China

Large language models (LLMs) have improved significantly in their reasoning through extensive training on massive datasets. However, relying solely on additional data for improvement is becoming increasingly impractical, highlighting the need for models to autonomously enhance their reasoning without external supervision. In this paper, we propose textbfDebate, Train, Evolve (DTE), a novel ground truth-free training framework that uses multi-agent debate traces to evolve a single language model. We also introduce a new prompting strategy textbfReflect-Critique-Refine, to improve debate quality by explicitly instructing agents to critique and refine their reasoning. Extensive evaluations on textbffive reasoning benchmarks with textbfsix open-weight models show that our DTE framework achieve substantial improvements, with an average accuracy gain of textbf8.92\% on the challenging GSM-PLUS dataset. Furthermore, we observe strong cross-domain generalization, with an average accuracy gain of textbf5.8\% on all other benchmarks, suggesting that our method captures general reasoning capabilities.

EMNLP 2025

DEBATE, TRAIN, EVOLVE: Self‑Evolution of Language Model Reasoning

llm/ai agents

self-evolution

prompting

large language models

continual learning

fine-tuning

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."<br>

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

[**Link to Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1johU5QqVVYO4RfH7QcIORr7qrVBdzdwC/view?usp=sharing)





<br>

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

Nonverbal vocalizations are an essential component of human communication, conveying rich information without linguistic content. However, the computational analysis of nonverbal vocalization faces significant challenges due to a lack of lexical anchors in the data, compounded by biased distributions of imbalanced multi-label data. While disentangled representation learning has shown promise in isolating specific speech features, its application to nonverbal speech remains unexplored. In this paper, we introduce N-CORE, a novel supervised framework designed to disentangle representations in nonverbal vocalizations by leveraging N views of the audio sample to learn invariance to specific perturbed features. We find that N-CORE achieves competitive performance compared to the baseline methods when tested for emotion and speaker classification tasks on the VIVAE, ReCANVo, and ReCANVo-Balanced datasets. We further propose an emotion perturbation function for audio signals that preserves speaker information, and validate speech transformation functions on nonverbal vocalizations. Our work informs research directions on the application of paralinguistic speech, including privacy-preserving encoding, clinical diagnoses of atypical speech, and longitudinal analysis of communicative development.

N-CORE: N-View Consistency Regularization for Disentangled Representation Learning in Nonverbal Vocalizations

State-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) models like Whisper, perform poorly on atypical speech, such as that produced by individuals with dysarthria. Past works for atypical speech have mostly investigated fully personalized (or idiosyncratic) models, but modeling strategies that can both generalize and and handle idiosyncracy could be more effective for capturing atypical speech. To investigate this, we compare four strategies: (a) *normative* models trained on typical speech (no personalization), (b) *idiosyncratic* models completely personalized to individuals, (c) *dyarthric-normative* models trained on other dysarthric speakers and (d) *dyarthric-idiosyncratic* models which combine strategies by first modeling normative patterns before adapting to individual speech. We find the dysarthric-idiosyncratic model performs better than idiosyncratic approach while requiring less than half as much personalized data (36.43 WER with 128 train size vs 36.99 with 256). Further, we found that tuning the speech encoder alone (as opposed to the LM decoder) yielded the best results reducing word error rate from 71% to 32% on average. Our findings highlight the value of leveraging both normative (cross-speaker) and idiosyncratic (speaker-specific) patterns to improve ASR for underrepresented speech populations.

Idiosyncratic Versus Normative Modeling of Atypical Speech Recognition: Dysarthric Case Studies

The resurgence of autonomous agents built using large language models (LLMs) to solve complex real-world tasks has brought increased focus on LLMs' fundamental ability of tool or function calling. At the core of these agents, an LLM must plan, execute, and respond using external tools, APIs, and custom functions. Research on tool calling has gathered momentum, but evaluation benchmarks and datasets representing the complexity of the tasks have lagged behind. In this work, we focus on one such complexity, nested sequencing, with the goal of extending existing benchmarks and evaluation. Specifically, we present NESTFUL, a benchmark to evaluate LLMs on nested sequences of API calls, i.e., sequences where the output of one API call is passed as input to a subsequent call. NESTFUL contains 1800+ nested sequences where all the function calls are executable. Experimental results on a variety of models show that the best-performing model (GPT-4o) achieves a full sequence match accuracy of 28% and a win-rate of 60%, necessitating a large scope for improvement in the nested sequencing aspect of function calling. Our analysis of these results provides possible future research directions for the community, in addition to a benchmark to track progress.

NESTFUL: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Nested Sequences of API Calls

We introduce **seqBench**, a parametrized benchmark for probing sequential reasoning limits in Large Language Models (LLMs) through precise, multi-dimensional control over several key complexity dimensions. **seqBench** allows systematic variation of (1) the logical depth, defined as the number of sequential actions required to solve the task; (2) the number of backtracking steps along the optimal path, quantifying how often the agent must revisit prior states to satisfy deferred preconditions (e.g., retrieving a key after encountering a locked door); and (3) the noise ratio, defined as the ratio between supporting and distracting facts about the environment. Our evaluations on state-of-the-art LLMs reveal a universal failure pattern: accuracy collapses exponentially beyond a model-specific logical depth. Unlike existing benchmarks, **seqBench**'s fine-grained control facilitates targeted analyses of these reasoning failures, illuminating universal scaling laws and statistical limits, as detailed in this paper alongside its generation methodology and evaluation metrics. We find that even top-performing models systematically fail on **seqBench**'s structured reasoning tasks despite minimal search complexity, underscoring key limitations in their commonsense reasoning capabilities. Designed for future evolution to keep pace with advancing models, the **seqBench** datasets are publicly released to spur deeper scientific inquiry into LLM reasoning, aiming to establish a clearer understanding of their true potential and current boundaries for robust real-world application.

seqBench: A Tunable Benchmark to Quantify Sequential Reasoning Limits of LLMs

Digitization is essential yet challenging for preserving historical heritage. This paper investigates the potential and limitations of large multimodal models (LMMs) in historical document digitization. Despite having advanced text recognition, LMMs today primarily focus on contemporary documents with modern layouts and high-resource languages. To bridge this gap, we introduce CHURRO, a large unified benchmark and dataset comprising over 150 historical corpora. CHURRO includes 100,471 pages spanning 22 centuries of textual heritage, covering handwritten and printed documents from 48 language clusters, historical language variants, and dead languages such as Latin and Sanskrit. The dataset features diverse layouts representative of real-world archival scenarios. We evaluate state-of-the-art LMMs and OCR systems on CHURRO and find that all models struggle with historical documents. Gemini 2.5 Pro is by far the best-performing model, yet it achieves only 78.7% and 67.5% normalized Levenshtein similarity on printed and handwritten documents, respectively. Importantly, fine-tuning a 3-billion-parameter multimodal model on CHURRO improves its performance substantially, by 12.4% (printed) and 25.4% (handwritten), attaining a performance of 75.9% (printed) and 66.7% (handwritten), respectively. These results highlight the untapped potential of targeted fine-tuning for historical document digitization.

CHURRO: Making History Readable with an Open-Weight Large Vision-Language Model for High-Accuracy, Low-Cost Historical Text Recognition

According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, more than 3.4 million children experience speech disorders that require clinical intervention. The number of speech-language pathologists (SLPs) is roughly twenty times fewer than the number of affected children, highlighting a significant gap in children's care and a pressing need for technological support that improves the productivity of SLPs. State-of-the-art multimodal language models (MLMs) hold a promise for supporting SLPs, as recent advances have demonstrated their ability to understand human speech patterns from audio inputs. Despite their potential, the use of MLMs in supporting SLPs remains underexplored, largely due to a limited holistic understanding of their performance in high-stakes clinical settings. To address this gap, we collaborate with domain experts to develop a taxonomy of real-world use cases of MLMs in speech-language pathologies. Based on our taxonomy, we introduce the first comprehensive benchmark that assesses the performance of LLMs on five core use cases, such as speech disorder diagnosis and symptom identification. For each use case, we manually label 1,000 data points to assess model performance. To further improve the performance of LLMs for SLPs, we fine-tune MLMs, enhancing performance across multiple tasks by more than 30\% over baseline models. We study the robustness and sensitivity of model performance under various settings, including background noise, speaker gender, and accent. Our evaluation of 15 state-of-the-art MLMs reveals that no single model consistently outperforms others across all tasks. Notably, we observe a performance disparity favoring male speakers and find that enabling reasoning may degrade performance. These findings highlight both the promise and limitations of current MLMs in speech-language pathology applications, underscoring the need for further research and targeted development.

The Sound of Syntax: Finetuning and Comprehensive Evaluation of Language Models for Speech Pathology

LLMs are increasingly applied in the legal domain in tasks such as summarizing legal texts and providing basic legal advice. Yet, their capacity to draft full judicial analyses in U.S. court opinions is still largely uncharted, such as generating entire judicial reasoning sections in U.S. court decisions, remain under-explored. Given the continued adoption of LLMs and the significance of law to society at large, measurement of LLM's legal reasoning capabilities is a pressing task. We propose CourtReasoner, a novel expert-annotated judicial reasoning benchmark for evaluating LLM agents' capabilities in complex legal reasoning. Sourcing U.S. court opinions, we construct benchmarks that measure the LLMs ability to construct goal-oriented legal reasoning. CourtReasoner measured the agent's ability to argue both ways in a legal dispute, rather than simple Q/A. Our results show that more than 60% of frontier model outputs contain invalid arguments and more than 53% of frontier model produced irrelevant citations when conducting complex legal reasoning. We also introduce a meta-evaluation benchmark to provide insights into the capabilities of LLMs as evaluators of legal reasoning. We will release our data, code and full annotation guidelines publicly for future research.

CourtReasoner: Can LLM Agents Reason Like Judges?

Regulatory agencies often operate with limited resources and rely on tips from the public to identify potential violations. However, processing these tips at scale presents significant operational challenges, as agencies must correctly identify and route relevant tips to the appropriate enforcement divisions. Through a case study, we demonstrate how advances in large language models can be utilized to support overburdened agencies with limited capacities. In partnership with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, we leverage previously unstudied citizen tips data from their “Report a Violation” system to develop an LLM-assisted pipeline for tip routing. Our approach filters out 75.2% of irrelevant tips and increases overall routing accuracy from 32.8% to 81.2% compared to the current routing system. At a time of increased focus on government efficiencies, our approach provides a constructive path forward by using technology to empower civil servants.

Not Your Typical Government Tipline: LLM-Assisted Routing of Environmental Protection Agency Citizen Tips

Transformer-based speech language models (SLMs) have significantly improved neural speech recognition and understanding. While existing research has examined how well SLMs encode shallow acoustic and phonetic features, the extent to which SLMs encode nuanced syntactic and conceptual features remains unclear. By drawing parallels with linguistic competence assessments for large language models, this study is the first to systematically evaluate the presence of contextual syntactic and semantic features across SLMs for self-supervised learning (S3M), automatic speech recognition (ASR), speech compression (codec), and as the encoder for auditory large language models (AudioLLMs). Through minimal pair designs and diagnostic feature analysis across 71 tasks spanning diverse linguistic levels, our layer-wise and time-resolved analysis uncovers that 1) all speech encode grammatical features more robustly than conceptual ones. 2) Despite never seeing text, S3M match or surpass ASR encoders on every linguistic level, demonstrating that rich grammatical and even conceptual knowledge can arise purely from audio. 3) S3M representations peak mid-network and then crash in the final layers, whereas ASR and AudioLLM encoders maintain or improve, reflecting how pre-training objectives reshape late-layer content. 4) Temporal probing further shows that S3Ms encode grammatical cues 500 ms before a word begins, whereas AudioLLMs distribute evidence more evenly—indicating that objectives shape not only where but also when linguistic information is most salient. Together, these findings establish the first large-scale map of contextual syntax and semantics in speech models and highlight both the promise and the limits of current SLM training paradigms.

Layer-wise Minimal Pair Probing Reveals Contextual Grammatical-Conceptual Hierarchy in Speech Representations

The rise of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially integrated with Large Language Models (LLMs), has greatly facilitated the resolution of complex tasks. However, current systems are still facing challenges of inter-agent communication, coordination, and interaction with heterogeneous tools and resources. Most recently, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) by Anthropic and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication protocol by Google have been introduced, and to the best of our knowledge, very few applications exist where both protocols are employed within a single MAS framework. We present a pilot study of AgentMaster, a novel modular multi-protocol MAS framework with self-implemented A2A and MCP, enabling dynamic coordination, flexible communication, and rapid development with faster iteration. Through a unified conversational interface, the system supports natural language interaction without prior technical expertise and responds to multimodal queries for tasks including information retrieval, question answering, and image analysis. The experiments are validated through both human evaluation and quantitative metrics, including BERTScore F1 (96.3%) and LLM-as-a-Judge G-Eval (87.1%). These results demonstrate robust inter-agent coordination, query decomposition, dynamic routing, and domain-specific relevant responses. Overall, our proposed framework contributes to the potential capabilities of domain-specific, cooperative, and scalable conversational AI powered by MAS.

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Next from EMNLP 2025

N-CORE: N-View Consistency Regularization for Disentangled Representation Learning in Nonverbal Vocalizations