Morocco

We present a novel approach to bias mitigation in large language models (LLMs) by applying steering vectors to modify model activations in forward passes. We compute 8 steering vectors, each corresponding to a different social bias axis, such as age, gender, or race, on a training subset of the BBQ dataset and compare the effectiveness of these to 3 additional bias mitigation methods across 4 datasets. When optimized on the BBQ dataset, our individually tuned steering vectors achieve average improvements of 12.8% on BBQ, 8.3% on CLEAR-Bias, and 1% on StereoSet, and show improvements over prompting and Self-Debias in all cases, and improvements over fine-tuning in 12 out of 17 evaluations. In addition, steering vectors showed the lowest impact on MMLU scores of the four bias mitigation methods tested. The work presents the first systematic investigation of steering vectors for bias mitigation, and we demonstrate that they are a powerful and computationally efficient strategy for reducing bias in LLMs, with broader implications for enhancing AI safety.

EACL 2026

Shifting Perspectives: Steering Vectors for Robust Bias Mitigation in LLMs

steering vectors

ai safety

social bias

#### *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. 

poster

In today's rapidly expanding data landscape, knowledge extraction from unstructured text is vital for real-time analytics, temporal inference, and dynamic memory frameworks. However, traditional static knowledge graph (KG) construction often overlooks the dynamic and time-sensitive nature of real-world data, limiting adaptability to continuous changes. Moreover, recent zero- or few-shot approaches that avoid domain-specific fine-tuning or reliance on prebuilt ontologies often suffer from instability across multiple runs, as well as incomplete coverage of key facts. To address these challenges, we introduce ATOM (AdapTive and OptiMized), a few-shot and scalable approach that builds and continuously updates Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) from unstructured texts. ATOM splits input documents into minimal, self-contained вЂњatomicвЂќ facts, improving extraction exhaustivity and stability. From these atomic facts, atomic KGs are derived and then merged in parallel. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that ATOM maintains high exhaustivity, achieves stability across multiple runs, and outperforms baseline methods while ensuring low latency and high scalability for large-scale deployments.

ATOM: AdapTive and OptiMized dynamic temporal knowledge graph construction using LLMs

The impact of human label variation (HLV) on model fairness is an unexplored topic. This paper examines the interplay by comparing training on majority-vote labels with a range of HLV methods. Our experiments show that without explicit debiasing, HLV training methods have a positive impact on fairness.

On the Interplay between Human Label Variation and Model Fairness

Biomedical Named Entity Recognition (NER) consists of identifying and classifying important biomedical entities mentioned in text. Traditionally, biomedical NER has heavily relied on domain-specific pre-trained language models; particularly variant of BERT models. With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), some studies have evaluated their performance on biomedical NLP tasks. These studies consistently show that, despite their general capabilities, LLMs still fall short compared to specialized BERT-based models for biomedical NER. However, as LLMs continue to advance at a remarkable pace, natural questions arise: Are they still far behind, or are they starting to be competitive? In this study, we investigate the performance of recent LLMs across multiple biomedical NER datasets under both clean and noisy dataset conditions. Our findings reveal that LLMs are progressively closing the performance gap with BERT-based models and demonstrate particular strengths in low-data settings. Moreover, our results suggest that in-context learning with LLMs exhibits a notable degree of robustness to noise, making them a promising alternative in settings where labeled data is scarce or noisy.

Where do LLMs currently stand on biomedical NER in both clean and noisy settings ?

This study investigates the internal information flow of large language models (LLMs) while performing chain-of-thought (CoT) style reasoning. Specifically, with a particular interest in the faithfulness of the CoT explanation to LLMs' final answer, we explore (i) when the LLMs' answer is (pre)determined, especially before the CoT begins or after, and (ii) how strongly the information from CoT specifically has a causal effect on the final answer. Our experiments with controlled arithmetic tasks reveal a systematic internal reasoning mechanism of LLMs. They have not derived an answer at the moment when input was fed into the model. Instead, they compute (sub-)answers while generating the reasoning chain on the fly. Therefore, the generated reasoning chains can be regarded as faithful reflections of the model's internal computation.

LLMs Faithfully and Iteratively Compute Answers During CoT: A Systematic Analysis With Multi-hop Arithmetics

With the growing use of large language models (LLMs) as evaluators, their application has expanded to code evaluation tasks, where they assess the correctness of generated code without relying on reference implementations. While this offers scalability and flexibility, it also raises a critical, unresolved question: Can LLM judges fairly and robustly evaluate semantically equivalent code with superficial variations? Functionally correct code often exhibits variationsвЂ”such as differences in variable names, comments, or formattingвЂ”that should not influence its correctness. Yet, whether LLM judges can reliably handle these variations remains unclear. We present the first comprehensive study of this issue, defining six types of potential bias in code evaluation and revealing their systematic impact on LLM judges. Across five programming languages and multiple LLMs, we empirically demonstrate that all tested LLM judges are susceptible to both positive and negative biases, resulting in inflated or unfairly low scores. Moreover, we observe that LLM judges remain vulnerable to these biases even when prompted to generate test cases before scoring, highlighting the need for more robust code evaluation method

Don’t Judge Code by Its Cover: Exploring Biases in LLM Judges for Code Evaluation

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is integral to social media analytics but often processes content containing Personally Identifiable Information (PII), behavioral cues, and metadata raising privacy risks such as surveillance, profiling, and targeted advertising. To systematically assess these risks, we review 203 peer-reviewed papers and propose the~NLP Privacy Risk Identification in Social Media (NLP-PRISM) framework, which evaluates vulnerabilities across six dimensions: data collection, preprocessing, visibility, fairness, computational risk, and regulatory compliance. Our analysis shows that transformer models achieve F1-scores ranging from 0.58 – 0.84, but incur a 1% - 23% drop under privacy-preserving fine-tuning. Using NLP-PRISM, we examine privacy coverage in six NLP tasks: sentiment analysis (16), emotion detection (14), offensive language identification (19), code-mixed processing (39), native language identification (29), and dialect detection (24) revealing substantial gaps in privacy research. We further found a (2%-9%) trade-off in model utility, MIA AUC (membership inference attacks) 0.81, AIA accuracy 0.75 (attribute inference attacks). Finally, we advocate for stronger anonymization, privacy-aware learning, and fairness-driven training to enable ethical NLP in social media contexts.

NLP Privacy Risk Identification in Social Media (NLP-PRISM): A Survey

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to understand how scientific research evolves, drawing growing interest from the research community. However, limited work has explored the scientific fact-checking of research questions and claims from manuscripts, particularly within the NLP domain, an emerging direction for advancing scientific integrity and knowledge validation. In this work, we propose a novel scientific fact-checking dataset, SCINLP, tailored to the NLP domain. Our proposed framework on SCINLP systematically verifies the veracity of complex scientific research questions across varying rationale contexts, while also assessing their temporal positioning. SCINLP includes supporting and refuting research questions from a curated collection of influential and reputed NLP papers published between 2000 and 2024. In our framework, we use multiple LLMs and diverse rationale contexts from our dataset to examine scientific claims and research focus, complemented by feasibility judgments for deeper insight into scientific reasoning in NLP.

Pushing the Frontiers of Scientific Fact-Checking: The SCINLP Dataset

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have introduced explicit reasoning capabilities, yet the factors that truly drive their improved performance remain unclear. In this work, we disentangle the effects of reasoning quality and sequence length by fine-tuning 8B models on several Polish variants of the Mixture-of-Thoughts (MoT-PL) dataset, each representing a distinct reasoning style: Detailed, Summarized, BabyThink, Lengthy. We found that the model trained on high-quality reasoning traces achieved better average performance than all other models; neither longer reasoning with similar quality nor low-quality reasoning with similar length achieved similar gains. Qualitative and quantitative analyses further reveal that reasoning clarity, rather than verbosity, determines model performance. These findings underscore the importance of reasoning content quality in LLM training and provide new insights into designing more effective reasoning-oriented datasets and models.

Breaking the Illusion of Reasoning in Polish LLMs: Quality over Quantity of Thought

Women are twice as likely as men to face online harassment due to their gender. Despite recent advances in multimodal content moderation, most approaches still overlook the social dynamics behind this phenomenon, where perpetrators reinforce prejudices and group identity within like-minded communities. Graph-based methods offer a promising way to capture such interactions, yet existing solutions remain limited by heuristic graph construction, shallow modality fusion, and instance-level reasoning. In this work, we present MemeWeaver, an end-to-end trainable multimodal framework for detecting sexism and misogyny through a novel inter-meme graph reasoning mechanism. We systematically evaluate multiple visual-textual fusion strategies and show that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on the MAMI and EXIST benchmarks, while achieving faster training convergence. Further analyses reveal that the learned graph structure captures semantically meaningful patterns, offering valuable insights into the relational nature of online hate.

MemeWeaver: Inter-Meme Graph Reasoning for Sexism and Misogyny Detection

Speech-LLM integration faces a temporal-semantic granularity gap: speech representations scale with temporal duration while text tokens scale with semantic content. Existing duration-based methods generate embeddings at fixed rates, creating distributional mismatch with LLM pre-training. We propose SEAM (Speech Encoder-Decoder Alignment Module), an encoder-decoder architecture employing variable-rate generation through cross-attention between speech features and text embeddings. SEAM produces embeddings at adaptive rates that closely match natural text distributions while preserving pre-trained knowledge by freezing both speech encoder and LLM. We introduce a multi-stage training strategy and First Token Guidance to improve initial token prediction. SEAM achieves competitive performance on LibriSpeech (2.6\%/5.2\% WER). More significantly, trained only on LibriSpeech (960h), SEAM achieves 4.7\% WER on cross-domain TED-LIUM-v2, demonstrating that integrating LLM's linguistic knowledge enables effective generalization beyond limited speech training data.

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ATOM: AdapTive and OptiMized dynamic temporal knowledge graph construction using LLMs

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