India

Dialogue State Tracking (DST) is a key part of task-oriented dialogue systems, identifying important information in conversations. However, its accuracy drops significantly in spoken dialogue environments due to named entity errors from Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. We introduce a simple yet effective data augmentation method that targets those entities to improve the robustness of DST model. Our novel method can control the placement of errors using keyword-highlighted prompts while introducing phonetically similar errors. As a result, our method generated sufficient error patterns on keywords, leading to improved accuracy in noised and low-accuracy ASR environments.

IJCNLP-AACL 2025

Speak &amp; Spell: LLM-Driven Controllable Phonetic Error Augmentation for Robust Dialogue State Tracking

noisy enviroment

dialogue state tracking

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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.

Speak & Spell: LLM-Driven Controllable Phonetic Error Augmentation for Robust Dialogue State Tracking

poster

### Welcome to IJCNLP-AACL 2025! 
 It is a great honor to host this joint conference in Mumbai, India, from December 20 to 24, 2025. The joint conferences of IJCNLP and AACL are organized with alternating leadership in the Asia-Pacific region. The event is run by the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP) in odd years, and by AACL in even years, while it is organized solely by ACL when the annual ACL meeting is held in the region. This year, the conference is primarily organized by AFNLP. 
*Kentaro Inui
MBZUAI, UAE
General Chair, IJCNLP-AACL 2025* 
Read full message and download the Conference Handbook [**here**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UTwxkAqSqI-GAoJC3wE1zZt5VP1Y8GX0/view?usp=sharing).

The 14th IJCNLP & 4th AACL will be held in Mumbai, India from December 20th to December 24th, 2025.

Social media has become a crucial platform for information dissemination and opinion expression. The massive and continuous generation of user content has given rise to various natural language processing tasks, such as sentiment analysis and topic classification. However, existing mainstream approaches typically focus on modeling individual tasks in isolation, lacking systematic exploration of collaborative modeling across multiple tasks. This neglects the inherent correlations among social media tasks, thereby limiting the model’s ability to fully comprehend and exploit the rich, multi-dimensional semantic information embedded in text. To address this challenge, we propose $\textbf{Ta}$sk-adaptive $\textbf{C}$ontrastive $\textbf{L}$earning with $\textbf{Co}$operative $\textbf{M}$ixture $\textbf{o}$f $\textbf{E}$xperts ($\textbf{TaCL-CoMoE}$), a unified framework for social media multi-task learning. Specifically, we improve the gating mechanism by replacing the traditional softmax routing with sigmoid activation, enabling cooperative selection among multiple experts and mitigating the ``expert monopoly'' phenomenon. In addition, we introduce a task-adaptive contrastive learning strategy to further enhance the model’s ability to capture and distinguish semantic structures across different tasks. Experimental results on multiple public social media datasets demonstrate that TaCL-CoMoE consistently achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. The code is available at https://github.com/wxr2847/TaCL-CoMoE.

TaCL-CoMoE: Task-adaptive Contrastive Learning with Cooperative Mixture of Experts for Multi-task Social Media Analysis

Radiology report summarization (RRS) is critical for clinical workflows, requiring concise Impressions "distilled from detailed Findings." This paper proposes a novel prompting strategy that enhances RRS by introducing a layperson summary as an intermediate step. This summary helps normalize key observations and simplify complex terminology using communication techniques inspired by doctor–patient interactions. Combined with few-shot in-context learning, this approach improves the model’s ability to map generalized descriptions to specific clinical findings. We evaluate our method on three benchmark datasets, MIMIC-CXR, CheXpert, and MIMIC-III, and compare it against state-of-the-art open-source language models in the 7B/8B parameter range, such as Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct. Results show consistent improvements in summarization quality, with gains of up to 5% on some metrics for prompting, and more than 20% for some models when instruction tuning.

Simplified Rewriting Improves Expert Summarization

User satisfaction in dialogue systems is inherently subjective. When the same response strategy is applied across users, minority users may assign different satisfaction ratings than majority users due to variations in individual intents and preferences. However, existing alignment methods typically train one-size-fits-all models that aim for broad consensus, often overlooking minority perspectives and user-specific adaptation. We propose a unified framework that models both individual- and group-level preferences for user satisfaction estimation. First, we introduce Chain-of-Personalized-Reasoning (CoPeR) to capture individual preferences through interpretable reasoning chains. Second, we propose an expectation-maximization-based Majority-Minority Preference-Aware Clustering (M²PC) algorithm that discovers distinct user groups in an unsupervised manner to learn group-level preferences. Finally, we integrate these components into a preference-adaptive reinforcement learning framework (PAda-PPO) that jointly optimizes alignment with both individual and group preferences. Experiments on the Emotional Support Conversation dataset demonstrate consistent improvements in user satisfaction estimation, particularly for underrepresented user groups.

Minority-Aware Satisfaction Estimation in Dialogue Systems via Preference-Adaptive Reinforcement Learning

Knowledge graph-based dialogue generation (KG-DG) is a challenging task requiring models to effectively incorporate external knowledge into conversational responses. While large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results across various NLP tasks, their ability to utilize external knowledge in KG-DG remains under-explored. We observe that LLMs often rely on internal knowledge, leading to detachment from provided knowledge graphs, even when they are given a flawlessly retrieved knowledge graph. First, we introduce LLM-KAT, an evaluation procedure for measuring knowledge attachment in generated responses. Second, we propose a simple yet effective entity anonymization technique to encourage LLMs to better leverage external knowledge. Experiments on the OpenDialKG dataset demonstrate that our approach improves LLMs' attachment on external knowledge.

Improving LLM’s Attachment to External Knowledge In Dialogue Generation Tasks Through Entity Anonymization

With the rapid development of spatial audio technologies today, applications in AR, VR and other scenarios have garnered extensive attention. Unlike traditional mono sound, spatial audio offers a more realistic and immersive auditory experience. Despite notable progress in the field, there remains a lack of comprehensive surveys that systematically organize and analyze these methods and their underlying technologies. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of spatial audio and systematically review recent literature in the area. To address this, we chronologically outline existing work related to spatial audio and categorize these studies based on input-output representations, as well as generation and understanding tasks, thereby summarizing various research aspects of spatial audio. In addition, we review related datasets, evaluation metrics, and benchmarks, offering insights from both training and evaluation perspectives. Related materials are available at https://github.com/dieKarotte/ASAudio.

ASAudio: A Survey of Advanced Spatial Audio Research

Multimodal foundation models (MFMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in e-commerce by effectively leveraging multimodal data to enhance product understanding and user experienceHowever, the development of e-commerce MFMs is hindered by two challenges: (1) the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality multimodal benchmark datasets; and (2) the lack of effective multimodal information integration methods in e-commerce. To address these challenges, we introduce MMECInstruct, the first large-scale, high-quality multimodal instruction dataset designed specifically for e-commerce MFMs. MMECInstruct comprises 75,000 samples covering 7 real-world e-commerce tasks, supporting both in-domain (IND) and out-of-domain (OOD) evaluations. Leveraging MMECInstruct, we develop CASLIE, a lightweight framework that enhances multimodal information understanding and integration for e-commerce. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that MMECInstruct endows CASLIE with advanced capability and strong generalizability in e-commerce applications. MMECInstruct and CASLIE models are publicly accessible through https://github.com/ninglab/CASLIE.

Captions Speak Louder than Images: Generalizing Foundation Models for E-commerce from High-quality Multimodal Instruction Data

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong instruction-following capabilities in text-based tasks. However, this ability often deteriorates in multimodal models after alignment with non-text modalities such as images or audio. While several recent efforts have investigated instruction-following performance in text and vision-language models, instruction-following in audio-based large language models remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce IFEval-Audio, a novel evaluation dataset designed to assess the ability to follow instructions in an audio LLM. IFEval-Audio contains 280 audio–instruction–answer triples across six diverse dimensions: Content, Capitalization, Symbol, List Structure, Length, and Format. Each example pairs an audio input with a text instruction, requiring the model to generate an output that follows a specified structure. We benchmark state-of-the-art audio LLMs on their ability to follow audio-involved instructions. The dataset is released publicly to support future research in this emerging area.

IFEval-Audio: Benchmarking Instruction-Following Capability in Audio-based Large Language Models

In this work, we address the challenge of generalizable audio deepfake detection (ADD) across diverse speech synthesis paradigms—including conventional text-to-speech (TTS) systems and modern diffusion or flow-matching (FM) based generators. Prior work has mostly targeted individual synthesis families and often fails to generalize across paradigms due to overfitting to generation-specific artifacts. We hypothesize that synthetic speech, irrespective of its generative origin, leaves behind shared structural distortions in the embedding space that can be aligned through geometry-aware modeling. To this end, we propose RHYME, a unified detection framework that fuses utterance-level embeddings from diverse pretrained speech encoders using non-Euclidean projections. RHYME maps representations into hyperbolic and spherical manifolds—where hyperbolic geometry excels at modeling hierarchical generator families, and spherical projections capture angular, energy-invariant cues such as periodic vocoder artifacts. The fused representation is obtained via Riemannian barycentric averaging, enabling synthesis invariant alignment. RHYME outperforms individual PTMs and homogeneous fusion baselines, achieving top performance and setting new state-of-the-art in cross-paradigm ADD.

Curved Worlds, Clear Boundaries: Generalizing Speech Deepfake Detection using Hyperbolic and Spherical Geometry Spaces

While automatic speech recognition (ASR) now achieves human-level accuracy for a dozen or so languages, the majority of the world's languages lack the resources needed to train robust ASR models. For many of these languages, the largest available source of transcribed speech data consists of recordings of the Bible. Bible recordings are appealingly large and well-structured resources, but they have notable limitations: the vocabulary and style are constrained, and the recordings are typically produced by a single speaker in a studio. These factors raise an important question: to what extent are Bible recordings useful for developing ASR models to transcribe contemporary naturalistic speech, the goal of most ASR applications? In this paper, we use Bible recordings alongside contemporary speech recordings to train ASR models in a selection of under-resourced and endangered languages. We find that models trained solely on Bible data yield shockingly weak performance when tested on contemporary everyday speech, even when compared to models trained on other (non-Bible) out-of-domain data. We identify one way of effectively leveraging Bible data in the ASR training pipeline via a two-stage training regime. Our results highlight the need to re-assess reported results relying exclusively on Bible data and to use Bible data carefully and judiciously.

Faithful Transcription: Leveraging Bible Recordings to Improve ASR for Endangered Languages

Learners of a second language (L2) often map non-native phonemes to similar native-language (L1) phonemes, making conventional L2-focused training slow and effortful. To address this, we propose an L1-grounded pronunciation training method based on compositional phoneme approximation (CPA), a feature-based representation technique that approximates L2 sounds with sequences of L1 phonemes.
Evaluations with 20 Korean non-native English speakers show that CPA-based training achieves a 76\% in-box formant rate in acoustic analysis, 17.6\% relative improvement in phoneme recognition accuracy, and over 80\% of speech being rated as more native-like, with minimal training. Project page: \url{https://gsanpark.github.io/CPA-Pronunciation}.

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Next from IJCNLP-AACL 2025

TaCL-CoMoE: Task-adaptive Contrastive Learning with Cooperative Mixture of Experts for Multi-task Social Media Analysis

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