Thailand

Symbolic sentence meaning representations, such as AMR (Abstract Meaning Representation) provide expressive and structured semantic graphs that act as intermediates that simplify downstream NLP tasks. However, the instruction-following capability of large language models (LLMs) offers a shortcut to effectively solve NLP tasks, questioning the utility of semantic graphs. Meanwhile, recent work has also shown the difficulty of using meaning representations merely as a helpful auxiliary for LLMs. We revisit the position of semantic graphs in syntactic simplification, the task of simplifying sentence structures while preserving their meaning, which requires semantic understanding, and evaluate it on a new complex and natural dataset. The AMR-based method that we propose, AMRS$^3$, demonstrates that state-of-the-art meaning representations can lead to easy-to-implement simplification methods with competitive performance and unique advantages in cost, interpretability, and generalization. With AMRS$^3$ as an anchor, we discover that syntactic simplification is a task where semantic graphs are helpful in LLM prompting. We propose AMRCoC prompting that guides LLMs to emulate graph algorithms for explicit symbolic reasoning on AMR graphs, and show its potential for improving LLM on semantic-centered tasks like syntactic simplification.

ACL 2024

Semantic Graphs for Syntactic Simplification: A Revisit from the Age of LLM

syntactic simplification

split and rephrase

meaning representation

sentence splitting

prompting

#### *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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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. 

workshop paper

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This paper presents a model for solving the Multiple Choice Question Answering (MCQA) problem, focusing on the impact of subgraph extraction from a Knowledge Graph on model performance. The proposed method combines textual and graph information by adding linearized subgraphs directly into the main question prompt with separate tokens, enhancing the performance of models working with each modality separately. The study also includes an examination of Large Language Model (LLM) backbones and the benefits of linearized subgraphs and sequence length, with efficient training achieved through fine-tuning with LoRA. The top benchmark, using subgraphs and MPNet, achieved an F1 score of 0.3887. The main limitation of the experiments is the reliance on pre-generated subgraphs/triplets from the graph, and the lack of exploration of in-context learning and prompting strategies with decoder-based architectures.

nlp_enjoyers at TextGraphs-17 Shared Task: Text-Graph Representations for Knowledge Graph Question Answering using all-MPNet

This paper introduces a novel late interaction mechanism for knowledge base question answering (KBQA) systems, combining Graphormer and transformer representations. We conducted extensive experiments, comparing various pooling mechanisms and configurations. Our results demonstrate significant improvements in F1-score compared to traditional baselines. Specifically, we found that attention pooling, in conjunction with linearized graph and question features alongside sub-graph representations, yields the best performance. Our study highlights the importance of advanced interaction mechanisms and the integration of diverse modalities in KBQA systems.

TIGFORMER at TextGraphs-17 Shared Task: A Late Interaction Method for text and Graph Representations in KBQA Classification Task

This work describes an approach to develop Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) system for TextGraphs-17 shared task. The task focuses on the fusion of Large Language Models (LLMs) with Knowledge Graphs (KGs). The goal is to select a KG entity (out of several candidates) which corresponds to an answer given a textual question. Our approach applies LLM to identify the correct answer among the list of possible candidates. We confirm that integrating external information is particularly beneficial when the subject entities are not well-known, and using RAG can negatively impact the performance of LLM on questions related to popular entities, as the retrieved context might be misleading. With our result, we achieved 2nd place in the post-evaluation phase.

JellyBell at TextGraphs-17 Shared Task: Fusing Large Language Models with External Knowledge for Enhanced Question Answering

Argumentative Relation Classification is the task of determining the relationship between two contributions in the context of an argumentative dialogue. Existing models in the literature rely on a combination of lexical features and pre-trained language models to tackle this task; while this approach is somewhat effective, it fails to take into account the importance of pragmatic features such as the illocutionary force of the argument or the structure of previous utterances in the discussion; relying solely on lexical features also produces models that over-fit their initial training set and do not scale to unseen domains. In this work, we introduce ArguNet, a new model for Argumentative Relation Classification which relies on a combination of Dialogue Acts and Dialogue Context to improve the representation of argument structures in opinionated dialogues. We show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on the Kialo benchmark test set, and provide evidence of its robustness in an open-domain scenario.

Exploiting Dialogue Acts and Context to Identify Argumentative Relations in Online Debates

Argument Mining (AM) is the task of automatically analysing arguments, such that the unstructured information contained in them is converted into structured representations. Undercut is a unique structure in arguments, as it challenges the relationship between a premise and a claim, unlike direct attacks which challenge the claim or the premise itself. Undercut is also an important counterargument device as it often reflects the value of arguers. However, undercuts have not received the attention in the filed of AM they should have --- there is neither much corpus data about undercuts, nor an existing AM model that can automatically recognise them.  
In this paper, we present a real-world dataset of arguments with explicitly annotated undercuts, and the first computational model that is able to recognise them. The dataset consists of 400 arguments, containing 326 undercuts. On this dataset, our approach beats a strong baseline in undercut recognition, with F1 = 38.8%, which is comparable to the performance on recognising direct attacks. We also conduct experiments on a benchmark dataset containing no undercuts, and prove that our approach is as good as the state of the art in terms of recognising the overall structure of arguments. Our work pioneers the systematic analysis and computational modelling of undercuts in real-world arguments, setting a foundation for future research in the role of undercuts in the dynamics of argumentation.

Computational Modelling of Undercuts in Real-world Arguments

In this paper, we present our framework for DialAM-2024 TaskA: Identification of Propositional Relations and TaskB: Identification of Illocutionary Relations. The goal of task A is to detect argumentative relations between propositions in an argumentative dialogue. i.e., Inference, Conflict, Rephrase while task B aims to detect illocutionary relations between locutions and argumentative propositions in a dialogue. e.g., Asserting, Agreeing, Arguing, Disagreeing. Noticing the definition of the relations are strict and professional under the context of IAT framework, we meticulously curate prompts which not only incorporate formal definition of the relations, but also exhibit the subtle differences between them. The PTLMs are then fine-tuned on the human-designed prompts to enhance its discrimination capability in classifying different theoretical relations by learning from the human instruction and the ground truth samples. After extensive experiments, a fine-tuned DeBERTa-v3-base model exhibits the best performance among all PTLMs with an F1 score of 78.90% on Task B. It is worth noticing that our framework ranks #2 in the ILO - General official leaderboard.

KnowComp at DialAM-2024: Fine-tuning Pre-trained Language Models for Dialogical Argument Mining with Inference Anchoring Theory

Dialogue Argument Mining(DialAM) is an important branch of Argument Mining(AM). DialAM-2024 is a shared task focusing on dialogue argument mining, which requires us to identify argumentative relations and illocutionary relations among proposition nodes and locution nodes. To accomplish this, we propose a two-stage pipeline, which includes the Two-Step S-Node Prediction Model in Stage 1 and the YA-Node Prediction Model in Stage 2. We also augment the training data in both stages and introduce context in the prediction of Stage 2. We successfully completed the task and achieved good results. Our team KNOWCOMP POKEMON ranked 1st in the ARI Focused score and 4th in the Global Focused score.

KNOWCOMP POKEMON Team at DialAM-2024: A Two-Stage Pipeline for Detecting Relations in Dialogue Argument Mining

In this paper we tackle the shared task DialAM-2024 aiming to annotate dialogue based on the inference anchoring theory (IAT). The task can be split into two parts, identification of propositional relations and identification of illocutionary relations. We propose a pipelined system made up of three parts: (1) locutionary-propositions relation detection, (2) propositional relations detection, and (3) illocutionary relations identification. We fine-tune models independently for each step, and combine at the end for the final system. Our proposed system ranks second overall compared to other participants in the shared task, scoring an average f1-score on both sub-parts of 63.7.

Pungene at DialAM-2024: Identification of Propositional and Illocutionary Relations

Argument retrieval is the task of finding relevant arguments for a given query. While existing approaches rely solely on the semantic alignment of queries and arguments, this first shared task on perspective argument retrieval incorporates perspectives during retrieval, accounting for latent influences in argumentation. We present a novel multilingual dataset covering demographic and socio-cultural (socio) variables, such as age, gender, and political attitude, representing minority and majority groups in society. We distinguish between three scenarios to explore how retrieval systems consider explicitly (in both query and corpus) and implicitly (only in query) formulated perspectives. This paper provides an overview of this shared task and summarizes the results of the six submitted systems. We find substantial challenges in incorporating perspectivism, especially when aiming for personalization based solely on the text of arguments without explicitly providing socio profiles. Moreover, retrieval systems tend to be biased towards the majority group but partially mitigate bias for the female gender. While we bootstrap perspective argument retrieval, further research is essential to optimize retrieval systems to facilitate personalization and reduce polarization.

Overview of PerpectiveArg2024 The First Shared Task on Perspective Argument Retrieval

This paper describes the contribution of team GESIS-DSM to the Perspective Argument Retrieval Task, a task on retrieving socio-culturally relevant and diverse arguments for different user queries. Our experiments and analyses aim to explore the nature of the socio-cultural specialization in argument retrieval: (how) do the arguments written by different socio-cultural groups differ? We investigate the impact of content and style for the task of identifying arguments relevant to a query and a certain demographic attribute. In its different configurations, our system employs sentence embedding representations, arguments generated with Large Language Model, as well as stylistic features. Our final method places third overall in the shared task, and, in comparison, does particularly well in the most difficult evaluation scenario, where the socio-cultural background of the argument author is implicit (i.e. has to be inferred from the text). This result indicates that socio-cultural differences in argument production may indeed be a matter of style.

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