Singapore

Characterized by elevated hostility, disputes often result in disputants being unable to resolve their differences. This emphasizes the role of a mediator; however, mediators are typically highly specialized, difficult to find, and expensive. While alternatives exist, such as acquaintances or online moderators, these prove less effective. This raises the question of whether AI can effectively facilitate contentious disputes. We assess the potential of LLMs as mediators. First (Study 1), we focus on a large open-source corpus of customer service disputes that are objectively classified in terms of two key reasons for mediation: (1) whether or not the dispute ended in success or failure, and (2) to what extent the participants reported frustration with each other. We examine whether LLMs could be prompted to predict when a mediator should intervene in advance, and show that the decision to intervene is correctly sensitive to these two factors. Finally, we conducted a user study that compared AI to human suggestions on when and how to intervene. We find that the LLMs were rated significantly better in predicting when to intervene, rated as providing a better rationale for intervening, and rated as providing a more effective mediation message to the disputants. Remarkably, observers preferred the AI 2-to-1 over the human mediation decisions. Second (Study 2), we collect a small corpus of mediated dispute dialogues and analyze the effectiveness of novice human mediators. Quantifying the similarity of novice mediators’ behaviors to those of an LLM, we find the closer one mediates to an LLM, the better the outcome — both subjectively and objectively. These results indicate LLMs not only outperform novice mediators but may serve to identify effective mediators.

AAAI 2026

Can LLMs Mediate Synchronous Dispute Dialogues?

dispute

negotiation

mediation

#### *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.
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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. 

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.<br><br>

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

This paper introduces a novel neuro-symbolic method for irony detection that offers both high accuracy and interpretability. Our two-stage approach first uses a Transformer model to translate sentences into symbolic sequences representing their core linguistic components, such as sentiment expressions and irony targets. A machine learning classifier then uses this symbolic representation for the final classification. By explicitly modeling the internal structure of ironic statements, our method outperforms strong end-to-end baselines while providing a transparent, human-readable decision process.

A Novel Neuro-symbolic Approach to Irony Detection Based on Structural Components of Ironic Statements

The proliferation of specialized Large Language Model (LLM) dialogue systems necessitates robust defense mechanisms against unrelated prompts that introduce functional misalignment and unnecessary costs. While LLM-based filtering approaches usually work well, using them requires payments, and that motivated us to develop simple, high-speed, pre-inference input validation techniques. In this paper, we evaluate the efficacy of two semantic pre-filtering strategies applied to a Japanese export control (trade security) application domain: (1) a Centroid-based similarity guardrail (utilizing the mean vector of on-topic embeddings) and (2) a supervised Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. Using various multilingual embedding models, we demonstrate that the Centroid-based Similarity Guardrail exhibits superior robustness against adversarial keyword augmentation, effectively maintaining high refusal rates despite injected domain-related terms intended to shift the query’s semantic vector. Furthermore, our analysis of cross-lingual zero-shot transfer confirms that while the strongest multilingual embedding models successfully maintain topic alignment when processing English queries against a Japanese-trained filter, the efficacy is highly model-dependent, underscoring the necessity of model-specific cross-lingual validation for deployment in multilingual environments.

Evaluating Lightweight Embedding Guardrails for Cost-Effective Misalignment Mitigation in Export Control Dialog Systems

In recent years, research on role-playing agents that leverage the powerful conversational capabilities of large language models (LLMs) has been actively conducted. Role-playing agents are designed to converse as real or fictional characters, reproducing dialogues that resemble those of the target persona. While many studies have explored how LLMs can generate utterances that reflect a character’s individuality, the examination of utterance generation conditioned on the target character’s emotions has not been sufficiently conducted. Because it is difficult to collect ground-truth data for the target character’s emotions, it has not yet been fully investigated whether conditioning on emotional information can improve the perceived character-likeness of generated utterances. To address this gap, we used scenario data from a visual novel game in which facial expressions, one of the key components of emotional information, are explicitly annotated. We trained an LLM to generate responses conditioned on facial expression labels by incorporating these labels into the input during fine-tuning, and evaluated the resulting utterances in terms of their character-likeness. Our experiments revealed three key findings: (1) conditioning on facial expression labels improves the perceived character-likeness of the generated utterances; (2) providing the LLM with facial expression labels that do not correspond to the character’s actual expressions can still enhance the perceived character-likeness of the generated utterances; and (3) there remains a gap between how humans and LLMs process emotional information in dialogue generation.

Evaluation of Emotion-Conditioned Response Generation for Role-Playing Agents Using Large Language Models: A Case Study with Facial Expression Labels from Visual Novel Data

Data as a Lever: A Neighbouring Datasets Perspective on Predictive Multiplicity

Adapting Multiverse Analysis for Prediction: A Decision-Maker’s Dashboard

On Arbitrary Predictions From Equally Valid Models

Intervention Efficiency and Perturbation Validation Framework: Capacity-Aware and Robust Clinical Model Selection under the Rashomon Effect

Be Intentional About Fairness!: Fairness, Size, and Multiplicity in the Rashomon Set

Evaluating the Ability of Explanations to Disambiguate Models in a Rashomon Set

The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) in applications targeting children and adolescents necessitates a fundamental reassessment of prevailing AI safety frameworks, which are largely tailored to adult users and neglect the distinct developmental vulnerabilities of minors. This paper highlights key deficiencies in existing LLM safety benchmarks, including their inadequate coverage of age-specific cognitive, emotional, and social risks spanning early childhood (ages 0–6), middle childhood (7–12), and adolescence (13–18). To bridge these gaps, we introduce SproutBench, an innovative evaluation suite comprising 1,283 developmentally grounded adversarial prompts designed to probe risks such as emotional dependency, privacy violations, and imitation of hazardous behaviors. Through rigorous empirical evaluation of 47 diverse LLMs, we uncover substantial safety vulnerabilities, corroborated by robust inter-dimensional correlations (e.g., between Safety and Risk Prevention, p = 0.86) and a notable inverse relationship between Interactivity and Age Appropriateness (p = -0.48). These insights yield practical guidelines for advancing child-centric AI design and deployment.

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Next from AAAI 2026

A Novel Neuro-symbolic Approach to Irony Detection Based on Structural Components of Ironic Statements

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