China

Language models can be used to provide interactive, personalized student feedback in educational settings. However, real-world deployment faces three key challenges: privacy concerns, limited computational resources, and the need for pedagogically valid responses. These constraints require small, open-source models that can run locally and reliably ground their outputs in correct information. We introduce SCRIBE, a framework for multi-hop, tool-augmented reasoning designed to generate valid responses to student questions about feedback reports. SCRIBE combines domain-specific tools with a self-reflective inference pipeline that supports iterative reasoning, tool use, and error recovery. We distill these capabilities into 3B and 8B models via two-stage LoRA fine-tuning on synthetic GPT-4o-generated data. Evaluation using a human-aligned GPT-Judge and a user study with 108 students shows that SCRIBE matches or exceeds the perceived quality of much larger models, demonstrating its viability for low-resource, privacy-sensitive educational applications.

EMNLP 2025

SCRIBE: Structured Chain Reasoning for Interactive Behaviour Explanations using Tool Calling

tool calling

parameter-efficient-training

human-centered evaluation

educational applications

## 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

Large language models (LLMs) have gained increasing attention in recommender systems, but their inherent hallucination issues significantly compromise the accuracy and reliability of recommendation results. Existing LLM-based recommender systems predominantly rely on standard fine-tuning methodologies, often ignoring hallucination issues during the fine-tuning process. To address this challenge, we propose Logit Space Constraints Fine-Tuning (LCFT), a novel fine-tuning framework designed to mitigate hallucination in LLM-based recommenders. Specifically, LCFT takes as input semantically positive and negative instruction pairs and incorporates Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence into the training objective to explicitly maximise their distributional disparity in the logit space. By conducting such logit space-constrained fine-tuning, LCFT encourages more distinguishable and semantically grounded representations, thereby reducing the model’s susceptibility to hallucination. Extensive experiments on two recommendation models with distinct LLM backbones and four real-world datasets demonstrate that LCFT consistently reduces hallucination and enhances recommendation performance.

Logit Space Constrained Fine-Tuning for Mitigating Hallucinations in LLM-Based Recommender Systems

Schema linking is widely recognized as a key factor in improving text-to-SQL performance. Supervised fine-tuning approaches enhance SQL generation quality by explicitly fine-tuning schema linking as an extraction task. However, they suffer from two major limitations: (i) The training corpus of small language models restricts their cross-domain generalization ability. (ii) The extraction-based fine-tuning process struggles to capture complex linking patterns. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{GenLink}, a generation-driven schema-linking framework based on multi-model learning. Instead of explicitly extracting schema elements, GenLink enhances linking through a generation-based learning process, effectively capturing implicit schema relationships. By integrating multiple small language models, GenLink improves schema-linking recall rate and ensures robust cross-domain adaptability. Experimental results on the BIRD and Spider benchmarks validate the effectiveness of GenLink, achieving execution accuracies of 67.34\% (BIRD), 89.7\% (Spider development set), and 87.8\% (Spider test set), demonstrating its superiority in handling diverse and complex database schemas.

GenLink: Generation-Driven Schema-Linking via Multi-Model Learning for Text-to-SQL

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled zero-shot automated essay scoring (AES), providing a promising way to reduce the cost and effort of essay scoring in comparison with manual grading. However, most existing zero-shot approaches rely on LLMs to directly generate absolute scores, which often diverge from human evaluations owing to model biases and inconsistent scoring. To address these limitations, we propose LLM-based Comparative Essay Scoring (LCES), a method that formulates AES as a pairwise comparison task. Specifically, we instruct LLMs to judge which of two essays is better, collect many such comparisons, and convert them into continuous scores. Considering that the number of possible comparisons grows quadratically with the number of essays, we improve scalability by employing RankNet to efficiently transform LLM preferences into scalar scores. Experiments using AES benchmark datasets show that LCES outperforms conventional zero-shot methods in accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency. Moreover, LCES is robust across different LLM backbones, highlighting its applicability to real-world zero-shot AES.

LCES: Zero-shot Automated Essay Scoring via Pairwise Comparisons Using Large Language Models

We address the problem of data scarcity in harmful text classification for guardrailing applications and introduce GRAID (Geometric and Reflective AI-Driven Data Augmentation), a novel pipeline that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for dataset augmentation. GRAID consists of two stages: (i) generation of geometrically controlled examples using a constrained LLM, and (ii) augmentation through a multi-agentic reflective process that promotes stylistic diversity and uncovers edge cases. This combination enables both reliable coverage of the input space and nuanced exploration of harmful content. Using two benchmark data sets, we demonstrate that augmenting a harmful text classification dataset with GRAID leads to significant improvements in downstream guardrail model performance.

GRAID: Synthetic Data Generation with Geometric Constraints and Multi-Agentic Reflection for Harmful Content Detection

Systematic reviews in medicine play a critical role in evidence-based decision-making by aggregating findings from multiple studies. A central bottleneck in automating this process is extracting numeric evidence and determining study-level conclusions for specific outcomes and comparisons. Prior work has framed this problem as a textual inference task by retrieving relevant content fragments and inferring conclusions from them. However, such approaches often rely on shallow textual cues and fail to capture the underlying numeric reasoning behind expert assessments. In this work, we conceptualise the problem as one of quantitative reasoning. Rather than inferring conclusions from surface text, we extract structured numerical evidence (e.g., event counts or standard deviations) and apply domain knowledge informed logic to derive outcome-specific conclusions. We develop a numeric reasoning system composed of a numeric data extraction model and an effect estimate component, enabling more accurate and interpretable inference aligned with the domain expert principles. We train the numeric data extraction model using different strategies, including supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) with a new value reward model. When evaluated on the CochraneForest benchmark, our best-performing approach -- using RL to train a small-scale number extraction model -- yields up to a 21% absolute improvement in F1 score over retrieval-based systems and outperforms general-purpose LLMs of over 400B parameters by up to 9%. Our results demonstrate the promise of reasoning-driven approaches for automating systematic evidence synthesis.

Enhancing Study-Level Inference from Clinical Trial Papers via Reinforcement Learning-Based Numeric Reasoning

Innovators often exhibit cognitive fixation on existing solutions or nascent ideas, hindering the exploration of novel alternatives. This paper introduces a methodology for constructing Functional Concept Graphs (FCGs), interconnected representations of functional elements that support abstraction, problem reframing, and analogical inspiration. Our approach yields large-scale, high-quality FCGs with explicit abstraction relations, overcoming limitations of prior work. We further present MUSE, an algorithm leveraging FCGs to generate creative inspirations for a given problem. We demonstrate our method by computing an FCG on 500K patents, which we release for further research. We introduced MUSE, a novel engine to find unexpected solutions to problems. This engine consists of the inspiration graph, whose problem and solution nodes were extracted from 500K patent descriptions. For a given problem, MUSE aims to enhance users' creative problem solving by providing them with inspirations sampled from the inspiration graph. A user study indicates that participants exposed to MUSE's inspirations generated more creative ideas, both in terms of absolute number (up to 19% increase over participants not given inspirations) and ratio (75%, compared to 49% for no inspirations).

Finding your MUSE: Mining Unexpected Solutions Engine

Recent advancements in large language models have significantly influenced the field of online medical consultations. However, critical challenges remain, such as the generation of hallucinated information and the integration of up-to-date medical knowledge. To address these issues, we propose **I**nformatics **Llama** (ILlama), a novel framework that combines retrieval-augmented generation with a structured medical knowledge graph. ILlama incorporates relevant medical knowledge by transforming subgraphs from a structured medical knowledge graph into text for retrieval-augmented generation. By generating subgraphs from the medical knowledge graph in advance, specifically focusing on diseases and symptoms, ILlama is able to enhance the accuracy and relevance of its medical reasoning. This framework enables effective incorporation of causal relationships between symptoms and diseases. Also, it delivers context-aware consultations aligned with user queries. Experimental results on the two medical consultation datasets demonstrate that ILlama outperforms the strong baselines, achieving a semantic similarity F1-score of 0.884 when compared with ground truth consultation answers. Furthermore, qualitative analysis of ILlama’s responses reveals significant improvements in hallucination reduction and clinical usefulness. These results suggest that ILlama has strong potential as a reliable tool for real-world medical consultation environments.

Leveraging Knowledge Graph-Enhanced LLMs for Context-Aware Medical Consultation

Natural language generation (NLG) metrics play a central role in evaluating generated texts, but are not well suited for the structural and legal characteristics of patent documents. Large language models (LLMs) offer strong potential in automating patent generation, yet research on evaluating LLM-generated patents remains limited, especially in evaluating the generation quality of patent claims, which are central to defining the scope of protection. Effective claim evaluation requires addressing legal validity, technical accuracy, and structural compliance. To address this gap, we introduce PatentScore, a multi-dimensional evaluation framework for assessing LLM-generated patent claims. PatentScore incorporates: (1) hierarchical decomposition for claim analysis; (2) domain-specific validation patterns based on legal and technical standards; and (3) scoring across structural, semantic, and legal dimensions. Unlike general-purpose NLG metrics, PatentScore reflects patent-specific constraints and document structures, enabling evaluation beyond surface similarity. We evaluate 400 GPT-4o-mini generated Claim 1s and report a Pearson correlation of r = 0.819 with expert annotations, outperforming existing NLG metrics. Furthermore, we conduct additional evaluations using open models such as Claude-3.5-Haiku and Gemini-1.5-flash, all of which show strong correlations with expert judgments, confirming the robustness and generalizability of our framework.

PatentScore: Multi-dimensional Evaluation of LLM-Generated Patent Claims

An important task in machine learning (ML) research is comparing prior work, which is often performed via ML leaderboards: a tabular overview of experiments with comparable conditions (e.g. same task, dataset, and metric). However, the growing volume of literature creates challenges in creating and maintaining these leaderboards. To ease this burden, researchers have developed methods to extract leaderboard entries from research papers for automated leaderboard curation. Yet, prior work varies in problem framing, complicating comparisons and limiting real-world applicability. In this position paper, we present the first overview of Automatic Leaderboard Generation (ALG) research, identifying fundamental differences in assumptions, scope, and output formats. We propose an ALG unified conceptual framework to standardise how the ALG task is defined. We offer ALG benchmarking guidelines, including recommendations for datasets and metrics that promote fair, reproducible evaluation. Lastly, we outline challenges and new directions for ALG, advocating for broader coverage by including all reported results and richer metadata.

A Position Paper on the Automatic Generation of Machine Learning Leaderboards

Visual Document Retrieval (VDR) typically operates as text-to-image retrieval using specialized bi-encoders trained to directly embed document images. We revisit a zero-shot generate-and-encode pipeline: a vision–language model first produces a detailed textual description of each document image, which is then embedded by a standard text encoder. On the ViDoRe-v2 benchmark, the method reaches 63.4% nDCG@5, surpassing the strongest specialised multi-vector visual document encoder. Analysis shows that modern vision–language models capture complex textual and visual cues with sufficient granularity to act as a reusable semantic proxy. By off-loading modality alignment to pretrained vision–language models, our approach removes the need for computationally intensive text-image contrastive training and establishes a strong zero-shot baseline for future VDR systems.

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