Morocco

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can substantially enhance the performance of LLMs on knowledge-intensive tasks. Various RAG paradigms—including vanilla, planning-based, and iterative RAG—all depend on a robust retriever, yet existing retrievers rely heavily on public knowledge and often falter when faced with domain-specific queries. To address these limitations, we introduce DRAGON, a framework that combines a data-construction modeling approach with a scalable synthetic data-generation pipeline, specifically designed to optimize domain-specific retrieval performance and bolster retriever robustness. To evaluate RAG performance on domain-specific RAGs, we propose DRAGONBench, a benchmark spanning 8 domain-specific document collections across 4 distinct fields and featuring a wide spectrum of query complexities, answerability, and hops. Leveraging DRAGON, we generate a large-scale synthetic dataset—encompassing both single-hop and multi-hop queries—to enrich retriever training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that retrievers trained on this data yield significant performance gains and exhibit strong cross-domain generalization. Moreover, when our optimized retrievers are integrated into vanilla, planning-based, and iterative RAG paradigms, we observe consistent end-to-end improvements in system accuracy.

EACL 2026

DRAGON: Domain-specific Robust Automatic Data Generation for RAG Optimization

retriever

data synthesis

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community."<br>

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*





<br>

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

technical paper

#### *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)*<br><br>

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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. 

Cultural evaluation of large language models has become increasingly important, yet current benchmarks often reduce culture to static facts or homogeneous values. This view conflicts with anthropological accounts that emphasize culture as dynamic, historically situated, and enacted in practice. To analyze this gap, we introduce a four-part framework that categorizes how benchmarks frame culture, such as knowledge, preference, performance, or bias. Using this lens, we qualitatively examine 20 cultural benchmarks and identify six recurring methodological issues, including treating countries as cultures, overlooking within-culture diversity, and relying on oversimplified survey formats. Drawing on established anthropological methods, we propose concrete improvements: incorporating real-world narratives and scenarios, involving cultural communities in design and validation, and evaluating models in context rather than isolation. Our aim is to guide the development of cultural benchmarks that go beyond static recall tasks and more accurately capture the responses of the models to complex cultural situations.

Hire Your Anthropologist! Rethinking Culture Benchmarks Through an Anthropological Lens

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive capabilities in various context-based text generation tasks, such as summarization and reasoning; however, their applications in intention-based generation tasks remain underexplored. One such example is revision generation, which requires the generated text to explicitly reflect the writer's actual intentions. Identifying intentions and generating desirable revisions are challenging due to their complex and diverse nature. Although prior work has employed LLMs to generate revisions with few-shot learning, they struggle with handling entangled multi-intent scenarios. While fine-tuning LLMs using intention-based instructions appears promising, it demands large amounts of annotated data, which is expensive and scarce in the revision community. To address these challenges, we propose Intention-Tuning, an intention-adaptive layer-wise LLM fine-tuning framework that dynamically selects a subset of LLM layers to learn the intentions and subsequently transfers their representations to revision generation. Experimental results suggest that Intention-Tuning is effective and efficient on small revision corpora, outperforming several PEFT baselines.

Intention-Adaptive LLM Fine-Tuning for Text Revision Generation

Contemporary advancements in language model reasoning typically require computationally intensive reinforcement learning (RL) and massive datasets, creating barriers for resource-constrained teams. In this work, we demonstrate that high-quality, iterative training on minimal data can rival modern RL approaches. We introduce a resource-efficient framework that combines Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with selective guidance from larger models, iteratively refining solutions through a "reflect, rewrite, repeat" cycle (R). Using Qwen-2.5-7B and Qwen 2.5-Math-7B as base models, our method shows meaningful performance improvements across arithmetic, symbolic and cognitive reasoning benchmarksвЂ”including GSM8K (83.1% в†’ 88.6%), AIME'25@10 (20.0% в†’ 30.0%) and LastLetterConcat (40.7% в†’ 53.3%) problems. The model-agnostic nature of our R framework is further demonstrated through substantial improvements when applied to Mistral and LLaMA-based models. Remarkably, these gains are achieved using mere 700 basic arithmetic training samples, in stark contrast to the hundreds of thousands of examples typically required by RL-based systems. Our results suggest that reasoning improvements need not strictly depend on large-scale data. By emphasizing strategically curated training grounded in foundational principles, we achieve competitive generalization with minimal resource overhead. Our R pipeline also generates high-quality SFT data with high-fidelity reasoning traces as byproduct, further enabling scalable and annotation-free fine-tuning.

Reflect, Rewrite, Repeat: How Simple Arithmetic Enables Advanced Reasoning in Small Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with complex mathematical reasoning, where prose-based generation leads to unverified and arithmetically unsound solutions. Current prompting strategies like Chain of Thought still operate within this unreliable medium, lacking a mechanism for deterministic verification. To address these limitations, we introduce SymCode, a neurosymbolic framework that reframes mathematical problem-solving as a task of verifiable code generation using the SymPy library. We evaluate SymCode on challenging benchmarks, including MATH-500 and OlympiadBench, demonstrating significant accuracy improvements of up to 13.6 percentage points over baselines. Our analysis shows that SymCode is not only more token-efficient but also fundamentally shifts model failures from opaque logical fallacies towards transparent, programmatic errors. By grounding LLM reasoning in a deterministic symbolic engine, SymCode represents a key step towards more accurate and trustworthy AI in formal domains.

SymCode: A Neurosymbolic Approach to Mathematical Reasoning via Verifiable Code Generation

Distilling advanced Large Language Models' instruction-following capabilities into smaller models using a selected subset has become a mainstream approach in model training. While existing synthetic instruction data selection strategies rely mainly on single-dimensional signals (i.e., reward scores, model perplexity), they fail to capture the complexity of instruction-following across diverse fields. Therefore, we investigate more diverse signals to capture comprehensive instruction-response pair characteristics and propose three foundational metrics that leverage Multi-LLMs wisdom, informed by (1) diverse LLM responses and (2) reward model assessment. Building upon base metrics, we propose CROWDSELECT, an integrated metric incorporating a clustering-based approach to maintain response diversity. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our foundation metrics consistently improve performance across 4 base models on MT-bench and Arena-Hard. CROWDSELECT, efficiently incorporating all metrics, achieves state-of-the-art performance in both Full and LoRA fine-tuning, showing improvements of 4.81% on Arena-Hard and 11.1% on MT-bench with Llama-3.2-3b-instruct. We hope our findings will bring valuable insights for future research in this direction.

CROWDSELECT: SyntheticInstruction Data Selection with Multi-LLM Wisdom

We conduct a systematic audit of three widely used reasoning benchmarks, SocialIQa, FauxPas-EAI, and ToMi, and uncover pervasive flaws in both benchmark items and evaluation methodology. Using five LLMs (GPT-{3, 3.5, 4, o1}, and LLaMA 3.1) as diagnostic tools, we identify structural, semantic, and pragmatic issues in benchmark design (e.g., duplicated items, ambiguous wording, and implausible answers), as well as scoring procedures that prioritize output form over reasoning process. Through systematic human annotation and re-evaluation on cleaned benchmark subsets, we find that model scores often improve not due to due to erratic surface wording variations and not to improved reasoning. Infact, further analyses show that model performance is highly sensitive to minor input variations such as context availability and phrasing, revealing that high scores may reflect alignment with format-specific cues rather than consistent inference based on the input. These findings challenge the validity of current benchmark-based claims about reasoning in LLMs, and highlight the need for evaluation protocols that assess reasoning as a process of drawing inference from available information, rather than as static output selection. We release audited data and evaluation tools to support more interpretable and diagnostic assessments of model reasoning.

Garbage In, Reasoning Out? Why Benchmark Scores are Unreliable and What to Do About It

Robustly evaluating the long-form storytelling capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge, as existing benchmarks often lack the necessary scale, diversity, or objective measures. To address this, we introduce WebNovelBench, a novel benchmark specifically designed for evaluating long-form novel generation. WebNovelBench leverages a large-scale dataset of over 4,000 Chinese web novels, framing evaluation as a synopsis-to-story generation task. We propose a multi-faceted framework encompassing eight narrative quality dimensions, assessed automatically via an LLM-as-Judge approach. Scores are aggregated using Principal Component Analysis and mapped to a percentile rank against human-authored works. Our experiments demonstrate that WebNovelBench effectively differentiates between human-written masterpieces, popular web novels, and LLM-generated content. We provide a comprehensive analysis of 24 state-of-the-art LLMs, ranking their storytelling abilities and offering insights for future development. This benchmark provides a scalable, replicable, and data-driven methodology for assessing and advancing LLM-driven narrative generation.

WebNovelBench: Placing LLM Novelists on the Web Novel Distribution

The rapid rise of deepfake technology poses a severe threat to social and political stability by enabling hyper-realistic synthetic media capable of manipulating public perception. However, existing detection methods struggle with two core limitations: (1) modality fragmentation, which leads to poor generalization across diverse and adversarial deepfake modalities; and (2) shallow inter-modal reasoning, resulting in limited detection of fine-grained semantic inconsistencies. To address these, we propose ConLLM (Contrastive Learning with Large Language Models), a hybrid framework for robust multimodal deepfake detection. ConLLM employs a two-stage architecture: stage 1 uses Pre-Trained Models (PTMs) to extract modality-specific embeddings; stage 2 aligns these embeddings via contrastive learning to mitigate modality fragmentation, and refines them using LLM-based reasoning to address shallow inter-modal reasoning by capturing semantic inconsistencies. ConLLM demonstrates strong performance across audio, video, and audio-visual modalities. It reduces audio deepfake EER by up to 50%, improves video accuracy by up to 8%, and achieves approximately 9% accuracy gains in audio-visual tasks. Ablation studies confirm that PTM-based embeddings contribute 9%вЂ“10% consistent improvements across modalities. Our code and data is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ConLLM-0D8A/README.md

Revealing the Truth with ConLLM for Detecting Multi-Modal Deepfakes

Large Language Model (LLM) safety is inherently pluralistic, reflecting variations in moral norms, cultural expectations, and demographic contexts. Yet, existing alignment datasets such as Anthropic-HH and DICES rely on demographically narrow annotator pools, overlooking variation in safety perception across communities. Demo-SafetyBench addresses this gap by modeling demographic pluralism directly at the prompt level, decoupling value framing from responses. In Stage I, prompts from DICES are reclassified into 14 safety domains (adapted from BeaverTails) using Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3, retaining demographic metadata and expanding low-resource domains via Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct with SimHash-based deduplication, yielding 43,050 samples. In Stage II, pluralistic sensitivity is evaluated using LLMs-as-Raters—Gemma-7B, GPT-4o, and LLaMA-2-7B—under zero-shot inference. Balanced thresholds (delta = 0.5, tau = 10) achieve high reliability (ICC = 0.87) and low demographic sensitivity (DS = 0.12), confirming that pluralistic safety evaluation can be both scalable and demographically robust. Code and data available at: https://github.com/usmaann/Demo-SafetyBench

Do Large Language Models Reflect Demographic Pluralism in Safety?

We design, implement, and evaluate adversarial decoding, a new, generic text generation technique that produces readable documents for adversarial objectives such as RAG poisoning, jailbreaking, and evasion of defensive filters. Prior generation methods either produce easily detectable gibberish (even methods that optimize for low perplexity), or cannot handle objectives that include embedding similarity. In particular, they cannot produce readable adversarial documents that (1) are retrieved by RAG systems in response to broad classes of queries, and (2) adversarially influence subsequent generation. We measure the effectiveness of adversarial decoding for different objectives and demonstrate that it outperforms existing methods while producing adversarial documents that cannot be automatically distinguished from natural documents by fluency and readability.

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