United States

Understanding character relationships is essential for interpreting complex narratives and conducting socially grounded AI research. However, manual annotation is time-consuming and low in coverage, while large language models (LLMs) often produce hallucinated or logically inconsistent outputs. We present SymbolicThought, a human-in-the-loop framework that combines LLM-based extraction with symbolic reasoning. The system constructs editable character relationship graphs, refines them using seven types of logical constraints, and enables real-time validation and conflict resolution through an interactive interface. To support logical supervision and explainable social analysis, we release a dataset of 160 interpersonal relationships with corresponding logical structures. Experiments show that SymbolicThought improves annotation accuracy and consistency while significantly reducing time cost, offering a practical tool for narrative understanding, explainable AI, and LLM evaluation. A screencast (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb10-bDCkRU) and demo (http://104.168.96.23:3000/) are available online.

ACL 2026

G-D2 SymbolicThought: Integrating Language Models and Symbolic Reasoning for Consistent and Interpretable Human Relationship Understanding

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. <br>
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) <br><br><br>
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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.

demo

Real-time speech translation with large language models (LLMs) has become feasible in controlled settings such as mobile apps and web browsers, where developers assume wideband audio and client-side echo cancellation. Recent end-to-end full-duplex models further push latency below 200\,ms but remain confined to broadband environments. However, deploying such systems over the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) remains challenging due to narrowband G.711 audio, unpredictable round-trip delays, and absence of client-side signal processing. We present \textbf{WIGVO} (WIGTN Voice-Only), a server-side relay system that enables bidirectional LLM-based speech translation over ordinary telephone calls without requiring app installation or carrier integration. A central contribution is addressing what we term \emph{echo-induced self-reinforcing translation loops}: synthesized speech echoing back through the PSTN gets re-ingested and repeatedly translated. WIGVO solves this through a dual-session architecture with deterministic silence injection and energy-based voice activity detection (VAD) gating. We evaluate WIGVO on 155 PSTN calls (148 instrumented, 147 completed) across three communication modes---voice-to-voice (V2V), text-to-voice (T2V), and full-agent---observing 555\,ms median caller-to-callee latency and 2{,}684\,ms median callee-to-caller latency, zero echo-induced translation loops, and USD\,0.28 per minute cost. The system is deployed at \url{https://wigvo-web-gzjzn35jyq-du.a.run.app} with a live demo and video walkthrough. Evaluation scripts and anonymized call logs are available in the open-source repository.

G-D3 WIGVO: Real-Time Bidirectional Speech Translation over Legacy PSTN Calls via Dual-Session Echo Gating

The rapid adoption of LLM-based agentic systems has produced a rich ecosystem of frameworks (smolagents, LangGraph, AutoGen, CAMEL, LlamaIndex, i.a.). Yet existing benchmarks are model-centric: they fix the agentic setup and do not compare other system components. We argue that implementation decisions substantially impact performance, including choices such as topology, orchestration logic, and error handling. MASEval addresses this evaluation gap as a framework-agnostic library that treats the entire system as the unit of analysis. Through the first systematic system-level comparison across 3 benchmarks, 3 models, and 3 frameworks, we find that framework choice matters as much as model choice. MASEval allows researchers to explore all components of agentic systems, opening new avenues for principled system design, and practitioners to identify the best implementation for their use case. MASEval is available under the MIT licence at https://github.com/parameterlab/MASEval.

G-D4 MASEval: Extending Multi-Agent Evaluation from Models to Systems

Tokenization quality varies significantly across languages, contributing to disparities in LLM performance and cost for speakers of less-resourced languages – a phenomenon known as the "token premium" problem. Despite growing research interest, no existing tool provides a comprehensive intrinsic evaluation of tokenizers paired with interactive visualization. We present TokCollate (pronounced similarly to chocolate), a Python-based evaluation framework combined with a JavaScript visualization interface that addresses this gap. TokCollate implements a wide range of intrinsic metrics, including monolingual measures such as average token length and Rényi/Shannon efficiency, and cross-lingual measures such as vocabulary overlap, Jensen-Shannon divergence, alignment-based Eflomal scores, and length ratios. It further enables analysis across language groups defined by genealogical families, scripts, geographic regions, speaker populations, and estimated data availability. TokCollate is open-source under the MIT license and available on GitHub.

G-D6 TokCollate: A Comprehensive Tool for Tokenizer Evaluation and Visualization across Languages

We present LinkNav, an enhanced experience for reading academic papers which makes explicit connections between related but non-adjacent passages. To create the experience, we instruct a language model to generate questions that may arise while reading a passage and then search for answer-bearing passages elsewhere in the document, forming intra-document connections when answers are found. We confirm that these building blocks work well to power the experience, with an answer detection pipeline that works with high precision, resulting in a reasonable number of such connections being made for a document. On a dataset of academic papers, we find that connected segments are on average ten segments away from each other, making explicit connections that a reader may have otherwise missed.

G-D7 LinkNav: Surfacing Interconnected Information in Scientific Articles

We present rosaOS, an open source agentic operating system for embodied LLMs: interactive, LLM-driven agents coordinate various software tools and physical devices through a single embodied desktop companion, the Reachy Mini robot. Existing LLM-robotic systems are generally built as an intertwined stack, making it difficult to switch hardware, add extra capabilities, or expand to multiple devices without bespoke integration. rosaOS aims to provide an OS-inspired architecture where an agentic kernel manages all task execution and mediates device access, while worker agents invoke tools to perform actions. We adopt industry standard interfaces with MCP for agentic tool-calling and ROS for connecting robots, and demonstrate rosaOS on a multi-device setup including a quadruped robot, a mobile robot, and a smart lamp, all controlled through interactions with Reachy Mini. By incorporating MCP extensibility with ROS hardware interoperability, rosaOS enables a plug-and-play ecosystem to build and evaluate embodied agentic systems. The implementation is available at rosaos.ai.

G-D8 rosaOS: Agentic Operating System for Embodied LLMs

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly used for open-ended idea generation, driven by the expectation that collective interaction will broaden the exploration diversity. However, when and why such collaboration truly expands the solution space remains unclear. We present a systematic empirical study of diversity in MAS-based ideation across three bottom-up levels: model intelligence, agent cognition, and system dynamics. At the model level, we identify a compute efficiency paradox, where stronger, highly aligned models yield diminishing marginal diversity despite higher per-sample quality. At the cognition level, authority-driven dynamics suppress semantic diversity compared to junior-dominated groups. At the system level, group-size scaling yields diminishing returns and dense communication topologies accelerate premature convergence. We characterize these outcomes as collective failures emerging from structural coupling, a process where interaction inadvertently contracts agent exploration and triggers diversity collapse. Our analysis shows that this collapse arises primarily from the interaction structure rather than inherent model insufficiency, highlighting the importance of preserving independence and disagreement when designing MAS for creative tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xtra-Computing/MAS_Diversity.

Diversity Collapse in Multi-Agent LLM Systems: Structural Coupling and Collective Failure in Open-Ended Idea Generation

Despite the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) in code generation, existing evaluations focus on functional correctness or syntactic validity, overlooking how LLMs make critical design choices such as which library or programming language to use.
To fill this gap, we perform the first empirical study of LLMs' preferences for libraries and programming languages when generating code, covering eight diverse LLMs.
We observe a strong tendency to overuse widely adopted libraries such as NumPy; in up to 45\% of cases, this usage is not required and deviates from the ground-truth solutions.
The LLMs we study also show a significant preference toward Python as their default language.
For high-performance project initialisation tasks where Python is not the optimal language, it remains the dominant choice in 58\% of cases, and Rust is not used once.
These results highlight how LLMs prioritise familiarity and popularity over suitability and task-specific optimality;
underscoring the need for targeted fine-tuning, data diversification, and evaluation benchmarks that explicitly measure language and library selection fidelity.

 A Study of LLMs' Preferences for Libraries and Programming Languages

Multilingual ASR systems often fail to generalize to low-resource and linguistically diverse languages while remaining costly to scale. We introduce PUMA, a unified multilingual ASR model that improves low-resource performance with reduced model complexity. PUMA employs a Universal Language Projection (ULP) module that integrates a learnable language token with acoustic representations, enabling language-aware processing through shared parameters. Experiments on diverse African languages show consistent word error rate reductions over strong multilingual baselines, highlighting improved robustness and generalization. Our code is available at the following GitHub URL: https://github.com/ilyes-okd/PUMA

PUMA: Projected Universal Multilingual ASR for Low-Resource Settings. Application to Diverse African Languages

The U.S.~Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) regularly discusses and sets monetary policy, affecting the borrowing and spending decisions of hundreds of millions of people. In this work, we release \textsc{Op-Fed}, a dataset of 1044 human-annotated sentences and their contexts from FOMC transcripts that captures monetary policy stance---specifically, whether an individual FOMC member expresses support for tightening or loosening policy. We faced two major technical challenges in dataset creation: imbalanced classes---we estimate fewer than 8\% of sentences express a non-neutral stance toward monetary policy---and inter-sentence dependence---65\% of instances require context beyond the sentence-level to annotate. To address these challenges, we developed a five-stage hierarchical schema to isolate aspects of opinion, monetary policy, and stance toward monetary policy, as well as the level of context needed. Second, we selected instances to annotate using active learning, approximately doubling the number of positive instances across all schema aspects. Using \textsc{Op-Fed}, we found a top-performing, closed-weight LLM achieves 0.80 zero-shot accuracy in opinion classification but only 0.61 zero-shot accuracy classifying stance toward monetary policy---below our human baseline of 0.89. We expect \textsc{Op-Fed} to be useful for future model training, confidence calibration, and as a seed dataset for future annotation efforts.

Op-Fed: Opinion, Stance, and Monetary Policy Annotations on FOMC Transcripts Using Active Learning

Recent work suggests that LLMs "know what they don't know", positing that hallucinated and factually correct outputs arise from distinct internal processes and can therefore be distinguished using internal signals.
However, hallucinations have multifaceted causes: beyond simple knowledge gaps, they can emerge from training incentives that encourage models to exploit statistical shortcuts or spurious associations learned during pretraining.
In this paper, we argue that when LLMs rely on such learned associations to produce hallucinations, their internal processes are mechanistically similar to those of factual recall, as both stem from strong statistical correlations encoded in the model's parameters.
To verify this, we propose a novel taxonomy categorizing hallucinations into Unassociated Hallucinations (UHs), where outputs lack parametric grounding, and Associated Hallucinations (AHs), which are driven by spurious associations. Through mechanistic analysis, we compare their computational processes and hidden-state geometries with factually correct outputs.
Our results show that hidden states primarily reflect whether the model is recalling parametric knowledge rather than the truthfulness of the output itself. Consequently, AHs exhibit hidden-state geometries that largely overlap with factual outputs, rendering standard detection methods ineffective. In contrast, UHs exhibit distinctive, clustered representations that facilitate reliable detection.

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G-D3 WIGVO: Real-Time Bidirectional Speech Translation over Legacy PSTN Calls via Dual-Session Echo Gating

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