China

Customer service often relies on human agents, which, while effective, can be costly and slower to scale. 
Recent advancements in intelligent chatbots, particularly Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models, have significantly enhanced efficiency by integrating large language models with external knowledge retrieval. However, developing a multi-turn RAG-based chatbot for real-world customer service presents additional complexities, requiring components like adaptive retrieval and query reformulation. These components typically require substantial annotated data, which is often scarce. To overcome this limitation, we propose methods to automatically generate labels for these components using real customer-agent dialogue data. Specifically, we introduce two labeling strategies for adaptive retrieval: an intent-guided strategy and an explanation-based strategy, along with two query reformulation strategies: natural language query reformulation and keyword-based reformulation. Our experiments reveal that the explanation-based strategy yields the best results for adaptive retrieval, while the keyword-based reformulation improves document retrieval quality.
Our findings offer valuable insights for practitioners working on multi-turn RAG systems.

EMNLP 2025

LLM-Based Dialogue Labeling for Multiturn Adaptive RAG

rag; query reformulation; retrieval augmented generation;

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields 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.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

poster

## 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*

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

Financial dialogue transcripts pose a unique challenge for sentence-level information extraction due to their informal structure, domain-specific vocabulary, and variable intent density. We introduce Fin-ExBERT, a lightweight and modular framework for extracting user intent–relevant sentences from annotated financial service calls. Our approach builds on a domain-adapted BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) backbone enhanced with LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) adapters, enabling efficient fine-tuning using limited labeled data. We propose a two-stage training strategy with progressive unfreezing: initially training a classifier head while freezing the backbone, followed by gradual fine-tuning of the entire model with differential learning rates. To ensure robust extraction under uncertainty, we adopt a dynamic thresholding strategy based on probability curvature (elbow detection), avoiding fixed cutoff heuristics. Empirical results show strong precision and F1 performance on real-world transcripts, with interpretable output suitable for downstream auditing and question-answering workflows. The full framework supports batched evaluation, visualization, and calibrated export, offering a deployable solution for financial dialogue mining.

Fin-ExBERT: User Intent based Text Extraction in Financial Context using Graph-Augmented BERT and trainable Plugin

Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to convert natural language (NL) instructions into structured business process automation (BPA) process artifacts.
This paper contributes (i) FLOW-BENCH, a high quality dataset of paired NL instructions and business process definitions to
evaluate NL-based BPA tools, and support research in this area, and (ii) FLOW-GEN,
our approach to utilize LLMs to translate NL into an intermediate Python representation that facilitates final conversion into widely adopted business process definition languages, such as BPMN and DMN. We bootstrap FLOW-BENCH by demonstrating how it can be used to evaluate the components of FLOW-GEN across eight LLMs. We hope that FLOW-GEN and FLOW-BENCH
catalyze further research in BPA.

FLOW-BENCH: Towards Conversational Generation of Enterprise Workflows

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is a fundamental and important task in the field of speech and natural language processing. It is an inherent building block in many applications such as voice assistant, speech translation, etc. Despite the advancement of ASR technologies in recent years, it is still inevitable for modern ASR systems to have a substantial number of erroneous recognition due to environmental noise, ambiguity, etc. Therefore, the error correction in ASR is crucial. 


Motivated by this, this paper studies ASR error correction in the Chinese language, which is one of the most popular languages and enjoys a large number of users in the world. We first create a benchmark dataset named \emph{ASR-EC} that contains a wide spectrum of ASR errors generated by industry-grade ASR systems. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first Chinese ASR error correction benchmark. Then, inspired by the recent advances in \emph{large language models (LLMs)}, we investigate how to harness the power of LLMs to correct ASR errors. We apply LLMs to ASR error correction in three paradigms. The first paradigm is prompting, which is further categorized as zero-shot, few-shot, and multi-step. The second paradigm is finetuning, which finetunes LLMs with ASR error correction data. The third paradigm is multi-modal augmentation, which collectively utilizes the audio and ASR transcripts for error correction. Extensive experiments reveal that prompting is not effective for ASR error correction. Finetuning is effective only for a portion of LLMs. Multi-modal augmentation is the most effective method for error correction and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

ASR-EC Benchmark: Evaluating Large Language Models on Chinese ASR Error Correction

The utilization of conversational AI systems by leveraging Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques to solve customer problems
has been on the rise with the rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the absence of a company-specific dedicated knowledge base is a major barrier to the integration of conversational AI systems in contact centers. To this end, we introduce AI Knowledge Assist, a system that extracts knowledge in the form of question-answer (QA) pairs from historical customer‑agent conversations to automatically build a knowledge base. Fine‑tuning a lightweight LLM on internal data demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, outperforming larger closed-source LLMs. More specifically, empirical evaluation on 20 companies demonstrates that the proposed AI Knowledge Assist system that leverages the LLaMA-3.1-8B model eliminates the cold‑start gap in contact centers by achieving above 90\% accuracy in answering information‑seeking questions. This enables immediate deployment of RAG-powered chatbots.

AI Knowledge Assist: An Automated Approach for the Creation of Knowledge Bases for Conversational AI Agents

Collaborative filtering (CF) is widely adopted in industrial recommender systems (RecSys) for modeling user-item interactions across numerous applications, but often struggles with cold-start and data-sparse scenarios. Recent advancements in pre-trained large language models (LLMs) with rich semantic knowledge, offer promising solutions to these challenges. However, deploying LLMs at scale is hindered by their significant computational demands and latency. In this paper, we propose a novel and scalable LLM-RecSys framework, LLMInit, designed to integrate pretrained LLM embeddings into CF models through selective initialization strategies. Specifically, we identify the embedding collapse issue observed when CF models scale and match the large embedding sizes in LLMs and avoid the problem by introducing efficient sampling methods, including, random, uniform, and variance-based selections. Comprehensive experiments conducted on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that LLMInit significantly improves recommendation performance while maintaining low computational costs, offering a practical and scalable solution for industrial applications. To facilitate industry adoption and promote future research, we provide open-source access to our implementation at https://github.com/DavidZWZ/LLMInit.

LLMInit: A Free Lunch from Large Language Models for Selective Initialization of Recommendation

Effective product schema modeling is fundamental to e-commerce success, enabling accurate product discovery and superior customer experience. However, traditional manual schema modeling processes are severely bottlenecked, producing fewer tens of attributes per month—insufficient for modern e-commerce platforms managing thousands of product types. This paper introduces AttributeForge, the first framework to automate end-to-end product schema modeling using Large Language Models (LLMs). Our key innovation lies in orchestrating 43 specialized LLM agents through strategic workflow patterns to handle the complex interdependencies in schema generation. The framework incorporates two novel components: MC2-Eval, a comprehensive validation system that assesses schemas against technical, business, and customer experience requirements; and AutoFix, an intelligent mechanism that automatically corrects modeling defects through iterative refinement. Deployed in production, AttributeForge achieves an 88X increase in modeling throughput while delivering superior quality—a 59.83\% Good-to-Good conversion rate compared to 37.50\% for manual approaches. This significant improvement in both speed and quality enables e-commerce platforms to rapidly adapt their product schemas to evolving market needs.

AttributeForge: An Agentic LLM Framework for Automated Product Schema Modeling

In this work, we present the first embedding model specifically designed for Industry 4.0 applications, targeting the semantics of industrial asset operations. Given natural language tasks related to specific assets, our model retrieves relevant items and generalizes to queries involving similar assets, such as identifying sensors relevant to an asset’s failure mode. We systematically construct nine asset-specific datasets using an expert-validated knowledge base reflecting real operational scenarios. To ensure contextually rich embeddings, we augment queries with Large Language Models, generating concise entity descriptions that capture domain-specific nuances. Across five embedding models ranging from BERT (110M) to gte-Qwen (7B), we observe substantial in-domain gains: \textbf{HIT@1 +54.2\%, MAP@100 +50.1\%, NDCG@10 +54.7\%} on average. Ablation studies reveal that (a) LLM-based query augmentation significantly improves embedding quality; (b) contrastive objectives without in-batch negatives are more effective for tasks with many relevant items; and (c) balancing positives and negatives in batches is essential. We experimented out-of-domain tasks using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline.
\textbf{We open-source implementation and experiments.}

Generalized Embedding Models for Industry 4.0 Applications

Routing incoming queries to the most cost-effective LLM while maintaining response quality poses a fundamental challenge in optimizing performance-cost trade-offs for large-scale commercial systems.
We present IPR---a quality-constrained Intelligent Prompt Routing framework that dynamically selects optimal models based on predicted response quality and user-specified tolerance levels.
IPR introduces three key innovations: (1) a modular architecture with lightweight quality estimators trained on 1.5M prompts annotated with calibrated quality scores, enabling fine-grained quality prediction across model families; (2) a user-controlled routing mechanism with tolerance parameter τ in [0,1] that provides explicit control over quality-cost trade-offs; and (3) an extensible design using frozen encoders with model-specific adapters, reducing new model integration from days to hours. 
To rigorously train and evaluate IPR, we curate an industrial-level dataset IPRBench, a comprehensive benchmark containing 1.5 million examples with response quality annotations across 11 LLM candidates.
Deployed on a major cloud platform, IPR achieves 43.9\% cost reduction while maintaining quality parity with the strongest model in the Claude family and processes requests with sub-150ms latency.

IPR: Intelligent Prompt Routing with User-Controlled Quality-Cost Trade-offs

Interpreting visual scenes with high-level reasoning is essential for many real-world applications—from autonomous systems to content moderation—but training and maintaining Vision-Language Models (VLMs) remains resource-intensive and opaque. In this work, we present CAPSTONE, a lightweight and modular framework designed for industrial settings. Instead of relying on multimodal training or fine-tuning large models, CAPSTONE transforms outputs from off-the-shelf vision models into structured text prompts that can be interpreted by a frozen Large Language Model (LLM). This plug-and-play architecture enables reasoning over visual input without access to raw pixels, dramatically reducing computational cost and complexity. On the POPE dataset, our system—using a 7B LLM—outperforms several fully trained VLMs in zero-shot evaluations, demonstrating strong generalization without retraining. CAPSTONE offers a scalable and interpretable alternative for companies looking to integrate visual reasoning capabilities without the burden of full-scale VLM pipelines.

CAPSTONE: Composable Attribute‑Prompted Scene Translation for Zero‑Shot Vision–Language Reasoning

In the domain of text-to-image generative models, biases inherent in training datasets often propagate into generated content, posing significant ethical challenges, particularly in socially sensitive contexts. We introduce FairCoT, a novel framework that enhances fairness in text-to-image models through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning within multimodal generative large language models. FairCoT employs iterative CoT refinement to systematically mitigate biases, and dynamically adjusts textual prompts in real time, ensuring diverse and equitable representation in generated images. By integrating iterative reasoning processes, FairCoT addresses the limitations of zero-shot CoT in sensitive scenarios, balancing creativity with ethical responsibility. Experimental evaluations across popular text-to-image systems—including DALL-E and various Stable Diffusion variants—demonstrate that FairCoT significantly enhances fairness and diversity without sacrificing image quality or semantic fidelity. By combining robust reasoning, lightweight deployment, and extensibility to multiple models, FairCoT represents a promising step toward more socially responsible and transparent AI-driven content generation.

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