United States

Repair, an important resource for resolving trouble in human–human conversation, remains underexplored in human–LLM interaction.
In this study, we investigate how LLMs engage in the interactive process of repair in multi-turn dialogues around solvable and unsolvable math questions. We examine whether models initiate repair themselves and how they respond to user-initiated repair. 
Our results show strong differences across models: reactions range from being almost completely resistant to (appropriate) repair attempts to being highly susceptible and easily manipulated. We further demonstrate that once conversations extend beyond a single turn, model behavior becomes more distinctive and less predictable across systems. Overall, our findings indicate that each tested LLM exhibits its own characteristic form of unreliability in the context of repair.

ACL 2026

Talking to a Know-It-All GPT or a Second-Guesser Claude? How Repair reveals distinct Multi-Turn Behavior in LLMs

#### *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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EACL 2026

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

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

As Large Language Models (LLMs) have become capable of generating long and descriptive code summaries, accurate and reliable evaluation of factual consistency has become a critical challenge. However, previous evaluation methods are primarily designed for short summaries of isolated code snippets. Consequently, they struggle to provide fine-grained evaluation of multi-sentence functionalities and fail to accurately assess dependency context commonly found in real-world code summaries.
To address this, we propose ReFEree, a reference-free and fine-grained method for evaluating factual consistency in real-world code summaries. We define factual inconsistency criteria specific to code summaries and evaluate them at the segment level using these criteria along with dependency information. These segment-level results are then aggregated into a fine-grained score. We construct a code summarization benchmark with human-annotated factual consistency labels. The evaluation results demonstrate that ReFEree achieves the highest correlation with human judgment among 13 baselines, improving 15-18\% over the previous state-of-the-art. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/bsy99615/ReFEree.git.

ReFEree: Reference-Free and Fine-Grained Method for Evaluating Factual Consistency in Real-World Code Summarization

Most conversational agents (CAs) are designed to satisfy user needs through user-driven interactions. However, many real-world settings, such as academic interviewing, judicial proceedings, and journalistic investigations, involve broader institutional decision-making processes and require agents that can elicit information from users. In this paper, we introduce Information Elicitation Agents (IEAs) in which the agent’s goal is to elicit information from users to support the agent's institutional or task-oriented objectives. To enable systematic research on this setting, we present YIELD, a 26M-token dataset of 2,281 ethically sourced, human-to-human dialogues. Moreover, we formalize information elicitation as a finite-horizon POMDP and propose novel metrics tailored to IEAs. Pilot experiments on multiple foundation LLMs show that training on YIELD improves their alignment with real elicitation behavior and findings are corroborated by human evaluation. We release YIELD under CC BY 4.0. The dataset, project code, evaluation tools, and fine-tuned model adapters are available at: https://github.com/infosenselab/yield.

YIELD: A Large-Scale Dataset and Evaluation Framework for Information Elicitation Agents

Hallucination, broadly referring to unfaithful, fabricated, or inconsistent content generated by LLMs, has wide-ranging implications. Therefore, a large body of effort has been devoted to detecting LLM hallucinations, as well as designing benchmark datasets for evaluating these detectors. In this work, we first establish a desiderata of properties for hallucination detection benchmarks (HDBs) to exhibit for effective evaluation. A critical look at existing HDBs through the lens of our desiderata reveals that none of them exhibits all the properties. We identify two largest gaps: (1) RAG-based grounded benchmarks with long context are severely lacking (partly because length impedes human annotation); and (2) Existing benchmarks do not make available realistic label noise for stress-testing detectors although real-world use-cases often grapple with label noise due to human or automated/weak annotation. To close these gaps, we build and open-source a new RAG-based HDB called TRIVIA+ that underwent a rigorous human annotation process. Notably, our benchmark exhibits all desirable properties including (1) TRIVIA+ contains samples with the longest context in the literature; and (2) we design and share three sets of noisy labels with different, sample-dependent noise schemes. Finally, we perform experiments on RAG-based HDBs, including our TRIVIA+, using popular SOTA detectors that reveal new insights: (i) ample room remains for current detectors to reach the performance ceiling on RAG-based HDBs, (ii) the basic LLM-as-a-Judge baseline performs competitively, and (iii) label noise hinders detection performance. We expect that our findings, along with our proposed benchmark, will motivate and foster needed research on hallucination detection for RAG-based tasks.

Rethinking Evaluation for LLM Hallucination Detection: A Desiderata, A New RAG-based Benchmark, New Insights

Static concreteness ratings are widely used in NLP, yet a word’s concreteness can shift with context, especially in figurative language such as metaphor, where common concrete nouns can take abstract interpretations. While such shifts are evident from context, it remains unclear how LLMs understand concreteness internally. We conduct a layer-wise and geometric analysis of LLM hidden representations across four model families, examining how models distinguish literal vs. figurative uses of the same noun and how concreteness is organized in representation space. We find that LLMs separate literal and figurative usage in early layers, and that mid-to-late layers compress concreteness into a one-dimensional direction that is consistent across models. Finally, we show this geometric structure is practically useful: a single concreteness direction supports efficient figurative-language classification and enables training-free steering of generation toward more literal or more figurative rewrites.

Exploring Concreteness Through a Figurative Lens

Question answering over visually rich documents (VRDs) requires reasoning not only over isolated content but also over documents' structural organization and cross-page dependencies. However, conventional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods encode content in isolated chunks during ingestion, losing structural and cross-page dependencies, and retrieve a fixed number of pages at inference, regardless of the specific demands of the question or context. This often results in incomplete evidence retrieval and degraded answer quality for multi-page reasoning tasks. To address these limitations, we propose LAD-RAG, a novel Layout-Aware Dynamic RAG framework. During ingestion, LAD-RAG constructs a symbolic document graph that captures layout structure and cross-page dependencies, adding it alongside standard neural embeddings to yield a more holistic representation of the document. During inference, an LLM agent dynamically interacts with the neural and symbolic indices to adaptively retrieve the necessary evidence based on the query. Experiments on MMLongBench-Doc, LongDocURL, DUDE, and MP-DocVQA demonstrate that LAD-RAG improves retrieval, achieving over 90% perfect recall on average without any top‑$k$ tuning, and outperforming baseline retrievers by up to 20% in recall at comparable noise levels, yielding higher QA accuracy with minimal latency.

LAD-RAG: Layout-aware Dynamic RAG for Visually-Rich Document Understanding

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multilingual, real-world applications with user inputs -- naturally introducing \emph{typographical errors} (typos). Yet most benchmarks assume clean input, leaving the robustness of LLMs to typos across languages largely underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce MulTypo, a multilingual typo generation algorithm that simulates human-like errors based on language-specific keyboard layouts and typing behavior. We evaluate 18 open-source LLMs across three model families and five downstream tasks spanning language inference, multi-choice question answering, mathematical reasoning, and machine translation tasks. Our results show that typos consistently degrade performance, particularly in generative tasks and those requiring reasoning -- while the natural language inference task is comparatively more robust. Instruction tuning improves clean-input performance but may increase brittleness under noise. We also observe language-dependent robustness: high-resource languages are generally more robust than low-resource ones, and translation from English is more robust than translation into English. Our findings underscore the need for noise-aware training and multilingual robustness evaluation. We release a Python package for MulTypo and make the source code publicly available at \url{https://github.com/cisnlp/multypo}.

Evaluating Robustness of Large Language Models Against Multilingual Typographical Errors

Parallel programming is central to HPC and AI, but producing code that is correct and fast remains challenging, especially for OpenMP GPU offload, where data movement and tuning dominate. Autonomous coding agents can compile, test, and profile on target hardware, but outputs are brittle without domain scaffolding.

We present ParaCodex, an HPC-engineer workflow that turns a Codex-based agent into an autonomous OpenMP GPU offload system using staged hotspot analysis, explicit data planning, correctness gating, and profiling-guided refinement. We evaluate translation from serial CPU kernels to OpenMP GPU offload kernels on HeCBench, Rodinia, and NAS. After excluding five kernels, ParaCodex succeeded on all 31 valid kernels. In 27/31 (87%) of these valid cases, the generated kernels improved GPU time over reference implementations, a result that holds independently on both the A100 and RTX 4060. The resulting OpenMP kernels achieve geometric-mean speedups of 3.1 (A100) and 3.6 (RTX 4060) on HeCBench and 1.5 and 1.1 on Rodinia, and outperform a zero-shot Codex baseline on all suites. We also evaluate CUDA -> OpenMP offload translation on ParEval, where ParaCodex maintains high compilation and validation rates in code-only and end-to-end settings.

ParaCodex is available at https://github.com/Scientific-Computing-Lab/ParaCodex

ParaCodex: A Profiling-Guided Autonomous Coding Agent for Reliable Parallel Code Generation and Translation

Agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for performing sophisticated software engineering tasks autonomously. In addition, there has been progress towards developing agents that can perform parts of the research pipeline in machine learning and the natural sciences. We argue that research extension and its implementation is a critical capability for such systems, and introduce RExBench to support the evaluation of this capability. RExBench is a benchmark consisting of realistic extensions of 12 research papers that aim to investigate \textit{novel} research hypotheses. Each task is set up as an extension to an existing research paper and codebase, accompanied by domain expert-written instructions. RExBench is robust to data contamination, and supports an automatic evaluation infrastructure that executes agent outputs to determine whether the success criteria are met. We use this benchmark to evaluate 12 LLM agents implemented using two different frameworks: aider and OpenHands. We find that all agents fail to autonomously implement the majority of the extensions, with the best agent at around 33% success rate. Although the success rate improves with additional human-written hints, the best performance under this setting remains below 44%. This indicates that current agents are still short of being able to handle realistic research extension tasks without substantial human guidance.

RExBench: Can coding agents autonomously implement AI research extensions?

Many applications of LLM-based text regression require predicting a full conditional distribution rather than a single point value. We study distributional regression under empirical-quantile supervision, where each input is paired with multiple observed quantile outcomes, and the target distribution is represented by a dense grid of quantiles. We address two key limitations of current approaches: the lack of local grounding for distribution estimates, and the reliance on shared representations that create an indirect bottleneck between inputs and quantile outputs. In this paper, we introduce Quantile Token Regression, which, to our knowledge, is the first work to insert dedicated quantile tokens into the input sequence, enabling direct input-output pathways for each quantile through self-attention. We further augment these quantile tokens with retrieval, incorporating semantically similar neighbor instances and their empirical distributions to ground predictions with local evidence from similar instances. We also provide the first theoretical analysis of loss functions for quantile regression, clarifying which distributional objectives each optimizes. Experiments on the Inside Airbnb and StackSample benchmark datasets with LLMs ranging from 1.7B to 14B parameters show that quantile tokens with neighbors consistently outperform baselines ($\sim$4 points lower MAPE and 2$\times$ narrower prediction intervals), with especially large gains on smaller and more challenging datasets where quantile tokens produce substantially sharper and more accurate distributions.

Text-to-Distribution Prediction with Quantile Tokens and Neighbor Context

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in culturally sensitive real-world tasks. However, existing cultural alignment approaches fail to align LLMs' broad cultural values with the specific goals of downstream tasks and suffer from cross-culture interference. We propose CultureManager, a novel pipeline for task-specific cultural alignment. CultureManager synthesizes task-aware cultural data in line with target task formats, grounded in culturally relevant web search results. To prevent conflicts between cultural norms, it manages multi-culture knowledge learned in separate adapters with a culture router that selects the appropriate one to apply. Experiments across five national cultures and ten culture-sensitive tasks show consistent improvements over prompt-based and fine-tuning baselines. Our results demonstrate the necessity of task adaptation and modular culture management for effective cultural alignment.

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ReFEree: Reference-Free and Fine-Grained Method for Evaluating Factual Consistency in Real-World Code Summarization

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