Morocco

Supervised learning relies on data annotation which usually is time-consuming and therefore expensive. A longstanding strategy to reduce annotation costs is active learning, an iterative process, in which a human annotates only data instances deemed informative by a model. Research in active learning has made considerable progress, especially with the rise of large language models (LLMs). However, we still know little about how these remarkable advances have translated into real-world applications, or contributed to removing key barriers to active learning adoption. To fill in this gap, we conduct an online survey in the NLP community to collect previously intangible insights on current implementation practices, common obstacles in application, and future prospects in active learning. We also reassess the perceived relevance of data annotation and active learning as fundamental assumptions. Our findings show that data annotation is expected to remain important and active learning to stay highly relevant while benefiting from LLMs. Consistent with a community survey from over 15 years ago, three key challenges yet persist---setup complexity, uncertain cost reduction, and tooling---for which we propose alleviation strategies. We publish an anonymized version of the dataset.

EACL 2026

Reassessing Active Learning Adoption in Contemporary NLP: A Community Survey

data annotation

supervised learning

active learning

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s 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.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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. 

Understanding fine-grained links between documents is crucial for many applications, yet progress is limited by the lack of efficient methods for for data curation. To address this limitation, we introduce a domain-agnostic framework for bootstrapping sentence-level cross-document links from scratch. Our approach (1) generates and validates semi-synthetic datasets of linked documents, (2) uses these datasets to benchmark and shortlist the best-performing linking approaches, and (3) applies the shortlisted methods in large-scale human-in-the-loop annotation of natural text pairs. We apply the framework in two distinct domains вЂ“ peer review and news вЂ“ and show that combining retrieval models with LLMs achieves a 73% human approval rate for suggested links, more than doubling the acceptance of strong retrievers alone. Our framework allows users to produce novel datasets that enable systematic study of cross-document understanding, supporting downstream tasks such as media framing analysis and peer review assessment. All code, data, and annotation protocols are released to facilitate future research.

ABCD-LINK: Annotation Bootstrapping for Cross-Document Fine-Grained Links

LLMs have been shown to be useful for a variety of language tasks, without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. However, these models often struggle with hallucinations and complex reasoning problems due to their autoregressive nature. We propose to address some of these issues, specifically in the area of structured prediction, by combining LLMs with combinatorial inference in an attempt to marry the predictive power of LLMs with the structural consistency provided by inference methods. We perform exhaustive experiments in an effort to understand which prompting strategies can effectively estimate LLM confidence values for use with symbolic inference, and show that, regardless of the prompting strategy, the addition of symbolic inference on top of prompting alone leads to more consistent and accurate predictions. Additionally, we show that calibration and fine-tuning using structured prediction objectives leads to increased performance for challenging tasks, showing that structured learning is still valuable in the era of LLMs.

Mapping the Course for Prompt-based Structured Prediction

Augmenting toxic language data in a controllable and class-specific manner is crucial for improving robustness in toxicity classification, yet remains challenging due to limited supervision and distributional skew. We propose ToxiGAN, a class-aware text augmentation framework that combines adversarial generation with semantic guidance from large language models (LLMs). To address common issues in GAN-based augmentation such as mode collapse and semantic drift, ToxiGAN introduces a two-step directional training strategy and leverages LLM-generated neutral texts as semantic ballast. Unlike prior work that treats LLMs as static generators, our approach dynamically selects neutral exemplars to provide balanced guidance. Toxic samples are explicitly optimized to diverge from these exemplars, reinforcing class-specific contrastive signals. Experiments on four hate speech benchmarks show that ToxiGAN achieves the strongest average performance in both macro-F1 and hate-F1, consistently outperforming traditional and LLM-based augmentation methods. Ablation and sensitivity analyses further confirm the benefits of semantic ballast and directional training in enhancing classifier robustness.

ToxiGAN: Toxic Data Augmentation via LLM-Guided Directional Adversarial Generation

The role of world knowledge has been particularly crucial to predict the discourse connective that marks the discourse relation between two arguments, with language models (LMs) being generally successful at this task. We flip this premise in our work, and instead study the inverse problem of understanding whether discourse connectives can inform LMs about the world. To this end, we present WUGNECTIVES, a dataset of 8,880 stimuli that evaluates LMs' inferences about *novel* entities in contexts where connectives link the entities to particular attributes. On investigating 17 different LMs at various scales, and training regimens, we found that tuning an LM to show reasoning behavior yields noteworthy improvements on most connectives. At the same time, there was a large variation in LMs' overall performance across connective type, with *all* models systematically struggling on connectives that express a concessive meaning. Our findings pave the way for more nuanced investigations into the functional role of language cues as captured by LMs.

Wugnectives: Novel Entity Inferences of Language Models from Discourse Connectives

We systematically examine, analyze, and compare representative creativity measuresвЂ”creativity index, perplexity, syntactic templates, and LLM-as-a-JudgeвЂ”across diverse creative domains, including creative writing, unconventional problem-solving, and research ideation. Our analyses reveal that these metrics exhibit limited consistency, capturing different dimensions of creativity. We highlight key limitations, including the creativity index's focus on lexical diversity, perplexity's sensitivity to model confidence, and the inability of syntactic templates to capture conceptual creativity. Additionally, LLM-as-a-Judge shows instability and bias. Our findings underscore the need for more robust, generalizable evaluation frameworks that better align with human judgments of creativity.

Rethinking Creativity Evaluation: A Critical Analysis of Existing Creativity Evaluations

Building effective tokenizers for multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) requires careful control over language-specific data mixtures. While a tokenizer’s compression performance critically affects the efficiency of LLM training and inference, existing approaches rely on heuristics or costly large-scale searches to determine optimal language ratios. We introduce T okenizer Re gression for Optimal Data Mi X ture (TReX), a regression-based framework that efficiently predicts the optimal data mixture for tokenizer training. TReX trains small-scale proxy tokenizers on random mixtures, gathers their compression statistics, and learns to predict compression performance from data mixtures. This learned model enables scalable mixture search before large-scale tokenizer training, mitigating the accuracy-cost trade-off in multilingual tokenizer design. Tokenizers trained with TReX’s predicted mixtures outperform mixtures based on LLaMA3 and uniform distributions by up to 12% in both in- and out-of-distribution compression efficiency, demonstrating strong scalability, robustness, and practical effectiveness.

TReX: Tokenizer Regression for Optimal Data Mixture

Language identification (LID) is a critical step in curating multilingual LLM pretraining corpora from web crawls. While many studies on LID model training focus on collecting diverse training data to improve performance, low-resource languages -- often limited to single-domain data, such as the Bible -- continue to perform poorly. To resolve these class imbalance and bias issues, we propose a novel supervised contrastive learning (SCL) approach to learn domain-invariant representations for low-resource languages. We show that our approach improves LID performance on out-of-domain data for low-resource languages by 3.2 percentage points, while maintaining its performance for the high-resource languages.

ConLID: Supervised Contrastive Learning for Low-Resource Language Identification

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong multimodal reasoning capability on Visual-Question-Answering (VQA) benchmarks. However, their robustness against textual misinformation remains under-explored. While existing research has extensively studied the effect of misinformation in text-only domains, it is not clear how VLMs arbitrate between contradictory information from different modalities. To bridge the gap, we first propose the ConText-VQA (i.e. Conflicting Text) dataset, consisting of image-question pairs together with systematically generated persuasive prompts that deliberately conflict with visual evidence. Then, a thorough testing framework is designed and executed to benchmark the susceptibility of various models to these conflicting textual inputs. Comprehensive experiments over 11 state-of-the-art VLMs reveal that these models are indeed vulnerable to misleading prompts, often overriding clear visual evidence in favor of the conflicting text, and show an average performance drop of over 48.2% after only one round of persuasive conversation. Our findings highlight a critical limitation in current VLMs and underscore the need for improved robustness against textual manipulation.

Do Images Speak Louder than Words? Investigating the Effect of Textual Misinformation in VLMs

Psychological insights have long shaped pivotal NLP breakthroughs, from attention mechanisms to reinforcement learning and social modeling. As Large Language Models (LLMs) develop, there is a rising consensus that psychology is essential for capturing human-like cognition, behavior, and interaction.This paper reviews how psychological theories can inform and enhance stages of LLM development. Our review integrates insights from six subfields of psychology, including cognitive, developmental, behavioral, social, personality psychology, and psycholinguistics. With stage-wise analysis, we highlight current trends and gaps in how psychological theories are applied. By examining both cross-domain connections and points of tension, we aim to bridge disciplinary divides and promote more thoughtful integration of psychology into NLP research.

A Review of Incorporating Psychological Theories in LLMs

Evaluating creative writing generated by large language models (LLMs) remains challenging because open-ended narratives lack ground truths. Without performant automated evaluation methods, off-the-shelf (OTS) language models are employed as zero-shot judges, yet their reliability is unclear in this context. To address this gap, we introduce LitBench, a large-scale benchmark for creative writing evaluation, featuring a training corpus of 43,827 story pairs and a 2,480-pair test set curated from Reddit. Using LitBench, we benchmark existing LLM judges and train specialized reward models. Our analysis reveals that the strongest OTS judge, Claude-3.7-Sonnet, achieves only 73% agreement with human preferences. In contrast, our trained Bradley-Terry and generative reward models both reach 78% accuracy, outperforming all OTS judges. An online human study further validates our models, showing their rankings of newly generated stories align more closely with human preferences. Our work provides the first reliable benchmark and specialized reward models for creative writing, establishing a crucial foundation for the future development of more capable verifiers.

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ABCD-LINK: Annotation Bootstrapping for Cross-Document Fine-Grained Links

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From Selection to Generation: A Survey of LLM-based Active Learning