Austria

Ensuring clinical data privacy while preserving utility is critical for AI-driven healthcare and data analytics. Existing de-identification (De-ID) methods, including rule-based techniques, deep learning models, and large language models (LLMs), often suffer from recall errors, limited generalization, and inefficiencies, limiting their real-world applicability. We propose a fully automated, multi-modal framework, RedactOR for de-identifying structured and unstructured electronic health records, including clinical audio records. Our framework employs cost-efficient De-ID strategies, including intelligent routing, hybrid rule and LLM based approaches, and a two-step audio redaction approach. We present a retrieval-based entity relexicalization approach to ensure consistent substitutions of protected entities, thereby enhancing data coherence for downstream applications. We discuss key design desiderata, de-identification and relexicalization methodology, and modular architecture of RedactOR and its integration with Oracle Health Clinical AI system. Evaluated on the i2b2 2014 De-ID dataset using standard metrics with strict recall, our approach achieves competitive performance while optimizing token usage to reduce LLM costs. Finally, we discuss key lessons and insights from deployment in real-world AI-driven healthcare data pipelines.

ACL 2025

RedactOR: An LLM-Powered Framework for Automatic Clinical Data De-Identification

relexicalization

health ai

llms

de-identification

clinical

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

poster

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
[Read more](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GI_hvOpjswAuYdUTromfeDiPpCcqidwg/view?usp=sharing)

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Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely used for relevance assessment in information retrieval. However, our study demonstrates that combining two distinct small language models (SLMs) with different architectures can outperform LLMs in this task. Our approach—QUPID—integrates a generative SLM with an embedding-based SLM, achieving higher relevance judgment accuracy while reducing computational costs compared to state-of-the-art LLM solutions. This computational efficiency makes QUPID highly scalable for real-world search systems processing millions of queries daily. In experiments across diverse document types, our method demonstrated consistent performance improvements (Cohen's Kappa of 0.646 versus 0.387 for leading LLMs) while offering 60x faster inference times. Furthermore, when integrated into production search pipelines, QUPID improved nDCG@5 scores by 1.9\%. These findings underscore how architectural diversity in model combinations can significantly enhance both search relevance and operational efficiency in information retrieval systems.

QUPID: Quantified Understanding for Enhanced Performance, Insights, and Decisions in Korean Search Engines

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely studied by researchers for their roles in various downstream NLP tasks. As a fundamental task in the NLP field, Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) aims to correct all potential grammatical errors in the input sentences. Previous studies have shown that LLMs' performance as correctors on CGEC remains unsatisfactory due to the challenging nature of the task. To promote the CGEC field to better adapt to the era of LLMs, we rethink the roles of LLMs in the CGEC task so that they can be better utilized and explored in CGEC. Considering the rich grammatical knowledge stored in LLMs and their powerful semantic understanding capabilities, we utilize LLMs as explainers to provide explanation information to the CGEC small models during error correction, aiming to enhance performance. We also use LLMs as evaluators to bring more reasonable CGEC evaluations, thus alleviating the troubles caused by the subjectivity of the CGEC task. In particular, our work is also an active exploration of how LLMs and small models better collaborate in downstream tasks. Extensive experiment and detailed analyses on widely used datasets verify the effectiveness of our intuition and the proposed methods.

Rethinking the Roles of Large Language Models in Chinese Grammatical Error Correction

The discovery of novel antibiotics is critical to address the growing antimicrobial resistance (AMR). However, pharmaceutical industries face high costs (over $1 billion), long timelines, and a high failure rate, worsened by the rediscovery of known compounds. We propose an LLM-based pipeline that acts as an alert system, detecting prior evidence of antibiotic activity to prevent costly rediscoveries. The system integrates literature on organisms and chemicals into a Knowledge Graph (KG), ensuring taxonomic resolution, synonym handling, and multi-level evidence classification. We tested the pipeline on a private list of 73 potential antibiotic-producing organisms, disclosing 12 negative hits for evaluation. The results highlight the effectiveness of the pipeline for evidence reviewing, reducing false negatives, and accelerating decision-making. The KG for negative hits as well as the user interface for interactive exploration are available at https://github.com/idiap/abroad-kg-store and https://github.com/idiap/abroad-demo-webapp.

Accelerating Antibiotic Discovery with Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs

We investigate the utility of Large Language Models for automated taxonomy generation and completion specifically applied to taxonomies from the food technology industry. We explore the extent to which taxonomies can be completed from a seed taxonomy or generated without a seed from a set of known concepts, in an iterative fashion using recent prompting techniques.
Experiments on five taxonomies using an open-source LLM (Llama-3), while promising, point to the difficulty of correctly placing inner nodes.

FoodTaxo: Generating Food Taxonomies with Large Language Models

This paper presents a user-centered, empirically guided approach to multilingual metadata enrichment for children’s books. We combine LLMs with human-in-the-loop quality control in a scalable CI/CD pipeline to curate brand collections that enhance book discovery and engagement for young readers across multiple European markets. Our results demonstrate that this hybrid approach delivers high-quality, child-appropriate labels, improves user experience, and accelerates deployment in real-world production environments. This work offers practical insights for applying generative NLP in the media and publishing industry.

Enriching children’s stories with LLMs: Delivering multilingual data enrichment for children’s books at scale and across markets

Modern text processing pipelines demand robust methods to remove extraneous content while preserving a document's core message. Traditional approaches—such as HTML boilerplate extraction or keyword filters—often fail in multilingual settings and struggle with context-sensitive nuances, whereas Large Language Models (LLMs) offer improved quality at high computational cost. We introduce SORE (Semantic Outlier Removal), a cost-effective, transparent method that leverages multilingual sentence embeddings and approximate nearest-neighbor search to identify and excise unwanted text segments. By first identifying core content via metadata embedding and then flagging segments that either closely match predefined outlier groups or deviate significantly from the core, SORE achieves near-LLM extraction precision at a fraction of the cost. Experiments on HTML datasets demonstrate that SORE outperforms structural methods and yield high precision in diverse scenarios. Our system is currently deployed in production, processing millions of documents daily across multiple languages while maintaining both efficiency and accuracy. To facilitate reproducibility and further research, we will publicly release our implementation and evaluation datasets.

Semantic Outlier Removal with Embedding Models and LLMs

Named Entity Recognition (NER) for low-resource variants of English remains challenging, as most NER models are trained on datasets predominantly focused on American or British English. While recent work has shown that proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs) can perform NER effectively in low-resource settings through in-context learning, practical deployment is limited by their high computational costs and privacy concerns. Open-source Small Language Models (SLMs) offer promising alternatives, but the tendency of these Language Models (LM) to hallucinate poses challenges for production use. To address this, we introduce SLENDER, a novel output format for LM-based NER that achieves a three-fold reduction in inference time on average compared to JSON format, which is widely used for structured outputs. Our approach using Gemma-2-9B-it with the SLENDER output format and constrained decoding in zero-shot settings outperforms the en_core_web_trf model from SpaCy, an industry-standard NER tool, in all five regions of the Worldwide test set.

SLENDER: Structured Outputs for SLM-based NER in Low-Resource Englishes

Virtual Teaching Assistants (VTAs) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to enhance student learning by providing instant feedback and facilitating multi-turn interactions. However, empirical studies on their effectiveness and acceptance in real-world classrooms are limited, leaving their practical impact uncertain. In this study, we develop an LLM-based VTA and deploy it in an introductory AI programming course with 477 graduate students. To assess how student perceptions of the VTA’s performance evolve over time, we conduct three rounds of comprehensive surveys at different stages of the course. Additionally, we analyze 3,869 student–VTA interaction pairs to identify common question types and engagement patterns. We then compare these interactions with traditional student-human instructor interactions to evaluate the VTA’s role in the learning process. Through a large-scale empirical study and interaction analysis, we assess the feasibility of deploying VTAs in real-world classrooms and identify key challenges for broader adoption. Finally, we release the source code of our VTA system, fostering future advancements in AI-driven education.

A Large-Scale Real-World Evaluation of an LLM-Based Virtual Teaching Assistant

Effective content moderation is essential for video platforms to safeguard user experience and uphold community standards. While traditional video classification models effectively handle well-defined moderation tasks, they struggle with complicated scenarios such as implicit harmful content and contextual ambiguity. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer a promising solution to these limitations with their superior cross-modal reasoning and contextual understanding. However, two key challenges hinder their industrial adoption. First, the high computational cost of MLLMs makes full-scale deployment impractical. Second, adapting generative models for discriminative classification remains an open research problem. In this paper, we first introduce an efficient method to transform a generative MLLM into a multimodal classifier using minimal discriminative training data. To enable industry-scale deployment, we then propose a router-ranking cascade system that integrates MLLMs with a lightweight router model. Offline experiments demonstrate that our MLLM-based approach improves F1 score by 66.50% over traditional classifiers while requiring only 2% of the fine-tuning data. Online evaluations show that our system increases automatic content moderation volume by 41%, while the cascading deployment reduces computational cost to only 1.5% of direct full-scale deployment.

Filter-And-Refine: A MLLM Based Cascade System for Industrial-Scale Video Content Moderation

Ambiguous user queries pose a significant challenge in task-oriented dialogue systems relying on information retrieval. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating clarification questions to tackle query ambiguity, they rely solely on the top-k retrieved documents for clarification which fails when ambiguity is too high to retrieve relevant documents in the first place. Traditional approaches 
lack principled mechanisms to determine when to use broad domain knowledge vs specific retrieved document context for clarification. We propose AsK, a novel hybrid approach that dynamically chooses between document-based or aspect-based clarification based on query ambiguity. Our approach requires no labeled clarification data and introduces: (1) Weakly-supervised Longformer-based ambiguity analysis, (2) Automated domain-specific aspect generation using clustering and LLMs and (3) LLM-powered clarification generation. AsK demonstrates significant improvements over baselines in both single-turn and multi-turn settings (recall@5 gain of ~20%) when evaluated on product troubleshooting and product search datasets.

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Next from ACL 2025

QUPID: Quantified Understanding for Enhanced Performance, Insights, and Decisions in Korean Search Engines

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Utility Preservation of Clinical Text After De-Identification