Austria

Model routing allocates queries to the suitable model, improving system performance while reducing costs. However, existing routing methods face practical limitations that hinder scalability in large-scale applications and struggle to keep up with the rapid growth of the large language model (LLM) ecosystem. To tackle these challenges, we propose TagRouter, a training-free model routing method designed to optimize the synergy among multiple LLMs for open-domain text generation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that TagRouter outperforms 13 baseline methods, increasing the accept rate of system by 6.15% and reducing costs by 17.20%, achieving optimal cost-efficiency. Our findings provides the LLM community with an efficient and scalable solution for model ensembling, offering users an evolvable &quot;super model.&quot;

ACL 2025

TagRouter: Learning Route to LLMs through Tags for Open-Domain Text Generation Tasks

model route

text generation

#### *Message from the General Chair, Aline Villavicencio*
I’m delighted and honoured to welcome you to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), taking place in the beautiful city of Rabat, in Morocco, in March 24-29, 2026. EACL is the flagship European conference of the Association and EACL 2026 proudly continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity. I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers whose dedication, generosity, and tireless efforts have made this conference possible.
For the first time EACL is being hosted in the African continent. This is an important milestone for our community, and we are grateful to our Moroccan hosts for enabling this historic moment by bringing this edition of EACL to Rabat. We are also delighted that the Second Arabic NLP School is co-located with EACL. We hope attendees enjoy this wonderful opportunity to strengthen ties with the Computational Linguistics communities across the African continent. *[Read full message](https://drive.google.com/file/d/14NlmHvwM6fPJuMmOvVh7K0vtQbEyv3SZ/view?usp=sharing)* 

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EACL 2026

Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 2026. 

Model routing allocates queries to the suitable model, improving system performance while reducing costs. However, existing routing methods face practical limitations that hinder scalability in large-scale applications and struggle to keep up with the rapid growth of the large language model (LLM) ecosystem. To tackle these challenges, we propose TagRouter, a training-free model routing method designed to optimize the synergy among multiple LLMs for open-domain text generation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that TagRouter outperforms 13 baseline methods, increasing the accept rate of system by 6.15% and reducing costs by 17.20%, achieving optimal cost-efficiency. Our findings provides the LLM community with an efficient and scalable solution for model ensembling, offering users an evolvable "super model."

poster

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
[Read more](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GI_hvOpjswAuYdUTromfeDiPpCcqidwg/view?usp=sharing)

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Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

The development of autonomous agents increasingly relies on Multimodal Language Models (MLMs) to perform tasks described in natural language with GUI environments, such as websites, desktop computers, or mobile phones. Existing benchmarks for MLM agents in interactive environments are limited by their focus on a single environment, lack of detailed and generalized evaluation methods, and the complexities of constructing tasks and evaluators. To overcome these limitations, we introduce CRAB, the first cross-environment agent benchmark framework, incorporating a graph-based fine-grained evaluation method and an efficient task generation method. Our framework supports multiple devices and can be easily extended to any environment with a Python interface. Leveraging CRAB, we develope CRAB Benchmark-v0 comprising 120 tasks in computer desktop and mobile phone environments. We evaluated 6 advanced MLMs using different single and multi-agent system configurations on this benchmark. The experimental results demonstrate that the single agent with GPT-4o achieves the best completion ratio of 38.01%.

CRAB: Cross-environment Agent Benchmark for Multimodal Language Model Agents

Current exploration on creative generation focuses mainly on short stories, poetry, and scripts. With the expansion of Large Language Models (LLMs) context windows, "novel" avenues emerge. This study aims to extend the boundaries of Natural Language Generation (NLG) evaluation by exploring LLMs' capabilities in more challenging long-form fiction. We propose a new multi-level evaluation framework that incorporates ten metrics across the Macro, Meso, and Micro levels. An annotated fiction dataset, sourced from human authors, LLMs, and human-AI collaborations in both English and Chinese is then constructed. Human evaluation reveals notable disparities between LLM-generated and human-authored fictions, particularly the “high-starting, low-ending” pattern in LLM outputs. We further probe ten high-performing LLMs through different prompt templates, achieving moderate correlations by strategically utilizing diverse LLMs tailored to different levels, as an initial step towards better automatic fiction evaluation. Finally, we offer a fine-grained analysis of LLMs capabilities through six issues, providing promising insights for future advancements.

Towards A “Novel” Benchmark: Evaluating Literary Fiction with Large Language Models

Document image parsing is challenging due to its complexly intertwined elements such as text paragraphs, figures, formulas, and tables. Current approaches either assemble specialized expert models or directly generate page-level content autoregressively, facing integration overhead, efficiency bottlenecks, and layout structure degradation despite their decent performance. To address these limitations, we present Dolphin ( Document Image Parsing via Heterogeneous Anchor Prompting), a novel multimodal document image parsing model following an analyze-then-parse paradigm. In the first stage, Dolphin generates a sequence of layout elements in reading order. These heterogeneous elements, serving as anchors and coupled with task-specific prompts, are fed back to Dolphin for parallel content parsing in the second stage. To train Dolphin, we construct a large-scale dataset of over 30 million samples, covering multi-granularity parsing tasks. Through comprehensive evaluations on both prevalent benchmarks and self-constructed ones, Dolphin achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse page-level and element-level settings, while ensuring superior efficiency through its lightweight architecture and parallel parsing mechanism. The code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/ByteDance/Dolphin

Dolphin: Document Image Parsing via Heterogeneous Anchor Prompting

Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with external context significantly improves their performance in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, LLMs struggle to answer queries reliably when the provided context lacks information, often resorting to ungrounded speculation or internal knowledge. Groundedness – generating responses strictly supported by the context – is essential for ensuring factual consistency and trustworthiness. This study focuses on detecting whether a given query is grounded in a document provided in context before the costly answer generation by LLMs. Such a detection mechanism can significantly reduce both inference time and resource consumption. We show that lightweight, task-specific encoder models such as RoBERTa and NomicBERT, fine-tuned on curated datasets, can achieve accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art LLMs, such as Llama3 8B and GPT4o, in groundedness detection while reducing inference latency by orders of magnitude.

Small Encoders Can Rival Large Decoders in Detecting Groundedness

With the growing adoption of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in document processing, robust text recognition has become increasingly critical for knowledge extraction. While OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for English and other languages benefits from large datasets and well-established benchmarks, Arabic OCR faces unique challenges due to its cursive script, right-to-left text flow, and complex typographic and calligraphic features. We present KITAB-Bench, a comprehensive Arabic OCR benchmark that fills the gaps in current evaluation systems. Our benchmark comprises 8,809 samples across 9 major domains and 36 sub-domains, encompassing diverse document types including handwritten text, structured tables, and specialized coverage of 21 chart types for business intelligence. Our findings show that modern vision-language models (such as GPT-4, Gemini, and Qwen) outperform traditional OCR approached (like EasyOCR, PaddleOCR, and Surya) by an average of 60% in Character Error Rate (CER). Furthermore, we highlight significant limitations of current Arabic OCR models, particularly in PDF-to-Markdown conversion, where the best model Gemini-2.0-Flash achieves only 65% accuracy. This underscores the challenges in accurately recognizing Arabic text, including issues with complex fonts, numeral recognition errors, word elongation, and table structure detection. This work establishes a rigorous evaluation framework that can drive improvements in Arabic document analysis methods and bridge the performance gap with English OCR technologies.

KITAB-Bench: A Comprehensive Multi-Domain Benchmark for Arabic OCR and Document Understanding

The field of machine translation has achieved significant advancements, yet domain-specific terminology translation, particularly in AI, remains challenging. This work introduces GIST, a large-scale multilingual AI terminology dataset containing 5K terms extracted from top AI conference papers spanning 2000 to 2023. The terms were translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Japanese, and Russian using a hybrid framework that combines LLMs for extraction with human expertise for translation. The dataset's quality was benchmarked against existing resources, demonstrating superior translation accuracy through crowdsourced evaluation. GIST was integrated into translation workflows using post-translation refinement methods that required no retraining, where LLM prompting consistently improved BLEU and COMET scores. A web demonstration on the ACL Anthology platform highlights its practical application, showcasing improved accessibility for non-English speakers. We address a critical gap in AI terminology resources and fosters global inclusivity and collaboration in AI research.

Toward Global AI Inclusivity: A Large-Scale Multilingual Terminology Dataset (GIST)

Speculative Decoding has gained popularity as an effective technique for accelerating the auto-regressive inference process of Large Language Models. However, Speculative Decoding entirely relies on the availability of efficient draft models, which are often lacking for many existing language models due to a stringent constraint of vocabulary compatibility. In this work we introduce FastDraft, a novel and efficient approach for pre-training and aligning a draft model to any large language model by incorporating efficient pre-training, followed by fine-tuning over synthetic datasets generated by the target model. We demonstrate FastDraft by training two highly parameter efficient drafts for the popular Phi-3-mini and Llama-3.1-8B models. Using FastDraft, we were able to produce a draft with approximately 10 billion tokens on a single server with 8 Intel Gaudi 2 accelerators in under 24 hours. Our results show that the draft model achieves impressive results in key metrics of acceptance rate, block efficiency and up to 3x memory bound speed up when evaluated on code completion and up to 2x in summarization, text completion and instruction tasks. We validate our theoretical findings through benchmarking on the latest Intel Core Ultra, achieving a wall-clock time speedup of up to 2x, indicating a significant reduction in runtime. Due to its high quality, FastDraft unlocks large language models inference on AI-PC and other edge-devices.

FastDraft: How to Train Your Draft

Humor is prevalent in online communications and it often relies on more than one modality (e.g., cartoons and memes).
Interpreting humor in multimodal settings requires drawing on diverse types of knowledge, including metaphorical, sociocultural, and commonsense knowledge. However, identifying the most useful knowledge remains an open question. We introduce BottleHumor, a method inspired by the information bottleneck principle that elicits relevant world knowledge from vision and language models which is iteratively refined for generating an explanation of the humor in an unsupervised manner. Our experiments on three datasets confirm the advantage of our method over a range of baselines. Our method can further be adapted in the future for additional tasks that can benefit from eliciting and conditioning on relevant world knowledge and open new research avenues in this direction.

BottleHumor: Self-Informed Humor Explanation using the Information Bottleneck Principle

Slice discovery refers to identifying systematic biases in the mistakes of pre-trained vision models. Current slice discovery methods in computer vision rely on converting input images into sets of attributes and then testing hypotheses about configurations of these pre-computed attributes associated with elevated error patterns. However, such methods face several limitations: 1) they are restricted by the predefined attribute bank; 2) they lack the common sense reasoning and domain-specific knowledge often required for specialized fields e.g., radiology; 3) at best, they can only identify biases in image attributes while overlooking those introduced during preprocessing or data preparation. We hypothesize that bias-inducing variables leave traces in the form of language (e.g., logs), which can be captured as unstructured text. Thus, we introduce ladder, which leverages the reasoning capabilities and latent domain knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate hypotheses about these mistakes. Specifically, we project the internal activations of a pre-trained model into text using a retrieval approach and prompt the LLM to propose potential bias hypotheses. To detect biases from preprocessing pipelines, we convert the preprocessing data into text and prompt the LLM. Finally, ladder generates pseudo-labels for each identified bias, thereby mitigating all biases without requiring expensive attribute annotations. Rigorous evaluations on 3 natural and 3 medical imaging datasets, 200+ classifiers, and 4 LLMs with varied architectures and pretraining strategies - demonstrate that\ladder consistently outperforms current methods. Code is available: \url{https://github.com/annonymous-vision/ACL}.

LADDER: Language-Driven Slice Discovery and Error Rectification in Vision Classifiers

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at text summarization, a task that requires models to select content based on its importance. However, the exact notion of salience that LLMs have internalized remains unclear. To bridge this gap, we introduce an explainable framework to systematically derive and investigate information salience in LLMs through their summarization behavior. Using length-controlled summarization as a behavioral probe into the content selection process, and tracing the answerability of Questions Under Discussion throughout, we derive a proxy for how models prioritize information. Our experiments on 13 models across four datasets reveal that LLMs have a nuanced, hierarchical notion of salience, generally consistent across model families and sizes. While models show highly consistent behavior and hence salience patterns, this notion of salience cannot be accessed through introspection, and only weakly correlates with human perceptions of information salience.

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CRAB: Cross-environment Agent Benchmark for Multimodal Language Model Agents

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