United States

We present three innovations in tokenization and subword segmentation. First, we propose to use unsupervised morphological analysis with Morfessor as pre-tokenization. Second, we present an algebraic method for obtaining subword embeddings grounded in a word embedding space. Based on that, we design a novel subword segmentation algorithm that uses the embeddings, ensuring that the procedure considers lexical meaning. Third, we introduce an efficient segmentation algorithm based on a subword bigram model that can be initialized with the lexically aware segmentation method to avoid using Morfessor and large embedding tables at inference time. We evaluate the proposed approaches using two intrinsic metrics and measure their performance on two downstream tasks: part-of-speech tagging and machine translation. Our experiments show significant improvements in the morphological plausibility of the segmentation when evaluated using segmentation precision on morpheme boundaries and improved Rényi efficiency in 8 languages. Although the proposed tokenization methods do not have a large impact on automatic translation quality, we observe consistent performance gains in the arguably more morphological task of part-of-speech tagging.

EMNLP 2024

Lexically Grounded Subword Segmentation

speculative sampling

inference acceleration

#### *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)* 

<html><button style="display: inline-flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; white-space: nowrap; border-radius: 9999px; font-weight: bold; background: #7c3aed; color: white; font-family: 'Space Grotesk', sans-serif; height: 40px; font-size: 16px; padding: 0 20px; border: none; cursor: pointer" onclick="window.open('https://underline.io/events/522/reception','_blank')">Go to Workshops and Tutorials Program</button></html>

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline - subject line "Welcome to EACL 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://2026.eacl.org/registration/) first.

**Online Registration Form**: https://acl.swoogo.com/eacl2026

Registration Required

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. 

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPROgxjLAC96AJL7Ugy0tEnYm7dkrbHt/view?usp=sharing)

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.emnlp.org/registration/).** The EMNLP 2024 event page on Underline will be open to public one week prior to the event.

Please register!

EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

Recent studies highlight the effectiveness of using in-context learning (ICL) to steer large language models (LLMs) in processing tabular data, a challenging task given the structured nature of such data. Despite advancements in performance, the fairness implications of these methods are less understood. This study investigates how varying demonstrations within ICL prompts influence the fairness outcomes of LLMs. Our findings reveal that deliberately including minority group samples in prompts significantly boosts fairness without sacrificing predictive accuracy. Further experiments demonstrate that the proportion of minority to majority samples in demonstrations affects the trade-off between fairness and prediction accuracy. Based on these insights, we introduce a mitigation technique that employs clustering and evolutionary strategies to curate a diverse and representative sample set from the training data. This approach aims to enhance both predictive performance and fairness in ICL applications. Experimental results validate that our proposed method dramatically improves fairness across various metrics, showing its efficacy in real-world scenarios.

Strategic Demonstration Selection for Improved Fairness in LLM In-Context Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful zero-shot assessors used in real-world situations such as assessing written exams and benchmarking systems. Despite these critical applications, no existing work has analyzed the vulnerability of judge-LLMs to adversarial manipulation. This work presents the first study on the adversarial robustness of assessment LLMs, where we demonstrate that short universal adversarial phrases can be concatenated to deceive judge LLMs to predict inflated scores. Since adversaries may not know or have access to the judge-LLMs, we propose a simple surrogate attack where a surrogate model is first attacked, and the learned attack phrase then transferred to unknown judge-LLMs. We propose a practical algorithm to determine the short universal attack phrases and demonstrate that when transferred to unseen models, scores can be drastically inflated such that irrespective of the assessed text, maximum scores are predicted. It is found that judge-LLMs are significantly more susceptible to these adversarial attacks when used for absolute scoring, as opposed to comparative assessment. Our findings raise concerns on the reliability of LLM-as-a-judge methods, and emphasize the importance of addressing vulnerabilities in LLM assessment methods before deployment in high-stakes real-world scenarios.

Is LLM-as-a-Judge Robust? Investigating Universal Adversarial Attacks on Zero-shot LLM Assessment

Reasoning is one crucial capability in Large Language Models (LLMs), allowing them to perform complex tasks such as solving math problems and multi-step planning. While reasoning capability can emerge in larger models, smaller ones usually have to rely on distillation to transfer this capability from a larger model. However, recent efforts to distill reasoning capabilities have focused mainly on English, leaving multilingual distillation underexplored. To address this gap, this paper examines existing English reasoning distillation methods that utilize a variety of positive rationales in multilingual settings and proposes d-CoT-nR, a novel approach that incorporates incorrect rationales as additional guidance. Empirical results from multilingual high-school examinations show that d-CoT-nR significantly surpasses the baseline, improving accuracy in unseen languages and correctness in step-by-step reasoning.

An Empirical Study of Multilingual Reasoning Distillation for Question Answering

We posit that large language models (LLMs) should be capable of expressing their intrinsic uncertainty in natural language. For example, if the LLM is equally likely to output two contradicting answers to the same question, then its generated response should reflect this uncertainty by hedging its answer (e.g., "I’m not sure, but I think..."). We formalize faithful response uncertainty based on the gap between the model's intrinsic confidence in the assertions it makes and the decisiveness by which they are conveyed. This example-level metric reliably indicates whether the model reflects its uncertainty, as it penalizes both excessive and insufficient hedging. We evaluate a variety of aligned LLMs at faithfully conveying uncertainty on several knowledge-intensive question answering tasks. Our results provide strong evidence that modern LLMs are poor at faithfully conveying their uncertainty, and that better alignment is necessary to improve their trustworthiness.

Can Large Language Models Faithfully Express Their Intrinsic Uncertainty in Words?

Tools for translating natural language into code promise natural, open-ended interaction with databases, web APIs, and other software systems. However, this promise is complicated by the diversity and continual development of these systems, each with its own interface and distinct set of features. Building a new language-to-code translator, even starting with a large language model (LM), typically requires annotating a large set of natural language commands with their associated programs. In this paper, we describe ICIP (In-Context Inverse Programming), a method for bootstrapping a language-to-code system using mostly (or entirely) unlabeled programs written using a potentially unfamiliar (but human-readable) library or API. ICIP uses a pre-trained LM to assign candidate natural language descriptions to these programs, then iteratively refines the descriptions to ensure global consistency. Across nine different application domains from the Overnight and Spider benchmarks and text-davinci-003 and CodeLlama-7b-Instruct models, ICIP outperforms a number of prompting baselines. Indeed, in a “nearly unsupervised” setting with only a single annotated program and 100 unlabeled examples, it achieves up to 85% of the performance of a fully supervised system.

Language-to-Code Translation with a Single Labeled Example

LLMs can help humans working with long documents, but are known to hallucinate. *Attribution* can increase trust in LLM responses: The LLM provides evidence that supports its response, which enhances verifiability. Existing approaches to attribution have only been evaluated in RAG settings, where the initial retrieval confounds LLM performance. This is crucially different from the long document setting, where retrieval is not needed, but could help. Thus, a long document specific evaluation of attribution is missing. To fill this gap, we present LAB, a benchmark of 6 diverse long document tasks with attribution, and experiments with different approaches to attribution on 5 LLMs of different sizes. 

We find that *citation*, i.e. response generation and evidence extraction in one step, performs best for large and fine-tuned models, while additional retrieval can help for small, prompted models. We investigate whether the "Lost in the Middle'' phenomenon exists for attribution, but do not find this. We also find that evidence quality can predict response quality on datasets with simple responses, but not so for complex responses, as models struggle with providing evidence for complex claims. We release code and data for further investigation. [Link](https://github.com/UKPLab/arxiv2024-attribute-or-abstain)

Attribute or Abstain: Large Language Models as Long Document Assistants

Adopting human and large language models (LLM) as judges (*a.k.a* human- and LLM-as-a-judge) for evaluating the performance of LLMs has recently gained attention. Nonetheless, this approach concurrently introduces potential biases from human and LLMs, questioning the reliability of the evaluation results. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that is free from referencing groundtruth annotations for investigating **Misinformation Oversight Bias**, **Gender Bias**, **Authority Bias** and **Beauty Bias** on LLM and human judges. We curate a dataset referring to the revised Bloom's Taxonomy and conduct thousands of evaluations. Results show that human and LLM judges are vulnerable to perturbations to various degrees, and that even the cutting-edge judges possess considerable biases. We further exploit these biases to conduct attacks on LLM judges. We hope that our work can notify the community of the bias and vulnerability of human- and LLM-as-a-judge, as well as the urgency of developing robust evaluation systems.

Humans or LLMs as the Judge? A Study on Judgement Bias

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a promising solution to align large language models (LLMs) more closely with human values. Off-policy preference optimization, where the preference data is obtained from other models, is widely adopted due to its cost efficiency and scalability. However, off-policy preference optimization often suffers from a distributional gap between the policy used for data collection and the target policy, leading to suboptimal optimization. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy to mitigate this problem by simulating on-policy learning with off-policy preference data. Our Weighted Preference Optimization (WPO) method adapts off-policy data to resemble on-policy data more closely by reweighting preference pairs according to their probability under the current policy. This method not only addresses the distributional gap problem but also enhances the optimization process without incurring additional costs. We validate our method on instruction following benchmarks including Alpaca Eval 2 and MT-bench. WPO not only outperforms Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) by up to 5.6% on Alpaca Eval 2 but also establishes a remarkable length-controlled winning rate against GPT-4-turbo of 76.7% based on Gemma-2-9b-it. We release the code and models at https://github.com/wzhouad/WPO.

WPO: Enhancing RLHF with Weighted Preference Optimization

Unsupervised parsing, also known as grammar induction, aims to infer syntactic structure from raw text. Recently, binary representation has exhibited remarkable information-preserving capabilities at both lexicon and syntax levels. In this paper, we explore the possibility of leveraging this capability to deduce parsing trees from raw text, relying solely on the implicitly induced grammars within models. To achieve this, we upgrade the bit-level CKY from zero-order to first-order to encode the lexicon and syntax in a unified binary representation space, switch training from supervised to unsupervised under the contrastive hashing framework, and introduce a novel loss function to impose stronger yet balanced alignment signals. Our model shows competitive performance on various datasets, therefore, we claim that our method is effective and efficient enough to acquire high-quality parsing trees from pre-trained language models at a low cost.

On Eliciting Syntax from Language Models via Hashing

Alignment is a crucial step to enhance the instruction-following and conversational abilities of language models. Despite many recent works proposing new algorithms, datasets, and training pipelines, there is a lack of comprehensive studies measuring the impact of various design choices throughout the whole training process. We first conduct a rigorous analysis over a three-stage training pipeline consisting of supervised fine-tuning, offline preference learning, and online preference learning. We have found that using techniques like sequence packing, loss masking in SFT, increasing the preference dataset size in DPO, and online DPO training can significantly improve the performance of language models. We then train from Gemma-2b-base and LLama-3-8b-base, and find that our best models exceed the performance of the official instruct models tuned with closed-source data and algorithms. Our code and models can be found at https://github.com/Columbia-NLP-Lab/LionAlignment.

Downloads

Next from EMNLP 2024

Strategic Demonstration Selection for Improved Fairness in LLM In-Context Learning

Similar lecture

Probabilistic Bilingual Subword Segmentation with Latent Subword Alignment