Morocco

Novel metaphor comprehension involves complex semantic processes and linguistic creativity, making it an interesting task for studying language models (LMs). This study investigates whether surprisal, a probabilistic measure of predictability in LMs, correlates with annotations of metaphor novelty in different datasets. We analyse the surprisal of metaphoric words in corpus-based and synthetic metaphor datasets using 16 causal LM variants. We propose a cloze-style surprisal method that conditions on full-sentence context. Results show that LM surprisal yields significant moderate correlations with scores/labels of metaphor novelty. We further identify divergent scaling patterns: on corpus-based data, correlation strength decreases with model size (inverse scaling effect), whereas on synthetic data it increases (quality–power hypothesis). We conclude that while surprisal can partially account for annotations of metaphor novelty, it remains limited as a metric of linguistic creativity. Code and data are publicly available: https://github.com/OmarMomen14/surprisal-metaphor-novelty

EACL 2026

Surprisal and Metaphor Novelty Judgments: Moderate Correlations and Divergent Scaling Effects Revealed by Corpus-Based and Synthetic Datasets

corpus-based

metaphor novelty

scaling laws

synthetic datasets

surprisal

large language models

interpretability

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>
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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. 

Multi-hop reasoning over long contexts remains challenging, as it requires integrating relevant contexts scattered across distant sources while resisting semantic drift and noise from distracting content. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as the prevailing solution, most RAG approaches encode and store context in monolithic memory representations, resulting in noisy retrieval and brittle reasoning. To overcome these limitations, we introduce TAG (Tailoring Memory Granularity), a framework that prestructures memory into diverse granularities and employs a reward-guided navigator to adaptively compose hybrid memory tailored to each query. The navigator is trained with a multi-objective Bradley–Terry loss that learns the relative utility of different memory types, enabling dynamic routing across granularities. This design allows RAG systems to balance fine-grained detail with high-level abstraction, yielding more reliable reasoning. Extensive experiments on long-context multi-hop question answering (QA) benchmarks show that TAG achieves state-of-the-art performance. With only 0.033% additional parameters, it remains lightweight, highlighting its practicality as a scalable and effective solution for enhancing language model agents in complex, real-world scenarios.

Tailoring Memory Granularity for Multi-Hop Reasoning over Long Contexts

Social engineering scams increasingly employ personalized, multi-turn deception, exposing the limits of traditional detection methods. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in identifying deception, their cognitive assistance potential remains underexplored. We propose ScriptMind, an integrated framework for LLM-based scam detection that bridges automated reasoning and human cognition. It comprises three components: the Crime Script Inference Task (CSIT) for scam reasoning, the Crime Script–Aware Inference Dataset (CSID) for fine-tuning small LLMs, and the Cognitive Simulation-based Evaluation of Social Engineering Defense (CSED) for assessing real-time cognitive impact. Using 571 Korean scam cases, we built 22,712 structured scammer-sequence training instances. Experimental results show that the 11B small LLM fine-tuned with ScriptMind outperformed GPT-4o by 13%, achieving superior performance over commercial models in detection accuracy, false-positive reduction, scammer utterance prediction, and rationale quality. Moreover, in phone scam simulation experiments, it significantly enhanced and sustained users’ suspicion levels, improving their cognitive awareness of scams. ScriptMind represents a step toward human-centered, cognitively adaptive LLMs for scam defense.

SCRIPTMIND: Crime Script Inference and Cognitive Evaluation for LLM-based Social Engineering Scam Detection System

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is increasingly integral to healthcare services, where medical conversations present unique transcription challenges due to specialized terminology and frequent introduction of new terms. Existing ASR models, including widely used systems like Whisper, struggle with high word error rates (WER) on clinical vocabulary, especially medication names, primarily due to the scarcity of annotated audio-transcript data in the medical domain. This paper proposes and evaluates a novel synthetic data generation pipeline that produces comprehensive doctor-patient dialogues in both text and audio forms, specifically targeting a curated set of over 124,000 medical terms. The pipeline generated over 1 billion audios with ground truth transcriptions. Fine-tuning ASR models with this synthetic corpus significantly reduced overall WER and improved transcription accuracy on medical terms, marking a significant advance in healthcare ASR accuracy. Data generation code, dataset, and training and evaluation scripts are released.

Synthetic Doctor-Patient Dialogue Generation for Robust Medical ASR: A Scalable Pipeline for Vocabulary Expansion and Privacy Preservation

Fine-tuning a task-specific multilingual large language model (LLM) involves training the model on a multilingual dataset with examples in all the required languages. Updating one or more supported languages with additional data or adding support for a new language involves retraining the model, which can be computationally inefficient and creates a severe maintenance bottleneck. Recent research on merging multilingual multitask models has shown promise in terms of improved quality, but its computational and maintenance efficiency remains unstudied. In this work, we provide the first focused analysis of this merging strategy from an efficiency perspective, evaluating it across three independent tasks. We demonstrate significant efficiency gains while maintaining parity in terms of quality: this merging approach reduces the initial training time by up to 50\%. We also demonstrate that updating an individual language and re-merging as part of model maintenance reduces training costs by more than 60\%, compared to re-training the full multilingual model. We show this on both public and proprietary industry datasets confirming that the approach works well for industrial use cases in addition to academic settings already studied in previous work.

Improving Training Efficiency and Reducing Maintenance Costs via Language Specific Model Merging

High-quality search is essential for the success of online platforms, spanning e-commerce, social media, shopping-focused applications, and broader search systems such as content discovery and enterprise web search. To ensure optimal user experience and drive business growth, continuous evaluation and improvement of search systems is crucial. This paper introduces PROBES, a novel multi-task system powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) designed for end-to-end evaluation of semantic search systems. PROBES identifies context-aware relevance using a fine-grained scale (exact, substitute, complement, irrelevant) by leveraging the query category, feature-level intent, and category-aware feature importance, enabling more precise and consistent judgments than relying solely on raw query text. This allows PROBES to provide differentiated relevance assessment across a diverse range of query categories. PROBES then dives deeper to understand the reason behind irrelevant results (Precision issues) by checking product content conflicts and inaccuracies. It also analyzes Missed Recall by leveraging retrieval and relevance models to determine whether a missed recall was due to a selection issue or a ranking/retrieval system issue. To evaluate PROBES, we introduce a new metric, the Actionable Error Rate (AER), defined as the proportion of actionable errors over all flagged errors. We observe that PROBES operates at an AER of 76%, generating actionable insights across 100 product categories.

PROBES : Performance and Relevance Observation for BEtter Search

Extracting actionable suggestions from customer reviews is essential for operational decision-making, yet these directives are often embedded within mixed-intent, unstructured text. Existing approaches either classify suggestion-bearing sentences or generate high-level summaries, but rarely isolate the precise improvement instructions businesses need. We evaluate a hybrid pipeline combining a high-recall RoBERTa classifier trained with a precision–recall surrogate to reduce unrecoverable false negatives with a controlled, instruction-tuned LLM for suggestion extraction, categorization, clustering, and summarization. Across real-world hospitality and food datasets, the hybrid system outperforms prompt-only, rule-based, and classifier-only baselines in extraction accuracy and cluster coherence. Human evaluations further confirm that the resulting suggestions and summaries are clear, faithful, and interpretable. Overall, our results show that hybrid reasoning architectures achieve meaningful improvements fine-grained actionable suggestion mining while highlighting challenges in domain adaptation and efficient local deployment.

A Hybrid Supervised-LLM Pipeline for Actionable Suggestion Mining in Unstructured Customer Reviews

Event argument extraction (EAE) is a crucial task in information extraction. However, its performance heavily depends on expensive annotated data, making data scarcity a persistent challenge. Data augmentation serves as an effective approach to improving model performance in low-resource settings, yet research on applying LLMs for EAE augmentation remains preliminary. In this study, we pay attention to the boundary sensitivity of EAE and investigate four LLM-based augmentation strategies: argument replacement, adjunction rewriting, their combination, and annotation generation. We conduct comprehensive experiments across four benchmark datasets, employing GPT-4o-Mini and DeepSeek-R1-7B as data generators. Our results show that boundary-aware augmentation consistently leads to greater performance improvements over boundary-agnostic methods. In addition to performance gains, we provide a detailed analysis of augmentation quality from multiple perspectives, including uncertainty reduction, error types, data quality, and data scale. This work offers both empirical evidence and practical guidance for leveraging LLMs to enhance event argument extraction under low-resource conditions.

Boundary-Aware LLM Augmentation for Low-Resource Event Argument Extraction

We introduce LM-Lexicon, an innovative definition modeling approach that incorporates data clustering, semantic expert learning, and model merging using a sparse mixture-of-experts architecture. By decomposing the definition modeling task into specialized semantic domains, where small language models are trained as domain experts, LM-Lexicon achieves substantial improvements (+7% BLEU score compared with the prior state-of-the-art model) over existing methods on five widely used benchmarks. Empirically, we demonstrate that 1) the clustering strategy enables fine-grained expert specialization with nearly 10% improvement in definition quality; 2) the semantic-aware domain-level routing mechanism achieves higher expert efficacy (+1%) than conventional token-level routing; and 3) further performance gains can be obtained through test-time compute and semantic expert scaling. Our work advances definition modeling while providing insights into the development of efficient language models for semantic-intensive applications. The code, data, and models will be made publicly available upon completion of the review process.

LM-Lexicon: Improving Definition Modeling via Harmonizing Semantic Experts

The promise of LLM watermarking rests on a core assumption that a specific watermark proves authorship by a specific model. We demonstrate that this assumption is dangerously flawed. We introduce the threat of watermark spoofing, a sophisticated attack that allows a malicious model to generate text containing the authentic-looking watermark of a trusted, victim model. This enables the seamless misattribution of harmful content, such as disinformation, to reputable sources. The key to our attack is repurposing watermark radioactivity, the unintended inheritance of data patterns during fine-tuning, from a discoverable trait into an attack vector. By distilling knowledge from a watermarked teacher model, our framework allows an attacker to steal and replicate the watermarking signal of the victim model. This work reveals a critical security gap in text authorship verification and calls for a paradigm shift towards technologies capable of distinguishing authentic watermarks from expertly imitated ones. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ditto-8838/.

DITTO: A Spoofing Attack Framework on Watermarked LLMs via Knowledge Distillation

Multi-LLM systems enhance the creativity of large language models by simulating human collective intelligence but suffer from significant drawbacks, such as high computational costs and inference latency. To address these limitations, we propose BILLY (BlendIng persona vectors for Large Language model creativitY), a training-free framework that captures the benefits of multi-LLM collaboration, i.e. inducing diverse perspectives and specialized expertise, within a single model. BILLY operates by extracting and blending multiple distinct persona vectors directly in the model's activation space. We steer the model's generation process with this merged vector while inference, enabling multi-perspective output without explicit multi-LLM communication. Our experiments across creativity-oriented benchmarks demonstrate that BILLY surpasses single model prompting and traditional multi-LLM approaches, while substantially reducing inference time and computational costs. Our analyses further reveal that distinct persona vectors can be blended to achieve both effective control over complementary aspects of generation and greater interpretability.

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