Morocco

Despite the impressive performance of Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) systems across various NLP benchmarks, their robustness in handling real-world user-LLM interaction queries remains largely underexplored. This presents a critical gap for practical deployment, where user queries exhibit greater linguistic variations and can trigger cascading errors across interdependent RAG components. In this work, we systematically analyze how varying four linguistic dimensions (formality, readability, politeness, and grammatical correctness) impact RAG performance. We evaluate two retrieval models and nine LLMs, ranging from 3 to 72 billion parameters, across four information-seeking Question Answering (QA) datasets. Our results reveal that linguistic reformulations significantly impact both retrieval and generation stages, leading to a relative performance drop of up to 40.41% in Recall@5 scores for less formal queries and 38.86% in answer match scores for queries containing grammatical errors. Notably, RAG systems exhibit greater sensitivity to such variations compared to LLM-only generations, highlighting their vulnerability to error propagation due to linguistic shifts. These findings highlight the need for improved robustness techniques to enhance reliability in diverse user interactions.

EACL 2026

Out of Style: RAG&#39;s Fragility to Linguistic Variation

linguistic variations

retrieval-augmented generation

robustness

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. <br>
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) <br><br><br>
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

Out of Style: RAG's Fragility to Linguistic Variation

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. 

Large Language Models (LLMs) face challenges in integrating linguistic and spatial reasoning, which limits their performance on geometry problems. While prior work has attempted to bridge this gap using diagram parsers with multimodal models, a systematic comparison of how various auxiliary modalities and their combinations affect performance has been lacking. To address this, we present a systematic study of four auxiliary modalities—formal diagram facts (CDL), natural language representations (T CDL), diagram descriptions (DES), and image augmentations (IMG)—on a range of open- and closed-source multimodal LLMs. Our analysis reveals a compelling dichotomy in the effectiveness of these modalities. While formal representations like CDL and T CDL offer a modest performance lift, diagram descriptions (DES) cause a dramatic split: they significantly boost the accuracy of open-source LLMs which often struggle with visual parsing, while often misleading more capable closed-source models and causing a performance drop. This highlights a critical trade-off between augmenting input with helpful information and introducing misleading noise, demonstrating that the efficacy of auxiliary modalities is heavily dependent on the inherent capabilities of the underlying model.

When Does Auxiliary Modality Matter in Solving Geometric Problems? A Comprehensive Study of Textual, Formal, and Visual Modalities

Hate speech on social media poses significant challenges for content moderation and user safety. While various datasets exist for hate speech detection, existing approaches treat hate speech as a monolithic phenomenon, detecting hateful content by using simple categorical labels such as hate, offensive, or toxic. This approach fails to distinguish between the speaker's underlying motivations and the content's potential societal consequences. This paper introduces I2-Hate, a novel dataset with a dual taxonomy that separately captures Intent (why the speaker produced hate speech) and Impact (what harm it may cause to individuals and communities) of online hateful posts. This dual-taxonomy approach enables moderation systems to differentiate hateful content based on underlying motivation and potential harm, supporting more nuanced intervention strategies. We release the code publicly.

When Words Wear Masks: Detecting Malicious Intents and Hostile Impacts of Online Hate Speech

Real-world clinical text-to-SQL requires reasoning over heterogeneous EHR tables, temporal windows, and patient-similarity cohorts to produce executable queries. We introduce ClinSQL, a benchmark of 633 expert-annotated tasks on MIMIC-IV v3.1 that demands multi-table joins, clinically meaningful filters, and executable SQL. Solving ClinSQL entails navigating schema metadata and clinical coding systems, handling long contexts, and composing multi-step queries beyond traditional text-to-SQL. We evaluate 20 proprietary and open-source models under Chain-of-Thought self-refinement and use rubric-based SQL analysis with execution checks that prioritize critical clinical requirements. Despite recent advances, performance remains far from clinical reliability: on the test set, GPT-5-mini attains 74.7% execution score, DeepSeek-R1 leads open-source at 69.2% and Gemini-2.5-Pro drops from 85.5% on Easy to 67.2% on Hard. Progress on ClinSQL marks tangible advances toward clinically reliable text-to-SQL for real-world EHR analytics.

Patient-Similarity Cohort Reasoning in Clinical Text-to-SQL

Adapting large language models to full document translation remains challenging due to the difficulty of capturing long-range dependencies and preserving discourse coherence throughout extended texts. While recent agentic machine translation systems mitigate context window constraints through multi-agent orchestration and persistent memory, they require substantial computational resources and are sensitive to memory retrieval strategies. We introduce TransGraph, a discourse-guided framework that explicitly models inter-chunk relationships through structured discourse graphs and selectively conditions each translation segment on relevant graph neighbourhoods rather than relying on sequential or exhaustive context. Across three document-level MT benchmarks spanning six languages and diverse domains, TransGraph consistently surpasses strong baselines in translation quality and terminology consistency while incurring significantly lower token overhead.

Discourse Graph Guided Document Translation with Large Language Models

Mitigating toxic content is critical for maintaining a healthy social platform, yet existing detoxification systems face significant limitations: overcorrection from uniformly processing all toxic comments, and parallel data scarcity in paraphrasing model training. To tackle these challenges, we propose Detoxifiability-Aware Detoxification (DID), a novel paradigm that adaptively conducts filtering or paraphrasing for each toxic comment based on its detoxifiability, namely whether it can be paraphrased into a benign comment in essence. Specifically, DID integrates three core modules: (1) an unsupervised detoxifiability discriminator, (2) a semantic purification module that extracts harmful intents and then performs targeted paraphrasing only on detoxifiable comments and (3) a feedback-adaptive refinement loop that processes remaining harmful contents only when they are detoxifiable. Experimental results demonstrate that DID significantly outperforms existing approaches on academic data and an industrial platform, establishing a novel and practical modeling paradigm for comment detoxification.

To Paraphrase or Not: Efficient Comment Detoxification with Unsupervised Detoxifiability Discrimination

Despite advances in large language models (LLMs), Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems often fall short in delivering personalized, context-rich responses, especially in low-resource, code-mixed, and multimodal settings like Hinglish (Hindi-English). To bridge this gap, we introduce HiVisTask, the first Hinglish multimodal, multidomain, persona-based TOD dataset that captures user-agent interactions across text and visual modalities. We also propose G 3 TOD, a generalizable framework that enhances personalization using three structured knowledge graphs: entity context, user persona, and commonsense reasoning, all extracted from conversation history. Extensive experiments with LLMs (e.g., LLaMA3.2, Phi3, GPT4, Mistral7b, Qwen3, Gemma3) show that G 3 TOD consistently outperforms both standard and ablated baselines. We observe substantial gains across evaluation metrics (both quantitative: BLEU and qualitative: Human Eval) over existing models. The observed improvements strongly underscore the value of structured and selective contextualization in generating personalized and engaging multimodal responses.

I know you are different! Towards Persona Driven Knowledge-infused Dialogue Assistant

Large audio-language models (LALMs) benefit from Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting for audio question answering (AQA), but acquiring audio CoT examples is particularly challenging as it requires sequential listening and careful integration of acoustic and linguistic information. Surprisingly, our experiments reveal that standard few-shot prompting yields inconsistent results compared to zero-shot CoT, with several models showing degraded accuracy. Moreover, few-shot prompting incurs substantially higher inference costs by processing multiple audio demonstrations per inference. We propose Audio-Induct, which induces reusable textual task instructions from few audio examples once per task, requiring no additional demonstrations at inference. Evaluated on 9 LALMs across two benchmarks, Audio-Induct outperforms state-of-the-art prompting methods while maintaining low inference costs. Inducted Task Instructions transfer effectively across models, enabling scalable deployment.

Task-Level Instructions Induction for Audio Question Answering from Few Examples

Ensuring Large Language Models (LLMs) are aligned with human valuesвЂ”being helpful, harmless, and honest (HHH)вЂ”is crucial for safe deployment. Existing methods use supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to align LLMs. However, these methods face challenges in multi-objective settings: SFT leads to interference between conflicting goals, while MoEs suffer from miscalibrated routing. We term this failure mode Axis Collapse, marked by (1) disjoint feature spaces causing catastrophic forgetting, and (2) unreliable inference from misrouted experts. To address this, we propose AlignX, a two-stage alignment framework. Stage 1 uses prompt-injected fine-tuning to extract axis-specific task features, mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Stage 2 deploys a MoCaE module that calibrates expert routing using fractal and natural geometry, improving inference reliability. AlignX achieves significant gains on Alpaca (Helpfulness), BeaverTails (Harmlessness), and TruthfulQA (Honesty), with +171.5% win rate, +110.1% in truthfulness-informativeness, and 4.3% fewer safety violations. It also reduces latency and memory usage by over 35% compared to prior MoEs. Results across four LLMs validate its generalizability. Code and data are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AlignX-40BE/README.md

When the Model Said "No Comment", We Knew Helpfulness Was Dead, Honesty Was Alive, and Safety Was Terrified

Autoregressive (AR) models excel at generating temporally coherent audio by producing tokens sequentially, yet they often falter in faithfully following complex textual promptsвЂ”especially those describing complex sound events. We uncover a surprising capability in AR audio generators: their early prefix tokens implicitly encode global semantic attributes of the final output, such as event count and sound-object category, revealing a form of implicit planning. Building on this insight, we propose Plan-Critic, a lightweight auxiliary model trained with a Generalized Advantage Estimation (GAE)-inspired objective to predict final instruction-following quality from partial generations. At inference time, Plan-Critic enables guided exploration: it evaluates candidate prefixes early, prunes low-fidelity trajectories, and reallocates computation to high-potential planning seeds. Our Plan-Critic-guided sampling achieves up to a 10 points improvement in CLAP score over the AR baselineвЂ”establishing a new state of the art in AR text-to-audio generationвЂ”while maintaining computational parity with standard best-of-N decoding. This work bridges the gap between causal generation and global semantic alignment, demonstrating that even strictly autoregressive models can plan ahead.

Guided by the Plan: Enhancing Faithful Autoregressive Text-to-Audio Generation with Guided Decoding

Does the prior knowledge of the vision encoder constrain the capability boundary of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs)? While most existing research treats MLLMs as unified systems optimized through end-to-end training, the impact of vision encoder's prior knowledge is seldom investigated. In this work, we introduce a novel metric Rank e to quantify the effect of prior knowledge of the vision encoder on MLLM performance. Our analysis reveals a positive correlation between prior knowledge and MLLM performance. Moreover, we find that domain-specific fine-tuning using solely end-to-end visual question answering (VQA) data is insufficient, particularly for entities with low inherent visual prior knowledge. To address this issue, we propose VisPRE (Vision Prior Remediation), a two-stage training framework that explicitly incorporates prior knowledge at the vision encoder level. Experimental results demonstrate that augmenting vision encoder's prior knowledge substantially boosts the visual understanding capabilities of MLLMs, offering a novel and effective strategy for improving performance, especially in scenarios involving uncommon visual entities.

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When Does Auxiliary Modality Matter in Solving Geometric Problems? A Comprehensive Study of Textual, Formal, and Visual Modalities

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