United States

The widespread use of large language models (LLMs) has dramatically improved many applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP), including Information Retrieval (IR). However, domains that are not driven by commercial interest often lag behind in benefiting from AI-powered solutions. One such area is religious and heritage corpora. Alongside similar domains, Islamic literature holds significant cultural value and is regularly utilized by scholars and the general public. Navigating this extensive amount of text is challenging, and there is currently no unified resource that allows for easy searching of this data using advanced AI tools. This work focuses on the development of a multilingual non-profit IR system for the Islamic domain. This process brings a few major challenges, such as preparing multilingual domain-specific corpora when data is limited in certain languages, deploying a model on resource-constrained devices, and enabling fast search on a limited budget. By employing methods like continued pre-training for domain adaptation and language reduction to decrease model size, a lightweight multilingual retrieval model was prepared, demonstrating superior performance compared to larger models pre-trained on general domain data. Furthermore, evaluating the proposed architecture that utilizes Rust Language capabilities shows the possibility of implementing efficient semantic search in a low-resource setting.

EMNLP 2024

Building an Efficient Multilingual Non-Profit IR System for the Islamic Domain Leveraging Multiprocessing Design in Rust

sementic entity recognition

visually rich document

low resource language

## 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.

poster

## 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.
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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.

This paper presents LOFI (Language, OCR, Form Independent), a pipeline for Document Information Extraction (DIE) in Low-Resource Language (LRL) business documents. LOFI pipeline solves language, OCR, and form dependencies through flexible language model integration, a token-level box split algorithm, and the SPADE decoder. Experiments on Korean and Japanese documents demonstrate high performance without additional pre-training. The pipeline's effectiveness is validated through real-world applications in insurance and tax-free declaration services, advancing DIE capabilities for diverse languages and document types in industrial settings.

Language, OCR, Form Independent (LOFI) pipeline for Industrial Document Information Extraction

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated prowess in a wide range of tasks. However, many LLMs exhibit significant performance discrepancies between high-resource and low-resource languages, often observed in existing multilingual models, which tend to have limited focus on enhancing their multilingual capabilities. To address this gap, we introduce FuxiTranyu, an open-sourced multilingual LLM designed to address the research community's need for balanced and high-performing multilingual models. FuxiTranyu-8B, the foundational model, contains 8 billion parameters and is trained from scratch on a meticulously balanced dataset of 600 billion tokens spanning 43 natural languages and 16 programming languages. Beyond releasing the foundational model, we also introduce FuxiTranyu-8B-Instruct, fine-tuned on a diverse multilingual instruction dataset, and FuxiTranyu-8B-Chat, further refined with DPO on a preference dataset for enhanced conversational ability. Extensive evaluation on multilingual benchmarks demonstrate FuxiTranyu's superior performance compared to existing multilingual LLMs like BLOOM-7B and PolyLM-13B.

FuxiTranyu: A Multilingual Large Language Model Trained with Balanced Data

In this work we propose an efficient production-ready factoid question answering (QA) system that combines a local knowledge base search and generative context-based QA. To assess the quality of the generated content, we devise metrics for both manual and automatic evaluation of the answers to questions. A distinctive feature of our system is the Ranker component, which ranks potential answers according to their relevance. This enhances the quality of local knowledge base retrieval by 23\%. Another crucial aspect of the system is the LLM, which utilizes contextual information from the internet to formulate responses. It boosts the utility of voice-based answers by 94\%. **EARS** is language-agnostic and the approach can be implemented for any data domain.

Efficient Answer Retrieval System (EARS): Combining Local DB Search and Web Search for Generative QA

The Sparsely-Activated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture has gained popularity for scaling large language models (LLMs) due to the sub-linearly increasing computational costs. Despite its success, most of the current structure designs face the challenge that the experts share the same size such that tokens have no chance to choose the experts with the most appropriate size to generate the next token. To migrate this defect, we propose Mixture of Diverse Size Experts (MoDSE), a new MoE architecture with designed layers where experts have different sizes. Analysis on difficult token generation tasks shows that experts with different sizes give better predictions, and the routing path of the experts tends to be stable after a period of training. The diversity of experts' size will lead to load unbalancing. To tackle this limitation, we introduce an expert-pair allocation strategy to distribute the workload evenly across the GPUs. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of MoDSE, surpassing existing MoEs by adaptively assigning the parameter budget to experts while maintaining the same total parameter size and number of experts.

Mixture of Diverse Size Experts

The risk of harmful contents generated by large language models (LLMs) becomes a critical concern. This paper systematically evaluates and enhances LLMs' capability to perform \emph{course-correction}, \ie, the model can steer away from generating harmful content autonomously. First, we introduce the C$^2$-Eval benchmark for quantitative assessment and analyze 10 popular LLMs, revealing varying proficiency of current safety-tuned LLMs in course-correction. To improve, we propose fine-tuning LLMs with preference learning, emphasizing the preference for timely course-correction. Using an automated pipeline, we create C$^2$-Syn, a synthetic C$^2$-Syn with 750K pairwise preferences, to teach models the concept of timely course-correction through data-driven learning. Experiments on \textsc{Llama2-Chat 7B} and \textsc{Qwen2 7B} show that our method effectively enhances course-correction skills without affecting general performance. Additionally, it effectively improves LLMs' safety, particularly in resisting jailbreak attacks.

Course-Correction: Safety Alignment Using Synthetic Preferences

Scaling laws in language modeling traditionally quantify training loss as a function of dataset size and model parameters, providing compute-optimal estimates but often neglecting the impact of data quality on model generalization. In this paper, we extend the conventional understanding of scaling law by offering a microscopic view of data quality within the original formulation -- \emph{effective training tokens} -- which we posit to be a critical determinant of performance for parameter-constrained language models. Specifically, we formulate the proposed term of effective training tokens to be a combination of two readily-computed indicators of text: (i) text diversity and (ii) syntheticity as measured by a teacher model. We pretrained over $200$ models of 25M to 1.5B parameters on a diverse set of sampled, synthetic data, and estimated the constants that relate text quality, model size, training tokens, and eight reasoning task accuracy scores. We demonstrated the estimated constants yield +0.83 Pearson correlation with true accuracies, and analyze it in scenarios involving widely-used data techniques such as data sampling and synthesis which aim to improve data quality.

Scaling Parameter-Constrained Language Models with Quality Data

Improving the efficiency of inference in Large Language Models (LLMs) is a critical area of research. Post-training Quantization (PTQ) is a popular technique, but it often faces challenges at low-bit levels, particularly in downstream tasks. Quantization-aware Training (QAT) can alleviate this problem, but it requires significantly more computational resources. To tackle this, we introduced Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Quantization-Aware Training (DL-QAT), which merges the advantages of QAT while training only less than 1% of the total parameters. Specifically, we introduce a group-specific quantization magnitude to adjust the overall scale of each quantization group. Within each quantization group, we use LoRA matrices to update the weight size and direction in the quantization space. We validated the effectiveness of our method on the LLaMA and LLaMA2 model families. The results show significant improvements over our baseline method across different quantization granularities. For instance, for LLaMA-7B, our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method by 4.2% in MMLU on 3-bit LLaMA-7B. Additionally, our quantization results on pre-trained models also surpass previous QAT methods, demonstrating the superior performance and efficiency of our approach.

DL-QAT: Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Quantization-Aware Training for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) enhanced with retrieval augmentation has shown great performance in many applications. However, the computational demands for these models pose a challenge when applying them to real-time tasks, such as composition assistance. To address this, we propose Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Composition Assistance (Hybrid-RACA), a novel system for real-time text prediction that efficiently combines a cloud-based LLM with a smaller client-side model through retrieval augmented memory. This integration enables the client model to generate better responses, benefiting from the LLM's capabilities and cloud-based data. Meanwhile, via a novel asynchronous memory update mechanism, the client model can deliver real-time completions to user inputs without the need to wait for responses from the cloud. Our experiments on five datasets demonstrate that Hybrid-RACA offers strong performance while maintaining low latency.

Hybrid-RACA: Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Composition Assistance for Real-time Text Prediction

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) are propelling us toward artificial general intelligence with their remarkable emergent abilities and reasoning capabilities. However, the substantial computational and memory requirements limit the widespread adoption. Quantization, a key compression technique, can effectively mitigate these demands by compressing and accelerating LLMs, albeit with potential risks to accuracy. Numerous studies have aimed to minimize the accuracy loss associated with quantization. However, their quantization configurations vary from each other and cannot be fairly compared. In this paper, we present LLMC, a plug-and-play compression toolkit, to fairly and systematically explore the impact of quantization. LLMC integrates dozens of algorithms, models, and hardwares, offering high extensibility from integer to floating-point quantization, from LLM to vision-language (VLM) model, from fixed-bit to mixed precision, and from quantization to sparsification. Powered by this versatile toolkit, our benchmark covers three key aspects: calibration data, algorithms (three strategies), and data formats, providing novel insights and detailed analyses for further research and practical guidance for users. Our toolkit is available at \hyperref[LLMC]{https://github.com/anonymous-emnlp123/llmc}.

LLMC: Benchmarking Large Language Model Quantization with a Versatile Compression Toolkit

This paper introduces a novel framework that combines graph-driven context retrieval in conjunction to knowledge graphs based enhancement, honing the proficiency of LLMs, especially in domain specific community question answering platforms like AskUbuntu, Unix, and ServerFault. We conduct experiments on various LLMs with different parameter sizes to evaluate their ability to ground knowledge and determine factual accuracy in answers to open-ended questions. Our methodology GraphContextGen consistently outperforms dominant text-based retrieval systems, demonstrating its robustness and adaptability to a larger number of use cases. This advancement highlights the importance of pairing context rich data retrieval with LLMs, offering a renewed approach to knowledge sourcing and generation in AI systems. We also show that, due to rich contextual data retrieval, the crucial entities, along with the generated answer, remain factually coherent with the gold answer. We shall release the source code and datasets upon acceptance.

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Language, OCR, Form Independent (LOFI) pipeline for Industrial Document Information Extraction

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Efficient and Versatile Model for Multilingual Information Retrieval of Islamic Text: Development and Deployment in Real-World Scenarios