Morocco

Schema linking---the process of aligning natural language questions with database schema elements---is a critical yet underexplored component of Text-to-SQL systems. While recent methods have focused primarily on improving SQL generation, they often neglect the retrieval of relevant schema elements, which can lead to hallucinations and execution failures. In this work, we propose a context-aware bidirectional schema retrieval framework that treats schema linking as a standalone problem. Our approach combines two complementary strategies: table-first retrieval followed by column selection, and column-first retrieval followed by table selection. It is further augmented with techniques such as question decomposition, keyword extraction, and keyphrase extraction. Through comprehensive evaluations on challenging benchmarks such as BIRD and Spider, we demonstrate that our method significantly improves schema recall while reducing false positives. Moreover, SQL generation using our retrieved schema consistently outperforms full-schema baselines and closely approaches oracle performance, all without requiring query refinement. Notably, our method narrows the performance gap between full and perfect schema settings by 50%. Our findings highlight schema linking as a powerful lever for enhancing Text-to-SQL accuracy and efficiency.

EACL 2026

Rethinking Schema Linking: A Context-Aware Bidirectional Retrieval Approach for Text-to-SQL

schema linking

entity matching

text-to-sql

natural language inference

#### *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. 

technical paper

With the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), concerns about potential misuse have emerged. To this end, watermarking has been adapted to LLM, enabling a simple and effective way to detect and monitor generated text. However, while the existing methods can differentiate between watermarked and unwatermarked text with high accuracy, they often face a trade-off between the quality of the generated text and the effectiveness of the watermarking process. In this work, we present a novel type of LLM watermark, Sparse WatermARK (or SpARK), which aims to mitigate this trade-off by applying watermarks to a small subset of generated tokens distributed across the text. To demonstrate this type of watermark, we introduce two novel variants, SpARK-P and SpARK-R, which achieve sparsity by anchoring watermarked tokens to words that have specific Part-of-Speech (POS) tags and specific hash values w.r.t a pseudorandom hash function, respectively. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed watermarking schemes, albeit embarrassingly simple, are incredibly effective, achieving high detectability while generating text that outperforms previous LLM watermarking methods in quality across various tasks. SpARK further advances the watermarking capability for LLMs while maintaining their generated text quality.

SpARK: An Embarrassingly Simple Sparse Watermarking in LLMs with Enhanced Text Quality

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as knowledge discovery tools. Humanistic disciplines like historical linguistics and literary studies have shown interest in this capability. These fields often construct arguments on the basis of distinctions between phenomena like time-period or genre. Such methodological investments complicate reliance on LLMs pretrained over large sets of broadly-collected data. We show that efficient pretraining techniques produce useful models of semantic change over modest historical corpora without allowing potential contamination from anachronistic data. We verify that these trained-from-scratch models better respect historical divisions and are more computationally efficient compared to the standard approach of fine-tuning an existing LLM. We compare the trade-offs in general linguistic fluency versus detecting and characterizing various forms of linguistic change, and provide a pipeline implementation of our approach that can be readily adapted and applied to a wide range of diachronic phenomena.

Pretraining Language Models for Diachronic Linguistic Change Discovery

Code-switching, where speakers alternate between languages within a single utterance, poses unique challenges for language identification (LID). Existing LID models often fail to reliably identify English spoken with the accent of the matrix (dominant) language. We show that finetuning LID models with small amounts of such accented English significantly improves code-switched LID, without degrading performance on standard monolingual speech—a limitation observed with direct finetuning on code-switched utterances. This is achieved via low-rank adaptation (LoRA) on limited accented data, which allows models to adapt efficiently. To better evaluate performance, we introduce LangRank, a metric that captures the relative ranking of identified languages often overlooked by traditional metrics. Our method generalizes across multiple language pairs, including Hindi-English, Bengali-English, Mandarin-English, and Arabic-English, providing robust LID in code-switched multilingual contexts.

Improving Language Identification for Code-Switched Speech: The Pivotal Role of Accented English

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, enabling language agents to excel at single-turn tasks. However, their application to complex, multi-step, and long-horizon tasks remains challenging. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising avenue for addressing these challenges, mainstream approaches typically rely solely on sparse, outcome-based rewards вЂ” a limitation that becomes especially problematic for group-based RL algorithms lacking critic models, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). In such methods, uniformly rewarding or penalizing all actions within a trajectory can lead to training instability and suboptimal policies, because beneficial and detrimental actions are often entangled across multi-step interactions. To address this challenge, we propose SALT, a novel and lightweight framework that provides a finer-grained advantage assignment, derived solely from outcome rewards. We achieve this by constructing a graph from trajectories of the same prompt, which allows us to quantify the quality of each step and assign advantages accordingly. Crucially, SALT is designed as a plug-and-play module that seamlessly integrates with existing group-based RL algorithms вЂ” requiring no modifications to the rollout procedure and introducing negligible computational overhead. Extensive experiments on the WebShop, ALFWorld, and AppWorld benchmarks with various model sizes demonstrate that SALT consistently improves performance. We also conduct a thorough analysis to validate the design choices behind SALT and offer actionable insights.

SALT: Step-level Advantage Assignment for Long-horizon Agents via Trajectory Graph

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled autonomous agents to decompose complex tasks, select appropriate tools, and execute structured workflows. However, a key challenge in this field is the lack of a universal, large-scale, and cross-domain benchmark to systematically evaluate LLMs' ability to reason over and utilize interconnected tools for automation. Existing benchmarks, such as TaskBench, focus on manually curated tool graphs for benchmark generation, which lack scalability and diversity across domains. To address this, we propose UniToolBench, a benchmark that incorporates automated tool graph construction by formulating link prediction as a probabilistic task, instead of relying on categorical LLM outputs. Furthermore, we introduce a confidence-based beam search sampling strategy to select high-confidence tool dependencies, ensuring more structured and semantically coherent subgraphs for evaluation. Through extensive experiments on multiple datasets, we demonstrate that while LLMs show promise in tool selection, significant challenges remain in parameter prediction and handling complex tool dependencies.

UniToolBench: A Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMs in Cross-Domain, Universal Task Automation

Predicting how audiences react to Arabic social media posts requires reasoning beyond textual sentiment: reactions emerge from collective interpretation moderated by engagement dynamics and topical context. We present a multi-task learning (MTL) framework that jointly learns (i) audience reaction classification (Love, Haha, Angry, Sad, Care, Wow), (ii) engagement magnitude regression (six reactions, comments, shares), and (iii) non-engagement detection. On a corpus of 158k Arabic Facebook posts spanning women's rights, gender debates, and economic empowerment, our model achieves a test macro-F1 of 72.4 and weighted-F1 of 89.1.

A Multi-Task Learning Framework for Modeling Engagement and Topic-Sensitive Responses in Arabic Women's Discourse

Ranking is a fundamental component in a wide range of AI applications. However, large language models (LLMs) remain unstable on long-context ranking. Sliding-window processing is costly and listwise prompting over full candidates still yields inconsistent orders. We show that sampling alone, even with selection-based methods, cannot stabilize ranking because LLM consistency decomposes into within-list order and cross-list preference, in which a single stochastic process cannot align. To address this, we introduce Self-Sorting (SS), which generates m candidate lists and performs n selection-time re-rankings over those lists. SS fuses explicit within-list positions with implicit cross-list preferences to score entities and return a top-k set. Experimental results on five widely used ranking benchmarks show significant improvements in nDCG@{1,5,10}, highlighting the critical role of implicit consistency.

Beyond Sampling: Self-Sorting for Long-Context Ranking

Domain-specific Named Entity Recognition (NER) often requires data augmentation due to the scarcity of annotated corpora. Guidance Data Augmentation (GDA), a method utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) to decompose sentences into abstract components, can lead to over-abstraction, resulting in undefined entity tags and sentences lacking domain-specific vocabulary. In this work, we propose Reflective GDA (R-GDA), a framework that introduces a multi-agent feedback loop to enhance augmentation quality. R-GDA incorporates two distinct agents: a **Guidance Refiner (GR)**, which assesses the initial abstraction to prevent over-generalization, and an **Augmentation Calibrator (AC)**, which validates the final generated sample for domain-fidelity and tag integrity. On the SciERC and NCBI-disease datasets, R-GDA improves F1-Score, validating its effectiveness. Concurrently, it achieves low BERTScore in most cases, indicating greater sentence diversity. For the FIN dataset, it achieves performance comparable to the GDA baseline. R-GDA consistently prevents errors regarding domain-specific tags, demonstrating that the reflective feedback mechanism enhances data fidelity by mitigating critical generation errors.

R-GDA: Reflective Guidance Data Augmentation with Multi-Agent Feedback for Domain-Specific Named Entity Recognition

Historically, LLMs have been trained using either autoregressive (AR) or masked language modeling (MLM) objectives, with AR models gaining dominance in recent years. However, AR models are inherently incapable of masked infilling, which is the ability to predict masked tokens between past and future context. In contrast, MLM models suffer from intrinsic computational inefficiencies during both training and inference that hinder their scalability. This work introduces MARIA (Masked and Autoregressive Infilling Architecture), a novel approach that leverages the strengths of both paradigms to achieve state-of-the-art masked infilling performance. MARIA combines a pre-trained MLM and AR model by training a linear decoder that takes their concatenated hidden states as input. This minimal modification enables the AR model to perform infilling while retaining its inherent advantages in terms of faster inference with KV caching. Our results demonstrate that MARIA significantly outperforms existing methods, namely discrete diffusion models, on masked infilling tasks.

Enabling Autoregressive Models to Fill In Masked Tokens

Safety policies are critical for content moderation of online communities, but crafting them remains costly and labor-intensive. We present Deep Policy Research (DPR), an agentic framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) and web search to automatically construct domain-specific safety policies. Given only a high-level domain specification, DPR iteratively proposes subtopics, performs open-domain search, and distills retrieved information into structured policy rules. We evaluate DPR across two domains: (1) online content moderation using the OpenAI content moderation dataset and (2) multimodal advertisement moderation with an in-house benchmark dataset. Our results show that DPR-generated policies consistently outperform simple baselines and are on par with human written policies in terms of effectiveness, suggesting that LLM-based open-domain research offers a promising avenue for bootstrapping safety policies across diverse applications.

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SpARK: An Embarrassingly Simple Sparse Watermarking in LLMs with Enhanced Text Quality

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