Morocco

This paper presents a new open-source web application for simultaneous speech-to-text translation. The system translates live Estonian speech into English, Russian, and Ukrainian text, and also supports English-to-Estonian translation. Our solution uses a cascaded architecture that combines streaming speech recognition with a recently proposed LLM-based simultaneous translation model. The LLM treats translation as a conversation, processing input in small five-word chunks. Our streaming speech recognition achieves a word error rate of 10.2\% and a BLEU score of 26.1 for Estonian-to-English, significantly outperforming existing streaming solutions. The application is designed for real-world use, featuring a latency of only 3 - 6 seconds. The application is available at https://est2eng.vercel.app.

EACL 2026

Simultaneous Speech-to-Text Translation Web Application for Estonian

streaming speech recognition

simultaneous speech translation

large language models

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

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#### *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. 

Entity linking (EL) aims to disambiguate named entities in text by mapping them to the appropriate entities in a knowledge base. However, it is difficult to use some EL methods, as they sometimes have issues in reproducibility due to limited maintenance or the lack of official resources. To address this, we introduce \entitylinkings, a unified library for using and developing entity linking systems through a unified interface. Our library flexibly integrates various candidate retrievers and re-ranking models, making it easy to compare and use any entity linking methods within a unified framework. In addition, it is designed with a strong emphasis on API usability, making it highly extensible, and it supports both command-line tools and APIs. Our code is available on GitHub and distributed via PyPI under the MIT license. The video is available on YouTube.

entity-linkings: A Unified Library for Entity Linking

Bangla is one of the world’s most widely spoken languages, yet it remains significantly under-resourced in natural language processing (NLP). Existing efforts have focused on isolated tasks such as Parts of Speech (POS) tagging and Named Entity Recognition (NER), but comprehensive, integrated systems for core NLP tasks including Shallow Parsing and Dependency Parsing are largely absent. To address this gap, we present BanSuite, a unified Bangla NLP ecosystem developed under the EBLICT project. BanSuite combines a large-scale, manually annotated Bangla Treebank with high-quality pretrained models for POS tagging, NER, shallow parsing, and dependency parsing, achieving strong in-domain baseline performance (POS: 90.16 F1, NER: 90.11 F1, SP: 86.92 F1, DP: 90.27 UAS). The system is accessible through a Python toolkit (Bkit) and a Web Application, providing both researchers and non-technical users with robust NLP functionalities, including tokenization, normalization, lemmatization, and syntactic parsing. In benchmarking against existing Bangla NLP tools and multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs), BanSuite demonstrates superior task performance while maintaining high efficiency in resource usage. By offering the first comprehensive, open, and integrated NLP platform for Bangla, BanSuite lays a scalable foundation for research, application development, and further advancement of low-resource language technologies. A demonstration video is provided to illustrate the system’s functionality in https://youtu.be/3pcfiUQfCoA

BanSuite: A Unified Toolkit and Software Platform for Low-Resource NLP in Bangla (presented virtually)

Digitization of medical records often relies on smartphone photographs of printed reports, producing images degraded by blur, shadows, and other noise. Conventional OCR systems, optimized for clean scans, perform poorly under such real-world conditions. This study evaluates compact multimodal language models as privacy-preserving alternatives for transcribing noisy clinical documents. Using obstetric ultrasound reports written in regionally inflected medical English common to Indian healthcare settings, we compare eight systems in terms of transcription accuracy, noise sensitivity, numeric accuracy, and computational efficiency. Compact multimodal models consistently outperform both classical and neural OCR pipelines. Despite higher computational costs, their robustness and linguistic adaptability position them as viable candidates for on-premises healthcare digitization.

Compact Multimodal Language Models as Robust OCR Alternatives for Noisy Textual Clinical Reports

Generative agents offer promising capabilities for simulating realistic urban behaviors. However, existing methods often rely on static profiles, oversimplified behavioral logic, and synchronous inference pipelines that hinder scalability. We present MobileCity, a lightweight generative-agent framework for city-scale simulation powered by cognitively-grounded generative agents. Each agent acts based on its needs, habits, and obligations, evolving over time. Agents are initialized from survey-based demographic data and navigate a realistic multimodal transportation network spanning multiple types of vehicles. To achieve scalability, we introduce asynchronous batched LLM inference during action selection and a low-token communication mechanism. Experiments with 4,000 agents demonstrate that MobileCity generates more human-like urban dynamics than baselines while maintaining high computational efficiency. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Tony-Yip/MobileCity.

MobileCity: An Efficient Framework for Large-Scale Urban Behavior Simulation

When applying LLMs to real-world enterprise operations, LLMs need to handle proprietary knowledge in small domains of specific operations (micro domains). A previous study shows micro domain-adaptive pre-training (mDAPT) with fewer documents is effective, similarly to DAPT in larger domains. However, it evaluates mDAPT only on multiple-choice questions; thus, its effectiveness for generative tasks in real-world operations remains unknown. We aim to reveal the potential and bottlenecks of mDAPT for generative tasks. To this end, we disentangle the answering process into three subtasks and evaluate the performance of each subtask: (1) eliciting facts relevant to questions from an LLM's own knowledge, (2) reasoning over the facts to obtain conclusions, and (3) composing long-form answers based on the conclusions. We verified mDAPT on proprietary IT product knowledge for real-world questions in IT technical support operations. As a result, mDAPT resolved the elicitation task that the base model struggled with but did not resolve other subtasks. This clarifies mDAPT's effectiveness in the knowledge aspect and its bottlenecks in other aspects. Further analysis empirically shows that resolving the elicitation and reasoning tasks ensures sufficient performance (over 90\%), emphasizing the need to enhance reasoning capability.

Is Micro Domain-Adaptive Pre-Training Effective for Real-World Operations? Multi-Step Evaluation Reveals Potential and Bottlenecks

We evaluate the effectiveness of synthetic data fine-tuning for Semantic Search in a real-world Enterprise Team Formation problem scenario. In this problem, we aim to retrieve the best employee for a given task, given their information regarding abilities, experiences, and other aspects. We evaluate two synthetic data generation strategies: (1) augmenting real-world data with synthetic labels and (2) generating synthetic profiles for employees tailored to specific tasks. To measure the impact of these strategies, we fine-tune a pretrained text embedding model using LoRA and Rank Aggregation techniques. We evaluate the model performance against current SOTA algorithms on a human-curated dataset. Our experiments indicate that training a model that uses a combination of both Synthetic data generation strategies outperforms already established pre-trained models on the Team Formation task, improving the ranking metrics by an average of 30\% in comparison to the best-performing pre-trained model.

Synthetic Data Fine-Tuning for Effective Team Formation in Enterprises

Legal documents have complex document layouts involving multiple nested sections, lengthy footnotes and further use specialized linguistic devices like intricate syntax and domain-specific vocabulary to ensure precision and authority. These inherent characteristics of legal documents make question answering challenging, and particularly so when the answer to the question spans several pages (i.e. requires long-context) and is required to be comprehensive (i.e. a long-form answer). In this paper, we address the challenges of long-context question answering in context of long-form answers given the idiosyncrasies of legal documents. We propose a question answering system that can (a) deconstruct domain-specific vocabulary for better retrieval from source documents, (b) parse complex document layouts while isolating sections and footnotes and linking them appropriately, (c) generate comprehensive answers using precise domain-specific vocabulary. We also introduce a coverage metric that classifies the performance into recall-based coverage categories allowing human users to evaluate the recall with ease. By leveraging the expertise of professionals from fields such as law and corporate tax, we curate a QA dataset. Through comprehensive experiments and ablation studies, we demonstrate the usability and merit of the proposed system.

Long-Context Long-Form Question Answering for Legal Domain

We propose an efficient layer-specific optimization (ELO) method designed to enhance continual pretraining (CP) for specific languages in multilingual large language models (MLLMs). This approach addresses the common challenges of high computational cost and degradation of source language performance associated with traditional CP. The ELO method consists of two main stages: (1) ELO Pretraining, where a small subset of specific layers, identified in our experiments as the critically important first and last layers, are detached from the original MLLM and trained with the target language. This significantly reduces not only the number of trainable parameters but also the total parameters computed during the forward pass, minimizing GPU memory consumption and accelerating the training process. (2) Layer Alignment, where the newly trained layers are reintegrated into the original model, followed by a brief full fine-tuning step on a small dataset to align the parameters. Experimental results demonstrate that the ELO method achieves a training speedup of up to 6.46 times compared to existing methods, while improving target language performance by up to 6.2\% on qualitative benchmarks and effectively preserving source language (English) capabilities.

ELO: Efficient Layer-Specific Optimization for Continual Pretraining of Multilingual LLMs

Despite the state-of-the-art performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) achieved on many tasks, their massive scale often leads to high computational and environmental costs, limiting their accessibility. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods address this challenge by reducing the number of trainable parameters while maintaining strong downstream performance. Despite the increased development in PEFT methods, current evaluations remain limited (in terms of evaluated models and datasets) and difficult to reproduce. To bridge this gap, we introduce PEFT-Bench, a unified end-to-end benchmark for evaluating diverse PEFT methods on autoregressive LLMs. We demonstrate its usage across 27 NLP datasets and 6 PEFT methods. To account for different PEFT training and inference factors, we also introduce the PEFT Soft Score Penalties (PSCP) metric, which takes trainable parameters, inference speed, and training memory usage into account.

PEFT-Bench: A Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Methods Benchmark

Since many real-world documents combine textual and tabular data, robust Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are essential for effectively accessing and analyzing such content to support complex reasoning tasks. Therefore, this paper introduces T2-RAGBench, a benchmark comprising 23,088 question-context-answer triples, designed to evaluate RAG methods on real-world text-and-table data. Unlike typical QA datasets that operate under Oracle-Context settings, T2-RAGBench challenges models to first retrieve the correct context before conducting numerical reasoning. Existing QA datasets containing text-and-table data typically contain context-
dependent questions, which may yield multiple correct answers depending on the provided context. To address this, we transform SOTA
datasets into a context-independent format, validated by experts as 91.3% context-independent questions, enabling reliable RAG evaluation.
Our comprehensive evaluation identifies Hybrid BM25 , a technique that combines dense and sparse vectors, as the most effective approach for
text-and-table data. However, results demonstrate that T2-RAGBench remains challenging even for SOTA LLMs and RAG methods. Further ablation studies examine the impact of embedding models and corpus size on retrieval performance. T2-RAGBench provides a realistic and rigorous benchmark for existing RAG methods on text-and-table data. Code and dataset are available online: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/g4kmu-paper-D5F8/README.md.

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entity-linkings: A Unified Library for Entity Linking

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