China

Despite recent advances in Reasoning Language Models (RLMs), most research focuses solely on English, even though many models are pretrained on multilingual data. In this work, we investigate: *Is English the most efficient language for reasoning?* We evaluate three open-source RLMs: DeepSeek R1, Qwen 2.5, and Qwen 3, across four math datasets and seven typologically diverse languages. We find that reasoning in non-English languages consistently reduces token usage, often without sacrificing accuracy. These gains persist after translation into English, suggesting genuine shifts in reasoning behavior rather than surface-level linguistic effects. The extent of improvement, however, depends on the model’s multilingual strength. Our findings motivate a broader view of reasoning in language models, highlighting the potential of multilingual reasoning and the importance of strong multilingual foundations.

EMNLP 2025

EfficientXLang: Towards Improving Token Efficiency Through Cross-Lingual Reasoning

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.

Climate change communication on social media increasingly employs microtargeting strategies to effectively reach and influence specific demographic groups. This study presents a *post-hoc* analysis of microtargeting practices within climate campaigns by leveraging large language models (LLMs) to examine Meta (previously known as Facebook) advertisements. Our analysis focuses on two key aspects: **demographic targeting** and **fairness**. We evaluate the ability of LLMs to accurately predict the intended demographic targets, such as gender and age group. Furthermore, we instruct the LLMs to generate explanations for their classifications, providing transparent reasoning behind each decision. These explanations reveal the specific thematic elements used to engage different demographic segments, highlighting distinct strategies tailored to various audiences. Our findings show that ***young adults*** are primarily targeted through messages emphasizing *activism and environmental consciousness*, while **women** are engaged through themes related to *caregiving roles and social advocacy*. Additionally, we conduct a comprehensive fairness analysis to uncover biases in model predictions. We assess disparities in accuracy and error rates across demographic groups using established fairness metrics such as Demographic Parity, Equal Opportunity, and Predictive Equality. Our findings indicate that while LLMs perform well overall, certain biases exist, particularly in the classification of **male** audiences. The analysis of thematic explanations uncovers recurring patterns in messaging strategies tailored to various demographic groups, while the fairness analysis underscores the need for more inclusive targeting methods. This study provides a valuable framework for future research aimed at enhancing transparency, accountability, and inclusivity in social media-driven climate campaigns.

Post-hoc Study of Climate Microtargeting on Social Media Ads with LLMs: Thematic Insights and Fairness Evaluation

When does a large language model (LLM) know what it does not know? Uncertainty quantification (UQ) provides measures of uncertainty, such as an estimate of the \emph{confidence} in an LLM's generated output, and is therefore increasingly recognized as a crucial component of trusted AI systems. \emph{Black-box} UQ methods do not require access to internal model information from the generating LLM, and therefore have numerous real-world advantages, such as robustness to system changes, adaptability to choice of LLM, reduced costs, and computational tractability. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of UQ techniques that are primarily but not necessarily entirely black-box, where the consistency between a generated output and other sampled generations is used as a proxy for confidence in its correctness. We propose a high-level non-verbalized \emph{similarity-based aggregation} framework that subsumes a broad swath of UQ approaches suitable for complex generative tasks, as well as introduce specific novel techniques from the framework that train confidence estimation models using small training sets. Through an empirical study with datasets spanning the diverse tasks of question answering, summarization, and text-to-SQL, we demonstrate that our proposed similarity-based methods result in better calibrated confidences than baselines.

SIMBA UQ: Similarity-Based Aggregation for Uncertainty Quantification in Large Language Models

Recommendation systems play a critical role in shaping user experiences and access to digital content. However, these systems can exhibit unfair behavior when their performance varies across user groups, especially in linguistically diverse populations. Recent advances in NLP have enabled the identification of user dialects, allowing for more granular analysis of such disparities. In this work, we investigate fairness disparities in recommendation quality among Arabic-speaking users, a population whose dialectal diversity is underrepresented in recommendation system research. By uncovering performance gaps linked to dialectal variation, we highlight the intersection of NLP and recommendation system and underscore the broader social impact of NLP. Our findings emphasize the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in building fair systems, particularly for global and local platforms serving diverse Arabic-speaking communities. The anonymized source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FairArRecSys-E619/

Mind the Dialect: NLP Advancements Uncover Fairness Disparities for Arabic Users in Recommendation Systems

In text-video retrieval, auxiliary captions are often used to enhance video understanding, bridging the gap between the modalities. Recently, with the remarkable capabilities in multi-modal understanding, retrieval with MLLMs has emerged as a promising direction. However, we identify two key limitations: (1) retrieval models often fail to effectively leverage the auxiliary captions, neglecting the semantic distinction between the caption (as contextual knowledge) and text queries (as retrieval targets); and (2) auxiliary captions are not typically tailored for retrieval, evaluated with language generation metrics such as BLEU that misalign with retrieval objectives, which require fine-grained discrimination. To address these challenges, we propose CaRe-DPO, a retrieval framework that integrates two key components. First, retrieval role-embeddings are introduced to explicitly differentiate between the roles of heterogeneous textual inputs, allowing the model to better utilize auxiliary captions during retrieval. Second, we present DualGroup-Direct Preference Optimization (DG-DPO), a novel caption optimization strategy that directly uses retrieval relevance scores to supervise caption quality. Moreover, unlike traditional DPO, DG-DPO incorporates group-level preferences, enabling the model to learn a global retrieval ranking over video-caption pairs. Through extensive experiments, we show that CaRe-DPO significantly improves retrieval performance by effectively utilizing the auxiliary knowledge while generating better captions for retrieval.

Captioning for Text-Video Retrieval via Dual-Group Direct Preference Optimization

Designing a generalist scientific agent capable of performing tasks in laboratory settings to assist researchers has become a key goal in recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. Unlike everyday tasks, scientific tasks are inherently more delicate and complex, requiring agents to possess a higher level of reasoning ability, structured and temporal understanding of their environment, and a strong emphasis on safety. Existing approaches often fail to address these multifaceted requirements. To tackle these challenges, we present DAVIS. Unlike traditional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches, DAVIS incorporates structured and temporal memory, which enables model-based planning. Additionally, DAVIS implements an agentic, multi-turn retrieval system, similar to a human's inner monologue, allowing for a greater degree of reasoning over past experiences. DAVIS demonstrates substantially improved performance on the ScienceWorld benchmark comparing to previous approaches on 8 out of 9 elementary science subjects. In addition, DAVIS's World Model demonstrates competitive performance on the famous HotpotQA and MusiqueQA dataset for multi-hop question answering. To the best of our knowledge, DAVIS is the first RAG agent to employ an interactive retrieval method in a RAG pipeline.

DAVIS: Planning Agent with Knowledge Graph-Powered Inner Monologue

We propose a new, training-free method, Graph Reasoning via Retrieval Augmented Framework (GRRAF), that harnesses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) alongside the code-generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to address a wide range of graph reasoning tasks. In GRRAF, the target graph is stored in a graph database, and the LLM is prompted to generate executable code queries that retrieve the necessary information. This approach circumvents the limitations of existing methods that require extensive finetuning or depend on predefined algorithms, and it incorporates an error feedback loop with a time-out mechanism to ensure both correctness and efficiency. Experimental evaluations on the GraphInstruct dataset reveal that GRRAF achieves 100% accuracy on most graph reasoning tasks, including cycle detection, bipartite graph checks, shortest path computation, and maximum flow, while maintaining consistent token costs regardless of graph sizes. Imperfect but still very high performance is observed on subgraph matching. Notably, GRRAF scales effectively to large graphs with up to 10,000 nodes.

Zero-shot Graph Reasoning via Retrieval Augmented Framework with LLMs

The influence of personas on Large Language Models (LLMs) has been widely studied, yet their direct impact on performance remains uncertain. This work explores a novel approach to guiding LLM behaviour through role vectors, an alternative to persona-based prompting. We construct 29 role vectors derived from model activations and evaluate their impact on benchmark performance across multiple domains. Our analysis investigates whether these vectors can effectively steer models toward domain-specific expertise. We measure two key interventions: (i) activation addition, which reinforces role-specific directions, and (ii) directional ablation, which removes them. Results on well-established benchmarks indicate that role vectors do, in fact, influence model behaviour, improving task performance in relevant domains while marginally affecting unrelated tasks. This, in turn, suggests that manipulating internal model representations has a greater impact on outcomes than persona-based prompting.

Can Role Vectors Affect LLM Behaviour?

We investigate the effect of duplicating multihead self-attention (MHSA) layers in large language models (LLMs) across a range of language tasks, with and without fine-tuning. The results demonstrate that duplicating the initial layers once or twice often yields a significant performance boost. Attention analysis uncovered the underlying mechanisms driving the improvement when performing layer duplication. This method enhances LLM capabilities with or without additional training or labeled data.

Layer Duplication in LLMs

The past year has seen an increase in the number of large (parameter) mixture-of-expert (MoE) models in the open domain. With the increase in size has come an increase in capabilities, with the largest models achieving new state-of-the-art on mathematics and reasoning benchmarks. Although the benefit of the MoE architecture can be understood through an engineering efficiency lens, prior work has also investigated whether MoE models exhibit functional differentiation along architectural lines, by examining patterns in the routing behavior of MoE modules. This work investigates whether expert routing in large MoE models is related to the _semantics_ of the inputs. We develop a pair of controlled experiments to identify whether routing occurs on the basis of _semantics_, i.e. the meaning of the inputs. The first experiment compares the activations on lexically identical but semantically distinct inputs, by using pairs of sentences where a common target word either has the same meaning or not. The second experiment compares activations where context is kept constant but the target word is substituted for semantically equivalent/distinct words. By comparing the rate of overlap in expert routing between sentence pairs where meaning is kept the same versus sentence pairs where meaning is changed, we identify whether expert routing is made on the basis of semantics. Our experiments show clear and statistically significant evidence of _semantic routing_ in large MoE models; inputs with the same meaning have greater overlap in routed experts than inputs with differing meaning.

Probing Semantic Routing in Large Mixture-of-Expert Models

Digital tool-based agents that invoke external Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) often rely on documentation to understand API functionality. However, such documentation is frequently missing, outdated, privatized, or inconsistent—hindering the development of reliable, general-purpose agents. In this work, we propose learning API functionality directly from demonstrations as a new paradigm applicable in scenarios without documentation. Using existing API benchmarks, we collect demonstrations from both expert API-based agents and from self-exploration. To understand what information demonstrations must convey for successful task completion, we extensively study how the number of demonstrations and the use of LLM-generated summaries and evaluations affect the task success rate of the API-based agent. Our experiments across datasets and models show that learning functionality from demonstrations remains a non-trivial challenge, even for state-of-the-art LLMs. We find that providing explicit function calls and natural language critiques significantly improves the agent’s task success rate due to more accurate parameter filling. We analyze failure modes, identify sources of error, and highlight key open challenges for future work in documentation-free, self-improving, API-based agents.

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Post-hoc Study of Climate Microtargeting on Social Media Ads with LLMs: Thematic Insights and Fairness Evaluation

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