Morocco

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of instruction-following tasks, yet their grasp of nuanced social science concepts remains underexplored. This paper examines whether LLMs can identify and classify fine-grained forms of populism, a complex and contested concept in both academic and media debates. To this end, we curate and release novel datasets specifically designed to capture populist discourse. We evaluate a range of pre-trained (large) language models, both open-weight and proprietary, across multiple prompting paradigms. Our analysis reveals notable variation in performance, highlighting the limitations of LLMs in detecting populist discourse. We find that a fine-tuned RoBERTa classifier vastly outperforms all new-era instruction-tuned LLMs, unless fine-tuned. Additionally, we apply our best-performing model to analyze campaign speeches by Donald Trump, extracting valuable insights into his strategic use of populist rhetoric. Finally, we assess the generalizability of these models by benchmarking them on campaign speeches by European politicians, offering a lens into cross-context transferability in political discourse analysis. In this setting, we find that instruction-tuned LLMs exhibit greater robustness on out-of-domain data.

EACL 2026

Identifying Fine-grained Forms of Populism in Political Discourse: A Case Study on Donald Trump&#39;s Presidential Campaigns

frame detection and analysis

populism

politics

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

EACL 2023

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Identifying Fine-grained Forms of Populism in Political Discourse: A Case Study on Donald Trump's Presidential Campaigns

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. 

Game-theoretic interactions between agents with large language models (LLMs) have revealed many emergent capabilities, yet the linguistic diversity of these interactions has not been sufficiently quantified. In this paper, we present the Conversational Robustness Evaluation Score: CORE, a metric to quantify the effectiveness of language use within multi-agent systems across different game-theoretic interactions. CORE integrates measures of cluster entropy, lexical repetition, and semantic similarity, providing a direct lens of dialog quality. We apply CORE to pairwise LLM dialogs across competitive, cooperative, and neutral settings, further grounding our analysis in Zipf's and Heaps' Laws to characterize word frequency distributions and vocabulary growth. Our findings show that cooperative settings exhibit both steeper Zipf distributions and higher Heap exponents, indicating more repetition alongside greater vocabulary expansion. In contrast, competitive interactions display lower Zipf and Heaps exponents, reflecting less repetition and more constrained vocabularies. These results provide new insights into how social incentives influence language adaptation, and highlight CORE as a robust diagnostic for measuring linguistic robustness in multi-agent LLM systems.

CORE: Measuring Multi-Agent LLM Interaction Quality under Game-Theoretic Pressures

Workflows are a fundamental component of automation in enterprise platforms, enabling the orchestration of tasks, data processing, and system integrations. Despite being widely used, building workflows can be complex, often requiring manual configuration through low-code platforms or visual programming tools. To simplify this process, we explore the use of generative foundation models, particularly vision-language models (VLMs), to automatically generate structured workflows from visual inputs. Translating hand-drawn sketches or computer-generated diagrams into executable workflows is challenging due to the ambiguity of free-form drawings, variations in diagram styles, and the difficulty of inferring execution logic from visual elements. To address this, we introduce StarFlow, a framework for generating structured workflow outputs from sketches using vision-language models. We curate a diverse dataset of workflow diagrams -- including synthetic, manually annotated, and real-world samples -- to enable robust training and evaluation. We finetune and benchmark multiple vision-language models, conducting a series of ablation studies to analyze the strengths and limitations of our approach. Our results show that finetuning significantly enhances structured workflow generation, outperforming large vision-language models on this task.

StarFlow: Generating Structured Workflow Outputs From Sketch Images

The way our eyes move while reading can tell us about the cognitive effort required to process the text. In the present study, we use this fact to generate texts with controllable reading ease. Our method employs a model that predicts human gaze patterns to steer language model outputs towards eliciting certain reading behaviors. We evaluate the approach in an eye-tracking experiment with native and non-native speakers of English. The results demonstrate that the method is effective at making the generated texts easier or harder to read, measured both in terms of reading times and perceived difficulty of the texts. A statistical analysis reveals that the changes in reading behavior are mostly due to features that affect lexical processing. Possible applications of our approach include generation of personalized educational material for language learning and text simplification for information accessibility.

Controlling Reading Ease with Gaze-Guided Text Generation

Recent studies suggest that transformer-based vision-language models (VLMs) capture the multimodality of concept processing in the human brain. However, a systematic evaluation exploring different types of VLM architectures and the role played by visual and textual context is still lacking. Here, we analyse multiple VLMs employing different strategies to integrate visual and textual modalities, along with language-only counterparts. We measure the alignment between concept representations by models and existing (fMRI) brain responses to concept words presented in two experimental conditions, where either visual (pictures) or textual (sentences) context is provided. Our results reveal that VLMs outperform the language-only counterparts in both experimental conditions. However, controlled ablation studies show that only for some VLMs, such as LXMERT and IDEFICS2, brain alignment stems from genuinely learning more human-like concepts during _pretraining_, while others are highly sensitive to the context provided at _inference_. Additionally, we find that vision-language encoders are more brain-aligned than more recent, generative VLMs. Altogether, our study shows that VLMs align with human neural representations in concept processing, while highlighting differences among architectures.

Vision-Language Models Align with Human Neural Representations in Concept Processing

Large Language Models (LLMs) are integral to applications such as conversational agents and content creation, where precise control over a model's personality is essential for maintaining tone, consistency, and user engagement. However, prevailing prompt-based or fine-tuning approaches either lack robustness or demand large-scale training data, making them costly and impractical. In this paper, we present PALETTE (Personality Adjustment by LLM SElf-TargeTed quEries), a novel method for personality editing in LLMs. Our approach introduces adjustment queries, where self-referential statements grounded in psychological constructs are treated analogously to factual knowledge, enabling direct editing of personality-related responses. Unlike fine-tuning, PALETTE requires only 12 editing samples to achieve substantial improvements in personality alignment across personality dimensions. Experimental results from both automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that our method enables more stable and well-balanced personality control in LLMs.

Personality Editing for Language Models through Adjusting Self-Referential Queries

Long-form videos that span across wide temporal intervals are highly information redundant and contain multiple distinct events or entities that are often loosely related. Therefore, when performing long-form video question answering (LVQA), all information necessary to generate a correct response can often be contained within a small subset of frames. Recent literature leverage large language models (LLMs) in LVQA benchmarks, achieving exceptional performance, while relying on vision language models (VLMs) to convert all visual content within videos into natural language. Such VLMs often independently caption a large number of frames uniformly sampled from long videos, which is not efficient and can mostly be redundant. Motivated by this inefficiency, we propose LVNet, a modular and training-free framework featuring a novel Hierarchical Keyframe Selector (HKS) that efficiently selects a minimal set of informative frames tailored to each question. LVNet's modularity allows easy integration with existing approaches for more efficient LVQA. We achieve state-of-the-art performance among similarly configured models across four benchmark LVQA datasets: EgoSchema, NExT-QA, IntentQA, VideoMME. Our code will be released publicly.

Too Many Frames, Not All Useful: Efficient Strategies for Long-Form Video QA

We introduce Simplified Topic Retrieval Exploration and Analysis Module for Chinese language (STREAM-ZH), the first topic modeling package to fully support the Chinese language across a broad range of topic models, evaluation metrics, and preprocessing workflows. Tailored to both simplified and traditional Chinese language, our package extends the STREAM topic modeling framework with a curated collection of preprocessed textual datasets in Chinese from which we assess the performance of classical, neural, and clustering topic models using commonly-used intruder, diversity, and coherence metrics. The results of a benchmark analysis bring evidence that within our framework, topic models may generate coherent and diverse topics from datasets in Chinese language, outperforming those generated by topic models using English-translated textual input. Our framework facilitates multilingual accessibility and research in topic modeling applied to Chinese textual data. The code is available at the following link: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/STREAM-ZH-DC5B

STREAM-ZH: Simplified Topic Retrieval Exploration and Analysis Module for Chinese Language

The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis posits that speakers tend to distribute information evenly across words within utterances, minimising surprisal variance. While this hypothesis was verified empirically, prior studies are limited exclusively to textвЂ“only inputs, abstracting away from the perceptual context. In this work, we present the first computational study of UID in grounded settings, estimating surprisal using multilingual visionвЂ“andвЂ“language models over imageвЂ“caption data in 30 languages and visual storytelling data in 14 languages, together spanning 11 families. We find that grounding on perception consistently smooths the distribution of information, lowering both global and local UID metrics across typologically diverse languages compared to text-only settings. In visual narratives, the combination of image and discourse contexts yields additive effects, with the strongest surprisal reductions at unit onsets. Grounded language exhibits greater information uniformity, supporting a context-sensitive formulation of UID. Hence, we take a first step towards modelling the temporal dynamics of information flow in ecologically plausible, multimodal language use.

Is Information Density Uniform when Utterances are Grounded on Perception and Discourse?

As vision-language models (VLMs) are deployed globally, their ability to understand culturally situated knowledge becomes essential. Yet, existing evaluations largely assess static recall or isolated visual grounding, leaving unanswered whether VLMs possess robust and transferable cultural understanding. We introduce `BLEnD-Vis`, a multimodal, multicultural benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness of everyday cultural knowledge in VLMs across linguistic rephrasings and visual modalities. Building on the BLEnD dataset, `BLEnD-Vis` constructs 313 culturally grounded question templates spanning 16 regions and generates three aligned multiple-choice formats: (i) a text-only baseline querying from Region Entity, (ii) an inverted text-only variant (Entity Region), and (iii) a VQA-style version of (ii) with generated images. The resulting benchmark comprises 4,916 images and over 21,000 multiple-choice questions (MCQ) instances, validated through human annotation. `BLEnD-Vis` reveals significant fragility in current VLM cultural knowledge; models exhibit performance drops under linguistic rephrasing. While visual cues often aid performance, low cross-modal consistency highlights the challenges of robustly integrating textual and visual understanding, particularly in lower-resource regions. `BLEnD-Vis` thus provides a crucial testbed for systematically analysing cultural robustness and multimodal grounding, exposing limitations and guiding the development of more culturally competent VLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/Social-AI-Studio/BLEnD-Vis.

BLEnD-Vis: Benchmarking Multimodal Cultural Understanding in Vision Language Models

Large language models have simplified the production of personalized translations reflecting predefined stylistic constraints. However, these systems still struggle when stylistic requirements are implicitly represented by a set of examples, such as texts produced by a specific human translator. In this work, we explore various strategies for personalizing automatically generated translations when few examples are available, with a focus on the challenging domain of literary translation. We begin by determining the feasibility of the task and how style information is encoded within model representations. Then, we evaluate various prompting strategies and inference-time interventions for steering model generations towards a personalized style, with a particular focus on contrastive steering with sparse autoencoder (SAE) latents to identify salient personalization properties. We demonstrate that contrastive SAE steering yields robust style conditioning and translation quality, resulting in higher inference-time computational efficiency than prompting approaches. We further examine the impact of steering on model activations, finding that layers encoding personalization properties are impacted similarly by prompting and SAE steering, suggesting a similar mechanism at play.

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CORE: Measuring Multi-Agent LLM Interaction Quality under Game-Theoretic Pressures

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