India

Recent approaches have shown impressive proficiency in extracting and leveraging parametric knowledge from Large-Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs). In this work, we consider how we can improve the retrieval of videos related to complex real-world events by automatically extracting latent parametric knowledge about those events. We present Q2E: a Query-to-Event decomposition method for zero-shot multilingual text-to-video retrieval, adaptable across datasets, domains, LLMs, or VLMs. Our approach demonstrates that we can enhance the understanding of otherwise overly simplified human queries by decomposing the query using the knowledge embedded in LLMs and VLMs. We additionally show how to apply our approach to both visual and speech-based inputs. To combine this varied multimodal knowledge, we adopt entropy-based fusion scoring for zero-shot fusion. Q2E outperforms the previous SOTA on the MultiVENT dataset by 8 NDCG points, while improving on MSR-VTT and MSVD by 4 and 3 points, respectively, outperforming several existing retrieval methods, including many fine-tuned and SOTA zero-shot approaches. We have released both code and data.

IJCNLP-AACL 2025

Q2E: Query-to-Event Decomposition for Zero-Shot Multilingual Text-to-Video Retrieval

event decomposition

query decomposition

multimodal reasoning

text-to-video retrieval

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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NAACL 2021

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### Welcome to IJCNLP-AACL 2025! 
<br>It is a great honor to host this joint conference in Mumbai, India, from December 20 to 24, 2025. The joint conferences of IJCNLP and AACL are organized with alternating leadership in the Asia-Pacific region. The event is run by the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP) in odd years, and by AACL in even years, while it is organized solely by ACL when the annual ACL meeting is held in the region. This year, the conference is primarily organized by AFNLP.<br>
*Kentaro Inui
MBZUAI, UAE
General Chair, IJCNLP-AACL 2025*<br>
Read full message and download the Conference Handbook [**here**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UTwxkAqSqI-GAoJC3wE1zZt5VP1Y8GX0/view?usp=sharing).
<br><br><br><br>

The 14th IJCNLP & 4th AACL will be held in Mumbai, India from December 20th to December 24th, 2025.

Recent advances in singing voice synthesis (SVS) have attracted substantial attention from both academia and industry. With the advent of large language models and novel generative paradigms, producing controllable, high‑fidelity singing voices has become an attainable goal. Yet the field still lacks a comprehensive survey that systematically analyzes deep‑learning‑based singing voice systems and their enabling technologies.
To address the aforementioned issue, this survey first categorizes existing systems by task type and then organizes current architectures into two major paradigms: cascaded and end-to-end approaches. Moreover, we provide an in-depth analysis of core technologies, covering singing modeling and control techniques. Finally, we review relevant datasets, annotation tools, and evaluation benchmarks that support training and assessment. In appendix, we introduce training strategies and further discussion of SVS. This survey provides an up-to-date review of the literature on SVS models, which would be a useful reference for both researchers and engineers. Related materials are available at https://github.com/David-Pigeon/SyntheticSingers.

Synthetic Singers: A Review of Deep-Learning-based Singing Voice Synthesis Approaches

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle to balance visual and textual information when summarizing complex multimodal inputs, such as entire TV show episodes. In this paper, we propose a zero-shot video-to-text summarization approach that builds its own screenplay-like representation of an episode, effectively integrating key video moments, dialogue, and character information into a unified document. Unlike previous approaches, we simultaneously generate screenplays and name the characters in zero-shot, using only the audio, video, and transcripts as input. Additionally, we highlight that existing summarization metrics can fail to assess the multimodal content in summaries. To address this, we introduce MFactSum, a multimodal metric that evaluates summaries with respect to both vision and text modalities. Using MFactSum, we evaluate our screenplay summaries on the SummScreen3D dataset, demonstrating superiority against state-of-the-art VLMs such as Gemini 1.5 by generating summaries containing 20% more relevant visual information while requiring 75% less of the video as input.

Integrating Video and Text: A Balanced Approach to Multimodal Summary Generation and Evaluation

Recent advances in speech‑enabled AI, including Google's NotebookLM and OpenAI's speech-to-speech API, are driving widespread interest in voice interfaces across sectors such as finance, health, agritech, legal services, and call‑centers in the global north and south. Despite this momentum, there exists no publicly available application-specific model evaluation that caters to Africa's linguistic diversity. We present $\textbf{AfriSpeech‑MultiBench}$, the first domain‑specific evaluation suite for over 100 African English accents across 10+ countries and seven application domains: Finance, Legal, Medical, General dialogue, Call Center, Named Entities, and Hallucination Robustness. We benchmark a diverse range of open, closed, unimodal ASR and multimodal LLM-based speech recognition systems using both spontaneous and non-spontaneous speech conversations drawn from various open African accented English speech datasets. Our empirical analysis reveals systematic variation: open‑source ASR excels in spontaneous speech contexts but degrades on noisy, non‑native dialogue; multimodal LLMs are more accent‑robust yet struggle with domain‑specific named entities; proprietary models deliver high accuracy on clean speech but vary significantly by country and domain. Smaller models fine‑tuned on African English achieve competitive accuracy with lower latency, a practical advantage for deployment. By releasing this benchmark, we empower practitioners and researchers to select voice technologies suited to African use‑cases, fostering inclusive voice applications for undeserved communities.

AfriSpeech-MultiBench: A Verticalized Multidomain Multicountry Benchmark Suite for African Accented English ASR

Clinical trials are designed in natural language and the task of matching them to patients, represented via both structured and unstructured textual data, benefits from knowledge aggregation and reasoning abilities of LLMs. LLMs with their ability to consolidate distributed knowledge hold the potential to build a more general solution than classical approaches that employ trial-specific heuristics. Yet, adoption of LLMs in critical domains, such as clinical research, comes with many challenges, such as, the availability of public benchmarks, the dimensions of evaluation and data sensitivity. In this survey, we contextualize emerging LLM-based approaches in clinical trial recruitment. We examine the main components of the clinical trial recruitment process, discuss existing challenges in adopting LLM technologies in clinical research and exciting future directions.

A Survey on LLM-Assisted Clinical Trial Recruitment

Personalization is critical for improving user experience in interactive writing and educational applications, yet remains understudied in story generation. We study the task of personalizing story generation, where our goal is to mimic an author's writing style, given other stories written by them. We collect Mythos, a dataset of 3.6k stories from 112 authors, with an average of 16 stories per author, across five distinct sources reflecting diverse story-writing settings. We propose a two-stage pipeline for personalized story generation: first, we infer authors' implicit writing characteristics and organize them into an Author Writing Sheet, which is validated by humans to be of high quality; second, we simulate the author's persona using tailored persona descriptions and personalized story rules. We find that stories personalized using the Author Writing Sheet outperform a non-personalized baseline, achieving a 78% win-rate in capturing authors' past style and 59% in similarity to ground-truth author stories. Human evaluation supports these findings and further highlights trends, such as Reddit stories being easier to personalize, and the Creativity and Language Use aspects of stories being easier to personalize than the Plot.

Whose story is it? Personalizing story generation by inferring author styles

Predictive modeling of hospital patient data is challenging due to its structured format, irregular timing of measurements, and variation in data representation across institutions. While traditional models often struggle with such inconsistencies, Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a flexible alternative. In this work, we propose a method for verbalizing structured Electronic Health Records (EHRs) into a format suitable for LLMs and systematically examine how to include time-stamped clinical observations—such as lab tests and vital signs—from previous time points in the prompt. We study how different ways of structuring this temporal information affect predictive performance, and whether fine-tuning alone enables LLMs to effectively reason over such data. Evaluated on two real-world hospital datasets and MIMIC-IV, our approach achieves strong in-hospital and cross-hospital performance, laying the groundwork for more generalizable clinical modeling.

Decode Like a Clinician: Enhancing LLM Fine-Tuning with Temporal Structured Data Representation

Reference-free metrics such as CLIPScore and PAC-S are increasingly used in vision-language tasks due to their scalability and independence from human-written references. However, their reliability under linguistic, visual, and cultural variation remains underexplored. In this work, we present a systematic audit of CLIPScore and PAC-S using an eight-factor diagnostic framework applied to MS-COCO validation images. Our analysis reveals consistent failure modes across dimensions including object size, content category, syntax, named entities, spatial relations and cultural context. Both metrics penalize captions referencing African (−5.5%, −4.8%) and Arabian (−4.9%, −5.3%) cultures, favor large-object and animal-centric scenes (by 20-30%) and show limited sensitivity to spatial negation and word order. CLIPScore correlates more strongly with syntactic complexity, while PAC-S demonstrates greater robustness to verbosity and named–entity variation highlighting complementary strengths rather than superiority. These findings expose cultural and content bias, weak semantic robustness, and limited compositional understanding. We conclude with design recommendations to improve fairness, scale invariance, and semantic grounding in future reference-free evaluation metrics.

A Diagnostic Framework for Auditing Reference-Free Vision-Language Metrics

Live commentary has the potential of making specific broadcasts such as sports or video games more engaging and interesting to watch for spectators. With the recent popularity rise of online live streaming many new categories have entered the space, like art in its many forms or even software development, however, not all live streamers have the capability to be naturally engaging with the audience. We introduce a live commentator assistant system that can discuss what is visible on screen in real time. Our experimental setting is focused on the use-case of a photo editing live stream. We compare several recent vision language models for commentary generation and text to speech models for spoken output, all on relatively modest consumer hardware configurations.

Real-time Commentator Assistant for Photo Editing Live Streaming

We present LITMUS++, a prototype demo system that predicts model performance for queries of the form “How will a Model perform on a Task in a Language?” even when no benchmark exists. The system replaces static suites and opaque LLM-as-judge setups with an agentic, auditable workflow: a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) of specialized Thought Agents that hypothesize, retrieve multilingual evidence, select features, and train lightweight regressors with calibrated uncertainty. The web interface offers a chat entry point, a live reasoning view, and an evidence panel with citations and exportable reports. Experiments across six tasks and five multilingual scenarios show that LITMUS++ delivers accurate predictions with interpretable reasoning.

LITMUS++ : An Agentic System for Predictive Analysis of Low-Resource Languages Across Tasks and Models

We present a modular, interactive system, SPORTSQL, for natural language querying and visualization of dynamic sports data, with a focus on the English Premier League (EPL). The system translates user questions into executable SQL over a live, temporally indexed database constructed from real-time Fantasy Premier League (FPL) data. It supports both tabular and visual outputs, leveraging symbolic reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) for query parsing, schema linking, and visualization selection. To evaluate system performance, we introduce the Dynamic Sport Question Answering Benchmark (DSQABENCH), comprising 1,700+ queries annotated with SQL programs, gold answers, and database snapshots. Our demo highlights how non-expert users can seamlessly explore evolving sports statistics through a natural, conversational interface.

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Synthetic Singers: A Review of Deep-Learning-based Singing Voice Synthesis Approaches

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