United States

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human expectations requires high-quality instructional dialogues, which can be achieved by raising diverse, in-depth, and insightful instructions that deepen interactions. Existing methods target instructions from real instruction dialogues as a learning goal and fine-tune a user simulator for posing instructions. However, the user simulator struggles to implicitly model complex dialogue flows and pose high-quality instructions. In this paper, we take inspiration from the cognitive abilities inherent in human learning and propose the explicit modeling of complex dialogue flows through instructional strategy reuse. Specifically, we first induce high-level strategies from various real instruction dialogues. These strategies are applied to new dialogue scenarios deductively, where the instructional strategies facilitate high-quality instructions. Experimental results show that our method can generate diverse, in-depth, and insightful instructions for a given dialogue history. The constructed multi-turn instructional dialogues can outperform competitive baselines on the downstream chat model.

EMNLP 2024

Inductive-Deductive Strategy Reuse for Multi-Turn Instructional Dialogues

interpretability

language models

transformer

#### *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. 

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## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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To handle the vast amounts of qualitative data produced in corporate climate communication, stakeholders increasingly rely on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. However, a significant gap remains in evaluating domain-specific information retrieval -- the basis for answer generation. To address this challenge, this work simulates the typical tasks of a sustainability analyst by examining 30 sustainability reports with 16 detailed climate-related questions. As a result, we obtain a dataset with over 8.5K unique question-source-answer pairs labeled by different levels of relevance. Furthermore, we develop a use case with the dataset to investigate the integration of expert knowledge into information retrieval with embeddings. Although we show that incorporating expert knowledge works, we also outline the critical limitations of embeddings in knowledge-intensive downstream domains like climate change communication.

ClimRetrieve: A Benchmarking Dataset for Information Retrieval from Corporate Climate Disclosures

We develop quantum RNNs with cells based on Parametrised Quantum Circuits (PQCs). PQCs can provide a form of hybrid quantum-classical computation where the input and the output is in the form of classical data. The previous "hidden" state is the quantum state from the previous time-step, and an angle encoding is used to define a (non-linear) mapping from a classical word embedding into the quantum Hilbert space. Measurements of the quantum state provide classical statistics which are used for classification. We report results which are competitive with various RNN baselines on the Rotten Tomatoes dataset, as well as emulator results which demonstrate the feasibility of running such models on quantum hardware.

Quantum Recurrent Architectures for Text Classification

Knowledge distillation (KD) is known as a promising solution to compress large language models (LLMs) via transferring their knowledge to smaller models. During this process, white-box KD methods usually minimize the distance between the output distributions of the two models so that more knowledge can be transferred. However, in the current white-box KD framework, the output distributions are from the respective output spaces of the two models, using their own prediction heads. We argue that the space discrepancy will lead to low similarity between the teacher model and the student model on both representation and distribution levels. Furthermore, this discrepancy also hinders the KD process between models with different vocabularies, which is common for current LLMs. To address these issues, we propose a dual-space knowledge distillation (DSKD) framework that unifies the output spaces of the two models for KD. On the basis of DSKD, we further develop a cross-model attention mechanism, which can automatically align the representations of the two models with different vocabularies. Thus, our framework is not only compatible with various distance functions for KD (e.g., KL divergence) like the current framework, but also supports KD between any two LLMs regardless of their vocabularies. Experiments on task-agnostic instruction-following benchmarks show that DSKD significantly outperforms the current white-box KD framework with various distance functions, and also surpasses existing KD methods for LLMs with different vocabularies.

Dual-Space Knowledge Distillation for Large Language Models

Multilingual pre-trained language models (mPLMs) have demonstrated notable effectiveness in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer tasks. Specifically, they can be fine-tuned solely on tasks in the source language and subsequently applied to tasks in the target language. However, for low-resource languages unseen during pre-training, relying solely on zero-shot language transfer often yields sub-optimal results. One common strategy is to continue training PLMs using masked language modeling objectives on the target language. Nonetheless, this approach can be inefficient due to the need to adjust all parameters for language adaptation. In this paper, we propose a more efficient solution: soft-prompt tuning for language adaptation. Our experiments demonstrate that with carefully designed prompts, soft-prompt tuning enables mPLMs to achieve effective zero-shot cross-lingual transfer to downstream tasks in previously unseen languages. Notably, we found that prompt tuning outperforms continuously trained baselines on two text classification benchmarks, encompassing 20 low-resource languages while utilizing a mere 0.28% of the tuned parameters. These results underscore the superior adaptability of mPLMs to previously unseen languages afforded by soft-prompt tuning compared to traditional fine-tuning methods.

Efficient Unseen Language Adaptation for Multilingual Pre-Trained Language Models

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown significant potential in assisting medical diagnosis by leveraging extensive biomedical datasets. However, the advancement of medical image understanding and reasoning critically depends on building high-quality visual instruction data, which is costly and labor-intensive to obtain, particularly in the medical domain. To mitigate this data-starving issue, we introduce Self-Training Large Language and Vision Assistant for Medical (STLLaVA-Med). The proposed method is designed to train a policy model (an LVLM) capable of auto-generating medical visual instruction data to improve data efficiency, guided through Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Specifically, a more powerful and larger LVLM (e.g., GPT-4o) is involved as a biomedical expert to oversee the DPO fine-tuning process on the auto-generated data, encouraging the policy model to align efficiently with human preferences. We validate the efficacy and data efficiency of STLLaVA-Med across three major medical Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmarks, demonstrating competitive zero-shot performance with the utilization of only 9% of the medical data.

Self-Training Large Language and Vision Assistant for Medical

Generally, the ${\it decoder-only}$ large language models (LLMs) are adapted to context-aware neural machine translation (NMT) in a concatenating way, where LLMs take the concatenation of the source sentence (i.e., intra-sentence context) and the inter-sentence context as the input, and then to generate the target tokens sequentially. This adaptation strategy, i.e., concatenation mode, considers intra-sentence and inter-sentence contexts with the same priority, despite an apparent difference between the two kinds of contexts. In this paper, we propose an alternative adaptation approach, named ${\bf D}$ecoding-${\bf e}$nhanced ${\bf M}$ulti-phase ${\bf P}$rompt ${\bf T}$uning (DeMPT), to make LLMs discriminately model and utilize the inter- and intra-sentence context and more effectively adapt LLMs to context-aware NMT. First, DeMPT divides the context-aware NMT process into three separate phases. During each phase, different continuous prompts are introduced to make LLMs discriminately model various information. Second, DeMPT employs a heuristic way 
to further discriminately enhance the utilization of the source-side inter- and intra-sentence information at the final decoding phase. Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms the concatenation method, and further improves the performance of LLMs in discourse modeling.

DeMPT: Decoding-enhanced Multi-phase Prompt Tuning for Making LLMs Be Better Context-aware Translators

In conversational AI, large-scale models excel in various tasks but struggle with target-driven conversation planning. Current methods, such as chain-of-thought reasoning and tree-search policy learning techniques, either neglect plan rationality or require extensive human simulation procedures. Addressing this, we propose a novel two-stage framework, named EnPL, to improve the LLMs' capability in planning conversations towards designated targets, including (1) distilling natural language plans from target-driven conversation corpus and (2) generating new plans with demonstration-guided in-context learning. Specifically, we first propose a filter approach to distill a high-quality plan dataset, ConvPlan (Resources of this paper can be found at https://github.com/pandazzh2020/ConvPlan). With the aid of corresponding conversational data and support from relevant knowledge bases, we validate the quality and rationality of these plans. Then, these plans are leveraged to help guide LLMs to further plan for new targets. Empirical results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the planning ability of LLMs, especially in target-driven conversations. Furthermore, EnPL is demonstrated to be quite effective in collecting target-driven conversation datasets and enhancing response generation, paving the way for constructing extensive target-driven conversational models.

Thoughts to Target: Enhance Planning for Target-driven Conversation

The abstract inference capability of the Language Model plays a pivotal role in boosting its generalization and reasoning prowess in Natural Language Inference (NLI). Entailment graphs are crafted precisely for this purpose, focusing on learning entailment relations among predicates. Yet, prevailing approaches overlook the *polysemy* and *hierarchical nature of concepts* during entity conceptualization. This oversight disregards how arguments might entail differently across various concept levels, thereby missing potential entailment connections. To tackle this hurdle, we introduce the *concept pyramid* and propose the HiCon-EG (Hierarchical Conceptual Entailment Graph) framework, which organizes arguments hierarchically, delving into entailment relations at diverse concept levels. By learning entailment relationships at different concept levels, the model is guided to better understand concepts so as to improve its abstract inference capabilities. Our method enhances scalability and efficiency in acquiring common-sense knowledge through leveraging statistical language distribution instead of manual labeling, Experimental results show that entailment relations derived from HiCon-EG significantly bolster abstract detection tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/SXUCFN/HiCon-EG

HCEG: Improving the Abstraction Ability of Language Models with Hierarchical Conceptual Entailment Graphs

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are trained on parallel corpora with unbalanced word frequency distribution. As a result, NMT models are likely to prefer high-frequency words than low-frequency ones despite low-frequency word may carry the crucial semantic information, which may hamper the translation quality once they are neglected. The objective of this study is to enhance the translation of meaningful but low-frequency words. Our general idea is to optimize the translation of low-frequency words through knowledge distillation. Specifically, we employ a low-frequency teacher model that excels in translating low-frequency words to guide the learning of the student model. To remain the translation quality of high-frequency words, we further introduce a dual-teacher distillation framework, leveraging both the low-frequency and high-frequency teacher models to guide the student model's training. Our single-teacher distillation method already achieves a +0.64 BLEU improvements over the state-of-the-art method on the WMT 16 English-to-German translation task on the low-frequency test set. While our dual-teacher framework leads to +0.87, +1.24, +0.47, +0.87 and +0.86 BLEU improvements on the IWSLT 14 German-to-English, WMT 16 English-to-German, WMT 15 English-to-Czech, WMT 14 English-to-French and WMT 18 Chinese-to-English tasks respectively compared to the baseline, while maintaining the translation performance of high-frequency words.

Dual-teacher Knowledge Distillation for Low-frequency Word Translation

Unsupervised multimodal machine translation (UMMT) aims to leverage vision information as a pivot between two languages to achieve better performance on low-resource language pairs. However, there is presently a challenge: how to handle alignment between distant language pairs (DLPs) in UMMT. To this end, this paper proposes a visual pivoting UMMT method for DLPs. Specifically, we first construct a dataset containing two DLPs, including English-Uyghur and Chinese-Uyghur. We then apply the visual pivoting method for both to pre-training and fine-tuning, and we observe that the images on the encoder and decoder of UMMT have noticeable effects on DLPs.
Finally, we introduce informative multi-granularity image features to facilitate further alignment of the latent space between the two languages. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms several baselines on DLPs and close language pairs (CLPs).

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