Morocco

Multimodal models excel in English, supported by abundant imageвЂ“text and audioвЂ“text data, but performance drops sharply for other languages due to limited multilingual multimodal resources. Existing solutions rely on machine translation, while advances in multilingual text modeling remain underutilized. We introduce M2M, a lightweight alignment method that learns only a few linear layersвЂ”using English text aloneвЂ”to map multilingual text embeddings into multimodal space. Despite its simplicity, M2M matches baseline performance in English (94.9% Recall@10) and achieves strong zero-shot transfer (89.5% Recall@10 averaged across 11 languages, 10 unseen) on XTD Text-to-Image retrieval. Qualitative t-SNE visualizations show that multilingual embeddings align tightly with multimodal representations, while weight analysis reveals that the transformation reshapes embedding geometry rather than performing trivial rotations. Beyond imageвЂ“text retrieval, M2M generalizes to AudioвЂ“Text retrieval and cross-lingual Text-to-Image generation. We release code, checkpoints, and multilingual evaluation datasets (https://github.com/m2m-codebase/M2M) to facilitate further research.

EACL 2026

Multilingual-To-Multimodal (M2M): Unlocking New Languages with Monolingual Text

synthetic evaluation dataset

text-to-image

multimodality

multilinguality

retrieval

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
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This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
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ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

poster

#### *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)* 

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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. 

Generative models are known to have reduced performance in different global cultural contexts and languages. While continual data updates have been known to be conducted to improve overall model performance, bolstering and evaluating this cross-cultural competence of generative AI models requires data resources to be intentionally expanded to include global contexts and languages. In this work, we construct a multi-pronged pipeline to collect and contribute culturally salient, multilingual data. We posit that such data can assess the state of the global applicability of our models and thus, in turn, help identify and improve upon cross-cultural gaps.

Scaling Cultural Resources for Improving Generative Models

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Supervised Finetuning (SFT) have become the predominant paradigms for equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with external knowledge for diverse, knowledge-intensive tasks. However, while such knowledge injection improves performance, it also exposes new attack surfaces. Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs), which aim to determine whether a given data sample was included in a model's training set, pose serious threats to privacy and trust in sensitive domains. To this end, we first systematically evaluate the vulnerability of RAG- and SFT-based LLMs to various MIAs. Then, to address the privacy risk, we further introduce a novel, model-agnostic defense framework, Ensemble Privacy Defense (EPD), which aggregates and evaluates the outputs of a knowledge-injected LLM, a base LLM, and a dedicated judge model to enhance resistance against MIAs. Comprehensive experiments show that, on average, EPD reduces MIA success by up to 27.8% for SFT and 526.3% for RAG compared to inference-time baseline, while maintaining answer quality.

Ensemble Privacy Defense for Knowledge-Intensive LLMs against Membership Inference Attacks

Instruction optimization provides a lightweight, model-agnostic approach to enhancing the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs). This paper presents the first systematic comparison of instruction optimization for tabular fact verification, a task that requires numerical, compositional, and schema-grounded reasoning over structured data. We evaluate four prompting paradigms, direct prediction, Chain-of-Thought (CoT), ReAct with SQL tools, and CodeAct with Python execution, across three benchmarks (TabFact, PubHealthTab, SciTab) and two model families. Using the DSPy framework, we study three optimizers: COPRO, MiPROv2, and SIMBA. Instruction optimization consistently improves verification accuracy, with MiPROv2 yielding the most stable gains for CoT, and SIMBA providing the largest benefits for tool-augmented agents, particularly at larger model scales. Behavioral analyzes reveal that SIMBA encourages more direct reasoning paths by applying heuristics, which enhances numerical comparison in CoT reasoning and helps avoid unnecessary tool calls in ReAct agents. Comparing different pipelines, CoT remains effective for tabular fact checking, especially with smaller models. ReAct agent built with larger models can achieve competitive performance but requires careful instruction optimization.

Analyzing LLM Instruction Optimization for Tabular Fact Verification

Automatic workflow generation is the process of automatically synthesizing sequences of LLM calls, tool invocations, and post-processing steps for complex end-to-end tasks. Most prior methods cast this task as an optimization problem with limited theoretical grounding. We propose to cast workflow generation as Bayesian inference over a posterior distribution on workflows, and introduce \textbf{Bayesian Workflow Generation (BWG)}, a sampling framework that builds workflows step-by-step using parallel look-ahead rollouts for importance weighting and a sequential in-loop refiner for pool-wide improvements. We prove that, without the refiner, the weighted empirical distribution converges to the target posterior. We instantiate BWG as \textbf{BayesFlow}, a training-free algorithm for workflow construction. Across six benchmark datasets, BayesFlow improves accuracy by up to 9 percentage points over SOTA workflow generation baselines and by up to 65 percentage points over zero-shot prompting, establishing BWG as a principled upgrade to search-based workflow design.

BayesFlow: A Probability Inference Framework for Meta-Agent Assisted Workflow Generation

Scientific research is inherently global. However, the vast majority of academic journals are published exclusively in English, creating barriers for non-native-English-speaking researchers. In this study, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to translate published scientific articles while preserving their native JATS XML formatting, thereby developing a practical, automated approach for implementation by academic journals. Using our approach, we translate articles across multiple scientific disciplines into 28 languages. To evaluate translation accuracy, we introduce a novel question-and-answer (QA) benchmarking method and show an average performance of 95.9%, indicating that the key scientific details are accurately conveyed. In a user study, we translate the scientific papers of 15 researchers into their native languages. Interestingly, a third of the authors found many technical terms вЂњovertranslated,вЂќ expressing a preference to keep terminology more familiar in English untranslated. Finally, we demonstrate how in-context learning techniques can be used to align translations with domain-specific preferences such as mitigating overtranslation, highlighting the adaptability and utility of LLM-driven scientific translation.

Science Across Languages: Assessing LLM Multilingual Translation of Scientific Papers

Statutory article retrieval (SAR) targets retrieval of legislative provisions relevant to a natural language question. The lexical gap between everyday queries and specialized legal language, as well as the structural dependencies of statute law, makes it a challenging task. Here, we introduce JuriFindIT, the first SAR dataset for the Italian legal domain and the first to explicitly encode cross-article references extracted from national legal code. The dataset covers four macro-areasвЂ”civil law, criminal law, anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism, and privacyвЂ”and includes 895 expert-authored questions and 169,301 generated ones, linked to more than 23,000 statutory articles. We provide retrieval models fine-tuned on JuriFindIT, proposing a pipeline that integrates dense encoders with an heterogeneous legislative graph, achieving consistent improvements over prior SAR approaches.

JuriFindIT: an Italian legal retrieval dataset

This paper examines how Large Language Models (LLMs) reproduce societal norms, particularly heterocisnormativity, and how these norms translate into measurable biases in their text generations. We investigate whether explicit information about a subject's gender or sexuality influences LLM responses across three subject categories: queer-marked, non-queer-marked, and the normalized "unmarked" category. Representational imbalances are operationalized as measurable differences in English sentence completions across four dimensions: sentiment, regard, toxicity, and prediction diversity. Our findings show that Masked Language Models (MLMs) produce the least favorable sentiment, higher toxicity, and more negative regard for queer-marked subjects. Autoregressive Language Models (ARLMs) partially mitigate these patterns, while closed-access ARLMs tend to produce more harmful outputs for unmarked subjects. Results suggest that LLMs reproduce normative social assumptions, though the form and degree of bias depend strongly on specific model characteristics, which may redistributeвЂ”but not eliminateвЂ”representational harms.

QueerGen: How LLMs Reflect Societal Norms on Gender and Sexuality in Sentence Completion Task

Language models (LMs) may memorize personally identifiable information (PII) from training data, enabling adversaries to extract it during inference. Existing defense mechanisms such as differential privacy (DP) reduce this leakage, but incur large drops in utility. Based on a comprehensive study using circuit discovery to identify the computational circuits responsible PII leakage in LMs, we hypothesize that specific PII leakage circuits in LMs should be responsible for this behavior. Therefore, we propose PATCH: Privacy-Aware Targeted Circuit Patching, a novel approach that first identifies and subsequently directly edits PII circuits to reduce leakage. PATCH achieves better privacy-utility trade-off than existing defenses, e.g., reducing recall of PII leakage from LMs by up to 65%. Finally, PATCH can be combined with DP to reduce recall of residual leakage of an LM to as low as 0.01%. Our analysis shows that PII leakage circuits persist even after the application of existing defense mechanisms. In contrast, PATCH can effectively mitigate their impact.

PATCH: Mitigating PII Leakage in Language Models with Privacy-Aware Targeted Circuit PatcHing

Information Extraction (IE), encompassing Named Entity Recognition (NER), Named Entity Linking (NEL), and Relation Extraction (RE), is critical for transforming the rapidly growing volume of scientific publications into structured, actionable knowledge. This need is especially evident in fast-evolving biomedical fields such as the gut-brain axis, where research investigates complex interactions between the gut microbiota and brain-related disorders. Existing biomedical IE benchmarks, however, are often narrow in scope and rely heavily on distantly supervised or automatically generated annotations, limiting their utility for advancing robust IE methods. We introduce GutBrainIE, a benchmark based on more than 1,600 PubMed abstracts, manually annotated by biomedical and terminological experts with fine-grained entities, concept-level links, and relations. While grounded in the gut-brain axis, the benchmark's rich schema, multiple tasks, and combination of highly curated and weakly supervised data make it broadly applicable to the development and evaluation of biomedical IE systems across domains.

A Domain-Specific Curated Benchmark for Entity and Document-Level Relation Extraction

he rapid integration of large language models (LLMs) into high-stakes legal work has exposed a critical gap: no benchmark exists to systematically stress-test their reliability against the nuanced, adversarial, and often subtle flaws present in real-world contracts. To address this, we introduce CLAUSE, a first-of-its-kind benchmark designed to evaluate the fragility of an LLM's legal reasoning. We study the capabilities of LLMs to detect and reason about fine-grained discrepancies by producing over 7500 real-world perturbed contracts from foundational datasets like CUAD and ContractNLI. Our novel, persona-driven pipeline generates 10 distinct anomaly categories, which are then validated against official statutes using a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system to ensure legal fidelity. We use CLAUSE to evaluate leading LLMs’ ability to detect embedded legal flaws and explain their significance. Our analysis shows a key weakness: these models often miss subtle errors and struggle even more to justify them legally. Our work outlines a path to identify and correct such reasoning failures in legal AI.

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Scaling Cultural Resources for Improving Generative Models

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