United States

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate human-level capabilities in dialogue, reasoning, and knowledge retention. However, even the most advanced LLMs face challenges such as hallucinations and real-time updating of their knowledge. Current research addresses this bottleneck by equipping LLMs with external knowledge, a technique known as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). However, two key issues constrained the development of RAG. First, there is a growing lack of comprehensive and fair comparisons between novel RAG algorithms. Second, open-source tools such as LlamaIndex and LangChain employ high-level abstractions, which results in a lack of transparency and limits the ability to develop novel algorithms and evaluation metrics. To close this gap, we introduce RAGLAB, a modular and research-oriented open-source library. RAGLAB reproduces 6 existing algorithms and provides a comprehensive ecosystem for investigating RAG algorithms. Leveraging RAGLAB, we conduct a fair comparison of 6 RAG algorithms across 10 benchmarks. With RAGLAB, researchers can efficiently compare the performance of various algorithms and develop novel algorithms.

EMNLP 2024

xRAGLAB: A Modular and Research-Oriented Unified Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

## 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*

EMNLP 2025

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

demo

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPROgxjLAC96AJL7Ugy0tEnYm7dkrbHt/view?usp=sharing)

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.emnlp.org/registration/).** The EMNLP 2024 event page on Underline will be open to public one week prior to the event.

Please register!

EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

We present Sailor, a family of open language models ranging from 0.5B to 14B parameters, tailored for South-East Asian (SEA) languages. From Qwen1.5, Sailor models accept 200B to 400B tokens during continual pre-training, primarily covering the languages of English, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Malay, and Lao. The training leverages several techniques, including BPE dropout for improving the model robustness, aggressive data cleaning and deduplication, and small proxy models to optimize the data mixture. Experimental results on four typical tasks indicate that Sailor models demonstrate strong performance across different benchmarks, including commonsense reasoning, question answering, reading comprehension and examination. We share our insights to spark a wider interest in developing large language models for multilingual use cases.

Sailor: Open Language Models for South-East Asia

We present DeepPavlov 1.0, an open-source framework for using Natural Language Processing (NLP) models by leveraging transfer learning techniques. DeepPavlov 1.0 is created for modular and configuration-driven development of state-of-the-art NLP models and supports a wide range of NLP model applications. DeepPavlov 1.0 is designed for practitioners with limited knowledge of NLP/ML. DeepPavlov is based on PyTorch and supports HuggingFace transformers. DeepPavlov is publicly released under the Apache 2.0 license and provides access to an online demo.

DeepPavlov 1.0: Your Gateway to Advanced NLP Models Backed by Transformers and Transfer Learning

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) requires comprehensive understanding and generation capabilities for a variety of tasks spanning different modalities and functionalities. Integrative AI is one important direction to approach AGI, through combining multiple models to tackle complex multimodal tasks. However, there is a lack of a flexible and composable platform to facilitate efficient and effective model composition and coordination. In this paper, we propose the i-Code Studio, a configurable and composable framework for Integrative AI. The i-Code Studio orchestrates multiple pre-trained models in a finetuning-free fashion to conduct complex multimodal tasks. Instead of simple model composition, the i-Code Studio provides an integrative, flexible, and composable setting for developers to quickly and easily compose cutting-edge services and technologies tailored to their specific requirements. The i-Code Studio achieves impressive results on a variety of zero-shot multimodal tasks, such as video-to-text retrieval, speech-to-speech translation, and visual question answering. We also demonstrate how to quickly build a multimodal agent based on the i-Code Studio that can communicate and personalize for users. The project page with demonstrations and code is at https://i-code-studio.github.io/.

i-Code Studio: A Configurable and Composable Framework for Integrative AI

This paper introduces Evalverse, a novel library that streamlines the evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) by unifying disparate evaluation tools into a single, user-friendly framework. Evalverse enables individuals with limited knowledge of artificial intelligence to easily request LLM evaluations and receive detailed reports, facilitated by an integration with communication platforms like Slack. Thus, Evalverse serves as a powerful tool for the comprehensive assessment of LLMs, offering both researchers and practitioners a centralized and easily accessible evaluation framework. Finally, we also provide a demo video for Evalverse, showcasing its capabilities and implementation in a two-minute format.

Evalverse: Unified and Accessible Library for Large Language Model Evaluation

As we all know, hallucinations prevail in Large Language Models (LLMs), where the generated content is coherent but factually incorrect, which inflicts a heavy blow on the widespread application of LLMs. Previous studies have shown that LLMs could confidently state non-existent facts rather than answering ``I don't know''. Therefore, it is necessary to resort to external knowledge to detect and correct the hallucinated content. Since manual detection and correction of factual errors is labor-intensive, developing an automatic end-to-end hallucination-checking approach is indeed a needful thing. To this end, we present Medico, a Multi-source evidence fusion enhanced hallucination detection and correction framework. It fuses diverse evidence from multiple sources, detects whether the generated content contains factual errors, provides the rationale behind the judgment, and iteratively revises the hallucinated content. Experimental results on evidence retrieval (0.964 HR@5, 0.908 MRR@5), hallucination detection (0.927-0.951 F1), and hallucination correction (0.973-0.979 approval rate) manifest the great potential of Medico. A video demo of Medico can be found at https://youtu.be/RtsO6CSesBI.

Medico: Towards Hallucination Detection and Correction with Multi-source Evidence Fusion

Multimodal conversational agents are highly desirable because they offer natural and human-like interaction. However, there is a lack of comprehensive end-to-end solutions to support collaborative development and benchmarking. While proprietary systems like GPT-4o and Gemini demonstrating impressive integration of audio, video, and text with response times of 200-250ms, challenges remain in balancing latency, accuracy, cost, and data privacy. To better understand and quantify these issues, we developed \textbf{OpenOmni}, an open-source, end-to-end pipeline benchmarking tool that integrates advanced technologies such as Speech-to-Text, Emotion Detection, Retrieval Augmented Generation, Large Language Models, along with the ability to integrate customized models. OpenOmni supports local and cloud deployment, ensuring data privacy and supporting latency and accuracy benchmarking. This flexible framework allows researchers to customize the pipeline, focusing on real bottlenecks and facilitating rapid proof-of-concept development. OpenOmni can significantly enhance applications like indoor assistance for visually impaired individuals, advancing human-computer interaction. Our demonstration video is available https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaSiT3clWqY, demo is available via https://openomni.ai4wa.com, code is available via https://github.com/AI4WA/OpenOmniFramework.

OpenOmni: A Collaborative Open Source Tool for Building Future-Ready Multimodal Conversational Agents

Annotation tools are increasingly only steps in a larger process into which they need to be integrated, for instance by calling out to web services for labeling support or importing documents from external sources. This requires certain capabilities that annotation tools need to support in order to keep up. Here, we define the respective requirements and how popular annotation tools support them. As a demonstration for how these can be implemented, we adapted INCEpTION, a semantic annotation platform offering intelligent assistance and knowledge management. For instance, support for a range of APIs has been added to INCEpTION through which it can be controlled and which allow it to interact with external services such as authorization services, crowdsourcing platforms, terminology services or machine learning services. Additionally, we introduce new capabilities that allow custom rendering of XML documents and even the ability to add new JavaScript-based editor plugins, thereby making INCEpTION usable in an even wider range of annotation tasks.

Integrating INCEpTION into larger annotation processes

It is well-known that language models are biased; they have patchy knowledge of countries and cultures that are poorly represented in their training data. We introduce CAVA, a visualization tool for identifying and analyzing country-specific biases in language models. Our tool allows users to identify whether a language model successful captures the perspectives of people of different nationalities. The tool supports analysis of both longform and multiple-choice models responses and comparisons between models. Our open-source code easily allows users to upload any country-based language model generations they wish to analyze. To showcase CAVA's efficacy, we present a case study analyzing how several popular language models answer survey questions from the World Values Survey.

CAVA: A Tool for Cultural Alignment Visualization & Analysis

The proliferation of open-source large models necessitates dedicated tools for deployment and accessibility. To mitigate the complexities of model serving, we develop Xinference, an open-source library designed to simplify the deployment and management of large models. Xinference effectively simplifies deployment complexities for users by (a) preventing users from writing code and providing built-in support for various models and OpenAI-compatible APIs; (b) enabling full model serving lifecycle management; (c) guaranteeing efficient and scalable inference and achieving high throughput and low latency. In comparative experiments with similar products like BentoML and Ray Serve, Xinference outperforms these tools and offers superior ease of use. Xinference is available at https://github.com/xorbitsai/inference.

Xinference: Making Large Model Serving Easy

Machine learning applications for text classification are increasingly used in domains such as toxicity and misinformation detection in online settings. However, obtaining precisely labeled data for training remains challenging, particularly because not all problematic instances are reported. Positive-Unlabeled (PU) learning, which uses only labeled positive and unlabeled samples, offers a solution for these scenarios. A significant concern in PU learning, especially in online settings, is fairness: specific groups may be disproportionately classified as problematic. Despite its importance, this issue has not been explicitly addressed in research. This paper aims to bridge this gap by investigating the fairness of PU learning in both offline and online settings. We propose a novel approach to achieve more equitable results by extending PU learning methods to online learning for both linear and non-linear classifiers and analyzing the impact of the online setting on fairness. Our approach incorporates a convex fairness constraint during training, applicable to both offline and online PU learning. Our solution is theoretically robust, and experimental results demonstrate its efficacy in improving fairness in PU learning in text classification.

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Sailor: Open Language Models for South-East Asia

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