China

The Nüshu script, originating from Jiangyong County, China, is the world’s only known writing system historically created and used exclusively by women. Although Natural Language Processing (NLP) efforts have begun digitizing limited Nüshu-Chinese text pairs, computational access to the script remains highly restricted due to its handwritten, visual nature and absence of multimodal tools. We contribute two novel datasets: NüshuVision, an image corpus of 500 rendered sentences in traditional vertical, right-to-left orthography, and NüshuStrokes, the first sequential handwriting recordings of all 397 Unicode Nüshu characters by an expert calligrapher. Benchmarking five leading Chinese OCR systems on NüshuVision shows a consistent Character Error Rate (CER) of 1.0. Fine-tuning Microsoft’s TrOCR model reduces CER to 0.67. These resources mark a crucial step toward multimodal processing of Nüshu and present a new paradigm for culturally sensitive language revitalization.

EMNLP 2025

Revitalizing Nüshu Through Mixed Media

mixed media

nüshu

recontextualization

## 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.

workshop paper

This paper focuses on data-driven dependency parsing for Vedic Sanskrit. We propose and evaluate a transfer learning approach that benefits from syntactic analysis of typologically related languages, including Ancient Greek and Latin, and a descendant language - Classical Sanskrit. Experiments on the Vedic TreeBank demonstrate the effectiveness of cross-lingual transfer, demonstrating improvements from the biaffine baseline as well as outperforming the current state of the art benchmark, the deep contextualised self-training algorithm, across a wide range of experimental setups.

Transfer learning for dependency parsing of Vedic Sanskrit

Political stance detection in low-resource and culturally complex settings poses a critical challenge for large language models (LLMs). In the Thai political landscape—rich with indirect expressions, polarized figures, and sentiment-stance entanglement—LLMs often exhibit systematic biases, including sentiment leakage and entity favoritism. These biases not only compromise model fairness but also degrade predictive reliability in real-world applications. We introduce ThaiFACTUAL, a lightweight, model-agnostic calibration framework that mitigates political bias without fine-tuning LLMs. ThaiFACTUAL combines counterfactual data augmentation with rationale-based supervision to disentangle sentiment from stance and neutralize political preferences. We curate and release the first high-quality Thai political stance dataset with stance, sentiment, rationale, and bias markers across diverse political entities and events. Our results show that ThaiFACTUAL substantially reduces spurious correlations, improves zero-shot generalization, and enhances fairness across multiple LLMs. This work underscores the need for culturally grounded bias mitigation and offers a scalable blueprint for debiasing LLMs in politically sensitive, underrepresented languages.

Debiasing Large Language Models in Thai Political Stance Detection via Counterfactual Calibration

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced automated code generation and debugging, facilitating powerful multi-agent coding frameworks. However, deploying these sophisticated models on resource-constrained edge devices remains challenging due to high computational demands, limited adaptability, and significant privacy risks associated with cloud-based processing. Motivated by these constraints, we propose \textbf{Edge Code Cloak Coder (ECCC)}, a novel edge-cloud hybrid framework integrating lightweight quantized LLM with robust AST-based anonymization and edge-side privacy validation. ECCC enables high-performance, privacy-preserving LLM capabilities on consumer GPUs, anonymizing user code before securely delegating abstracted tasks to cloud LLMs. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that ECCC achieves competitive correctness (within 4–5pp of the GPT-4-based frameworks) and a perfect privacy score of 10/10, effectively balancing functionality and security for sensitive and proprietary code applications.

ECCC: Edge Code Cloak Coder for Privacy Code Agent

We investigate the robustness of Whisper-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) models for two major Indonesian regional languages: Javanese and Sundanese. While recent work has demonstrated strong ASR performance under clean conditions, their effectiveness in noisy environments remains unclear. To address this, we experiment with multiple training strategies, including synthetic noise augmentation and SpecAugment, and evaluate performance across a range of signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Our results show that noise-aware training substantially improves robustness, particularly for larger Whisper models. A detailed error analysis further reveals language-specific challenges, highlighting avenues for future improvements.

ASR Under Noise: Exploring Robustness for Sundanese and Javanese

Scientific visual question answering poses significant challenges for vision-language models due to the complexity of scientific figures and their multimodal context. Traditional approaches treat the figure and accompanying text (e.g., questions and answer options) as separate inputs. EXAMS-V introduced a new paradigm by embedding both visual and textual content into a single image. However, even state-of-the-art proprietary models perform poorly on this setup in zero-shot settings, underscoring the need for task-specific fine-tuning. To address the scarcity of training data in this "text-in-image" format, we synthesize a new dataset by converting existing separate image-text pairs into unified images. Fine-tuning a small multilingual multimodal model on a mix of our synthetic data and EXAMS-V yields notable gains across 13 languages, demonstrating strong average improvements and cross-lingual transfer.

A Simple Data Augmentation Strategy for Text-in-Image Scientific VQA

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a popular method of transferring knowledge from a large "teacher" model to a small "student" model. Previous work has explored various layer-selection strategies (e.g., forward matching and in-order random matching) for intermediate-layer matching in KD, where a student layer is forced to resemble a certain teacher layer. In this work, we revisit such layer-selection strategies and observe an intriguing phenomenon that layer-selection strategy does not matter (much) in intermediate-layer matching---even seemingly nonsensical matching strategies such as reverse matching still result in surprisingly good student performance. We provide an interpretation for this phenomenon by examining the angles between teacher layers viewed from the student's perspective. Our work sheds light on KD practice, as layer-selection strategies may not be the main focus of KD system design and vanilla forward matching works well in most setups.

Revisiting Intermediate-Layer Matching in Knowledge Distillation: Layer-Selection Strategy Doesn’t Matter (Much)

Large language models (LLMs) excel in generating fluent utterances but can lack reliable grounding in verified information. At the same time, knowledge-graph-based fact-checkers deliver precise and interpretable evidence, yet suffer from limited coverage or latency. By integrating LLMs with knowledge graphs and real-time search agents, we introduce a hybrid fact-checking approach that leverages the individual strengths of each component. Our system comprises three autonomous steps: 1) a Knowledge Graph (KG) Retrieval for rapid one‑hop lookups in DBpedia, 2) an LM-based classification guided by a task-specific labeling prompt, producing outputs with internal rule-based logic, and 3) a Web Search Agent invoked only when KG coverage is insufficient. Our pipeline achieves an F1 score of 0.93 on the FEVER benchmark on the Supported/Refuted split without task‑specific fine‑tuning. To address Not enough information cases, we conduct a targeted reannotation study showing that our approach frequently uncovers valid evidence for claims originally labeled as Not Enough Information (NEI), as confirmed by both expert annotators and LLM reviewers. With this paper, we present a modular, open-source fact-checking pipeline with fallback strategies and generalization across datasets.

Hybrid Fact-Checking that Integrates Knowledge Graphs, Large Language Models, and Search-Based Retrieval Agents Improves Interpretable Claim Verification

Warning: This paper contains explicit statements of offensive stereotypes which may be upsetting.

Stereotypes vary across cultural contexts, making it essential to understand how language models encode social biases. MultiLingualCrowsPairs is a dataset of culturally adapted stereotypical and anti-stereotypical sentence pairs across nine languages. While prior work has primarily reported average fairness metrics on masked language models, this paper analyzes social biases in generative models by disaggregating results across specific bias types.

We find that although most languages show an overall preference for stereotypical sentences, this masks substantial variation across different types of bias, such as gender, religion, and socioeconomic status. Our findings underscore that relying solely on aggregated metrics can obscure important patterns, and that fine-grained, bias-specific analysis is critical for meaningful fairness evaluation.

Insights from a Disaggregated Analysis of Kinds of Biases in a Multicultural Dataset

As Large Language Models (LLMs) gain mainstream public usage, understanding how users interact with them becomes increasingly important. Limited variety in training data raises concerns about LLM reliability across different language inputs. To explore this, we test several LLMs using functionally equivalent prompts expressed in different English sublanguages. We frame this analysis using Question-Answer (QA) pairs, which allow us to detect and evaluate appropriate and anomalous model behavior. We contribute a cross-LLM testing method and a new QA dataset translated into AAVE and WAPE variants. Early results reveal a notable drop in accuracy for one sublanguage relative to the baseline.

That Ain't Right: Assessing LLM Performance on QA in African American and West African English Dialects

News classification is a key task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) that involves the automatic categorization of articles into predefined topics. While extensively studied in high-resource languages such as English, low-resource languages such as Amharic face significant challenges owing to limited datasets and the absence of language-specific model adaptations.
This study contributes to Amharic news classification by expanding the existing Amharic news dataset from 50,000 to 144,000 articles, nearly tripling its size. We evaluate five transformer-based models—mBERT, XLM-R, DistilBERT, AfriBERTa, and AfroXLM—on this enriched dataset to improve classification accuracy and effectiveness.
The model performance was assessed using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, with careful attention to computational efficiency and overfitting. Among the models, AfriBERTa and XLM-R achieved the highest F1-scores of 90.25\% and 90.11\%, respectively, significantly surpassing the Naïve Bayes baseline, which reached only 60.3\% accuracy on the former dataset. These findings underscore the importance of both advanced transformer architectures and larger, high-quality datasets in boosting classification performance for under-resourced languages such as Amharic, offering valuable insights and resources for future NLP research.

Next from EMNLP 2025

Transfer learning for dependency parsing of Vedic Sanskrit

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Recontextualizing Revitalization: A Mixed Media Approach to Reviving the Nüshu Language