Austria

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.



ACL 2025

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

direct preference alignment

query generation

large language model

## 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.

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)

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.

Sampling-based Pseudo-Likelihood for Membership Inference Attacks

Measuring social bias in large language models (LLMs) is crucial, but existing bias evaluation methods struggle to assess bias in long-form generation. We propose a Bias Benchmark for Generation (BBG), an adaptation of the Bias Benchmark for QA (BBQ), designed to evaluate social bias in long-form generation by having LLMs generate continuations of story prompts. Building our benchmark in English and Korean, we measure the probability of neutral and biased generations across ten LLMs. We also compare our long-form story generation evaluation results with multiple-choice BBQ evaluation, showing that the two approaches produce inconsistent results.

Social Bias Benchmark for Generation: A Comparison of Generation and QA-Based Evaluations

We perform a critical examination of the scientific methodology behind contemporary large language model (LLM) research. For this we assess over 2,000 research works released between 2020 and 2024 based on criteria typical of what is considered good research (e.g. presence of statistical tests and reproducibility), and cross-validate it with arguments that are at the centre of controversy (e.g., claims of emergent behaviour). We find multiple trends, such as declines in ethics disclaimers, a rise of LLMs as evaluators, and an increase on claims of LLM reasoning abilities without leveraging human evaluation. We note that conference checklists are effective at curtailing some of these issues, but balancing velocity and rigour in research cannot solely rely on these. We tie all these findings to findings from recent meta-reviews and extend recommendations on how to address what does, does not, and should work in LLM research.

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TableCoder: Table Extraction from Text via Reliable Code Generation

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