United States

Recent work in NLP has probed large language models for their understanding of cultural norms across countries. However, this work typically considers distributional patterns, ignoring group consensus or possible multicultural environments within a country. In this work, we leverage cultural consensus theory (CCT) from cultural anthropology to model such multidimensional nuance. Applying CCT to the World Values Survey (WVS) across 10 countries and 12 domains, we demonstrate that models frequently misrepresent cultural structures by either failing to form cohesive consensus or severely over-regularizing consensus. Through explicit representation of intra-group variance, CCT provides actionable diagnostics to evaluate when models reflect true human diversity versus algorithmic homogenization.

ACL 2026

Carefully Considering Culture: Analyzing LLM Alignment in Single- and Multi-Cultural Settings using Cultural Consensus Theory

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

poster

Explicit grammar teaching is central to endangered-language revitalization, but creating grammar lessons is labor-intensive and often falls to already overburdened teachers. We present HYGRAM, a hybrid grammar-induction method that combines typological priors, Bayesian inference, constrained LLM reasoning, and retrieval from sparse corpora and descriptive documents to generate topic-specific grammar lessons for classroom use. HYGRAM targets extremely low-resource settings and can operate from a small elicited corpus collected in roughly 10 hours of fieldwork together with any available reference materials. We evaluate the system on six typologically diverse endangered languages using expert linguist judgments of output content quality, pedagogical adequacy, and consistency across generated lessons. Results indicate that HYGRAM can produce coherent and practically useful lessons, with better quality when modest explanatory evidence is available. Feedback from Pacific language communities further suggests relevance for ongoing revitalization efforts. Overall, the work shows that evidence-constrained hybrid grammar induction can support grammar teaching and documentation where standard NLP pipelines are infeasible.

 Creating Grammar Teaching Material for Endangered Languages with Hybrid Grammar Induction

LLM-based agents represent a paradigm shift in AI, enabling autonomous systems to plan, reason, and use tools while interacting with dynamic environments. This paper provides the first comprehensive survey of evaluation methods for these increasingly capable agents. We analyze the field of agent evaluation across five perspectives: (1) Core LLM capabilities needed for agentic workflows, like planning, and tool use; (2) Application-specific benchmarks such as web and SWE agents; (3) Evaluation of generalist agents; (4) Analysis of agent benchmarks' core dimensions; and (5) Evaluation frameworks and tools for agent developers. Our analysis reveals current trends, including a shift toward more realistic, challenging evaluations with continuously updated benchmarks. We also identify critical gaps that future research must address—particularly in assessing cost-efficiency, safety, and robustness, and in developing fine-grained, scalable evaluation methods.

A Survey on Evaluation of LLM-based Agents

Despite significant advances in large language models, personalizing them for individual decision-makers remains an open problem. Here, we introduce a synthetic-organic supervision pipeline that transforms raw judicial decisions into instruction-tuning data, enabling parameter-efficient fine-tuning of personalized models for individual judges in low-resource settings. We compare our approach to state-of-the-art personalization techniques across three different tasks and settings. The results show that Causal Language Modeling followed by synthetically generated instruction-tuning significantly outperforms all other baselines, providing significant improvements across lexical, stylistic, and semantic similarity. Notably, our model-generated outputs are indistinguishable from the reasoning of human judges, highlighting the viability of efficient personalization, even in low-resource settings.

JudgeMeNot: Personalizing Large Language Models to Emulate Judicial Reasoning in Hebrew

Large language models have been extensively studied for emotion recognition and moral reasoning as distinct capabilities, yet the extent to which emotions influence moral judgment remains underexplored. In this work, we develop an emotion-induction pipeline that infuses emotion into moral situations and evaluate shifts in moral acceptability across multiple datasets and LLMs.
We observe a directional pattern: positive emotions increase moral acceptability and negative emotions decrease it, with effects strong enough to reverse binary moral judgments in up to 20\% of cases, and with susceptibility scaling inversely with model capability.
Our analysis further reveals that specific emotions can sometimes behave contrary to what their valence would predict (e.g., remorse paradoxically increases acceptability). A complementary human annotation study shows humans do not exhibit these systematic shifts, indicating an alignment gap in current LLMs.

Do Emotions Influence Moral Judgment in Large Language Models?

LLM-as-a-Judge, which uses LLMs to evaluate responses to open-ended questions, has seen significant growth in recent years. It has been adopted as a scalable alternative to manual human evaluation, such as crowdsourcing, which is often time-consuming and costly. However, the discrepancy between LLM-generated evaluations and human evaluations remains a critical problem in this field. To bridge this gap, we propose Multi-Aspect Panels of LLM Evaluators (MAPLE), a framework that orchestrates evaluations across multiple criteria using multiple LLMs. MAPLE integrates criterion-wise pairwise evaluations from multiple LLMs by estimating the importance of criteria and the reliability of individual evaluators. We conduct experiments with both open-source and closed-source models. Our results demonstrate that MAPLE achieves superior alignment with human evaluations compared to baselines, highlighting the importance of employing multi-agent and multi-criteria evaluation strategies.

 MAPLE: Multi-Aspect Panels of LLM Evaluators for Open-Ended Questions

Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (mRAG) systems often exhibit a perceived preference for high-resource languages, particularly English, resulting in the widespread adoption of English pivoting. While prior studies attribute this advantage to the superior English-centric capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), we find that such measurements are significantly distorted by structural priors inherent in evaluation benchmarks. Specifically, we identify exposure bias and a gold availability prior—both driven by the disproportionate concentration of resources in English—as well as cultural priors rooted in topic locality, as factors that hinder accurate assessment of genuine language preference. To address these biases, we propose DeLP (Debiased Language Preference), a calibrated metric designed to explicitly factor out these structural confounds. Our analysis using DeLP reveals that the previously reported English preference is largely a byproduct of evidence distribution rather than an inherent model bias. Instead, we find that retrievers fundamentally favor monolingual alignment between the query and the document language. Building on this insight, we introduce DELTA (DEbiased Language preference–guided Text Augmentation), a lightweight and efficient mRAG framework that strategically leverages monolingual alignment to optimize cross-lingual retrieval and generation. Experimental results demonstrate that DELTA consistently outperforms English pivoting and mRAG baselines across diverse languages.

Enhancing Multilingual RAG Systems with Debiased Language Preference-Guided Query Fusion

We introduce ***VLURes***, a multilingual benchmark for evaluating Vision-Language Models (VLMs) under *long-text grounding*: selecting and reasoning over the image-relevant subset of article-length text that contains distractors and ungrounded claims. *VLURes* contains **4,000** web-curated *image + long-text* pairs across **English (En), Japanese (Ja), Swahili (Sw), and Urdu (Ur)** and **10** topical categories, and defines **eight** tasks spanning image-only perception (OR, SU, RU, SS, IC) and image+text grounding (ITM, *Unrelatedness*, VQA). To construct web-realistic pairs, we apply language-adapted CLIP alignment to select representative images and filter weakly grounded pages. Across **10** proprietary and open VLMs evaluated under zero-shot and one-shot prompting, with and without rationales, the best model (GPT-4o) reaches **90.8%** overall accuracy but remains **6.7** points below human performance (**97.5%**) on Object Recognition, and cross-lingual sensitivity persists, while open models are substantially weaker and often lack reliable multilingual VL support. *VLURes* provides a practical testbed for long-text grounding and multilingual robustness in web-realistic agent settings.

 VLURes: Benchmarking Long-Text Grounding and Cross-Lingual Robustness in Vision Language Models

Despite the rapid progress of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), the field lacks benchmarks that rigorously diagnose their true reasoning abilities and chart meaningful progress toward human-like multimodal intelligence. Most existing evaluations focus on piecemeal or disconnected tasks, obscuring critical cognitive weaknesses and providing little insight for targeted improvement.
To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{BloomBench}, part of the \textit{Almieyar} benchmarking series, the first cognitively human-grounded, bilingual (English–Arabic) multimodal benchmark for VLMs. Grounded in Bloom’s Taxonomy, BloomBench systematically evaluates six levels of cognition (Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, Create) through carefully designed image–question–answer tasks. Built with a semi-automated pipeline and validated through a stratified hybrid quality assurance protocol, it ensures scalability, cultural inclusivity, and linguistic fidelity. 
Leveraging this framework, we conduct a comprehensive study of state-of-the-art VLMs to diagnose their cognitive profiles. 
Our analysis reveals a sharp cognitive asymmetry: while state-of-the-art models achieve strong performance ceilings in semantic understanding, they struggle substantially with factual recall and creative synthesis. This demonstrates that current general multimodal proficiency masks deeper limitations in specific cognitive layers.
Furthermore, our study highlights a critical performance gap between Arabic and English, exposing limitations in current cross-lingual multimodal reasoning. These findings establish a foundation for developing more cognitively aligned and inclusive VLMs.
The benchmark framework and dataset is available at: \url{https://github.com/qcri/Almieyar-Oryx-BloomBench}.

 Almieyar-Oryx-BloomBench: A Bilingual Multimodal Benchmark for Cognitively Informed Evaluation of Vision-Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and tool use. However, the fundamental cognitive faculties essential for problem-solving—perception, reasoning, and memory—remain the stable core of intelligence. Unlike memorizing specific patterns, humans succeed in novel environments by applying these intrinsic faculties to adapt and optimize. Yet, whether LLMs possess this essential capacity—namely, the ability to continuously refine solutions in response to dynamic environmental feedback—remains underexplored. To address this challenge, we introduce \textbf{OPT-BENCH}, a benchmark for evaluating self-improvement capabilities in large-scale search spaces. By combining 20 machine learning tasks with 10 classic NP-hard problems, OPT-BENCH provides a rigorous setting to assess whether agents can adapt through intrinsic self-reflection rather than rote tool application. We further propose \textbf{OPT-Agent}, a framework that emulates human-like cognitive adaptation. It operates via a general perception--memory--reasoning loop, iteratively refining solutions based on environmental feedback. Through extensive experiments on 19 LLMs from 7 model families, including reasoning models, general models, and open-source models ranging from 3B to 235B parameters, we demonstrate stronger models are more effective at leveraging feedback signals for self-improvement. However, this upper-bound adaptability remains fundamentally constrained by the models' base capacity, and even the most advanced LLMs still fall short of human expert performance.

OPT-BENCH: Evaluating the Iterative Self-Optimization of LLM Agents in Large-Scale Search Spaces

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in agentic collaborative problem-solving, albeit a gap exists. Existing frameworks predominantly rely on natural language as a primary representation (format) for agentic communication. However natural language could be ambiguous and verbose. Furthermore, recent works have shown that alternative representations can enhance performance in LLMs on certain tasks. But current approaches lack the intelligence necessary to understand, learn or apply optimal communication representations adaptively. In this paper, we propose to dynamically learn the optimal message representations to enhance agentic performance. We model the optimization problem as an Expanding Markov Decision Process (EMDP) and propose our method named OPTiMACS. We evaluate our system across benchmark datasets of collaborative problem-solving. The results show significant performance improvements while maintaining efficiency. Our work bridges the gap between rigid communication protocols and open-ended natural language by providing an adaptive framework that learns task-aware structural representations.

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Creating Grammar Teaching Material for Endangered Languages with Hybrid Grammar Induction

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Carefully Considering Culture: Analyzing LLM Alignment in Single- and Multi-Cultural Settings using Cultural Consensus Theory