China

Molecule and text representation learning has gained increasing interest due to its potential for enhancing the understanding of chemical information. However, existing models often struggle to capture subtle differences between molecules and their descriptions, as they lack the ability to learn fine-grained alignments between molecular substructures and chemical phrases. To address this limitation, we introduce MolBridge, a novel molecule–text learning framework based on substructure-aware alignments. Specifically, we augment the original molecule–description pairs with additional alignment signals derived from molecular substructures and chemical phrases. To effectively learn from these enriched alignments, MolBridge employs substructure-aware contrastive learning, coupled with a self-refinement mechanism that filters out noisy alignment signals. Experimental results show that MolBridge effectively captures fine-grained correspondences and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on a wide range of molecular benchmarks, highlighting the significance of substructure-aware alignment in molecule-text learning.

EMNLP 2025

Bridging the Gap Between Molecule and Textual Descriptions via Substructure-aware Alignment

substructure

pubchem

de novo molecule generation

molecule-text alignment

molecule captioning

molecular property prediction

nlp application

multimodal

## 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>

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

poster

While large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, LLMs exhibit a limited understanding of commonsense reasoning due to the necessity of implicit knowledge that is rarely expressed in text. Recently, retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs) have enhanced their commonsense reasoning ability by incorporating background knowledge from external corpora. However, previous RALMs overlook the implicit nature of commonsense knowledge, potentially resulting in the retrieved documents not directly containing information needed to answer questions. In this paper, we propose Retrieval-augmented knowledge Connection, ReConnect, which transforms indirectly relevant documents into a direct explanation to answer the given question. To this end, we extract relevant knowledge from various retrieved document subsets and aggregate them into a direct explanation. Experimental results show that ReConnect outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines, achieving improvements of +2.2% and +4.6% average accuracy on in-domain (ID) and out-of-domain (OOD) benchmarks, respectively.

Connecting the Knowledge Dots: Retrieval-augmented Knowledge Connection for Commonsense Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated near-human performance in summarization tasks based on traditional metrics such as ROUGE and BERTScore. However, these metrics do not adequately capture critical aspects of summarization quality, such as factual accuracy, particularly for long narratives (>100K tokens). Recent advances, such as LLM-as-a-Judge, address the limitations of metrics based on lexical similarity but still exhibit factual inconsistencies, especially in understanding character relationships and states. In this work, we introduce NarrativeFactScore (NFS), the first “Agent-as-a-Judge” framework that evaluates and refines factuality in narrative summarization. By leveraging a Character Knowledge Graph (CKG) extracted from input narrative, NarrativeFactScore evaluates the factuality and provides actionable guidance for refinement, such as identifying missing or erroneous facts. Our experimental results demonstrate that constructing the CKG enables reasoning with 1/3 of the factuality computation used in prior approach, and achieve three times higher correlation with human judgments. Furthermore, refinement with actionable guidance improves the quality of the summary.\footnote{\href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NFS-1240}{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NFS-1240}}

Agent-as-Judge for Factual Summarization of Long Narratives

The decompose-then-verify strategy for verification of Large Language Model (LLM) generations decomposes claims that are then independently verified. Decontextualization augments text (claims) to ensure it can be verified outside of the original context, enabling reliable verification. While decomposition and decontextualization have been explored independently, their interactions in a complete system have not been investigated. Their conflicting purposes can create tensions: decomposition isolates atomic facts while decontextualization inserts relevant information. Furthermore, a decontextualized subclaim presents a challenge to the verification step: what part of the augmented text should be verified as it now contains multiple atomic facts? We conduct an evaluation of different decomposition, decontextualization, and verification strategies and find that the choice of strategy matters in the resulting factuality scores. Additionally, we introduce DnDScore, a decontextualization aware verification method that validates subclaims in the context of contextual information.

DnDScore: Decontextualization and Decomposition for Factuality Verification in Long-Form Text Generation

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) hold great promise for automating complex financial analysis. To comprehensively evaluate their capabilities, we introduce VisFinEval, the first large‐scale Chinese benchmark that spans the full front‐middle‐back office lifecycle of financial tasks. VisFinEval comprises 15,848 annotated question–answer pairs drawn from eight common financial image modalities (e.g., K-line charts, financial statements, official seals), organized into three hierarchical scenario depths: Financial Knowledge & Data Analysis, Financial Analysis & Decision Support, and Financial Risk Control & Asset Optimization. We evaluate 21 state-of-the-art MLLMs in a zero-shot setting. The top model, Qwen-VL-max, achieves an overall accuracy of 76.3%, outperforming non-expert humans but trailing financial experts by over 14 percentage points. Our error analysis uncovers six recurring failure modes—including cross-modal misalignment, hallucinations, and lapses in business-process reasoning—that highlight critical avenues for future research. VisFinEval aims to accelerate the development of robust, domain-tailored MLLMs capable of seamlessly integrating textual and visual financial information. The data and the code are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/VisFinEval-626E.

VisFinEval: A Scenario-Driven Chinese Multimodal Benchmark for Holistic Financial Understanding

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on question-answering (QA) tasks because of their superior capabilities in natural language understanding and generation. However, LLM-based QA struggles with complex QA tasks due to poor reasoning capacity, outdated knowledge, and hallucinations. Several recent works synthesize LLMs and knowledge graphs (KGs) for QA to address the above challenges. In this survey, we propose a new structured taxonomy that categorizes the methodology of synthesizing LLMs and KGs for QA according to the categories of QA and the KG's role when integrating with LLMs. We systematically survey state-of-the-art methods in synthesizing LLMs and KGs for QA and compare and analyze these approaches in terms of strength, limitations, and KG requirements. We then align the approaches with QA and discuss how these approaches address the main challenges of different complex QA. Finally, we summarize the advancements, evaluation metrics, and benchmark datasets and highlight open challenges and opportunities.

Large Language Models Meet Knowledge Graphs for Question Answering: Synthesis and Opportunities

Item (question) difficulties play a crucial role in educational assessments, enabling accurate and efficient assessment of student abilities and personalization to maximize learning outcomes. Traditionally, estimating item difficulties can be costly, requiring real students to respond to items, followed by fitting an item response theory (IRT) model to get item difficulty estimates. This approach cannot be applied to the cold-start setting for previously unseen items either. In this work, we present SMART (Simulated Students Aligned with IRT), a novel method for aligning simulated students with instructed ability, which can then be used in simulations to predict the difficulty of open-ended items. We achieve this alignment using direct preference optimization (DPO), where we form preference pairs based on how likely responses are under a ground-truth IRT model. We perform a simulation by generating thousands of responses, evaluating them with an LLM-based scoring model, and fit the resulting data to an IRT model to obtain item difficulty estimates. Through extensive experiments on a real-world student response dataset, we show that SMART outperforms other item difficulty prediction methods by leveraging its improved ability alignment.

SMART: Simulated Students Aligned with Item Response Theory for Question Difficulty Prediction

Many contemporary data-driven research efforts in the natural sciences, such as chemistry and materials science, require large-scale, high-performance entity recognition from scientific datasets. Large language models (LLMs) have increasingly been adopted to solve the entity recognition task, with the same trend being observed on all-spectrum NLP tasks. The prevailing entity recognition LLMs rely on fine-tuned technology, yet the fine-tuning process often incurs significant cost. To achieve a best performance-cost trade-off, we propose ALLabel, a three-stage framework designed to select the most informative and representative samples in preparing the demonstrations for LLM modeling. The annotated examples are used to construct a ground-truth retrieval corpus for LLM in-context learning. By sequentially employing three distinct active learning strategies, ALLabel consistently outperforms all baselines under the same annotation budget across three specialized domain datasets. Experimental results also demonstrate that selectively annotating only 5%-10% of the dataset with ALLabel can achieve performance comparable to the method annotating the entire dataset. Further analyses and ablation studies verify the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposal.

ALLabel: Three-stage Active Learning for LLM-based Entity Recognition using Demonstration Retrieval

Learning Japanese vocabulary is a challenge for learners from Roman alphabet backgrounds due to script differences. Japanese combines syllabaries like hiragana with kanji, which are logographic characters of Chinese origin. Kanji are also complicated due to their complexity and volume. Keyword mnemonics are a common strategy to aid memorization, often using the compositional structure of kanji to form vivid associations. Despite recent efforts to use large language models (LLMs) to assist learners, existing methods for LLM-based keyword mnemonic generation function as a black box, offering limited interpretability. We propose a generative framework that explicitly models the mnemonic construction process as driven by a set of common rules, and learn them using a novel Expectation-Maximization-type algorithm. Trained on learner-authored mnemonics from an online platform, our method learns latent structures and compositional rules, enabling interpretable and systematic mnemonics generation. Experiments show that our method performs well in the cold-start setting for new learners while providing insight into the mechanisms behind effective mnemonic creation.

Interpretable Mnemonic Generation for Kanji Learning via Expectation-Maximization

Vocabulary acquisition poses a significant challenge for second-language (L2) learners, especially when learning typologically distant languages such as English and Korean, where phonological and structural mismatches complicate vocabulary learning. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been used to generate keyword mnemonics by leveraging similar keywords from a learner’s first language (L1) to aid in acquiring L2 vocabulary. However, most of this research has focused on native English speakers learning other languages, rather than the reverse. In this paper, we present PhoniTale, a novel cross-lingual mnemonic generation system that retrieves L1 keyword sequence based on phonological similarity and uses LLMs to generate mnemonics. We evaluate PhoniTale using both automated metrics and human evaluations, comparing its output to mnemonics created by humans and by previous automated approaches. To assess practical effectiveness, we also conduct a short-term recall test measuring mnemonic helpfulness. Our findings show that PhoniTale performs comparably to human-authored mnemonics. We also highlight key areas for future improvement in mnemonic quality and methodology.

PhoniTale: Phonologically Grounded Mnemonic Generation for Typologically Distant Language Pairs

Rapid advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have expanded information retrieval beyond purely textual inputs, enabling retrieval from complex real-world documents that combine text and visuals. However, most documents are private—either owned by individuals or confined within corporate silos—and current retrievers struggle when faced with unseen domains or languages. To address this gap, we introduce PREMIR, a simple yet effective framework that leverages the broad knowledge of an MLLM to generate cross-modal pre-questions (preQs) before retrieval. Unlike earlier multimodal retrievers that compare embeddings in a single vector space, PREMIR leverages preQs from multiple complementary modalities to expand the scope of matching to the token level. Experiments show that PREMIR achieves state-of-the-art performance on out-of-distribution benchmarks, including closed-domain and multilingual settings, outperforming strong baselines across all retrieval metrics. We confirm the contribution of each component through in-depth ablation studies, and qualitative analyses of the generated preQs further highlight the model’s robustness in real-world settings. The code will be publicly available.

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Next from EMNLP 2025

Connecting the Knowledge Dots: Retrieval-augmented Knowledge Connection for Commonsense Reasoning

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