United States

We study the problem of imposing conversational goals/keywords on open-domain conversational agents, where the agent is required to lead the conversation to a target keyword smoothly and fast. Solving this problem enables the application of conversational agents in many real-world scenarios, e.g., recommendation and psychotherapy. The dominant paradigm for tackling this problem is to 1) train a next-turn keyword classifier, and 2) train a keyword-augmented response retrieval model. However, existing approaches in this paradigm have two limitations: 1) the training and evaluation datasets for next-turn keyword classification are directly extracted from conversations without human annotations, thus, they are noisy and have low correlation with human judgements, and 2) during keyword transition, the agents solely rely on the similarities between word embeddings to move closer to the target keyword, which may not reflect how humans converse. In this paper, we assume that human conversations are grounded on commonsense and propose a keyword-guided neural conversational model that can leverage external commonsense knowledge graphs (CKG) for both keyword transition and response retrieval. Automatic evaluations suggest that commonsense improves the performance of both next-turn keyword prediction and keyword-augmented response retrieval. In addition, both self-play and human evaluations show that our model produces responses with smoother keyword transition and reaches the target keyword faster than competitive baselines.

AAAI 2021

Keyword-Guided Neural Conversational 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."<br>

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*





<br>

EMNLP 2025

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

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Rationality and emotion are two fundamental elements of humans. Endowing agents with rationality and emotion has been one of the major milestones in AI. However, in the field of conversational AI, most existing models only specialize in one aspect and neglect the other, which often leads to dull or unrelated responses. In this paper, we hypothesize that combining rationality and emotion into conversational agents can improve response quality. To test the hypothesis, we focus on one fundamental aspect of rationality, i.e., commonsense, and propose CARE, a novel model for commonsense-aware emotional response generation. Specifically, we first propose a framework to learn and construct commonsense-aware emotional latent concepts of the response given an input message and a desired emotion. We then propose three methods to collaboratively incorporate the latent concepts into response generation. Experimental results on two large-scale datasets support our hypothesis and show that our model can produce more accurate and commonsense-aware emotional responses and achieve better human ratings than state-of-the-art models that only specialize in one aspect.

CARE: Commonsense-Aware Emotional Response Generation with Latent Concepts

We solve a challenging yet practically useful variant of 3D Bin Packing Problem (3D-BPP). In our problem, the agent has limited information about the items to be packed into a single bin, and an item must be packed immediately after its arrival without buffering or readjusting. The item's placement also subjects to the constraints of order dependence and physical stability. We formulate this online 3D-BPP as a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). To solve the problem, we propose an effective and easy-to-implement constrained deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method under the actor-critic framework. In particular, we introduce a prediction-and-projection scheme: The agent first predicts a feasibility mask for the placement actions as an auxiliary task and then uses the mask to modulate the action probabilities output by the actor during training. Such supervision and projection facilitate the agent to learn feasible policies very efficiently. Our method can be easily extended to handle lookahead items, multi-bin packing, and item re-orienting. We have conducted extensive evaluation showing that the learned policy significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. A preliminary user study even suggests that our method might attain a human-level performance.

Online 3D Bin Packing with Constrained Deep Reinforcement Learning

To apply neural sequence models such as the Transformers to music generation tasks, one has to represent a piece of music by a sequence of tokens drawn from a finite set of pre-defined vocabulary. Such a vocabulary usually involves tokens of various types. For example, to describe a musical note, one needs separate tokens to indicate the noteâ€™s pitch, duration, velocity (dynamics), and placement (onset time) along the time grid. While different types of tokens may possess different properties, existing models usually treat them equally, in the same way as modeling words in natural languages. In this paper, we present a conceptually different approach that explicitly takes into account the type of the tokens, such as note types and metric types. And, we propose a new Transformer decoder architecture that uses different feed-forward heads to model tokens of different types. With an expansion-compression trick, we convert a piece of music to a sequence of compound words by grouping neighboring tokens, greatly reducing the length of the token sequences. We show that the resulting model can be viewed as a learner over dynamic directed hypergraphs. And, we employ it to learn to compose expressive Pop piano music of full-song length (involving up to 10K individual tokens per song), both conditionally and unconditionally. Our experiment shows that, compared to state-of-the-art models, the proposed model converges 5 to 10 times faster at training (i.e., within a day on a single GPU with 11 GB memory), and with comparable quality in the generated music

Compound Word Transformer: Learning to Compose Full-Song Music over Dynamic Directed Hypergraphs

Keyphrase Generation compresses a document into some highly-summative phrases, which is an important task in natural language processing. Most state-of-the-art adopt greedy search or beam search decoding methods. These two decoding methods generate a large number of duplicated keyphrases and are time-consuming. Moreover, beam search only predicts a fixed number of keyphrases for different documents. In this paper, we propose an adaptive generation model-AdaGM, which is mainly inspired by the importance of the first words in keyphrase generation. In AdaGM, a novel reset state training mechanism is proposed to maximize the difference in the predicted first words. To ensure the discreteness and get an appropriate number of keyphrases according to the content of the document adaptively, we equip beam search with a highly effective filter mechanism. Experiments on five public datasets demonstrate the proposed model can generate marginally less duplicated and more accurate keyphrases. The codes of AdaGM are available at: https://github.com/huangxiaolist/adaGM.

Adaptive Beam Search Decoding for Discrete Keyphrase Generation

Recently, the study on learned iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm (LISTA) has attracted increasing attentions. A large number of experiments as well as some theories have proved the high efficiency of LISTA for solving sparse coding problems. However, existing LISTA methods are all serial connection. To address this issue, we propose a novel extragradient based LISTA (ELISTA), which has a  residual structure and theoretical guarantees. Moreover, most LISTA methods use the soft thresholding function, which has been found to cause a large estimation bias. Therefore, we propose a  thresholding function for ELISTA instead of soft thresholding. From a theoretical perspective, we prove that our method attains linear convergence. Through ablation experiments, the improvements of our method on the network structure and the thresholding function are verified in practice. Extensive empirical results verify the advantages of our method.

Learned Extragradient ISTA with Interpretable Residual Structures for Sparse Coding

While existing work in robust deep learning has focused on small pixel-level norm-based perturbations, this may not account for perturbations encountered in several real world settings.
In many such cases although test data might not be available, broad specifications about the types of perturbations (such as an unknown degree of rotation) may be known.
We consider a setup where robustness is expected over an unseen test domain that is not i.i.d. but deviates from the training domain.
While this deviation may not be exactly known, its broad characterization is specified a priori, in terms of attributes.
We propose an adversarial training approach which learns to generate new samples so as to maximize exposure of the classifier to the attributes-space, without having access to the data from the test domain.
Our adversarial training solves a min-max optimization problem, with the inner maximization generating adversarial perturbations,
and the outer minimization finding model parameters by optimizing the loss on adversarial perturbations generated from the inner maximization.
We demonstrate the applicability of our approach on three types of naturally occurring perturbations --- object-related shifts, geometric transformations, and common image corruptions.
Our approach enables deep neural networks to be robust against a wide range of naturally occurring perturbations.
We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach by showing the robustness gains of deep neural networks trained using our adversarial training on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and a new variant of the CLEVR dataset.

Attribute-Guided Adversarial Training for Robustness to Natural Perturbations

Entities, as the essential elements in relation extraction tasks, exhibit certain structure. In this work, we formulate such entity structure as distinctive dependencies between mention pairs. We then propose SSAN, which incorporates these structural dependencies within the standard self-attention mechanism and throughout the overall encoding stage. Specifically, we design two alternative transformation modules inside each self-attention building block to produce attentive biases so as to adaptively regularize its attention flow. Our experiments demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed entity structure and the effectiveness of SSAN. It significantly outperforms competitive baselines, achieving new state-of-the-art results on three popular document-level relation extraction datasets. We further provide ablation and visualization to show how the entity structure guides the model for better relation extraction. Our code is publicly available.

Entity Structure Within and Throughout: Modeling Mention Dependencies for Document-Level Relation Extraction

Nucleus instance segmentation and classification in histopathological images is an essential prerequisite in pathology diagnosis/prognosis. However, nucleus annotations (e.g., segmentation and labeling) require domain experts, and annotating nuclei at pixel-level is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Moreover, nuclei from different cancer types vary in shapes and appearances. These inter-cancer variations require careful annotations for specific cancer types. Therefore, to minimize the labeling cost, we propose a novel application that considers each cancer type as an individual domain and apply domain adaptation techniques to improve the segmentation/classification performance among different cancer types. Unlike the previous studies that focus on unsupervised or weakly-supervised domain adaptation independently, we would like to discover what kinds of labeling can achieve the most cost-effective domain adaptation performance in nucleus instance segmentation and classification. Specifically, we propose a unified framework that is applicable to different level annotations: no annotations, image-level, and point-level annotations. Cyclic adaptation with pseudo labels and adversarial discriminator are utilized for unsupervised domain alignment. Image-level or point-level annotations are additionally adopted to supervise the nucleus classification and refine the pseudo labels. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficacy of the proposed framework (jointly using unsupervised and weakly supervised learning) on adapting the segmentation and classification model from one cancer type to 18 other cancer types.

Minimizing Labeling Cost for Nuclei Instance Segmentation and Classificationwith Cross-Domain Images and Weak Labels

In recent years, visual recognition on challenging long-tailed distributions, where classes often exhibit extremely imbalanced frequencies, has made great progress mostly based on various complex paradigms (e.g., meta learning). Apart from these complex methods, simple refinements on training procedures also make contributions. These refinements, also called tricks, are minor but effective, such as adjustments in the data distribution or loss functions. However, different tricks might conflict with each other. If users apply these long-tail related tricks inappropriately, it could cause worse recognition accuracy than expected. Unfortunately, there has not been a scientific guideline of these tricks in the literature. In this paper, we first collect existing tricks in long-tailed visual recognition and then perform extensive and systematic experiments, in order to give a detailed experimental guideline and obtain an effective combination of these tricks. Furthermore, we also propose a novel data augmentation approach based on class activation maps for long-tailed recognition, which can be friendly combined with re-sampling methods and shows excellent results. By assembling these tricks scientifically, we can outperform state-of-the-art methods on four long-tailed benchmark datasets, including ImageNet-LT and iNaturalist 2018. Our code is open-source and available at https://github.com/zhangyongshun/BagofTricks-LT.

Bag of Tricks for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Interpersonal language style shifting in dialogues is an interesting and almost instinctive ability of human. Understanding interpersonal relationship from language content is also a crucial step toward further understanding dialogues. Previous work mainly focuses on relation extraction between named entities in texts or within a single dialogue session.  In this paper, we propose the task of relation classification of interlocutors based on their dialogues. We crawled movie scripts from IMSDb, and annotated the relation label for each session according to 13 pre-defined relationships. The annotated dataset DDRel consists of 6,300 dyadic dialogue sessions between 694 pairs of speakers with 53,126 utterances in total. We also construct session-level and pair-level relation classification tasks with widely-accepted baselines. The experimental results show that both tasks are challenging for existing models and the dataset will be useful for future research.

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