Austria

Query classification, including multiple subtasks such as intent and category prediction, is a vital part of e-commerce applications. E-commerce queries are usually short and lack context, and the information between labels cannot be used, resulting in insufficient prior information for modeling. Most existing industrial query classification methods rely on users&#39; posterior click behavior to construct training samples, resulting in a Matthew vicious cycle. Furthermore, the subtasks of query classification lack a unified framework, leading to low efficiency for algorithm improvement.

In this paper, we propose a novel Semi-supervised Scalable Unified Framework (SSUF), containing multiple enhanced modules to unify the query classification tasks. The knowledge-enhanced module uses world knowledge to enhance query representations and solve the problem of insufficient query information. The label-enhanced module uses label semantics and semi-supervised signals to reduce the dependence on posterior labels. The structure-enhanced module enhances the label representation based on the complex label relations. Each module is highly pluggable, and input features can be added or removed as needed according to each subtask. We conduct extensive offline and online A/B experiments, and the results show that SSUF significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models.

ACL 2025

A Semi-supervised Scalable Unified Framework for E-commerce Query Classification

query intent classification

multi-label text classification

semi-supervised learning

## 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." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

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

Query classification, including multiple subtasks such as intent and category prediction, is a vital part of e-commerce applications. E-commerce queries are usually short and lack context, and the information between labels cannot be used, resulting in insufficient prior information for modeling. Most existing industrial query classification methods rely on users' posterior click behavior to construct training samples, resulting in a Matthew vicious cycle. Furthermore, the subtasks of query classification lack a unified framework, leading to low efficiency for algorithm improvement.

In this paper, we propose a novel Semi-supervised Scalable Unified Framework (SSUF), containing multiple enhanced modules to unify the query classification tasks. The knowledge-enhanced module uses world knowledge to enhance query representations and solve the problem of insufficient query information. The label-enhanced module uses label semantics and semi-supervised signals to reduce the dependence on posterior labels. The structure-enhanced module enhances the label representation based on the complex label relations. Each module is highly pluggable, and input features can be added or removed as needed according to each subtask. We conduct extensive offline and online A/B experiments, and the results show that SSUF significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models.

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)

A comprehensive benchmark is crucial for evaluating automated Business Intelligence (BI) systems and their real-world effectiveness. We propose BI-Bench, a holistic, end-to-end benchmarking framework that assesses BI systems based on the quality, relevance, and depth of insights. It categorizes queries into descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive types, aligning with practical BI needs. Our fully automated approach enables custom benchmark generation tailored to specific datasets. Additionally, we introduce an automated evaluation mechanism within BI-Bench that removes reliance on strict ground truth, ensuring scalable and adaptable assessments. By addressing key limitations, it offers a flexible and robust, user-centered methodology for advancing next-generation BI systems.

BI-Bench : A Comprehensive Benchmark Dataset and Unsupervised Evaluation for BI Systems

Modern digital platforms rely on related search query recommendations to enhance engagement, yet existing methods fail to reconcile click-through rate (CTR) optimization with topic expansion. We propose CMAQ, a Consistent Multi-Objective Aligned Query generation framework that harmonizes these goals through three components: (1) reward modeling to quantify objectives, (2) style alignment for format compliance, and (3) consistency-aware optimization to coordinate joint improvements. CMAQ employs adaptive-beta scaled DPO with geometric mean rewards, balancing CTR and expansion while mitigating objective conflicts. Extensive offline and online evaluations in a large-scale industrial setting demonstrate CMAQ’s superiority, achieving significant CTR gains (+2.3%) and higher human-rated query quality compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our approach enables high-quality query generation while sustaining user engagement and platform ecosystem health.



Consistency-Aware Online Multi-Objective Alignment for Related Search Query Generation

This paper introduces a task aimed at extracting structured tables from text using natural language (NL) instructions. 
We present TableCoder, an approach that leverages the symbolic nature of code to enhance the robustness of table structure construction and content extraction. TableCoder first generates Python classes or SQL statements to explicitly construct table structures, capturing semantic ontology, computational dependencies, numerical properties, and format strings. This approach reliably mitigates issues such as structural errors, erroneous computations, and mismatched value types. Subsequently, TableCoder proposes grounded content extraction, populating table cells sequentially and maintaining the exact order in which they are mentioned in the source text. By simulating a grounded "translation" from text to code, this method reduces the likelihood of omissions and hallucinations.

Experimental results demonstrate that TableCoder significantly improves F1 scores and mitigates hallucination and computational errors, crucial for high-stakes applications like government data analytics and financial compliance reporting. Moreover, the code-generation-based method naturally integrates with standard SQL databases and Python workflows, ensuring seamless deployment in existing enterprise data pipelines.

TableCoder: Table Extraction from Text via Reliable Code Generation

Due to the legal and ethical responsibilities of healthcare providers (HCPs) for accurate documentation and protection of patient data privacy, the natural variability in the responses of large language models (LLMs) presents challenges for incorporating clinical note generation (CNG) systems, driven by LLMs, into real-world clinical processes. The complexity is further amplified by the detailed nature of texts in CNG. To enhance the confidence of HCPs in tools powered by LLMs, this study evaluates the reliability of 12 open-weight and proprietary LLMs from Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, and OpenAI in CNG in terms of their ability to generate notes that are string equivalent (consistency rate), have the same meaning (semantic consistency) and are correct (semantic similarity), across several iterations using the same prompt. The results show that (1) LLMs from all model families are stable, such that their responses are semantically consistent despite being written in various ways, and (2) most of the LLMs generated notes close to the corresponding notes made by experts. Overall, Meta's Llama 70B was the most reliable, followed by Mistral's Small model. With these findings, we recommend the local deployment of these relatively smaller open-weight models for CNG to ensure compliance with data privacy regulations, as well as to improve the efficiency of HCPs in clinical documentation.

Are LLMs reliable? An exploration of the reliability of large language models in clinical note generation

Emotional support conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate the emotional distress of individuals through effective conversations. Although large language models (LLMs) have obtained remarkable progress on ESC, most of these studies might not define the diagram from the state model perspective, therefore providing a suboptimal solution for long-term satisfaction. To address such an issue, we leverage the Q-learning on LLMs, and propose a framework called straQ*. Our framework allows a plug-and-play LLM to bootstrap the planning during ESC, determine the optimal strategy based on long-term returns, and finally guide the LLM to response. Substantial experiments on ESC datasets suggest that straQ* outperforms many baselines, including direct inference, self-refine, chain of thought, finetuning, and finite state machines.

Convert Language Model into a Value-based Strategic Planner

System-level programming is essential for modern enterprise infrastructure, enabling the automation and management of complex systems through declarative code. Developers write this code based on schemas, which themselves are a form of code that defines constraints like data types and required fields. These schemas help ensure operational correctness and smooth integration across systems. However, as enterprise schemas become complex, manually writing code adhering to these constraints becomes challenging for developers. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in code generation and natural language understanding, particularly in zero-shot and few-shot settings. However, applying LLMs to handle constraints represented in code, essential for system-level programming rather than natural language, has not been explored. Hence, we introduce ConCodeEval, a study across two key dimensions: format and constraint efficacy, with a first-of-its-kind benchmark involving two novel experiments for code constraints across five representations (JSON, YAML, XML, Python, and natural language). Our findings suggest that conscious choice of representations can lead to optimal use of LLMs in enterprise use cases involving constraints. Nonetheless, LLMs continue to struggle significantly with code constraints, motivating the need for innovation in this direction.

ConCodeEval: Evaluating Large Language Models for Code Constraints in Domain-Specific Languages

Consumers often face inconsistent product quality, particularly when identical products vary between markets, a situation known as the dual quality problem. To identify and address this issue, automated techniques are needed. This paper explores how natural language processing (NLP) can aid in detecting such discrepancies and presents the full process of developing a solution. First, we describe in detail the creation of a new Polish-language dataset with 1,957 reviews, 540 highlighting dual quality issues. We then discuss experiments with various approaches like SetFit with sentence-transformers, transformer-based encoders, and LLMs, including error analysis and robustness verification. Additionally, we evaluate multilingual transfer using a subset of opinions in English, French, and German. The paper concludes with insights on deployment and practical applications.

Unveiling Dual Quality in Product Reviews: An NLP-Based Approach

A key ethical challenge in Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is ensuring that scores are only released when they meet high reliability standards. Confidence modelling addresses this by assigning a reliability estimate measure, in the form of a confidence score, to each automated score. In this study, we frame confidence estimation as a classification task: predicting whether an AES-generated score correctly places a candidate in the appropriate CEFR level. While this is a binary decision, we leverage the inherent granularity of the scoring domain in two ways. First, we reformulate the task as an n-ary classification problem using score binning. Second, we introduce a set of novel Kernel Weighted Ordinal Categorical Cross Entropy (KWOCCE) loss functions that incorporate the ordinal structure of CEFR labels. Our best-performing model achieves an F1 score of 0.97, and enables the system to release 47 percent of scores with 100 percent CEFR agreement and 99 percent with at least 95 percent CEFR agreement – compared to 92 percent (approx.) CEFR agreement from the standalone AES model where we release all AM predicted scores.

Enhancing Marker Scoring Accuracy through Ordinal Confidence Modelling in Educational Assessments

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to significant improvements in various service domains, including search, recommendation, and chatbot applications.
However, applying state-of-the-art (SOTA) research to industrial settings presents challenges, as it requires maintaining flexible conversational abilities while also strictly complying with service-specific constraints.
This can be seen as two conflicting requirements due to the probabilistic nature of LLMs.
In this paper, we propose our approach to addressing this challenge and detail the strategies we employed to overcome their inherent limitations in real-world applications.
We conduct a practical case study of a conversational agent designed for the e-commerce domain, detailing our implementation workflow and optimizations.
Our findings provide insights into bridging the gap between academic research and real-world application, introducing a framework for developing scalable, controllable, and reliable AI-driven agents.

A Practical Approach for Building Production-Grade Conversational Agents with Workflow Graphs

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on large-scale web data, which makes it difficult to grasp the contribution of each text. This poses the risk of leaking inappropriate data such as benchmarks, personal information, and copyrighted texts in the training data. Membership Inference Attacks (MIA), which determine whether a given text is included in the model’s training data, have been attracting attention. Previous studies of MIAs revealed that likelihood-based classification is effective for detecting leaks in LLMs. However, the existing likelihood-based methods cannot be applied to some proprietary models like ChatGPT or Claude 3 because the likelihood for input text is unavailable to the user. In this study, we propose a Sampling-based Pseudo-Likelihood (SPL) method for MIA (SaMIA) that calculates SPL using only the text generated by an LLM to detect leaks. The SaMIA treats the target text as the reference text and multiple outputs from the LLM as text samples, calculates the degree of n-gram match as SPL, and determines the membership of the text in the training data. Even without likelihoods, SaMIA performed on par with existing likelihood-based methods.

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BI-Bench : A Comprehensive Benchmark Dataset and Unsupervised Evaluation for BI Systems

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