Morocco

Speech emotion recognition (SER) is a compelling yet challenging research area with substantial practical relevance, particularly in enhancing human–machine interaction. Despite considerable progress in the field, the scarcity of realistic datasets that reflect real-world conditions makes it difficult to analyze system behavior in practice and can lead to degraded performance in industrial applications. In this study, we propose a system that detects negative emotions at each turn in a conversation by leveraging both linguistic and acoustic features. The approach is evaluated on real-world data, with a particular focus on identifying and responding to negative emotion in customer support scenarios. Designed for real-time application, the system is suitable for live deployment in call center environments. Furthermore, we propose an effective prompting strategy for using large language models (LLMs) as annotators, generating labeled data used to fine-tune small language models that achieve performance on par with the LLM used for annotation, while remaining suitable for real-time deployment.

EACL 2026

Real-Time Mitigation of Negative Emotion in Customer Care Calls

llm-as-annotator

audio llm

knowledge distillation

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community."<br>

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*





<br>

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

workshop 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. 

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly being adopted by users across the globe, who interact with them in a diverse range of languages. At the same time, there are well-documented imbalances in the training data and optimisation objectives of this technology, raising doubts as to whether LLMs can accurately represent the cultural diversity of their broad user base. In this study, we look at LLMs and cultural values in particular, and examine how prompt language and cultural framing influence model responses and their alignment with human values in different countries.We do so by probing 10 LLMs with 63 items from the Hofstede Values Survey Module and World Values Survey, translated into 11 languages, and formulated as prompts with and without different explicit cultural perspectives.; Our study confirms that both prompt language and cultural perspective produce variation in LLM outputs, but with an important caveat: While targeted prompting can, to a certain extent, steer LLM responses in the direction of the predominant values of the corresponding countries, it does not overcome the modelsâ systematic bias toward the values associated with a restricted set of countries in our dataset: the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, and Japan. All tested models, regardless of their origin, exhibit remarkably similar patterns: They produce fairly neutral responses on most topics, with selective progressive stances on issues such as social tolerance. Alignment with cultural values of human respondents is improved more with an explicit cultural perspective than with a targeted prompt language. Unexpectedly, combining both approaches is no more effective than cultural framing with an English prompt. These findings reveal that LLMs occupy an uncomfortable middle ground: They are responsive enough to changes in prompts to produce variation, but they are also too firmly anchored to specific cultural defaults to adequately represent cultural diversity.

LLMs and Cultural Values: The Impact of Prompt Language and Explicit Cultural Framing

In this paper, we present PropGenie, a novel multi-agent framework based on large language models (LLMs) to deliver comprehensive real estate assistance in real-world scenarios. PropGenie coordinates eight specialized sub-agents, each tailored for distinct tasks, including search and recommendation, question answering, financial calculations, and task execution. To enhance response accuracy and reliability, the system integrates diverse knowledge sources and advanced computational tools, leveraging structured, unstructured, and multimodal retrieval-augmented generation techniques. Experiments on real user queries show that PropGenie outperforms both a general-purpose LLM (OpenAI’s o3-mini-high) and a domain-specific chatbot (Realty AI's Madison) in real estate scenarios. We hope that PropGenie serves as a valuable reference for future research in broader AI-driven applications.

PropGenie: A Multi-Agent Conversational Framework for Real Estate Assistance (presented virtually)

The globalization of education and rapid growth of online learning have made localizing educational content a critical challenge. Lecture materials are inherently multimodal, combining spoken audio with visual slides, which requires systems capable of processing multiple input modalities. To provide an accessible and complete learning experience, translations must preserve all modalities: text for reading, slides for visual understanding, and speech for auditory learning. We present \textbf{BOOM}, a multimodal multilingual lecture companion that jointly translates lecture audio and slides to produce synchronized outputs across three modalities: translated text, localized slides with preserved visual elements, and synthesized speech. This end-to-end approach enables students to access lectures in their native language while aiming to preserve the original content in its entirety. Our experiments demonstrate that slide-aware transcripts also yield cascading benefits for downstream tasks such as summarization and question answering. We release our Slide Translation code at \url{https://github.com/saikoneru/image-translator} and integrate it in Lecture Translator at \url{https://gitlab.kit.edu/kit/isl-ai4lt/lt-middleware/ltpipeline}\footnote{All released code and models are licensed under the MIT License}.

BOOM: : Beyond Only One Modality KIT's Multimodal Multilingual Lecture Companion

High-quality datasets are crucial for training effective state of the art machine translation systems. However, due to the data-intensive nature of these systems, they have to be trained on large amounts of text that can easily go beyond the scope of full human inspection. This makes the presence of noisy data that can degrade overall system performance a frequent and significant issue. While various approaches have been developed to identify and select only the highest-quality training examples, this is undesirable in scenarios where resources are limited. For this reason, we introduce AlignFix, an open-source tool for augmenting data, identifying and correcting errors in parallel corpora. Leveraging word alignments, AlignFix extracts consistent phrase pairs, enabling targeted replacements that can improve the dataset quality. Besides targeted replacements, the tool enables contextual augmentation by duplicating sentences and allowing users to substitute words with alternatives of their choice. The tool maintains and updates the underlying word alignments, thereby avoiding the costly recomputation. AlignFix runs locally in the browser, requires no installation, and ensures that all data remains entirely on the client side. It is released under Apache 2.0 license, encouraging broad adoption, reuse, and further development. A live demo is available at https://ifi-alignfix.uibk.ac.at.

AlignFix: A Tool for Parallel Corpora Augmentation and Refinement

As large language models (LLMs) are deployed widely, detecting and understanding bias in their outputs is critical. We present LLM BiasScope, a web application for side-by-side comparison of LLM outputs with real-time bias analysis. The system supports multiple providers (Google Gemini, DeepSeek, MiniMax, Mistral, Meituan, Meta Llama) and enables researchers and practitioners to compare models on the same prompts while analyzing bias patterns.
LLM BiasScope uses a two-stage bias detection pipeline: sentence-level bias detection followed by bias type classification for biased sentences. The analysis runs automatically on both user prompts and model responses, providing statistics, visualizations, and detailed breakdowns of bias types. The interface displays two models side-by-side with synchronized streaming responses, per-model bias summaries, and a comparison view highlighting differences in bias distributions.
The system is built on Next.js with React, integrates Hugging Face inference endpoints for bias detection, and uses the Vercel AI SDK for multi-provider LLM access. Features include real-time streaming, export to JSON/PDF, and interactive visualizations (bar charts, radar charts) for bias analysis. LLM BiasScope is available as an open-source web application, providing a practical tool for bias evaluation and comparative analysis of LLM behaviour.

LLM BiasScope: A Real-Time Bias Analysis Platform for Comparative LLM Evaluation

Alongside its literal meaning, text also carries implicit social signals: information that is used by the reader to assign the author of the text a specific identity or make assumptions about the author's character. The reader creates a mental image of the author which influences the interpretation of the presented information. This is especially relevant for argumentative text, where the credibility of the information might depend on who provides it. We therefore focus on the question: How do readers of an argument imagine its author? Using the ContArgA corpus, we study arguments annotated for convincingness and perceived author properties (level of education and Big Five personality traits). We find that annotators perceive an author to be similar to themselves when they agree with the stance of the argument. We also find that the envisioned personality traits and education level of the author are statistically significantly correlated with the argument's convincingness. We conduct experiments with four generative LLMs and a RoBERTa-based regression model showing that LLMs do not replicate the annotators judgments. Argument convincingness can however provide a useful signal for modeling perceived author personality when it is explicitly used during training.

Says Who? Argument Convincingness and Reader Stance Are Correlated with Perceived Author Personality

Sarcasm detection, with its figurative nature, poses unique challenges for affective systems designed to perform sentiment analysis. While these systems typically perform well at identifying direct expressions of emotion, they struggle with sarcasm's inherent contradiction between literal and intended sentiment. Since transformer-based language models (LMs) are known for their efficient ability to capture contextual meanings, we propose a method that leverages LMs and prototype-based networks, enhanced by sentiment embeddings to conduct interpretable sarcasm detection. Our approach is intrinsically interpretable without extra post-hoc interpretability techniques. We test our model on three public benchmark datasets and show that our model outperforms the current state-of-the-art. At the same time, the prototypical layer enhances the model's inherent interpretability by generating explanations through similar examples in the reference time. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of incongruity loss in the ablation study, which we construct using sentiment prototypes.

A Transformer and Prototype-based Interpretable Model for Contextual Sarcasm Detection

Automated Fact-Checking (AFC) relies on claim extraction as a first step, yet existing methods largely overlook the multimodal nature of today’s misinformation. Social media posts often combine short, informal text with images such as memes, screenshots, and photos, creating challenges that differ from both text-only claim extraction and well-studied multimodal tasks like image captioning or visual question answering. In this work, we present the first benchmark for multimodal claim extraction from social media, consisting of posts containing text and one or more images, annotated with gold-standard claims derived from real-world fact-checkers. We evaluate state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) under a three-part evaluation framework (semantic alignment, faithfulness, and decontextualization) and find that baseline MLLMs struggle to model rhetorical intent and contextual cues. To address this, we introduce MICE, an intent-aware framework which shows improvements in intent-critical cases.

Multimodal Claim Extraction for Fact-Checking

Data augmentation (DA) using large language models (LLMs) is a cost-effective method for generating synthetic data, particularly for tasks with scarce datasets. However, its potential remains largely underexplored, both in terms of augmentation configuration and evaluation of synthetic data. This paper investigates LLM-based synthetic data generation for irony and sarcasm, two subjective and context-dependent forms of figurative language. We propose a multi-aspect evaluation framework assessing synthetic data's utility-plausibility and extrinsic-intrinsic dimensions through four aspects: predictive performance, sample diversity, linguistic properties, and human judgment. Our findings indicate that other aspects of evaluation, like diversity and linguistic features, do not necessarily correlate with an increase in predictive performance, underscoring the importance of multi-faceted evaluation. This work highlights the potential of LLM-based DA for irony and sarcasm detection, offering insights into the linguistic competence of LLMs. As synthetic data becomes increasingly prevalent, our framework offers a broadly applicable and crucial evaluation method, particularly for linguistically complex tasks.

A Multi-Aspect Evaluation Framework for Synthetic Data: Case Study on Irony and Sarcasm

Over the past four decades, work at the intersection of Arabic and technology has evolved alongside major technical breakthroughs and shifting regional and global political dynamics. In this talk, I revisit the development of Arabic NLP and AI, from early foundational efforts to today’s large-scale generative systems, and highlight how each phase has engaged with distinct aspects of Arabic’s linguistic complexity. I reflect on the language’s ambiguous orthography, rich morphology, diglossic landscape, and wide geographic and historical reach, and on the growing research community committed to ensuring that AI technologies meaningfully support Arabic and its diverse cultural expressions. I conclude with a forward-looking vision for building a cohesive and sustainable ecosystem that advances Arabic in AI through strengthened training, deeper collaboration, and sustained innovation for the next generation of researchers and practitioners.

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