Austria

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance in capability, prompt engineering has emerged as a crucial method for optimizing their performance on specialized tasks. While prompting strategies like Zero-shot, Few-shot, Chain-of-Thought, and Tree-of-Thought have demonstrated significant improvements in reasoning tasks, their application to machine translation has received comparatively less attention. This paper systematically evaluates these prompting techniques across diverse language pairs and domains, measuring their effect on translation quality. Our findings reveal substantial performance variations between prompting methods, with certain strategies offering consistent improvements for specific language directions and complexity levels. These results provide valuable insights for developing more effective LLM-based translation systems without requiring model fine-tuning and complement existing works in the field.

ACL 2025

Reasoning for Translation: Comparative Analysis of Chain-of-Thought and Tree-of-Thought Prompting for LLM Translation

tree-of-thought

chain-of-thought

in-context learning

prompting

large language models

machine translation

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

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EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

workshop paper

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

The Middle East is characterized by remarkable linguistic diversity, with over 400 million inhabitants speaking more than 60 languages across multiple language families. This study presents a pioneering work in developing the first parallel corpora for eight severely under-resourced varieties in the region–PARME, addressing fundamental challenges in low-resource scenarios including non-standardized writing and dialectal complexity. Through an extensive community-driven initiative, volunteers contributed to the creation of over 36,000 translated sentences, marking a significant milestone in resource development. We evaluate machine translation capabilities through zero-shot approaches and fine-tuning experiments with pretrained machine translation models and provide a comprehensive analysis of limitations. Our findings reveal significant gaps in existing technologies for processing the selected languages, highlighting critical areas for improvement in language technology for Middle Eastern languages.

PARME: Parallel Corpora for Low-Resourced Middle Eastern Languages

Examining logical inconsistencies among multiple statements (such as collections of sentences or question-answer pairs) is a crucial challenge in machine learning, particularly for ensuring the safety and reliability of models. Traditional methods that rely on 1:1 pairwise comparisons often fail to capture inconsistencies that only emerge when more than two statements are evaluated collectively. To address this gap, we introduce the task of set-consistency verification, an extension of natural language inference (NLI) that assesses the logical coherence of entire sets rather than isolated pairs. Building on this task, we present the Set-Consistency Energy Network (SC-Energy), a novel model that employs a margin-based loss to learn the compatibility among a collection of statements. Our approach not only efficiently verifies inconsistencies and pinpoints the specific statements responsible for logical contradictions, but also significantly outperforms existing methods, including prompting-based LLM models. Furthermore, we release two new datasets: Set-LConVQA and Set-SNLI for set-consistency verification task.

Introducing Verification Task of Set Consistency with Set-Consistency Energy Networks

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) enables zero-shot inference in downstream tasks such as image-text retrieval and classification. However, recent works extending CLIP suffer from the issue of *modality gap*, which arises when the image and text embeddings are projected to disparate manifolds, deviating from the intended objective of image-text contrastive learning. We discover that this phenomenon is linked to the modality-specific characteristic that each image or text encoder independently possesses. Herein, we propose two methods to address the modality gap: (1) a post-hoc embedding standardization method, $I0T_{post}$ that reduces the modality gap approximately to zero and (2) a trainable method, $I0T_{async}$, to alleviate the modality gap problem by adding two normalization layers for each encoder. Our I0T framework can significantly reduce the modality gap while preserving the original embedding representations of trained models with their locked parameters. In practice, $I0T_{post}$ can serve as an alternative explainable automatic evaluation metric of widely used CLIPScore (CLIP-S). The code is available in https://github.com/xfactlab/I0T.

I0T: Embedding Standardization Method Towards Zero Modality Gap

Safety concerns in large language models (LLMs) have gained significant attention due to their exposure to potentially harmful data during pre-training. In this paper, we identify a new safety vulnerability in LLMs: their susceptibility to \textit{natural distribution shifts} between attack prompts and original toxic prompts, where seemingly benign prompts, semantically related to harmful content, can bypass safety mechanisms. To explore this issue, we introduce a novel attack method, \textit{ActorBreaker}, which identifies actors related to toxic prompts within pre-training distribution to craft multi-turn prompts that gradually lead LLMs to reveal unsafe content. ActorBreaker is grounded in Latour's actor-network theory, encompassing both human and non-human actors to capture a broader range of vulnerabilities. Our experimental results demonstrate that ActorBreaker outperforms existing attack methods in terms of diversity, effectiveness, and efficiency across aligned LLMs. To address this vulnerability, we propose expanding safety training to cover a broader semantic space of toxic content. We thus construct a multi-turn safety dataset using ActorBreaker. Fine-tuning models on our dataset shows significant improvements in robustness, though with some trade-offs in utility. Code is available at https://github.com/AI45Lab/ActorAttack.

LLMs know their vulnerabilities: Uncover Safety Gaps through Natural Distribution Shifts

Personalized product search aims to retrieve and rank items that match users' preferences and search intent. Despite their effectiveness, existing approaches typically assume that users' query fully captures their real motivation. However, our analysis of a real-world e-commerce platform reveals that users often engage in relevant consultations before searching, indicating they refine intents through consultations based on motivation and need. The implied motivation in consultations is a key enhancing factor for personalized search. This unexplored area comes with new challenges including aligning contextual motivations with concise queries, bridging the category-text gap, and filtering noise within sequence history. To address these, we propose a Motivation-Aware Personalized Search (MAPS) method. It embeds queries and consultations into a unified semantic space via LLMs, utilizes a Mixture of Attention Experts (MoAE) to prioritize critical semantics, and introduces dual alignment: (1) contrastive learning aligns consultations, reviews, and product features; (2) bidirectional attention integrates motivation-aware embeddings with user preferences. Extensive experiments on real and synthetic data show MAPS outperforms existing methods in both retrieval and ranking tasks. Code and supplementary materials are available at: https://github.com/E-qin/MAPS.

MAPS: Motivation-Aware Personalized Search via LLM-Driven Consultation Alignment

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly advanced multi-turn conversation systems, emphasizing the need for proactive guidance to enhance users' interactions. However, these systems face challenges in dynamically adapting to shifts in users' goals and maintaining low latency for real-time interactions. In the Baidu Search AI assistant, an industrial-scale multi-turn search system, we propose a novel two-phase framework to provide proactive guidance. The first phase, Goal-adaptive Supervised Fine-Tuning (G-SFT), employs a goal adaptation agent that dynamically adapts to user goal shifts and provides goal-relevant contextual information. G-SFT also incorporates scalable knowledge transfer to distill insights from LLMs into a lightweight model for real-time interaction. The second phase, Click-oriented Reinforcement Learning (C-RL), adopts a generate-rank paradigm, systematically constructs preference pairs from user click signals, and proactively improves click-through rates through more engaging guidance. This dual-phase architecture achieves complementary objectives: G-SFT ensures accurate goal tracking, while C-RL optimizes interaction quality through click signal-driven reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves 86.10\% accuracy in offline evaluation (+23.95\% over baseline) and 25.28\% CTR in online deployment (149.06\% relative improvement), while reducing inference latency by 69.55\% through scalable knowledge distillation.

Proactive Guidance of Multi-Turn Conversation in Industrial Search

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become capable of generating highly fluent text in certain languages, without modules specially designed to capture grammar or semantic coherence. What does this mean for the future of linguistic expertise in NLP? We highlight several aspects in which NLP (still) relies on linguistics, or where linguistic thinking can illuminate new directions. We argue our case around the acronym RELIES, which encapsulates six major facets where linguistics contributes to NLP: Resources, Evaluation, Low-resource settings, Interpretability, Explanation, and the Study of language. This list is not exhaustive, nor is linguistics the main point of reference for every effort under these themes; but at a macro level, these facets highlight the enduring importance of studying machine systems vis-a-vis systems of human language.

Natural Language Processing RELIES on Linguistics

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success, but aligning them with human preferences remains a core challenge. As individuals have their own, multi-dimensional preferences, recent studies have explored *multi-dimensional personalization*, which aims to enable models to generate responses personalized to *explicit* preferences. However, human preferences are often *implicit* and thus difficult to articulate, limiting the direct application of this approach. To bridge this gap, we propose Active Multi-dimensional Preference Learning (AMPLe), designed to capture implicit user preferences from interactively collected comparative feedback. Building on Bayesian inference, our work introduces a modified posterior update procedure to mitigate estimation bias and potential noise in comparisons. Also, inspired by generalized binary search, we employ an active query selection strategy to minimize the number of required comparisons by a user. Through theoretical analysis and experiments on language generation tasks, we demonstrate feedback efficiency and effectiveness of our framework in personalizing model responses. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ml-postech/AMPLe.

Comparison-based Active Preference Learning for Multi-dimensional Personalization

Idioms are defined as a group of words with a figurative meaning not deducible from their individual components. Although modern machine translation systems have made remarkable progress, translating idioms remains a major challenge, especially for speech-to-text systems, where research on this topic is notably sparse. In this paper, we systematically evaluate idiom translation as compared to conventional news translation in both text-to-text machine translation (MT) and speech-to-text translation (SLT) systems across two language pairs (German to English, Russian to English). We compare state-of-the-art end-to-end SLT systems (SeamlessM4T SLT-to-text, Whisper Large v3) with MT systems (SeamlessM4T SLT-to-text, No Language Left Behind), Large Language Models (DeepSeek, LLaMA) and cascaded alternatives. Our results reveal that SLT systems experience a pronounced performance drop on idiomatic data, often reverting to literal translations even in higher layers, whereas MT systems and Large Language Models demonstrate better handling of idioms. These findings underscore the need for idiom-specific strategies and improved internal representations in SLT architectures.

It’s Not a Walk in the Park! Challenges of Idiom Translation in Speech-to-text Systems

Rational speakers are supposed to know what they know and what they do not know, and to generate expressions matching the strength of evidence. In contrast, it is still a challenge for current large language models to generate corresponding utterances based on the assessment of facts and confidence in an uncertain real-world environment. While it has recently become popular to estimate and calibrate confidence of LLMs with verbalized uncertainty, what is lacking is a careful examination of the linguistic knowledge of uncertainty encoded in the latent space of LLMs. In this paper, we draw on typological frameworks of epistemic expressions to evaluate LLMs' knowledge of epistemic modality, using controlled stories. Our experiments show that the performance of LLMs in generating epistemic expressions is limited and not robust, and hence the expressions of uncertainty generated by LLMs are not always reliable. To build uncertainty-aware LLMs, it is necessary to enrich semantic knowledge of epistemic modality in LLMs.

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PARME: Parallel Corpora for Low-Resourced Middle Eastern Languages

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What Makes Chain-of-Thought Prompting Effective? A Counterfactual Study