China

In this work, we introduce the first benchmark for evaluating the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in understanding and generating responses in Tunisian Arabic. To achieve this, we construct a dataset of Tunisian Arabic instructions and prompt ten widely-used LLMs that claim to support Arabic. We then assess the LLM responses through both human and LLM-based evaluations across four criteria: quality, correctness, relevance, and dialectal adherence. We analyze the agreement and correlation between these judgments and identify GPT-4o as our automated judge model based on its high correlation with human ratings, and generate a final leaderboard using this model. Our error analysis reveals that most LLMs struggle with recognizing and properly responding in Tunisian Arabic. To facilitate further research, we release our dataset and evaluation framework, allowing others to benchmark their own models.

EMNLP 2025

TounsiBench: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Tunisian Arabic

less-resourced languages;

dialects and language varieties

multilingual benchmarks

multilingual evaluation

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

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 and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

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."<br>

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*





<br>

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

While theories of discourse and cognitive science have long recognized the value of unhurried pacing, recent dialogue research tends to minimize friction in conversational systems. Yet, frictionless dialogue risks fostering uncritical reliance on AI outputs, which can obscure implicit assumptions and lead to unintended consequences. To meet this challenge, we propose integrating positive friction into conversational AI, which promotes user reflection on goals, critical thinking on system response, and subsequent re-conditioning of AI systems. We hypothesize systems can improve goal alignment, modeling of user mental states, and task success by deliberately slowing down conversations in strategic moments to ask questions, reveal assumptions, or pause. We present an ontology of positive friction and collect expert human annotations on multi-domain and embodied goal-oriented corpora. Experiments on these corpora, along with simulated interactions using state-of-the-art systems, suggest incorporating friction not only fosters accountable decision-making, but also enhances machine understanding of user beliefs and goals, and increases task success rates.

Better Slow than Sorry: Introducing Positive Friction for Reliable Dialogue Systems

This work demonstrates that LLM-based web navigation agents offer powerful automation capabilities but are vulnerable to Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) attacks. We show that adversaries can embed universal adversarial triggers in webpage HTML to hijack agent behavior that utilizes the accessibility tree to parse HTML, causing unintended or malicious actions. Using the Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) algorithm and a Browser Gym agent powered by Llama-3.1, our system demonstrates high success rates across real websites in both targeted and general attacks, including login credential exfiltration and forced ad clicks. Our empirical results highlight critical security risks and the need for stronger defenses as LLM-driven autonomous web agents become more widely adopted. The system software (https://github.com/sej2020/manipulating-web-agents) is released under the MIT License, with an accompanying publicly available demo website (http://lethaiq.github.io/attack-web-llm-agent).

Manipulating LLM Web Agents with Indirect Prompt Injection Attack via HTML Accessibility Tree

Scientific research often requires constructing high-quality datasets, yet the current workflows remain labor-intensive, and dependent on domain expertise. Existing approaches automate isolated steps such as retrieval or generation, but lack support for the full end-to-end data collection process. We present Quest2DataAgent, a general-purpose multi-agent framework for automating scientific data collection workflows. Given a natural language research question, it decomposes tasks into structured subtasks, retrieves relevant data using hybrid strategies, evaluates dataset quality, and generates visualizations through a conversational interface. We demonstrate its flexibility in two domains: EcoData for ecological research and PolyData for polymer materials. Both systems share the same core architecture but operate over distinct datasets and user needs. Human evaluations show that Quest2DataAgent significantly improves data relevance, usability, and time efficiency compared to manual collection and tool-assisted baselines. The framework is open-source and extensible to other domains.

Quest2DataAgent: Automating End-to-End Scientific Data Collection

Text Normalization (TN) is a key preprocessing step in Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems, converting written forms into their canonical spoken equivalents. Traditional TN systems can exhibit high accuracy, but involve substantial engineering effort, are difficult to scale, and pose challenges to language coverage, particularly in low-resource settings. We propose PolyNorm, a prompt-based approach to TN using Large Language Models (LLMs), aiming to reduce the reliance on manually crafted rules and enable broader linguistic applicability with minimal human intervention. Additionally, we present a language-agnostic pipeline for automatic data curation and evaluation, designed to facilitate scalable experimentation across diverse languages. Experiments across eight languages show consistent reductions in the word error rate (WER) compared to a production-grade-based system. To support further research, we release PolyNorm-Benchmark, a multilingual data set covering a diverse range of text normalization phenomena.

PolyNorm: Few-Shot LLM-Based Text Normalization for Text-to-Speech

Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed as autonomous agents with tool access present unique safety challenges that extend beyond standalone model vulnerabilities. Existing red-teaming frameworks like AgentHarm use static prompts and hardcoded toolsets, limiting their applicability to custom production systems.


We introduce a dual-component automated red-teaming framework: AgentHarm-Gen generates adversarial tasks and evaluation functions tailored to arbitrary toolsets, while Red-Agent-Reflect employs iterative prompt refinement with self-reflection to develop progressively more effective attacks.


Evaluating across 115 harmful tasks (71 generated, 44 from AgentHarm) spanning 8 risk categories, our method achieves substantial improvements: up to 162\% increase in attack success rate on o4-mini and 86\% success on Gemini 2.5 Pro. Successful attacks systematically decompose adversarial objectives into benign-appearing sub-tasks that circumvent safety alignment, highlighting the need for agent-specific guardrails.


We contribute our implementation to the AgentHarm repository, enabling systematic identification of safety vulnerabilities in custom agentic workflows before deployment.

Agent vs. Agent: Automated Data Generation and Red-Teaming for Custom Agentic Workflows

The Enterprise Intelligence Platform must integrate logs from numerous third-party vendors in order to perform various downstream tasks. However, vendor documentation is often unavailable at test time. It is either misplaced, mismatched, poorly formatted, or incomplete, which makes schema mapping challenging. We introduce a reinforcement learning agent that can self-improve without labeled examples or model weight updates. During inference, the agent: 1) Identifies ambiguous field-mapping attempts. 2) Generates targeted web-search queries to gather external evidence. 3) Applies a confidence-based reward to iteratively refine its mappings. To demonstrate this concept, we converted Microsoft Defender for Endpoint logs into a common schema. Our method increased mapping accuracy from 72.73\% to 93.94\% over 100 iterations using GPT-4o. At the same time, it reduced the number of low-confidence mappings requiring expert review by 85\%. This new approach provides an evidence-driven, transparent method for solving future industry problems, paving the way for more robust, accountable, scalable, efficient, flexible, adaptable, and collaborative solutions.

Mapping Smarter, Not Harder: A Test-Time Reinforcement Learning Agent That Improve Without Labels or Model Updates

Abstractive summarization is a core application in contact centers, where Large Language Models (LLMs) generate millions of summaries of call transcripts daily. Despite their apparent quality, it remains unclear whether LLMs systematically under- or over-attend to specific aspects of the transcript, potentially introducing biases in the generated summary. While prior work has examined social and positional biases, the specific forms of bias pertinent to contact center operations—which we term *Operational Bias*—have remained unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce ***BlindSpot***, a framework built upon a taxonomy of 15 operational bias dimensions (e.g., disfluency, speaker, topic) for the identification and quantification of these biases. ***BlindSpot*** leverages an LLM as a zero-shot classifier to derive categorical distributions for each bias dimension in a pair of transcript and its summary. The bias is then quantified using two metrics: *Fidelity Gap* (the JS Divergence between distributions) and *Coverage* (the percentage of source labels omitted). Using ***BlindSpot***, we conducted an empirical study with 2500 real call transcripts and their summaries generated by 20 LLMs of varying scales and families (e.g., GPT, Llama, Claude). Our analysis reveals that biases are systemic and present across all evaluated models, regardless of size or family.

Spot the BlindSpots: Systematic Identification and Quantification of Fine-Grained LLM Biases in Contact Center Summaries

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is one of the leading and most widely used techniques for enhancing LLM retrieval capabilities, but it still faces significant limitations in commercial use cases. RAG primarily relies on the query-chunk text-to-text similarity in the embedding space for retrieval and can fail to capture deeper semantic relationships across chunks, is highly sensitive to chunking strategies, and is prone to hallucinations.
To address these challenges, we propose TOBUGraph, a graph-based retrieval framework that first constructs the knowledge graph from unstructured data dynamically and automatically. Using LLMs, TOBUGraph extracts structured knowledge and diverse relationships among data, going beyond RAG's text-to-text similarity. Retrieval is achieved through graph traversal, leveraging the extracted relationships and structures to enhance retrieval accuracy, eliminating the need for chunking configurations while reducing hallucination. We demonstrate TOBUGraph’s effectiveness in TOBU, a real-world application in production for personal memory organization and retrieval. Our evaluation using real user data demonstrates that TOBUGraph outperforms multiple RAG implementations in both precision and recall, significantly improving user experience through improved retrieval accuracy.

TOBUGraph: Knowledge Graph-Based Retrieval for Enhanced LLM Performance Beyond RAG

Deploying natural language processing (NLP) models on mobile platforms requires models that can adapt across diverse applications while remaining efficient in memory and computation. We investigate pre-finetuning strategies to enhance the adaptability of lightweight BERT-like encoders for two fundamental NLP task families: named entity recognition (NER) and text classification. While pre-finetuning improves downstream performance for each task family individually, we find that naïve joint pre-finetuning introduces conflicting optimization signals that degrade overall performance. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective multi-task pre-finetuning framework based on task-primary LoRA modules, which enables a single shared encoder backbone with task-specific adapters. Our approach achieves performance comparable to individual pre-finetuning while supporting practical deployment requirements. Experiments on 21 downstream tasks show average improvements of +0.8% for NER and +8.8% for text classification, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method for versatile mobile NLP applications.

Multi-Task Pre-Finetuning of Lightweight Transformer Encoders for Text Classification and NER

Natural language to SQL (NL-to-SQL) systems are increasingly critical in industry for enabling non-technical users to access structured data efficiently, supporting faster decision-making and data accessibility. However, state-of-the-art systems often depend on large proprietary models, which introduce serious concerns around privacy. While open-source LLMs offer a viable substitute, high-performing variants (e.g., 70B or 405B) require substantial GPU memory, making them impractical for many production environments. Smaller open-source models that fit on a single 80GB GPU present a more deployable alternative, yet existing efforts to enhance their Text-to-SQL performance rely heavily on fine-tuning, limiting flexibility. We propose textbftextttRoSL, a plug-and-play framework that improves SQL generation for smaller LLMs without any task-specific training. While schema linking is often omitted for larger models, we show it remains essential for smaller ones. Further, we are the first to apply question decomposition at the schema linking stage, rather than during SQL generation as in prior work, to address the precision-recall tradeoff. Our approach improves schema linking recall by textbf25.1\% and execution accuracy by textbf8.2\% on the BIRD benchmark using textttibm-granite/granite-3.3-8b-instruct, making it an effective and industry-friendly NL-to-SQL solution.

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Better Slow than Sorry: Introducing Positive Friction for Reliable Dialogue Systems

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Parallel resources for Tunisian Arabic dialect translation