework while maintaining the DP guarantee. Based on this approach, we propose a private in-context learning algorithm that effectively balances privacy protection and model utility. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the utility of private ICL with the assistance of public data. Additionally, we show that our method is robust against membership inference attacks, demonstrating empirical privacy protection.

Public Data Assisted Differentially Private In-Context Learning

Large language models (LLMs) often mislead users with confident hallucinations. Current approaches to detect hallucination require many samples from the LLM generator, which is computationally infeasible as frontier model sizes and generation lengths continue to grow. We present a remarkably simple baseline for detecting hallucinations in long-form LLM generations, with performance comparable to expensive multi-sample approaches while drawing only a single sample from the LLM generator. Our key observation is that LLM hidden states are highly predictive of long-form factuality and that this information may be efficiently extracted at inference time using a lightweight probe. We benchmark a variety of long-form hallucination detection methods across open-source models up to 405B parameters and demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance with up to 100x fewer FLOPs. Furthermore, our probes generalize to out-of-distribution model outputs, evaluated using hidden states of smaller open-source models. Our results demonstrate the promise of hidden state probes in detecting long-form LLM hallucinations.

Simple Factuality Probes Detect Hallucinations in Long-Form Natural Language Generation

Sequential Recommendation Systems (SRS) have become essential in many real-world applications. However, existing SRS methods often rely on collaborative filtering signals and fail to capture real-time user preferences, while Conversational Recommendation Systems (CRS) excel at eliciting immediate interests through natural language interactions but neglect historical behavior. To bridge this gap, we propose CESRec, a novel framework that integrates the long-term preference modeling of SRS with the real-time preference elicitation of CRS. We introduce semantic-based pseudo interaction construction, which dynamically updates users’ historical interaction sequences by analyzing conversational feedback, generating a pseudo-interaction sequence that seamlessly combines long-term and real-time preferences. Additionally, we reduce the impact of outliers in historical items that deviate from users’ core preferences by proposing dual alignment outlier items masking, which identifies and masks such items using semantic-collaborative aligned representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CESRec achieves state-of-the-art performance by boosting strong SRS models, validating its effectiveness in integrating conversational feedback into SRS.

CESRec: Constructing Pseudo Interactions for Sequential Recommendation via Conversational Feedback

Large language models have consistently struggled with complex reasoning tasks, such as mathematical problem-solving. Investigating the internal reasoning mechanisms of these models can help us design better model architectures and training strategies, ultimately enhancing their reasoning capability. In this study, we constructed a symbolic multi-step reasoning task to investigate the information propagation mechanisms in Transformer models when solving the task through direct answering and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. We introduced the concept of buffer mechanism: the model stores various information in distinct buffers and selectively extracts it through the query-key matrix. We proposed a random matrix-based algorithm to enhance the model's reasoning ability. This algorithm introduces only 132 trainable parameters, yet leads to significant performance improvements on 7 multi-step reasoning datasets, including PrOntoQA, LogicAsker, and LogicInference. These findings provide new insights into understanding the large language models.

Understanding the Language Model to Solve the Symbolic Multi-Step Reasoning Problem from the Perspective of Buffer Mechanism

Existing alignment methods for preference optimization of large language models (LLMs) aim to enhance model performance by utilizing pairs of positive and negative samples. However, due to the limited capacity of models in scoring or generating responses, the quality of positive and negative samples may become similar during training, which complicates optimization for preference learning. To address this issue, we introduce SeaPO, a Strategic Error Amplification method that leverages multiple error types to introduce specific error patterns into the model Preference Optimization. This strategy ensures that negative samples are more erroneous than positive samples and preference-based training is employed to mitigate the occurrence of these errors, thereby enhancing model performance. Evaluations across five capability dimensions and different model scales (1.5B to 14B) demonstrate that the generated data significantly improved overall model performance, particularly in terms of truthfulness, with improvements of 5–10 percentage points observed. Further analysis reveals that task performance varies depending on the error types introduced. Injecting the most common error types improves performance in related tasks, while a mix of error types leads to a broader performance enhancement: most tasks show stable improvements, while a few tasks exhibit significant gains. The code and scripts are as follows: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SeaPO-4002.

SeaPO: Strategic Error Amplification for Robust Preference Optimization of Large Language Models

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting, notably degrading the safety of originally aligned models. While some existing methods attempt to restore safety by incorporating additional safety data, the quality of such data typically falls short of that used in the original alignment process. Moreover, these high-quality safety datasets are generally inaccessible, making it difficult to fully recover the model's original safety. We ask: How can we preserve safety while improving downstream task performance without additional safety data? We show that simply merging the weights of pre- and post-fine-tuned models effectively mitigates safety degradation while enhancing performance. Experiments across different downstream tasks and models validate the method’s practicality and effectiveness.

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Fine-tuning LLMs with Cross-Attention-based Weight Decay for Bias Mitigation

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