5TH MULTILINGUAL REPRESENTATION LEARNING (MRL) WORKSHOP 2025

CO-LOCATED WITH EMNLP IN SUZHOU, CHINA NOVEMBER 5th - 9th 2025



Keynote Speakers





Workshop Schedule

09:00 - 09:10  Opening remarks
09:10 - 09:50  Invited talk by TBD
09:50 - 10:30  Invited talk by TBD
10:30 - 11:00  Coffee Break
11:00 - 12:30  Poster Session
12:30 - 14:00  Lunch Break
14:00 - 14:30  Shared Task Session
  • • Findings Paper
  • • Winning team presentation
14:30 - 15:30  Best Paper Session
  • • Best Paper
  • • Honorable Mentions
15:30 - 16:00  Coffee Break
16:00 - 16:50  Invited talk by TBD
16:50 - 17:00  Closing remarks

Workshop Description

Multi-lingual representation learning methods have recently been found to be extremely efficient in learning features useful for transfer learning between languages and demonstrating potential in achieving successful adaptation of natural language processing (NLP) models into languages or tasks with little to no training resources. On the other hand, there are many aspects of such models which have the potential for further development and analysis in order to prove their applicability in various contexts. These contexts include different NLP tasks and also understudied language families, which face important obstacles in achieving practical advances that could improve the state-of-the-art in NLP of various low-resource or underrepresented languages.

This workshop aims to bring together the research community consisting of scientists studying different aspects in multilingual representation learning, currently the most promising approach to improve the NLP in low-resource or underrepresented languages, and provide the rapidly growing number of researchers working on the topic with a means of communication and an opportunity to present their work and exchange ideas. The main objectives of the workshop will be:

  •    • To construct and present a wide array of multi-lingual representation learning methods, including their theoretical formulation and analysis, practical aspects such as the application of current state-of-the-art approaches in transfer learning to different tasks or studies on adaptation into previously under-studied context;
  •    • To provide a better understanding on how the language typology may impact the applicability of these methods and motivate the development of novel methods that are more generic or competitive in different languages;
  •    • To promote collaborations in developing novel software libraries or benchmarks in implementing or evaluating multi-lingual models that would accelerate progress in the field.


By allowing a communication means for research groups working on machine learning, linguistic typology, or real-life applications of NLP tasks in various languages to share and discuss their recent findings, our ultimate goal is to support rapid development of NLP methods and tools that are applicable to a wider range of languages.




Accepted Papers



Main Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

   • Understanding the learning dynamics of multi-lingual representation learning methods

   • Multilingual pretraining for discriminative and generative downstream tasks

   • Probing and analysis of multilingual representations

   • New methods for multi-lingual representation learning

   • New approaches to language adaptation of NLP systems

   • Zero-shot and few-shot learning for multilingual NLP

   • Investigating and understanding transfer learning methods for adaptation of NLP systems into previously under-studied languages, such as morphologically-rich languages

   • Data sets, benchmarks or libraries for implementing and evaluating multi-lingual models




Submissions

Research papers: We invite all potential participants to submit their novel research contributions in the related fields as long papers following the EMNLP 2025 long paper format (anonymized with 8 pages excluding the references, and an additional page for the camera-ready versions for the accepted papers). All accepted research papers will be published as part of our workshop proceedings and presented either as oral or poster presentations. Our research paper track will accept submissions through our own submission system available at MRL 2025 OpenReview Submission.


Extended abstracts: Besides long paper submissions, we also invite previously published or ongoing and incomplete research contributions to our non-archival extended abstract track. All extended abstracts can use the same EMNLP template with a 2-page limit, excluding the bibliography.





Shared Task

The shared task at MRL 2025 calls for submissions of novel physical commonsense reasoning datasets in non-English languages, e.g. from researchers who speak non-English language(s) natively. The shared task submission deadline is September 15, 2025. See our shared task page for details!




Important Dates

   • Aug 23, 2025: Regular paper submission deadline

   • Sept 15, 2025: Shared task submission deadline

   • Oct. 1, 2025: Notification of acceptance

   • Oct. 14, 2025: Camera-ready papers due

   • Nov. 5-9, 2025: Workshop

   • Nov. 5-9, 2025: Main conference

(All deadlines are 11.59 pm UTC -12h (“anywhere on Earth”))




Organizers

David Ifeoluwa Adelani, McGill University and Mila Duygu Ataman, New York University Catherine Arnett, EleutherAI Jiayi Wang, UCL Fabian Schmidt, University of Würzburg David Stap, University of Amsterdam Tyler Chang, UC San Diego Hila Gonen, University of Washington




Sponsors

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