China

Knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to infer new knowledge and make predictions from knowledge graphs. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable reasoning capabilities. LLM-enhanced KGC methods primarily focus on designing task-specific instructions, achieving promising advancements. However, there are still two critical challenges. First, existing methods often ignore the inconsistent representation spaces between natural language and graph structures. Second, most approaches develop separate instructions for different KGC tasks, leading to duplicate works and time-consuming processes. To address these challenges, we propose SAT, a novel framework that enhances LLMs for KGC via structure-aware alignment-tuning. Specifically, we first introduce hierarchical knowledge alignment to align graph embeddings with the natural language space through multi-task contrastive learning. Then, we propose structural instruction tuning to guide LLMs in performing structure-aware reasoning over KGs, using a unified graph instruction combined with a lightweight knowledge adapter. Experimental results on two KGC tasks across four benchmark datasets demonstrate that SAT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially in the link prediction task with improvements ranging from 8.7% to 29.8%\footnote{Our source code is available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/KGC-SAT}.

EMNLP 2025

Enhancing Large Language Model for Knowledge Graph Completion via Structure-Aware Alignment-Tuning

representation space alignment

knowledge graph completion

large language models

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/81a3c0317d24f663b49b996875024d45.png)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2022.coling-1/)



### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes but also in industrial research departments including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

The hybrid format ultimately lends itself to greater exposure for our sponsors: COLING2022 will let you reach more potential partners and customers than ever before!

To gain access to this event page you are required to register. Find more information and pay the registration fee on event the organizer’s website **[https://coling2022.org/reg](https://coling2022.org/reg)**

COLING 2022

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

poster

## 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*

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

While large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities across diverse domains, their application to code vulnerability detection holds great potential for identifying security flaws and improving software safety. In this paper, we propose a sequential multi-stage approach via confidence- and collaboration-based decision making (ConfColl). The system adopts a three-stage sequential classification framework, proceeding through a single agent, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with external examples, and multi-agent reasoning enhanced with RAG. The decision process selects among these strategies to balance performance and cost, with the process terminating at any stage where a high-certainty prediction is achieved. Experiments on a benchmark dataset and a low-resource language demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in enhancing code vulnerability detection performance.

A Sequential Multi-Stage Approach for Code Vulnerability Detection via Confidence- and Collaboration-based Decision Making

Traditional information retrieval (IR) methods excel at textual and semantic matching but struggle in reasoning-intensive retrieval tasks that require multi-hop inference or complex semantic understanding between queries and documents. One promising solution is to explicitly rewrite or augment queries using large language models (LLMs) to elicit reasoning-relevant content prior to retrieval. However, the widespread use of large-scale LLMs like GPT-4 or LLaMA3-70B remains impractical due to their high inference cost and limited deployability in real-world systems. In this work, we introduce Reinforced Query Reasoner (RQR), a family of small-scale language models for query reasoning and rewriting in reasoning-intensive retrieval. Our approach frames query reformulation as a reinforcement learning problem and employs a novel semi-rule-based reward function. This enables smaller language models, e.g., Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct, to achieve reasoning performance rivaling large-scale LLMs without their prohibitive inference costs. Experiment results on BRIGHT benchmark show that, with BM25 as retrievers, both RQR-7B and RQR-1.5B models significantly outperform existing baselines, including prompt-based query reasoners and some latest dense retrievers trained for reasoning-intensive retrieval tasks, offering superior adaptability for real-world deployment. All code and dataset will be publicly released.

Reinforced Query Reasoners for Reasoning-intensive Retrieval Tasks

Large language models (LLMs) often fail to capture semantic changes in queries due to negation, and generate incorrect responses. Negation frequently exists in the real world and is useful for understanding the opposite or absence of a statement, so it is an essential element in logical reasoning. Previous studies have explored LLMs' ability to capture negations separately from their ability to properly ground knowledge for positive queries. However, this perspective is limited in that it cannot clearly distinguish whether the cause of incorrect responses is the logical incoherence caused by negations or the lack of grounding ability for the given context. To address this issue, we focus on the phenomenon of the model failing to capture semantic contradictions in negated queries despite its accurate understanding of knowledge about positive queries. We term this phenomenon negation blindness on the query. We propose a verification framework that includes task design and measurement methods to verify this issue. In detail, we establish two criteria for systematic task design-i) complexity and ii) constrainedness-and devise four verification tasks accordingly. Moreover, we analyze the results extensively and provide insights into problem alleviation feasibility through experiments on various approaches

Semantic Inversion, Identical Replies: Revisiting Negation Blindness in Large Language Models

Addressing the challenges in QA for specific technical domains requires identifying relevant portions of extensive documents and generating answers based on this focused content. Traditional pre-trained LLMs often struggle with domain-specific terminology, while fine-tuned LLMs demand substantial computational resources. To overcome these limitations, we propose TIDES, Technical Information Distillation and Extraction System. TIDES is a training-free approach that combines traditional TF-IDF techniques with prompt-based LLMs in a hybrid process, effectively addressing complex technical questions. It uses TF-IDF to identify and prioritize domain-specific terms that are less common in other documents and LLMs to refine the candidate pool by focusing on the most relevant segments in documents through multiple stages. Our approach improves the precision and efficiency of QA systems in technical contexts without LLM retraining.

TIDES: Technical Information Discovery and Extraction System

Equipped with the capability to call functions, modern LLM agents can leverage external tools for addressing a range of tasks unattainable through language skills alone. However, the effective execution of these tools relies heavily not just on the advanced capabilities of LLM agents but also on precise user instructions, which often cannot be ensured in the real world. To evaluate the performance of LLM agents tool-use under imperfect instructions, we meticulously examine the real-world instructions queried from users, analyze the error patterns, and build a challenging tool-use benchmark called Noisy ToolBench. We find that due to the next-token prediction training objective, LLM agents tend to arbitrarily generate the missed argument, which may lead to hallucinations and risks. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, Ask-when-Needed, which prompts LLM agents to ask questions to users whenever they encounter obstacles due to unclear instructions. Moreover, to reduce the manual labor involved in user-LLM interaction and assess LLM agents' performance in tool utilization from both accuracy and efficiency perspectives, we design an automated evaluation tool named ToolEvaluator. Our experiments demonstrate that the Ask-when-Needed significantly outperforms existing frameworks for tool learning in the Noisy ToolBench. We will release all related code and datasets to support future research.

Learning to Ask: When LLM Agents Meet Unclear Instruction

Efficient multi-hop reasoning requires Large Language Models (LLMs) based agents to acquire high-value external knowledge iteratively. Previous work has explored reinforcement learning (RL) to train LLMs to perform search-based document retrieval, achieving notable improvements in QA performance, but underperform on complex, multi-hop QA resulting from the sparse rewards from global signal only. To address this gap in existing research, we introduce StepSearch, a framework for search LLMs that trained with step-wise proximal policy optimization method. It consists of richer and more detailed intermediate search rewards and token-level process supervision based on information gain and redundancy penalties to better guide each search step. We constructed a fine-grained question-answering dataset containing sub-question-level search trajectories based on open source datasets through a set of data pipeline method. On standard multi-hop QA benchmarks, it significantly outperforms global-reward baselines, achieving 11.2% and 4.2% absolute improvements for 3B and 7B models over various search with RL baselines using only 19k training data, demonstrating the effectiveness of fine-grained, stepwise supervision in optimizing deep search LLMs.

StepSearch: Igniting LLMs Search Ability via Step-Wise Proximal Policy Optimization

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened new possibilities for table-based tasks. However, most existing methods remain confined to single-table settings, limiting their applicability to real-world databases composed of multiple interrelated tables. In multi-table scenarios, LLMs face two key challenges: reasoning over relational structures beyond sequential text, and handling the input length limitations imposed by large-scale table concatenation. To address these issues, we propose Guided Relational Integration for multiple Tables (GRIT), a lightweight method that converts relational schemas into LLM-friendly textual representations. GRIT employs hashing-based techniques to efficiently infer primary–foreign key relationships and constructs prompts that explicitly encode relevant join paths and question-relevant columns. When applied to off-the-shelf LLMs, GRIT consistently improves table-column retrieval performance across diverse multi-table benchmarks while significantly reducing memory and computational overhead.

GRIT: Guided Relational Integration for Efficient Multi-Table Understanding

Multimodal neural machine translation (MNMT), has received increasing attention due to its widespread applications in various fields such as cross-border e-commerce and cross-border social media platforms. The task which aims to integrate other modalities, such as the visual modality, with textual data to enhance translation performance, has recently received a lot of attention. We survey the major milestones in MNMT research, discussing key challenges and promising research directions for advancing MNMT.

Multimodal Neural Machine Translation: A Survey of the State of the Art

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks can improve the factual accuracy of large language models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge from retrieved documents, thereby overcoming the limitations of models' static intrinsic knowledge. However, these systems are susceptible to adversarial attacks that manipulate the retrieval process by introducing documents that are adversarial yet semantically similar to the query. Notably, while these adversarial documents resemble the query, they exhibit weak similarity to benign documents in the retrieval set. Thus, we propose a simple yet effective **G**raph-based **R**eranking against **A**dversarial **D**ocument **A**ttacks (GRADA) framework aiming at preserving retrieval quality while significantly reducing the success of adversaries. Our study evaluates the effectiveness of our approach through experiments conducted on six LLMs: GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4o, Llama3.1-8b-Instruct, Llama3.1-70b-Instruct, Qwen2.5-7b-Instruct and Qwen2.5-14b-Instruct. We use three datasets to assess performance, with results from the Natural Questions dataset demonstrating up to an 80% reduction in attack success rates while maintaining minimal loss in accuracy.

GRADA: Graph-based Reranking against Adversarial Documents Attack

Video-to-audio synthesis, which generates synchronized audio for visual content, critically enhances viewer immersion and narrative coherence in film and interactive media. However, video-to-audio dubbing for long-form content remains an unsolved challenge due to dynamic semantic shifts, audio diversity and the absence of dedicated datasets. While existing methods excel in short videos, they falter in long scenarios (e.g., movies) due to fragmented synthesis and inadequate cross-scene consistency. We propose LVAS-Agent, a multi-agent framework that offers a coordinated, multi-component approach to long-video audio generation. Our approach decomposes long-video synthesis into four steps including scene segmentation, script generation, audio design and audio synthesis. To enable systematic evaluation, we introduce LVAS-Bench, the first benchmark with 207 professionally curated long videos spanning diverse scenarios. Experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art V2A models in overall audio synthesis quality.

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