Austria

Text-to-SQL aims to translate natural language queries into SQL statements, which is practical as it enables anyone to easily retrieve the desired information from databases. Recently, many existing approaches tackle this problem with Large Language Models (LLMs), leveraging their strong capability in understanding user queries and generating corresponding SQL code. Yet, the parametric knowledge in LLMs might be limited to covering all the diverse and domain-specific queries that require grounding in various database schemas, which makes generated SQLs less accurate oftentimes. To tackle this, we propose constructing the knowledge base for text-to-SQL, a foundational source of knowledge, from which we retrieve and generate the necessary knowledge for given queries. In particular, unlike existing approaches that either manually annotate knowledge or generate only a few pieces of knowledge for each query, our knowledge base is comprehensive, which is constructed based on a combination of all the available questions and their associated database schemas along with their relevant knowledge, and can be reused for unseen databases from different datasets and domains. We validate our approach on multiple text-to-SQL datasets, considering both the overlapping and non-overlapping database scenarios, where it outperforms relevant baselines substantially.

ACL 2025

Knowledge Base Construction for Knowledge-Augmented Text-to-SQL

knowledge-augmented text-to-sql

text-to-sql

knowledge base

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

poster

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

The architectural industry produces extensive documents, including method statements—expository documents that integrate multi-source data into actionable guidance. Manual drafting however is labor-intensive and time-consuming. This paper introduces ArchiDocGen, a multi-agent framework automating method statement generation. Unlike traditional approaches relying on static templates or single-pass generation, ArchiDocGen decomposes the task into three steps: outline generation, section-based content generation, and polishing, each handled by specialized agents. To provide domain expertise, ArchiDocGen employs a section-based retriever to fetch and synthesize relevant documents from its custom knowledge base. Each section is generated through iterative reasoning of a section-based chain-of-thought (SeCoT) scheme, followed by refinement to meet professional standards. To evaluate the generated method statements, we partner with the industry to establish a multi-dimensional evaluation system by combining automatic and empirical methods. Experiments show that ArchiDocGen achieves 4.38 ContentScore, excelling in specialization, completeness, organization, and clarity. Additionally, a web-based application for ArchiDocGen is developed and deployed with industry partners.

ArchiDocGen: Multi-Agent Framework for Expository Document Generation in the Architectural Industry

Enhancing computational efficiency and reducing deployment costs for large language models (LLMs) have become critical challenges in various resource-constrained scenarios. In this work, we present DistilQwen2.5, a family of distilled, lightweight LLMs derived from the public Qwen2.5 models. These distilled models exhibit enhanced instruction-following capabilities compared to the original models based on a series of distillation techniques that incorporate knowledge from much larger LLMs. In our industrial practice, we first leverage powerful proprietary LLMs with varying capacities as multi-agent teachers to select, rewrite, and refine instruction-response pairs that are more suitable for student LLMs to learn. After standard fine-tuning, we further leverage a computationally efficient model fusion approach that enables student models to progressively integrate fine-grained hidden knowledge from their teachers. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the distilled models possess significantly stronger capabilities than their original checkpoints. Additionally, we present use cases to illustrate the applications of our framework in real-world scenarios. To facilitate practical use, we have released all the DistilQwen2.5 models to the open-source community.

DistilQwen2.5: Industrial Practices of Training Distilled Open Lightweight Language Models

We present MegaBeam-Mistral-7B\footnote{\url{https://huggingface.co/aws-prototyping/MegaBeam-Mistral-7B-512k}}, a language model that supports 512K-token context length. Our work addresses practical limitations in long-context training, supporting real-world tasks such as compliance monitoring and verification. Evaluated on three long-context benchmarks, our 7B-parameter model demonstrates superior in-context learning performance on HELMET and robust retrieval and tracing capability on RULER. It is currently the only open model to achieve competitive long-range reasoning on BABILong at 512K context length without RAG or targeted fine-tuning. Released as fully open source under the Apache 2.0 license, the model has been downloaded over 100,000 times on Hugging Face.

Scaling Context, Not Parameters: Training a Compact 7B Language Model for Efficient Long-Context Processing

Operations research (OR) is widely deployed to solve critical decision-making problems with complex objectives and constraints, impacting manufacturing, logistics, finance, and healthcare outcomes. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in various domains, their practical application in industry-relevant operations research (OR) problems presents significant challenges and opportunities. Preliminary industrial applications of LLMs for operations research face two critical deployment challenges: 1) Self-correction focuses on code syntax rather than mathematical accuracy, causing costly errors; 2) Complex expert selection creates unpredictable workflows that reduce transparency and increase maintenance costs, making them impractical for time-sensitive business applications. To address these business limitations, we introduce ORMind, a cognitive-inspired framework that enhances optimization through counterfactual reasoning. Our approach emulates human cognition—implementing an end-to-end workflow that systematically transforms requirements into mathematical models and executable solver code. It is currently being tested internally in Lenovo's AI Assistant, with plans to enhance optimization capabilities for both business and consumer customers. Experiments demonstrate that ORMind outperforms existing methods, achieving a 9.5\% improvement on the NL4Opt dataset and a 14.6\% improvement on the ComplexOR dataset.

ORMind: A Cognitive-Inspired End-to-End Reasoning Framework for Operations Research

With the rapid expansion of e-commerce and continuous urban evolution, Geospatial Repartition, dividing geographical regions into delivery zones, is essential to optimize various objectives, e.g., on-time delivery rate, for last-mile delivery. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have offered promising capabilities for integrating diverse contextual information that is beneficial for geospatial repartition. However, given the inherent uncertainty in LLMs, adapting them to practical usage in real-world repartition is nontrivial. Thus, we introduce CoAlign, a novel three-stage framework that calibrates LLM uncertainty to enable robust geospatial repartition by transforming the task into a ranking problem, integrating historical data with LLM-generated candidates. It first generates explainable candidate partitions with a multi-criteria strategy and then designs a novel conformal method to rank these candidates relative to historical partitions with coverage guarantees. Finally, CoAlign delivers candidates through an interactive decision support system. Extensive evaluation with real-world data shows that CoAlign effectively calibrates LLM uncertainty and generates partitions that better align with human feedback. Moreover, we have deployed CoAlign in one of the world’s largest logistics companies, significantly enhancing their delivery operations by increasing candidate acceptance rates by 300\% and improving on-time delivery rates by 3\%. Our work provides a novel angle to address industrial geospatial decision-making tasks by calibrating LLM uncertainty.

CoAlign: Uncertainty Calibration of LLM for Geospatial Repartition

In the retrieval stage of recommendation systems, two-tower models are widely adopted for their efficiency as a predominant paradigm. However, this method, which relies on collaborative filtering signals, exhibits limitations in modeling similarity for long-tail items. To address this issue, we propose a Motivation-aware Retrieval for Long-Tail Recommendation, named MotiR. The purchase motivations generated by LLMs represent a condensed abstraction of items' intrinsic attributes. By effectively integrating them with traditional item features, this approach enables the two-tower model to capture semantic-level similarities among long-tail items. Furthermore, a gated network-based adaptive weighting mechanism dynamically adjusts representation weights: emphasizing semantic modeling for long-tail items while preserving collaborative signal advantages for popular items. Experimental results demonstrate 60.5% Hit@10 improvements over existing methods on Amazon Books. Industrial deployment in Taobao&Tmall Group 88VIP scenarios achieves over 4% CTR and CVR improvement, validating the effectiveness of our method.

MotiR: Motivation-aware Retrieval for Long-Tail Recommendation

We introduce an active-sampling-based framework for automatic prompt optimization, designed to enhance the performance of Large Language Model (LLM)-as-a-judge systems, which use LLMs to evaluate the quality of text or other outputs, in label-scarce settings. Unlike existing approaches that rely on extensive annotations, our method starts with no labeled data and iteratively selects and labels a small, diverse, and informative subset of samples to guide prompt refinement. At each iteration, our method evaluates the current prompt based on selected data and automatically updates the prompt, enabling efficient prompt optimization with minimal supervision. Moreover, we formulate sample selection as a convex optimization problem that balances uncertainty and diversity, maximizing the utility of limited labeling budgets. We validate our framework across four popular LLMs and three real-world datasets, including one from a deployed industry product. Results show that our optimized prompts consistently outperform baselines, achieving significant gains in evaluation quality and robustness while substantially reducing labeling costs.

Enhancing LLM-as-a-Judge through Active-Sampling-based Prompt Optimization

The development of large language models (LLMs) offers a feasible approach to simulating complex behavioral patterns of individuals, enabling the reconstruction of microscopic and realistic human societal dynamics. However, this approach demands a realistic environment to provide feedback for the evolving of agents, as well as a parallelized framework to support the massive and uncertain interactions among agents and environments. To address the gaps in existing works, which lack real-world environments and struggle with complex interactions, we design a scalable framework named **AgentSociety**, which integrates realistic societal environments and parallelized interactions to support simulations of large-scale agents. Experiments demonstrate that the framework can support simulations of 30,000 agents that are faster than the wall-clock time with 24 NVIDIA A800 GPUs and the performance grows linearly with the increase of LLM computational resources. We also show that the integration of realistic environments significantly enhances the authenticity of the agents' behaviors. Through the framework and experimental results, we are confident that deploying large-scale LLM Agents to simulate human societies becomes feasible. This will help practitioners in fields such as social sciences and management sciences to obtain new scientific discoveries via language generation technologies, and even improve planning and decision-making in the real world. The code is available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/agentsociety/.

A Parallelized Framework for Simulating Large-Scale LLM Agents with Realistic Environments and Interactions

Document question answering plays a crucial role in enhancing employee productivity by providing quick and accurate access to information. Two primary approaches have been developed: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which reduces input tokens and inference costs, and long-context question answering (LC), which processes entire documents for higher accuracy. We introduce EXPLAIN (\textbf{EX}tracting, \textbf{P}re-summarizing, \textbf{L}inking and enh\textbf{A}c\textbf{IN}g RAG), a novel retrieval-augmented generation method that automatically extracts useful entities and generates summaries from documents. EXPLAIN improves accuracy by retrieving more informative entity summaries, achieving precision comparable to LC while maintaining low token consumption. Experimental results on internal dataset (ROUGE-L from 30.14\% to 30.31\%) and three public datasets (HotpotQA, 2WikiMQA, and Quality, average score from 62\% to 64\%) demonstrate the efficacy of EXPLAIN. Human evaluation in ant group production deployment indicates EXPLAIN surpasses baseline RAG in comprehensiveness.

EXPLAIN: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Entity Summary

Generating cell-level descriptions for Jupyter Notebooks, which is a major resource consisting of codes, tables, and descriptions, has been attracting increasing research attention. However, existing methods for Jupyter Notebooks mostly focus on generating descriptions from code snippets or table outputs independently. On the other side, descriptions should be personalized as users have different purposes in different scenarios while previous work ignored this situation during description generation. In this work, we formulate a new task, personalized description generation with code, tables,and user-written guidelines in Jupyter Notebooks. To evaluate this new task, we collect and propose a benchmark, namely NBDESCRIB, containing code, tables, and user-written guidelines as inputs and personalized descriptions as targets. Extensive experiments show that while existing models of text generation are able to generate fluent and readable descriptions, they still struggle to produce factually correct descriptions without user-written guidelines. CodeT5 achieved the highest scores in Orientation (1.27) and Correctness (-0.43) among foundation models in human evaluation, while the ground truth scored higher in Orientation (1.45) and Correctness (1.19). Common error patterns involve misalignment with guidelines, incorrect variable values, omission of im-031 portant code information, and reasoning errors.032 Moreover, ablation studies show that adding guidelines significantly enhances performance, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

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ArchiDocGen: Multi-Agent Framework for Expository Document Generation in the Architectural Industry

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