China

We analyze how English–Russian machine translation (MT) systems submitted to WMT25 perform on linguistically challenging translation tasks, similar to problems used in university professional translator training. 
We assessed the ten top-performing systems using a fine-grained test suite containing 465 manually devised test items, which cover 55 lexical, grammatical, and discourse phenomena, in 13 categories. 
By applying pass/fail rules with human adjudication and micro/macro aggregates, we observe three performance tiers. Compared with the official WMT25 ranking, our ranking broadly aligns but reveals notable shifts.

Our findings show that in 2025, even top-performing MT systems still struggle with translation problems that require deep understanding and rephrasing, much like human novices do. The best systems exhibit creativity and can be very good at handling such challenges, often producing more natural translations rather than producing word-for-word renditions. However, persistent structural and lexical problems remain: literal word order carry-overs, misused verb forms, and rigid phrase translations were common, mirroring errors typically seen in beginner translator assignments.

EMNLP 2025

Fine-Grained Evaluation of English-Russian MT in 2025: Linguistic Challenges Mirroring Human Translator Training

workshop paper

## 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.

Recent progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has driven the creation of Large Language Models (LLMs) capable of tackling a vast range of tasks. A critical property of these models is their ability to handle large documents and process long token sequences, which has fostered the need for a robust evaluation methodology for long-text scenarios. To meet this requirement in the context of the Russian language, we present our benchmark consisting of 18 datasets designed to assess LLM performance in tasks such as information retrieval, knowledge extraction, machine reading, question answering, and reasoning. These datasets are categorized into four levels of complexity, enabling model evaluation across context lengths up to 128k tokens. To facilitate further research, we provide open-source datasets, a codebase, and a public leaderboard associated with the benchmark.

Long Context Benchmark for the Russian Language

This study aims to enhance the automatic identification and classification of metadiscourse markers in English texts, evaluating various large language models for the purpose. Metadiscourse is a commonly used rhetorical strategy in both written and spoken language to guide addressees through discourse. Due to its linguistic complexity and dependency on the context, automated metadiscourse classification is challenging. With a hypothesis that LLMs may handle complicated tasks more effectively than supervised machine learning approaches, we tune and evaluate seven encoder language models on the task using a dataset totalling 575,541 tokens and annotated with 24 labels. The results show a clear improvement over supervised machine learning approaches as well as an untuned Llama3.3-70B-Instruct baseline, with XLNet-large achieving an accuracy and F1-score of 0.91 and 0.93, respectively. However, four less frequent categories record F-scores below 0.5, highlighting the need for more balanced data representation.

Enhancing the Automatic Classification of Metadiscourse in Low-Proficiency Learners' Spoken and Written English Texts Using XLNet

The ability to track entities is fundamental for language understanding, yet the internal mechanisms governing this capability in Small Language Models (SLMs) are poorly understood. Previous studies often rely on indirect probing or complex interpretability methods, leaving a gap for lightweight diagnostics that connect model behavior to performance. To bridge this gap, we introduce a framework to analyze entity tracking by measuring the attention flow between entity and non-entity tokens within SLMs. We apply this to analyze models both before and after Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT). Our analysis reveals two key findings. First, SLMs' attentional strategies vary significantly with text type, but entities consistently receive a high degree of focus. Second, we show that PEFT -- specifically QLoRA -- dramatically improves classification performance on entity-centric tasks by increasing the model's attentional focus on entity-related tokens. Our work provides direct evidence for how PEFT can refine a model's internal mechanisms and establishes attention analysis as a valuable, lightweight diagnostic tool for interpreting and improving SLMs.

Entity Tracking in Small Language Models: An Attention-Based Study of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

This paper presents PediaMind-R1, a domain-specialized large language model designed to achieve active personalization in intelligent parenting scenarios. Unlike conventional systems that provide generic suggestions, PediaMind-R1 draws on insights from developmental psychology. It introduces temperament theory from the Thomas–Chess framework and builds a temperament knowledge graph for infants and toddlers (0–3 years). Our two-stage training pipeline first uses supervised fine-tuning to teach structured chain-of-thought reasoning, and then applies a GRPO-based alignment stage to reinforce logical consistency, domain expertise, and empathetic caregiving strategies. We further design an evaluation framework comprising temperament-sensitive multiple-choice tests and human assessments. The results demonstrate that PediaMind-R1 can accurately interpret early childhood temperament profiles and proactively engage in individualized reasoning. This work highlights the value of integrating vertical-domain modeling with psychological theory. It offers a novel approach to developing user-centered LLMs that advance the practice of active personalization in sensitive caregiving contexts.

PediaMind-R1: A Temperament-Aware Language Model for Personalized Early Childhood Care Reasoning via Cognitive Modeling and Preference Alignment

Lightweight language models remain attractive for on-device and privacy-sensitive applications, but their responses are highly sensitive to prompt quality. For open-ended generation, non-expert users often lack the knowledge or time to consistently craft high-quality prompts, leading them to rely on prompt optimization tools. However, a key challenge is ensuring the optimized prompts genuinely align with users’ original intents and preferences. We introduce , a system for controllable prompt generation for open-ended text that improves model output quality by intent-aligned prompt synthesis. expands minimal user instructions into rich, domain-aware prompts while preserving the user’s stated preferences. The system is a quantized Llama3-8B model fine-tuned with a lightweight LoRA adapter on 12,300 prompt-refinement dialogues spanning 41 everyday domains, distilled from three stronger LLMs. The adapter attaches to any Llama3-8B base, enabling edge deployment. In human and LLM-judge evaluations across multiple target models and optimization baselines, yields higher preference rates than chain-of-thought prompting and matches or surpasses state-of-the-art prompt optimization methods while requiring fewer model calls (e.g., 3 vs. 9). These results show that a compact student, guided by powerful teachers, can learn effective prompt-generation strategies that enhance response quality while maintaining alignment with user intent.

PromptTailor: Multi-turn Intent-Aligned Prompt Synthesis for Lightweight LLMs

We propose a multi-agent framework for modeling artificial consciousness in large language models (LLMs), grounded in psychoanalytic theory. Our Psychodynamic Model simulates self-awareness, preconsciousness, and unconsciousness through agent interaction, guided by a Personality Module combining fixed traits and dynamic needs. Using parameter-efficient fine-tuning on emotionally rich dialogues, the system was evaluated across eight personalized conditions. An LLM as Judge approach showed a 71.2% preference for the fine-tuned model, with improved emotional depth and reduced output variance, demonstrating its potential for adaptive, personalized cognition.

Modeling Layered Consciousness with Multi-Agent Large Language Models

This study proposes augmenting dialog data with think-aloud utterances (TAUs) for modeling individual personalities in text chat by LLM. TAU is a verbalization of a speaker's thought before articulating the utterance. We expect "persona LLMs" trained with TAU-augmented data can mimic the speaker's personality trait better. We tested whether the trained persona LLMs obtain the human personality with respect to Big Five, a framework characterizing human personality traits from five aspects. The results showed that LLMs trained with TAU-augmented data more closely align to the speakers' Agreeableness and Neuroticism of Big Five than those trained with original dialog data. We also found that the quality of TAU-augmentation impacts persona LLM's performance.

Augmenting Dialog with Think-Aloud Utterances for Modeling Individual Personality Traits by LLM

Novice and expert users have different systematic preferences in task-oriented dialogues. However, whether catering to these preferences actually improves user experience and task performance remains understudied. To investigate the effects of expertise-based personalization, we first built a version of an enterprise AI assistant with passive personalization. We then conducted a user study where participants completed timed exams, aided by the two versions of the AI assistant. Preliminary results indicate that passive personalization helps reduce task load and improve assistant perception, but reveal task-specific limitations that can be addressed through providing more user agency. These findings underscore the importance of combining active and passive personalization to optimize user experience and effectiveness in enterprise task-oriented environments.

Is Passive Expertise-Based Personalization Enough? A Case Study in AI-Assisted Test-Taking

A prominent issue in aligning language models (LMs) to personalized preferences is underspecification-- the lack of information from users about their preferences. A popular trend of injecting such specification is adding a prefix (e.g. prior relevant conversations) to the current user's conversation to steer preference distribution. Most methods passively model personal preferences with prior example preferences pairs. We ask whether models benefit from actively inferring preference descriptions, and address this question by creating a synthetic personalized alignment dataset based on famous people with known public preferences. We then test how effective finetuned 1-8B size models are at inferring and aligning to personal preferences. Results show that higher-quality active prefixes lead to better generalization, more contextually faithful models, and less systematic biases across different protected attributes. All our results suggest active alignment can lead to a more controllable and efficient path for personalized alignment.

Is Active Persona Inference Necessary for Aligning Small Models to Personal Preferences?

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human opinions and reasoning, a key challenge lies in evaluating whether their reasoning accurately reflects the beliefs of individuals from diverse demographic backgrounds. Building on prior work in alignment assessment, we hope to provide a more extensive analysis to evaluate alignment methods across different model types. In this work, we analyze multiple strategies to induce alignment in instruct and reasoning models. Using the OpinionQA dataset, we construct 500 demographic personas and associated axioms, and assess LLM performance across multiple prompting setups. Our findings reveal trade-offs between model output correctness and reasoning faithfulness, highlighting key asymmetries in how LLMs simulate belief-grounded reasoning and the current gaps that exist in alignment in LLMs.

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Next from EMNLP 2025

Long Context Benchmark for the Russian Language

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

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