China

Domain adaptation is widely adopted in text retrieval scenarios where large labeled data is unavailable. To improve model adaptability, existing methods try to expand more source datasets. However, we found from experiments that indiscriminately using a large amount of source data from various text tasks does not guarantee improved adaptability, but may negatively impact model performance. To tackle this issue, we propose Trait, a framework that can effectively improve model adaptability by selecting beneficial data without evaluating all source data. Specifically, we first divide multiple source datasets into data chunks of the same size as the minimum selection unit to form the whole selection space. Then we devise an iterative process that includes Bayesian optimization-based selection and transfer-aware chunk evaluation to incrementally select beneficial chunks. To reduce unnecessary evaluation costs, we also design backtracking and pruning actions to adjust the selection subspace. Extensive experimental results show that Trait not only achieves average state-of-the-art for few-shot on nine target datasets by evaluating only 4% of BERRI source data, but also is very competitive for zero-shot compared with LLM-based rankers.

EMNLP 2025

Transfer-Aware Data Selection for Domain Adaptation in Text Retrieval

text ranking

data selection

domain adaptation

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

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*





<br>

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

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have enabled their successful application to a broad range of tasks. However, in information-intensive tasks, the prompt length can grow fast, leading to increased computational requirements, performance degradation, and induced biases from irrelevant or redundant information. Recently, various prompt compression techniques have been introduced to optimize the trade-off between reducing input length and retaining performance. We propose a holistic evaluation framework that allows for in-depth analysis of prompt compression methods. We focus on three key aspects, besides compression ratio: (i) downstream task performance, (ii) grounding in the input context, and (iii) information preservation. Using our framework, we analyze state-of-the-art soft and hard compression methods and show that some fail to preserve key details from the original prompt, limiting performance on complex tasks. By identifying these limitations, we are able to improve one soft prompting method by controlling compression granularity, achieving up to +23% in downstream performance, +8 BERTScore points in grounding, and 2.7× more entities preserved in compression. Ultimately, we find that the best effectiveness/compression rate trade-off is achieved with soft prompting combined with sequence-level training.

Understanding and Improving Information Preservation in Prompt Compression for LLMs

Commonsense reasoning in multimodal contexts remains a foundational challenge in artificial intelligence. We introduce Multimodal UNcommonsense (MUN), a benchmark designed to evaluate models' ability to handle scenarios that deviate from typical visual or contextual expectations. MUN pairs visual scenes with surprising or unlikely outcomes described in natural language, prompting models to either rationalize seemingly odd images using everyday logic or uncover unexpected interpretations in ordinary scenes. To support this task, we propose a retrieval-based in-context learning (R-ICL) framework that transfers reasoning capabilities from larger models to smaller ones without additional training. Leveraging a novel Multimodal Ensemble Retriever (MER), our method identifies semantically relevant exemplars even when image and text pairs are deliberately discordant. Experiments show an average improvement of 8.3% over baseline ICL methods, highlighting the effectiveness of R-ICL in low-frequency, atypical settings. MUN opens new directions for evaluating and improving visual-language models’ robustness and adaptability in real-world, culturally diverse, and non-prototypical scenarios.

Multimodal UNcommonsense: From Odd to Ordinary and Ordinary to Odd

The Transformer architecture has long dominated the development of large language models, but its quadratic complexity in sequence length presents scalability challenges. Recent advances in State Space Models, particularly Mamba series, offer a promising alternative with linear-time inference and competitive performance. While scaling model capacity via sparsification, exemplified by Mixture-of-Experts, has proven effective in reducing computation while expanding knowledge capacity, the integration of sparsification with Mamba remains largely unexplored. Existing attempts typically apply naive block-level stacking, failing to leverage Mamba’s internal structure for fine-grained sparsification. In this work, we mainly explore how to sparsify the parameters inside Mamba. We found that the effects of using sparsification strategies on parameters related to various mechanisms inside mamba are significantly different. Our proposed Mamba-MoZ framework introduces a flexible and effective sparsification mechanism inside Mamba, which can independently achieve parameter scalability and has stronger performance.

Sparsifying Mamba

Effective query expansion for web search benefits from promoting both exploration and diversity to capture multiple interpretations and facets of a query. While recent LLM-based methods improved retrieval performance and demonstrate strong domain generalization ability without additional training, they often generate narrowly focused expansions that overlook these properties due to knowledge anchoring within the model. We propose ThinkQE, a test-time query expansion framework addressing this limitation through two key components: a thinking-based expansion process that encourages deeper and comprehensive semantic exploration, and an evolving interaction strategy that iteratively refines expansions using retrieval feedback from the corpus. Experiments on diverse web search benchmarks (DL19, DL20, and BRIGHT) show ThinkQE consistently outperforms prior approaches, including training-intensive dense retrievers and rerankers.

ThinkQE: Query Expansion via an Evolving Thinking Process

Recent advances in Relation Extraction (RE) emphasize Zero-Shot methodologies, aiming to recognize unseen relations between entities with no annotated data. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance in many NLP tasks, their performance in Zero-Shot RE (ZSRE) without entity type constraints still lags behind Small Language Models (SLMs). LLM-based ZSRE often involves manual interventions and significant computational overhead, especially when scaling to large-scale multi-choice data. To this end, we introduce RE-GAR-AD, which not only leverages the generative capability of LLMs but also utilizes their representational power without tuning LLMs. We redefine LLM-based ZSRE as a retrieval challenge, utilizing a Generation-Augmented Retrieval framework coupled with a retrieval Adjuster. Specifically, our approach guides LLMs through crafted prompts to distill sentence semantics and enrich relation labels. We encode sentences and relation labels using LLMs and match their embeddings in a triplet fashion. This retrieval technique significantly reduces token input requirements. Additionally, to further optimize embeddings, we propose a plug-in retrieval adjuster with only 2M parameters, which allows rapid fine-tuning without accessing LLMs' parameters. Our LLM-based model demonstrates comparable performance on multiple benchmarks.

Generation-Augmented Retrieval: Rethinking the Role of Large Language Models in Zero-Shot Relation Extraction

Current approaches to embodied AI tend to learn policies from expert demonstrations. However, without a mechanism to evaluate the quality of demonstrated actions, they are limited to learning from optimal behaviour or risk replicating errors and inefficiencies. While reinforcement learning offers one alternative, the associated exploration typically results in sacrificing data efficiency. This work explores how agents trained with imitation learning can learn robust representations from both optimal and suboptimal demonstrations when given access to constructive language feedback as a means to contextualise different modes of behaviour. We directly provide language feedback embeddings as part of the input sequence into a Transformer-based policy, and optionally complement the traditional next action prediction objective with auxiliary self-supervised learning objectives for feedback prediction. We test our approach on a range of embodied Vision-and-Language tasks in our custom BabyAI-XGen environment and show significant improvements in agents' compositional generalisation abilities and robustness, suggesting that our data-efficient method allows models to successfully convert suboptimal behaviour into learning opportunities. Overall, our results suggest that language feedback is a competitive and intuitive alternative to intermediate scalar rewards for language-specified embodied tasks.

FOSSIL: Harnessing Feedback on Suboptimal Samples for Data-Efficient Generalisation with Imitation Learning for Embodied Vision-and-Language Tasks

Lemmatization is the task of transforming all words in a given text to their dictionary forms. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability to achieve competitive results across a wide range of NLP tasks, there is no prior evidence of how effective they are in the contextual lemmatization task. In this paper, we empirically investigate the capacity of the latest generation of LLMs to perform in-context lemmatization, comparing it to the traditional fully supervised approach. In particular, we consider the setting in which supervised training data is not available for a target domain or language, comparing (i) encoder-only supervised approaches, fine-tuned out-of-domain, and (ii) cross-lingual methods, against direct in-context lemma generation with LLMs. Our experimental investigation across 12 languages of different morphological complexity finds that, while encoders remain competitive in out-of-domain settings when fine-tuned on gold data, current LLMs reach state-of-the-art results for most languages by directly generating lemmas in-context without prior fine-tuning, provided just with a few examples. Data and code will be made available upon publication.

Lemma Dilemma: On Lemma Generation Without Domain- or Language-Specific Training Data

Recent advances in chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning have improved complex video understanding, but existing methods often struggle to adapt to domain-specific skills (e.g., temporal grounding, event detection, spatial relations) over various video content. To address this, we propose Video-Skill-CoT (aka Video-SKoT) a framework that automatically constructs and leverages skill-aware CoT supervisions for domain-adaptive video reasoning. First, we construct skill-based CoT annotations: We extract domain-relevant reasoning skills from training questions, cluster them into a shared skill taxonomy, and create detailed multi-step CoT rationale tailored to each video question pair for training. Second, we introduce a skill-specific expert learning framework. Each expert module specializes in a subset of reasoning skills and is trained with lightweight adapters using the collected CoT supervision. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on three video understanding benchmarks, where Video-SKoT consistently outperforms strong baselines. We also provide in-depth analyses on comparing different CoT annotation pipelines and learned skills over multiple video domains.

Video-Skill-CoT: Skill-based Chain-of-Thoughts for Domain-Adaptive Video Reasoning

Understanding temporal relations between events in a text is essential for determining its temporal structure. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have spurred research on temporal relation extraction. However, LLMs perform poorly in zero-shot and few-shot settings, often underperforming smaller fine-tuned models. Despite these limitations, little attention has been given to improving LLMs in temporal structure extraction tasks. This study systematically examines LLMs’ ability to extract and infer discourse-level temporal relations, identifying factors influencing their reasoning and extraction capabilities, including input context, reasoning process and ensuring consistency. We propose a three-step framework to improve LLMs' temporal relation extraction capabilities: context selection, prompts inspired by Allen's interval algebra (Allen, 1983), and reflection-based consistency learning (Shinn et al., 2024). Our results show the effectiveness of our method in guiding LLMs towards structured processing of temporal structure in discourse.

Consistent Discourse-level Temporal Relation Extraction Using Large Language Models

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable performance in visual-language understanding for downstream multimodal tasks. While their capabilities are improving, problems emerge simultaneously. Among those problems, the hallucinations have attracted much attention, which stands for the phenomenon where LVLMs generate contradictory content to their input visual and text contents. Many approaches have been proposed to deal with this issue, such as contrastive decoding and attention manipulation. However, contrastive decoding methods struggle in constructing appropriate contrastive samples, and attention manipulation methods are highly sensitive, lacking stability. In this work, we propose image head Masked Contrastive Decoding (MaskCD). Our approach utilizes the "image heads" in LVLMs, masking them to construct contrastive samples for contrastive decoding. We evaluated MaskCD on LLaVA-1.5-7b and Qwen-VL-7b, using various benchmarks such as CHAIR, POPE, and MME. The results demonstrate that MaskCD effectively alleviates the phenomenon of hallucinations and retains the general capabilities of LVLMs.

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Next from EMNLP 2025

Understanding and Improving Information Preservation in Prompt Compression for LLMs

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Generalised Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Neural Machine Translation with Cross-Lingual Data Selection

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