Morocco

We introduce EPAG, a benchmark dataset and framework designed for evaluating the pre-consultation ability of LLMs using diagnostic guidelines. LLMs are evaluated directly through HPI-diagnostic guideline comparison and indirectly through disease diagnosis. In our experiments, we observe that small open-source models fine-tuned with a well-curated, task-specific dataset can outperform frontier LLMs in pre-consultation. Additionally, we find that increased amount of HPI (History of Present Illness) does not necessarily lead to improved diagnostic performance. Further experiments reveal that the language of pre-consultation influences the characteristics of the dialogue. By open-sourcing our dataset and evaluation pipeline on https://github.com/seemdog/EPAG, we aim to contribute to the evaluation and further development of LLM applications in real-world clinical settings.

EACL 2026

Evaluating the Pre-Consultation Ability of LLMs using Diagnostic Guidelines

clinical llm

evaluation

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields 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.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. <br>
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) <br><br><br>
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

technical paper

#### *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)*<br><br>

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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. 

Lightweight, real-time text-to-speech systems are crucial for accessibility. However, the most efficient TTS models often rely on lightweight phonemizers that struggle with context-dependent challenges. In contrast, more advanced phonemizers with a deeper linguistic understanding typically incur high computational costs, which prevents real-time performance. This paper examines the trade-off between phonemization quality and inference speed in G2P-aided TTS systems, introducing a practical framework to bridge this gap. We propose lightweight strategies for context-aware phonemization and a service-oriented TTS architecture that executes these modules as independent services. This design decouples heavy context-aware components from the core TTS engine, effectively breaking the latency barrier and enabling real-time use of high-quality phonemization models. Experimental results confirm that the proposed system improves pronunciation soundness and linguistic accuracy while maintaining real-time responsiveness, making it well-suited for offline and end-device TTS applications.

Beyond Unified Models: A Service-Oriented Approach to Low Latency, Context Aware Phonemization for Real Time TTS

Despite extensive research in intent classification, most task-oriented dialogue systems still rigidly assign intents to user utterances without addressing ambiguity, often leading to misrouted requests, irrelevant responses, and user frustration. Proprietary large-language models (LLMs) can generate effective clarifying questions but are too costly for large-scale deployment. Smaller open-source LLMs are more economical, but struggle to ask appropriate clarifying questions. This paper introduces a domain-agnostic framework that equips lightweight, production-ready open-source LLMs with the ability to perform intent classification alongside precise ambiguity resolution via clarifying questions. We validate our framework on both proprietary and public intent classification datasets, demonstrating its ability to perform intent classification as well as generate clarification questions in case of ambiguity. To compare models, those trained with our framework and external baselines, we also propose an evaluation methodology that jointly assesses the accuracy of intent classification and the timing and quality of clarifying questions. Our instruction-tuned models achieve performance comparable to leading proprietary LLMs while offering an 8X reduction in inference cost, enabling broader, cost-efficient deployment. When deployed in the customer-care system of an e-commerce enterprise, our model reduced the misrouting rate by 8%, resulting in a significant improvement in automation rates, which potentially translates in dollar savings by reducing escalations to human agents.

Scaling Intent Understanding: A Framework for Classification with Clarification using Lightweight LLMs

Traditional customer support systems, such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR), rely on rigid scripts and lack the flexibility required for handling complex, policy-driven tasks. While large language model (LLM) agents offer a promising alternative, evaluating their ability to act in accordance with business rules and real-world support workflows remains an open challenge. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on tool usage or task completion, overlooking an agent's capacity to adhere to multi-step policies, navigate task dependencies, and remain robust to unpredictable user or environment behavior. In this work, we introduce JourneyBench, a benchmark designed to assess policy-aware agents in customer support. JourneyBench leverages graph representations to generate diverse, realistic support scenarios and proposes the User Journey Coverage Score, a novel metric to measure policy adherence. We evaluate multiple state-of-the-art LLMs using two agent designs: a Static-Prompt Agent (SPA) and a Dynamic-Prompt Agent (DPA) that explicitly models policy control. Across 703 conversations in three domains, we show that DPA significantly boosts policy adherence, even allowing smaller models like GPT-4o-mini to outperform more capable ones like GPT-4o. Our findings demonstrate the importance of structured orchestration and establish JourneyBench as a critical resource to advance AI-driven customer support beyond IVR-era limitations.

Beyond IVR: Benchmarking Customer Support LLM Agents for Business-Adherence

OCR for Bangla scripts remains a challenging problem, with existing solutions limited to single-domain processing. Current approaches lack a unified vision encoder that can understand diverse Bangla script variations, hindering practical deployment. We present BornoDrishti, the first unified OCR system based on the vision transformer that accurately recognizes both printed and handwritten Bangla scripts within a single model. Our approach introduces a novel domain objective that enables the model to learn domain-invariant representations while preserving script-specific features, eliminating the need for separate domain experts. BornoDrishti achieves competitive accuracy across both domains, setting state-of-the-art performance for printed scripts and demonstrating that a single unified model can match or exceed specialized uni-domain systems. We evaluate our model against state-of-the-art domain-specific and cross-domain OCR systems. This work establishes a foundation for advancing practical applications by using a unified multi-domain OCR system for complex Bangla scripts.

BornoDrishti: Leveraging Vision Encoders and Domain-Adaptive Learning for Bangla OCR on Diverse Documents

Opinion mining from real-world student feedback presents significant practical challenges, such as handling linguistic noise (slang, teencode) and the need for scalable and maintainable systems, which are often overlooked in academic research. This paper introduces EduPulse, a practical opinion mining system designed specifically to analyze student feedback in Vietnamese. Our application performs four opinion analysis tasks, including Sentiment Classification, Category-based Sentiment Classification, Suggestion Detection, and Opinion Summarization. We design the hybrid architecture that strategically balances performance, cost, and maintainability. This architecture leverages the robustness of Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex, noise-sensitive tasks as sentiment classification and suggestion detection, while employing a specialized, lightweight neural model for high-throughput, low-cost solutions. Our experiments show that applying the LLM-based approach achieves high robustness, justifying its operational cost by eliminating expensive retraining cycles. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our collaborative modular architecture significantly improves task performance (+7.6\%) compared to traditional approaches, offering a practical design for industry-focused Natural Language Processing applications.

EduPulse: A Practical LLM-Enhanced Opinion Mining System for Vietnamese Student Feedback in Educational Platforms

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, yet their internal mechanisms remain largely opaque, posing a significant challenge to their safe and reliable deployment. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising tool for decomposing LLM representations into more interpretable features, but explaining the features captured by SAEs remains a challenging task. In this work, we propose SAGE (SAE Agentic Explainer), an agent-based framework that recasts feature interpretation from a passive, single-pass generation task into an active, explanation-driven process. SAGE implements a rigorous methodology by systematically formulating multiple explanations for each feature, designing targeted experiments to test them, and iteratively refining explanations based on empirical activation feedback. Experiments on features from SAEs of diverse language models demonstrate that SAGE produces explanations with significantly higher generative and predictive accuracy compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

SAGE: An Agentic Explainer Framework for Interpreting SAE Features in Language Models

Social media platforms have become primary sources for news consumption due to their real-time and interactive nature, yet they have also facilitated the widespread proliferation of misinformation, negatively impacting public health, social cohesion, and market stability. While professional fact-checking is essential for debunking rumors, the process is time-consuming, necessitating automation to effectively combat fake news. Existing approaches, such as extractive methods, often lack coherence and context, whereas abstractive methods leveraging large language models (LLMs) can generate more readable and informative debunking passages. However, readability alone is insufficient for effective misinformation correction; user acceptance is critical. Recent advancements in LLMs offer new opportunities for personalized debunking, as these models can generate context-sensitive responses and adapt to user profiles. Building on this, we propose the MUti-round Refinement and Simulated fEedback-enhanced framework (MURSE), which generates Chinese user-specific debunking passages by iteratively refining outputs based on simulated user feedback. Specifically, MURSE-generated user-specific debunking passages were preferred twice as often as general debunking passages in most cases, highlighting its potential to improve misinformation correction and foster positive dissemination chains.

Tailoring Rumor Debunking to You: Diversifying Chinese Rumor-Debunking Passages with an LLM-Driven Simulated Feedback-Enhanced Framework

The labor market is experiencing rapid and continual shifts in required skills and competencies, driven by technological advancement and evolving industry structures. Within this dynamic environment, candidates increasingly face challenges in orienting their career development, requiring them to continuously update their knowledge and capabilities to meet contemporary job requirements; this need is particularly necessary for new entrants to the labor market, who must cultivate a comprehensive understanding of current labor-market conditions. To address these issues, this study proposes an enterprise recruitment framework grounded in a career path knowledge graph, capturing occupations, skill requirements, and career transitions using standardized taxonomies enriched with job-posting data. The framework integrates transformer-based embeddings, large language models, and knowledge-graph reasoning to support efficient and reliable CV assessment, CV-JD matching and career guidance.

CareerPathKG: Knowledge Graph Integrated Framework for Career Intelligence

Personalized shopping agents must adapt their decisions to different user personas, balancing efficiency, preference alignment, and goal success. Building upon the WebShop dataset and τ^2-Bench environment, ShopperBench introduces a persona-guided benchmark for evaluating such adaptive behaviors. ShopperBench augments shopping trajectories with persona-conditioned goals, reasoning rationales, and preference cues, capturing how diverse shopper types---from price-conscious planners to trend-seeking explorers---navigate product search and selection. We further design a baseline of ShopperAgents that operate under persona guidance to simulate realistic, goal-oriented shopping interactions. To evaluate these agents, we propose new metrics including Persona Fidelity, Persona-Query Alignment, and Path Consistency. Together, Our ShopperBench provides a testbed for studying personalized and context-aware shopping intelligence, bridging the gap between human-centered e-commerce behavior and agent-based simulation.

ShopperBench: A Benchmark for Personalized Shopping with Persona-Guided Simulation

Finding optimal configurations for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines via grid search is computationally prohibitive, limiting real-world scalability. We investigate Bayesian Optimization (BO) as an efficient alternative, systematically comparing seven BO strategies combining four surrogate models and two multi-fidelity methods across FiQA, SciFact, and HotpotQA datasets. Our framework explores both global pipeline and local component-wise optimization, targeting final RAG performance and resource efficiency. Our results show that BO reduces optimization time by up to 84\% compared to grid search while maintaining comparable accuracy, with local optimization offering the most practical balance for deployment. Notably, performance gains plateau with larger evaluation budgets, suggesting that moderate resource investments suffice for effective RAG tuning. We provide actionable guidelines that empower industry practitioners to efficiently configure and deploy high-performing RAG systems under real-world constraints.

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