Morocco

With their growing capabilities, generative large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly investigated for complex medical tasks. However, their effectiveness in real-world clinical applications remains underexplored. To address this, we present CliniBench, the first benchmark that enables comparability of well-studied encoder-based classifiers and generative LLMs for discharge diagnosis prediction from admission notes in MIMIC-IV dataset. Our extensive study compares 12 generative LLMs and 3 encoder-based classifiers and demonstrates that encoder-based classifiers consistently outperform generative models in diagnosis prediction. We assess several retrieval augmentation strategies for in-context learning from similar patients and find that they provide notable performance improvements for generative LLMs.

EACL 2026

CliniBench: A Clinical Outcome Prediction Benchmark for Generative and Encoder-Based Language Models

clinical decision support systems

encoder-based classifiers

mimic-iv

clinical outcome prediction

llms

multi-label classification

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
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Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

poster

#### *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. 

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems degrade sharply under extreme noise,where irrelevant or redundant passages dominate. Current methods-fixed top-k retrieval, cross-encoder reranking, or policy based iteration-depend on static heuristics or costly reinforcement learning, failing to assess evidence sufficiency, detect subtle mismatches, or reduce redundancy, leading to hallucinations and poor grounding. We introduce ReflectiveRAG, a lightweight yet reasoning-driven architecture that enhances factual grounding through two complementary mechanisms: Self-Reflective Retrieval (SRR) and Contrastive Noise Removal (NR). SRR employs small language model as a decision controller that iteratively evaluates evidence sufficiency, enabling adaptive query reformulation without fixed schedules or policy training. NR further refines retrieved content via embedding-based contrastive filtering, enforcing semantic sparsity and removing redundant or tangential passages. Evaluated on WebQuestions, HotpotQA (distractor setting) and InternalQA with 50M Common Crawl distractors, ReflectiveRAG achieves substantial gains over strong baselines-including DeepRAG-improving EM by +2.7 pp and F1 by +2.5 pp, while reducing evidence redundancy by 30.88% with only 18 ms additional latency. Ablation studies confirm that SRR and NR jointly drive both factual accuracy and efficiency, validating our central claim that retrieval reasoning and contrastive filtering can outperform large-scale policy optimization in RAG.

ReflectiveRAG: Rethinking Adaptivity in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Public opinion surveys show cross-cultural differences in political opinions between socio-cultural contexts. However, there is no clear evidence whether these differences translate to cross-lingual differences in multilingual large language models (MLLMs). We analyze whether opinions transfer between languages or whether there are separate opinions for each language in MLLMs of various sizes across five Western languages. We evaluate MLLMs' opinions by prompting them to report their (dis)agreement with political statements from voting advice applications. To better understand the interaction between languages in the models, we evaluate them both before and after aligning them with more left or right views using direct preference optimization and English alignment data only. Our findings reveal that unaligned models show only very few significant cross-lingual differences in the political opinions they reflect. The political alignment shifts opinions almost uniformly across all five languages. We conclude that in Western language contexts, political opinions transfer between languages, demonstrating the challenges in achieving explicit socio-linguistic, cultural, and political alignment of MLLMs.

Do Political Opinions Transfer Between Western Languages? An Analysis of Unaligned and Aligned Multilingual LLMs

We present AraBabyTalk-EGY, an enriched release of the Egyptian Arabic CHILDES corpus, that opens the child-adult interactions genre to modern Arabic NLP research. Starting from the original CHILDES recordings and IPA transcriptions of caregiver-child sessions, we (i) map each IPA token to fully diacritized Arabic script, and (ii) add core part-of-speech tags and lemmas aligned with existing dialectal Arabic morphological resources. These layers yield ~26K annotated tokens suitable for both text- and speech-based NLP tasks. We provide a benchmark on morphological disambiguation and Arabic ASR. We outline lexical and morphosyntactic differences between AraBabyTalk-EGY and general Egyptian Arabic resources, highlighting the value of genre-specific training data for language acquisition studies and Arabic speech technology.

Computational Benchmarks for Egyptian Arabic Child Directed Speech

Reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential when employing large language models (LLMs) in high-risk domains such as clinical question answering (QA). In this work, we evaluate uncertainty estimation methods for clinical QA focusing, for the first time, on eleven clinical specialties and six question types, and across ten open-source LLMs (general-purpose, biomedical, and reasoning models). We analyze score-based UQ methods, present a case study introducing a novel lightweight method based on behavioral features derived from reasoning-oriented models, and examine conformal prediction as a complementary set-based approach. Our findings reveal that uncertainty reliability is not a monolithic property, but one that depends on clinical specialty and question type due to shifts in calibration and discrimination. Our results highlight the need to select or ensemble models based on their distinct, complementary strengths and clinical use.

Mind the Gap: Benchmarking LLM Uncertainty and Calibration with Specialty-Aware Clinical QA and Reasoning-Based Behavioural Features

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show progress across many visual–language tasks; however, their capacity to evaluate artistic expression remains limited: aesthetic concepts are inherently abstract and open-ended, and multimodal artwork annotations are scarce. We introduce KidsArtBench, a new benchmark of over 1k children's artworks (ages 5-15) annotated by 12 expert educators across 9 rubric-aligned dimensions, together with expert comments for feedback. Unlike prior aesthetic datasets that provide single scalar scores on adult imagery, KidsArtBench targets children's artwork and pairs multi-dimensional annotations with comment supervision to enable both ordinal assessment and formative feedback. Building on this resource, we propose an attribute-specific multi-LoRA approach -- where each attribute corresponds to a distinct evaluation dimension (e.g., Realism, Imagination) in the scoring rubric -- with Regression-Aware Fine-Tuning (RAFT) to align predictions with ordinal scales. On Qwen2.5-VL-7B, our method increases correlation from 0.468 to 0.653, with the largest gains on perceptual dimensions and narrowed gaps on higher-order attributes. Our results show that educator-aligned supervision and attribute-aware training yield pedagogically meaningful evaluations and establish a rigorous testbed for sustained progress in educational AI.

KidsArtBench: Multi-Dimensional Children's Art Evaluation with Attribute-Aware MLLMs

Large language models remain predominantly English-centric, which limits their usefulness for underrepresented languages. We help bridge this gap for Hindi with Nanda, a family of open-weights bilingual models (10B and 87B) adapted from Llama-3/3.1. Our approach integrates: (i) a tokenizer extending Llama's vocabulary with 20% Hindi-specific tokens, thus halving Hindi tokenization fertility while preserving English efficiency, (ii) Hindi-first parameter-efficient continuous pretraining using Llama Pro on a 65B-token corpus spanning Devanagari script, code-mixed, and romanized Hindi, and (iii) bilingual instruction and safety alignment on a large culturally grounded dataset. The resulting Nanda models outperform open-weights LLMs of comparable size in terms of generative performance and cultural knowledge, while being on par on MCQ benchmarks. Nanda-87B further demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on summarization, translation, transliteration, and instruction following. Moreover, both models show state-of-the-art performance in terms of safety. Our results demonstrate that careful tokenizer design, data curation, and expansion-based continual pretraining can yield capable and safe LLMs for resource-poor languages without compromising English performance.

Nanda Family: Open-Weights Generative Large Language Models for Hindi

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) is a practical and challenging open-world task that aims to recognize both known and novel categories in unlabeled data using limited labeled data from known categories. Due to the lack of supervision, previous GCD methods face significant challenges, such as difficulty in rectifying errors for confusing instances, and inability to effectively uncover and leverage the semantic meanings of discovered clusters. Therefore, additional annotations are usually required for real-world applicability. However, human annotation is extremely costly and inefficient. To address these issues, we propose DeLFGCD , a unified framework for generalized category discovery that actively learns from diverse and collaborative LLM feedback. Our approach leverages three different types of LLM feedback to: (1) improve instance-level contrastive features, (2) generate category descriptions, and (3) align uncertain instances with LLM-selected category descriptions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of DeLFGCD over state-of-the-art models across diverse datasets, metrics, and supervision settings. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GCD-LLM-0DB9

Active Generalized Category Discovery with Diverse LLM Feedback

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated on reasoning tasks, yet their logical abilities remain contested. To address this, we study LLMs' reasoning in a well-defined fragment of logic: syllogistic reasoning. We cast the problem as premise selection and construct controlled datasets to isolate logical competence. Beyond evaluation, an open challenge is enabling LLMs to acquire abstract inference patterns that generalize to novel structures. We propose to apply few-shot meta-learning to this domain, thereby encouraging models to extract rules across tasks rather than memorize patterns within tasks. Although meta-learning has been little explored in the context of logic learnability, our experiments show that it is effective: small models (1.5B-7B) fine-tuned with meta-learning demonstrate strong gains in generalization, with especially pronounced benefits in low-data regimes. These meta-learned models outperform GPT-4o and o3-mini on our syllogistic reasoning task.

Teaching Small Language Models to Learn Logic through Meta-Learning

We introduce aligned probing, a novel interpretability framework that aligns the behavior of language models (LMs), based on their outputs, and their internal representations (internals). Using this framework, we examine over 20 OLMo, Llama, and Mistral models, bridging behavioral and internal perspectives for toxicity for the first time. Our results show that LMs strongly encode information about the toxicity level of inputs and subsequent outputs, particularly in lower layers. Focusing on how unique LMs differ offers both correlative and causal evidence that they generate less toxic output when strongly encoding information about the input toxicity. We also highlight the heterogeneity of toxicity, as model behavior and internals vary across unique attributes such as Threat. Finally, four case studies analyzing detoxification, multi-prompt evaluations, model quantization, and pre-training dynamics underline the practical impact of aligned probing with further concrete insights. Our findings contribute to a more holistic understanding of LMs, both within and beyond the context of toxicity.

Aligned Probing: Relating Toxic Behavior and Model Internals

Large Language Models (LLMs) have great potential to accelerate and support scholarly peer review and are increasingly used as fully automatic review generators (ARGs). However, potential biases and systematic errors may pose significant risks to scientific integrity; understanding the specific capabilities and limitations of state-of-the-art ARGs is essential. We focus on a core reviewing skill that underpins high-quality peer review: detecting faulty research logic. This involves evaluating the internal consistency between a paper’s results, interpretations, and claims. We present a fully automated counterfactual evaluation framework that isolates and tests this skill under controlled conditions. Testing a range of ARG approaches, we find that, contrary to expectation, flaws in research logic have no significant effect on their output reviews. Based on our findings, we derive three actionable recommendations for future work and release our counterfactual dataset and evaluation framework publicly.

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ReflectiveRAG: Rethinking Adaptivity in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

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Revisiting Clinical Outcome Prediction for MIMIC-IV