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Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a smaller model to draft future tokens, which are then verified by the target LLM. This preserves generation quality by accepting only aligned tokens. However, individual drafters, often trained for specific tasks or domains, exhibit limited effectiveness across diverse applications. To address this, we introduce MetaSD, a unified framework that integrates multiple drafters into the SD process. MetaSD dynamically allocates computational resources to heterogeneous drafters by leveraging alignment feedback and framing drafter selection as a multi-armed bandit problem. Extensive experiments show MetaSD consistently outperforms single-drafter approaches.

ACL 2026

 Multi-Drafter Speculative Decoding with Alignment Feedback

## 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." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

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

poster

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. 
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) 
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The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

Accurate and interpretable predictions of depression severity are essential for clinical decision support, yet existing models often lack uncertainty estimates and temporal interpretability. We propose PTTSD, a Probabilistic framework for Depression Detection from clinical interview utterance sequences that predicts PHQ-8 scores while modeling calibrated uncertainty. PTTSD includes sequence-to-sequence and sequence-to-one variants, both combining LSTMs, self-attention, and residual connections with Gaussian or Student's-t output heads trained via negative log-likelihood. The sequence-to-sequence variant enables temporal analysis of how predictive confidence evolves over an interview, despite the target being a single session-level score. Evaluated on E-DAIC and DAIC-WOZ, PTTSD achieves competitive performance among text-only systems (e.g., MAE = 3.85 on E-DAIC, 3.55 on DAIC) and produces well-calibrated prediction intervals. Ablations confirm the value of attention and probabilistic modeling, while a three-part calibration analysis and qualitative case studies highlight the clinical relevance of uncertainty-aware prediction.

Probabilistic Depression Detection from Textual Time Series

Tokenization plays a pivotal role in NLP and is fundamental to training language models. However, existing tokenizers are often skewed towards high-resource languages, limiting their effectiveness for linguistically diverse and morphologically rich languages such as those in the Indian subcontinent. In this work, we present a comprehensive empirical study of multilingual tokenization across 17 Indic languages spanning 11 scripts and two language families. We systematically evaluate the effects of (i) widely used subword algorithms: BPE \cite{sennrich-etal-2016-neural} and Unigram LM \cite{kudo-2018-subword}, (ii) script and orthography-aware normalization, (iii) vocabulary size, and (iv) multilingual vocabulary construction strategies. We use a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations to obtain the following observations: (i) script-specific normalization improves tokenization quality, (ii) Unigram LM better preserves morphological boundaries than BPE, (iii) cluster-based vocabulary construction shows improvement in downstream tasks compared to the joint method. Our findings highlight the importance of linguistically informed design choices in multilingual tokenization and offer practical guidance for building effective tokenizers for low-resource and morphologically complex languages.

Multilingual Tokenization through the Lens of Indian Languages: Challenges and Insights

Retrieval Augmented Generation faces a trade-off: concatenating documents in a long prompt enables multi-document reasoning but creates prefill bottlenecks, while encoding document KV caches separately offers speed but breaks cross-document interaction. We propose Parallel Context-of-Experts Decoding (PCED), a training-free framework that shifts evidence aggregation from the attention mechanism to the decoding. PCED treats retrieved documents as isolated "experts", synchronizing their predictions via a retrieval-aware extension of context-aware decoding. This approach recovers cross-document reasoning capabilities without constructing a shared attention across documents.

 Parallel Context-of-Experts Decoding for Retrieval Augmented Generation

Deduction, induction, and abduction are fundamental reasoning paradigms, core for human logical thinking. 
Although improving Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning has attracted significant research efforts, the extent to which the fundamental paradigms induce generalization has yet to be systematically explored. 
In this study, we shed light on how the interplay between these core paradigms influences LLMs' reasoning behavior. 
To this end, we first collect a new dataset of reasoning trajectories from symbolic tasks, each targeting one of the three fundamental paradigms, to abstract from concrete world knowledge. 
Then, we investigate effective ways for inducing these skills into LLMs.
We experiment with a battery of methods including simple fine-tuning, and more complex approaches to increase model depth, or transform a dense model to a mixture-of-experts. 
We comprehensively evaluate induced models on realistic out-of-domain tasks, that are entirely formulated in natural language and contain real-world knowledge. 
Our results reveal that our approach yields strong generalizability with substantial performance gains (up to $14.60$) across realistic tasks.

Fundamental Reasoning Paradigms Induce Out-of-Domain Generalization in Language Models

Research on hate speech detection (HSD) has centered on modern data, even though offensive language has a much longer history. This paper presents the first systematic evaluation of instruction-tuned LLMs on Early Modern English invectives, compared with a modern hate-speech benchmark. Our work applies a modular prompt design to measure the contribution of definitional richness, contextual grounding, decision rules and few-shot examples. The results indicate that clearer annotation boundaries in the curated historical corpus lead to higher classification performance compared to the modern benchmark, despite the disadvantage of linguistic unfamiliarity. Prompt brittleness, however, persists across both domains. Classification-oriented components (rules, examples) drive the strongest effects, while definitional or contextual additions matter less. Fine-tuned encoder models still outperform LLMs, but some prompt configurations can narrow the gap. Overall, our study provides practical guidance for prompt design in both digital humanities and HSD and new opportunities for tracing the historical development of hate speech.

Prompting Across Time: Evaluating LLMs on Historical and Contemporary Offensive Language

Recent advances in Text-to-SQL have greatly benefited from large language models, yet small and medium-sized models still suffer from frequent execution errors and limited self-correction ability. We present ReSQL (Retrieval-augmented error reasoning for Text-to-SQL), a self-improving framework that generates and learns from its own error-reasoning dataset, enabling models to autonomously refine their SQL generation and correction capabilities. ReSQL combines feedback-driven fine-tuning with retrieval-based inference: it gathers model-generated errors, analyzes them through structured feedback prompts, and retrieves relevant correction examples during inference. This unified approach allows models to internalize robust error-reasoning patterns and dynamically apply them to unseen queries. Experimental results on the SPIDER and BIRD benchmarks show that ReSQL substantially improves execution accuracy and self-correction ability over strong baselines, achieving competitive performance with much larger proprietary models such as GPT-4. Our findings highlight ReSQL as a promising step toward self-improving, reasoning-aware Text-to-SQL systems that can continually enhance their reliability and interpretability without external supervision. All code and generated reasoning datasets are available to facilitate application to open-source LLMs and reproducible baseline training.

ReSQL: Self-Improving Framework for Reasoning-Aware Text-to-SQL Dataset Generation

Existing hate speech detection models are often opaque and rely on surface-level lexical cues, which makes them vulnerable to spurious correlations and limits robustness, interpretability and cultural contextualization. We propose Supervised Moral Rationale Attention (SMRA), the first self-explaining hate speech detection framework to incorporate moral rationales as direct supervision for attention alignment. Based on Moral Foundations Theory, SMRA aligns token-level attention with expert-annotated moral rationales, guiding models to attend to morally salient spans. Unlike prior rationale-supervised or post-hoc approaches, SMRA integrates moral rationale supervision directly into the training objective, producing inherently interpretable and contextualized explanations. To support our framework, we also introduce HateBRMoralXplain, a Brazilian Portuguese benchmark dataset annotated with hate labels, moral categories, token-level moral rationales, and socio-political metadata. Across binary hate speech detection and multi-label moral sentiment classification, SMRA consistently improves performance while enhancing both faithful and plausible explanations. Although explanations become more concise, sufficiency decreases, indicating more compact and informative rationales. Fairness remains stable, suggesting that improvements in explanation quality do not introduce significant bias trade-offs.

Self-Explaining Hate Speech Detection with Moral Rationales

Personalized image aesthetics assessment (PIAA) is an important research problem with practical real-world applications. While methods based on vision-language models (VLMs) are promising candidates for PIAA, it remains unclear whether they internally encode rich, multi-level aesthetic attributes required for effective personalization. In this paper, we first analyze the internal representations of VLMs to examine the presence and distribution of such aesthetic attributes, and then leverage them for lightweight, individual-level personalization without model fine-tuning. Our analysis reveals that VLMs encode diverse aesthetic attributes that propagate into the language decoder layers. Building on these representations, we demonstrate that simple linear models can achieve effective personalized image aesthetics assessment. We further analyze how aesthetic information is transferred across layers in different VLM architectures and across image domains. Our findings provide insights into how VLMs can be utilized for modeling subjective, individual aesthetic preferences.

What Do Vision–Language Models Encode for Personalized Image Aesthetics Assessment?

Large Language Models (LLMs) are often deployed in tasks that require selecting an item from a long list provided in the model’s context. LLMs’ native selection behavior is brittle: predictions are sensitive to the surface form of the identifiers, their placement within the context, and the ordering of candidate items. We present OLR-Heads, a robust method for list selection that harnesses attention patterns available from a single forward call on the LLM. OLR-Heads learns the logic for item selection using a few in-context examples, and a simple online position-debiasing mechanism to correct attention distortion. Across multiple database and tool selection benchmarks, OLR-Heads consistently improves selection performance over direct generation and prior attention-based methods, while remaining robust to prompt variations and item ordering.
The LLM's KV cache states are unaffected, and can be reused for subsequent response generation. In contrast, existing approaches either entail additional LLM calls, or task-specific offline learning, or position debiasing methods that modify the attention or encoding rendering the KV states unusable for subsequent generation.

 Robust In-Context Selection via Online Learned Position-Corrected Attention

Conversational diagnosis prediction requires models to track evolving evidence in streaming clinical conversations and decide when to commit to a diagnosis. Existing medical dialogue corpora are largely dyadic or lack the multi-party workflow and annotations needed for this setting. We introduce an ePCR-grounded, topic-flow-based multi-agent generation pipeline that iteratively plans, generates, and self-refines dialogues with rule-based factual and topic flow checks. The pipeline yields EMSDialog, a dataset of 4,414 synthetic multi-speaker EMS conversations based on a real-world ePCR dataset, annotated with 43 diagnoses, speaker roles, and turn-level topics. Human and LLM evaluations confirm high quality and realism of EMSDialog using both utterance- and conversation-level metrics. Results show that EMSDialog-augmented training improves accuracy, timeliness, and stability of EMS conversational diagnosis prediction. Our datasets and code are publicly available at https://uva-dsa.github.io/EMSDialog

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Probabilistic Depression Detection from Textual Time Series

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