China

Deploying language models on resource-constrained devices, such as mobile phones, wearables, and on-device AI assistants, demands compact, efficient models without sacrificing performance. Compressing Small Language Models (SLMs) is particularly suited for these scenarios, yet their compression dynamics remain underexplored compared to Large Language Models (LLMs). We systematically evaluate leading post-training pruning (SparseGPT, Wanda) and quantization (GPTQ, AWQ) methods across five SLMs, seven languages, and seven downstream tasks (710 evaluations in total). Our results show that quantization consistently outperforms pruning in preserving model fidelity, multilingual perplexity, and reasoning accuracy. Notably, trends observed in LLMs (e.g., Wanda’s superiority over SparseGPT) do not generalize to SLMs. For practitioners, we recommend prioritizing quantization (particularly AWQ) for SLM compression and caution against relying on single metrics is critical.

EMNLP 2025

Revisiting Pruning vs Quantization for Small Language Models

quantization and pruning

small language models

model compression

## 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

Drawing real world social inferences usually requires taking into account information from multiple modalities. Language is a particularly powerful source of information in social settings, especially in novel situations where language can provide both abstract information about the environment dynamics and concrete specifics about an agent that cannot be easily visually observed. In this paper, we propose Language-Informed Rational Agent Synthesis (LIRAS), a framework for drawing context-specific social inferences that integrate linguistic and visual inputs. LIRAS frames multimodal social reasoning as a process of constructing structured but situation-specific agent and environment representations – leveraging multimodal language models to parse language and visual inputs into unified symbolic representations, over which a Bayesian inverse planning engine can be run to produce granular probabilistic judgments. On a range of existing and new social reasoning tasks derived from cognitive science experiments, we find that our model (instantiated with a comparatively lightweight VLM) outperforms ablations and state-of-the-art models in capturing human judgments across all domains.

Language-Informed Synthesis of Rational Agent Models for Grounded Theory-of-Mind Reasoning On-the-fly

A key challenge in Multi-Document Summarization (MDS) is effectively integrating information from multiple sources while maintaining coherence and topical relevance. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive results in single-document summarization, their performance on MDS still leaves room for improvement. In this paper, we propose a topic-guided reinforcement learning approach to improve content selection in MDS. We first show that explicitly prompting models with topic labels enhances the informativeness. Building on this insight, we propose a novel topic reward within the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) framework to measure topic alignment between the generated summary and source documents. Experimental results on the Multi-News and Multi-XScience datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of leveraging topical cues in MDS.

Topic-Guided Reinforcement Learning with LLMs for Enhancing Multi-Document Summarization

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in understanding visual information with human languages but also exhibit an imbalance in multilingual capabilities. In this work, we delve into the multilingual working pattern of LVLMs and identify a salient correlation between the multilingual understanding ability of LVLMs and language-specific neuron activations in shallow layers. Building on this insight, we introduce PLAST, a training recipe that achieves efficient multilingual enhancement for LVLMs by Precise LAnguage Specific layers fine-Tuning. PLAST first identifies layers involved in multilingual understanding by monitoring language-specific neuron activations. These layers are then precisely fine-tuned with question-translation pairs to achieve multilingual alignment. Our empirical results on MMBench and MMMB demonstrate that PLAST effectively improves the multilingual capabilities of LVLMs and achieves significant efficiency with only 14% of the parameters tuned. Further analysis reveals that PLAST facilitates the language-specific visual information engagement in shallow layers.

Language-Specific Layer Matters: Efficient Multilingual Enhancement for Large Vision-Language Models

Previous work has shown that simple mask-filling can provide useful information about the discourse informativeness of syntactic structures. Dong et al. (2024) first adopted this approach to investigating preposing constructions. The problem with single token mask fillers was that they were, by and large, ambiguous. We address the issue by adapting the approach of Kalinsky et al. (2023) to support the prediction of multi-token connectives in masked positions. Our first experiment demonstrates that this multi-token mask-filling approach substantially outperforms the previously considered single-token approach in recognizing implicit discourse relations. Our second experiment corroborates previous findings, providing additional empirical support for the role of preposed syntactic constituents in signaling discourse coherence. Overall, our study extends existing mask-filling methods to a new discourse-level task and reinforces the linguistic hypothesis concerning the discourse informativeness of preposed structures.

Multi-token Mask-filling and Implicit Discourse Relations

Researchers across many fields rely on web data to gain new insights and validate methods. However, assembling accurate and comprehensive datasets typically demands manual review of numerous web pages to identify and record only those data points relevant to specific research objectives. The vast and scattered nature of online information makes this process time-consuming and prone to human error. To address these challenges, we present a human-in-the-loop framework that automates web-scale data collection end-to-end using large language models (LLMs). Given a textual description of a target dataset, our framework (1) automatically formulates search engine queries, (2) navigates the web to identify relevant web pages, (3) extracts the data points of interest, and (4) performs quality control to produce a structured, research-ready dataset. Users remain in the loop throughout, able to inspect and adjust the framework’s decisions to ensure alignment with their needs. We introduce techniques to mitigate both search engine bias and LLM hallucinations during data extraction. Experiments across three diverse data collection tasks show our framework significantly outperforms existing methods, while a user-centered case study demonstrates its practical utility. We open-source our code to help other researchers create custom datasets more efficiently.

LLM-Based Web Data Collection for Research Dataset Creation

Two-step approaches combining pre-trained large language model embeddings and anomaly detectors show good performance in text anomaly detection by leveraging rich semantic representations. However, high-dimensional dense embeddings extracted by large language models create challenges in substantial memory requirements and high computation time. To address this challenge, we introduce the Simplified Isolation Kernel (SIK), which maps high-dimensional dense embeddings to lower-dimensional sparse representations while preserving crucial anomaly characteristics. SIK has linear-time complexity and significantly reduces space complexity through its innovative boundary-focused feature mapping. Experiments across 7 datasets demonstrate that SIK achieves better detection performance than 11 SOTA anomaly detection algorithms while maintaining computational efficiency and low memory cost. All code and demonstrations are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SIK-6577/.

Text Anomaly Detection with Simplified Isolation Kernel

Recent advancements in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have showcased their impressive capabilities in mathematical reasoning tasks in visual contexts. As a step toward developing AI models to conduct rigorous multi-step multimodal reasoning, we introduce StatsChartMWP, a real-world educational dataset for evaluating visual mathematical reasoning abilities on math word problems (MWPs) with statistical charts. Our dataset contains 8,514 chart-based MWPs, meticulously curated by K-12 educators within real-world teaching scenarios. We provide detailed preprocessing steps and manual annotations to help evaluate state-of-the-art models on StatsChartMWP. Comparing baselines, we find that current models struggle in undertaking meticulous multi-step mathematical reasoning among technical languages, diagrams, tables, and equations. Towards alleviate this gap, we introduce CoTAR, a chain-of-thought (CoT) augmented reasoning solution that fine-tunes the LMMs with solution-oriented CoT-alike reasoning steps. The LMM trained with CoTAR is more effective than current open-source approaches. We conclude by shedding lights on challenges and opportunities in enhancement in LMMs and steer future research and development efforts in the realm of statistical chart comprehension and analysis. The code and data are available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/StatsChartMWP-D25A}.

StatsChartMWP: A Dataset for Evaluating Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning Abilities on Math Word Problems with Statistical Charts

Complex chart understanding tasks demand advanced visual recognition and reasoning capabilities from multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, current research provides limited coverage of complex chart scenarios and computation-intensive reasoning tasks prevalent in real-world applications. This study proposes an automated multi-stage code-driven pipeline for systematically generating visual reasoning datasets to address these limitations. The pipeline integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to retrieve professional chart templates and employs chain-of-thought (CoT) strategies to generate reasoning codes that simulate real data distributions, thereby driving chart rendering and question-related statistical computations. Through model-based evaluation, the pipeline enhances chart diversity and data quality. Using this framework, we construct ChartM³, a multi-dimensional and multi-step dataset containing 38K charts and 142K Q&A pairs for training, along with 2,871 high-quality evaluation samples for enabling practical performance assessment. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) experiments demonstrate that our dataset significantly improves reasoning capabilities and cross-domain generalization performance, enabling smaller models to achieve performance comparable to larger-scale models in complex chart comprehension.

ChartM³: A Multi-Stage Code-Driven Pipeline for Constructing Multi-Dimensional and Multi-Step Visual Reasoning Data in Chart Comprehension

As the textual data given as the context of various tasks lengthens, having necessary information scattered throughout makes it more difficult for large language models (LLMs) to capture relevant details. This challenge is particularly prominent in tasks such as question answering (QA), where key information is often not evenly distributed within the context. This problem of information sparsity has led to the attempts of various approaches, such as direct context adjustment and retrieval-based methods. However, these approaches typically leverage compressed contexts, which increases the risk that key information may be contained in the dropped portions. Therefore, research from the perspective of addressing the information sparsity while not losing key details in contexts is required. To address this issue, we propose Highlighting entity-AWare Knowledge (HAWK) framework. HAWK consists of three main steps: i) entity extraction, ii) entity-aware subcontext selection, and iii) triplet construction. The core mechanism of HAWK is to highlight key information in a context and structuralize it in an entity-aware manner, facilitating knowledge-enhanced generation. Through extensive experiments and comprehensive analysis, HAWK confirms significant improvements in QA tasks with long contexts, achieving up to a 27.6-point F1 score increase and at least an average win rate of 76.75% over existing methods.

HAWK: Highlighting Entity-aware Knowledge for Alleviating Information Sparsity in Long Contexts

Code-switching (CS), the alternation between two or more languages within a single speaker's utterances, is common in real-world conversations and poses significant challenges for multilingual speech technology. However, systems capable of handling this phenomenon remain underexplored, primarily due to the scarcity of suitable datasets. To resolve this issue, we propose Universal Code-Mixer (UniCoM), a novel pipeline for generating high-quality, natural CS samples without altering sentence semantics. Our approach utilizes an algorithm we call Substituting WORDs with Synonyms (SWORDS), which generates CS speech by replacing selected words with their translations while considering their parts of speech. Using UniCoM, we construct Code-Switching FLEURS (CS-FLEURS), a multilingual CS corpus designed for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech-to-text translation (S2TT). Experimental results show that CS-FLEURS achieves high intelligibility and naturalness, performing comparably to existing datasets on both objective and subjective metrics. We expect our approach to advance CS speech technology and enable more inclusive multilingual systems.

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