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We reformulate explanation quality assessment as a ranking problem rather than a generation problem. Instead of optimizing models to produce a single “best” explanation token-by-token, we train reward models to discriminate among multiple candidate explanations and learn their relative quality. Concretely, we construct per-instance candidate sets with graded quality levels and train listwise and pairwise ranking models (ListNet, LambdaRank, RankNet) to preserve ordinal structure and avoid score compression typical of pointwise regression or binary preference objectives. We observe three findings: First, ranking losses consistently outperform regression on score separation across all domains tested. Second, the optimal ranking loss depends on data characteristics: listwise objectives excel with well-separated quality tiers, while pairwise methods are more robust to noisy natural annotations. Third, when trained on carefully curated and well-structured data, small encoder models can match models that are orders of magnitude larger, suggesting that data quality matters more than model scale. Finally, when used as rewards in policy optimization, ranking-based scores enable stable convergence in settings where regression-based rewards fail entirely. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/Tankiit/PPO_Learning_to_rank

ACL 2026

Explanation Quality Assessment as Ranking with Listwise Rewards

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
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EACL 2024

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

technical paper

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Large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance on natural language to SQL (NL2SQL) benchmarks, yet their reported accuracy may be inflated by contamination from benchmark queries or structurally similar patterns seen during training. We introduce SPENCE (Syntactic Probing and Evaluation of NL2SQL Contamination Effects), a controlled syntactic probing framework for detecting and quantifying such contamination. SPENCE systematically generates syntactic variants of test queries for four widely used NL2SQL datasets—Spider, SParC, CoSQL, and the newer BIRD benchmark. We use SPENCE to evaluate multiple high-capacity LLMs under execution-based scoring. For each model, we measure changes in execution accuracy (Delta~Accuracy) across increasing levels of syntactic divergence and quantify rank sensitivity using Kendall’s tau with bootstrap confidence intervals. By aligning these robustness trends with benchmark release dates, we observe a clear temporal gradient: older benchmarks such as Spider exhibit the strongest negative 
values and thus the highest likelihood of training leakage, whereas the more recent BIRD dataset shows minimal sensitivity and appears largely uncontaminated. Together, these findings highlight the importance of temporally contextualized, syntactic-probing evaluation for trustworthy NL2SQL benchmarking.

SPENCE: A Syntactic Probe for Detecting Contamination in NL2SQL Benchmarks

Large language models are increasingly used across various fields.
However, their adoption in regulated high-stakes
domains such as banking faces resistance due to the demand for high accuracy,
compliance with regulations, and the need for traceable, grounded responses.
In this work, we present a complete recipe for training and deploying
grounded banking LLMs. First, we describe a high-quality data generation
pipeline combining LLM-as-a-Judge filtering, citation annotation, and
two-stage curriculum learning that achieves 73% citation quality with only
143M tokens. Second, we train a model to respond with "I don't know" when information
is incomplete. We determine that a ratio of 22% unanswerable examples in training data yields calibrated refusal behavior.
Third, we provide an end-to-end methodology, from data curation to quantization to serving,
validated at 40+ financial institutions with real-world business outcomes. Our 12B model
outperforms GPT-4.1 on answer quality and citation grounding while responding 3--5x faster.

FinRAG-12B: A Production-Validated Recipe for Grounded Question Answering in Banking

Earnings calls are a key source of financial information about public companies. 
However, extracting information from these calls is difficult.
Unlike the templatic filings required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to report a company's financial situation, earnings conference calls have no built-in labels, are unstructured, and feature conversational language.
We explore this challenging domain by assessing the information captured by models trained on SEC filings and in-context learning methods. 
To establish a baseline, we first evaluate the generalization capabilities of SEC-trained models across established SEC datasets.
To support our investigation, we introduce three novel benchmarks: (1) SEC Filings Benchmark (SECB), (2) Earnings Calls Benchmark (ECB), and ECB-A, a subset with 5,346 expert annotations to support our qualitative analysis.
We find that encoder-based models struggle with the domain shift. 
Finally, we propose a system utilizing LLMs to perform open-ended extraction from unstructured call transcripts, verified by human evaluation (79.7\% precision), providing a baseline for this valuable domain through the consistent tracking of emergent KPIs.

Effective Performance Measurement: Challenges and Opportunities in KPI Extraction from Earnings Calls

We present TEN, a neurosymbolic approach for extracting tabular data from semistructured text such as copy-pasted content from PDFs, emails, or OCR-flattened outputs. This task poses real-world challenges in domains like finance and healthcare, where manual copy-paste into spreadsheets introduces errors and OCR distortions compromise data integrity, leading to financial losses and flawed decisions.
Purely neural methods suffer from hallucinations and structural inconsistencies, hindering deployment robustness. TEN addresses this via a novel triadic feedback loop that iteratively refines table hypotheses to enforce constraints and achieve verifiable convergence.
Experiments show TEN outperforms neural baselines in exact match accuracy and lower hallucination rates. A 21-participant user study rates TEN tables more accurate and preferred in over 60% of pairwise comparisons, though verification and correction effort did not differ significantly between conditions.

TEN: Table Explicitization, Neurosymbolically

Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely applied to boost the performance of pretrained models, yet its training efficiency is severely constrained by rollout generation. While speculative decoding based on multi-token prediction (MTP) offers a potential acceleration pathway, its widespread adoption is hindered by the absence of MTP in vanilla pretrained models and the rapid degradation of the MTP acceptance length in RL training. To address these issues, this paper proposes MTP-RL, a two-stage framework that pioneers effective training of MTPs in RL and accelerates the rollout phase for diverse models. It involves a pipeline to equip the multi-layer parameter-sharing MTP for all models and an innovative advantage-aware MTP optimization strategy to facilitate policy-aligned training of MTPs. Experiments demonstrate that our method not only achieves stable growth of acceptance length during RL training, but also accelerates RL rollouts, achieving an average 23.1%–55.3% reduction in rollout time compared to baselines.

MTP-RL: Acceleration of Reinforcement Learning Rollouts with Policy-Aligned Multi-Token Prediction

Biomedical data-to-text generation aims at generating textual natural language descriptions that can fluently and precisely describe the biomedical structured data. However, biomedical data-to-text generation faces the dilemma of a lack of labeled data due to the privacy and scarcity of medical data. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to solve few-shot tasks through in-context learning (ICL). In this paper, we are the first to explore the performance of different LLMs in the biomedical data-to-text generation task.To address the issues of semantic sparsity and misinterpretation of numerical values in biomedical structured data, we propose an EAG (Enrich, Aggregate, and Generate) framework, a simple but efficient LLM-based three-stage biomedical D2T approach in low-resource scenarios. We conduct extensive evaluations of closed-source general LLMs, open-source general LLMs, and open-source medical LLMs. The results show that the EAG framework provides good interpretability and superior performance, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the BioLeaflets dataset. The code and data will be released at https://github.com/FXLP/EAG.

Enrich, Aggregate, and Generate: Three-stage Biomedical Data-to-Text Generation Using Large Language Models in Low-resource Scenarios

Reasoning-oriented language models typically expose explicit reasoning as a long, front-loaded chain of “thinking” tokens before the main output, either always enabled or externally toggled at inference time. Although this can help on arithmetic, coding, and other multi-step tasks, it is costly, weakens claim-level auditability, and does not allow the model to re-trigger explicit reasoning once presentation has begun. In dialogue, these limitations are compounded by weak sensitivity to temporal structure: unless time is explicitly stated in text, standard models treat replies separated by seconds and replies separated by weeks as equivalent. We introduce TIME (Temporally Intelligent Meta-reasoning Engine), a behavioral alignment framework that learns explicit reasoning as a context-triggered control policy rather than a fixed response mode. TIME augments dialogue with optional ISO 8601 `<time>` tags, tick events that represent silent time passage, and short `<think>` blocks that may appear anywhere in a response. Using a four-phase curriculum, including a small maximally diverse full-batch alignment stage, we train Qwen3 dense models to invoke brief, in-place reasoning bursts only when contextual cues warrant them, while keeping user-facing output compact. We also introduce TIMEBench, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating reasoning from temporal cues in dialogue. Across 4B-32B scales, TIME improves TIMEBench scores over the corresponding base Qwen3 models in both thinking and no-thinking modes while reducing explicit reasoning tokens by roughly an order of magnitude. Beyond score improvements, TIME induces a distinct behavioral shift: explicit reasoning becomes more compact and more responsive to contextual cues. Code, training data, and benchmark artifacts are publicly available.

TIME: Temporally Intelligent Meta-reasoning Engine for Context-Triggered Explicit Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for creative tasks such as literary translation. Yet translational creativity remains underexplored and is rarely evaluated at scale, while source-text comprehension is typically studied in isolation, despite the fact that, in professional translation, comprehension and creativity are tightly intertwined. We address these gaps with a paired-task framework applied to literary excerpts from 11 books. Task 1 assesses source-text comprehension, and Task 2 evaluates translational creativity through Units of Creative Potential (UCPs), such as metaphors and wordplay. Using a scalable evaluation setup that combines expert human annotations with UCP-based automatic scoring, we benchmark 23 models and four creativity-oriented prompts. Our findings show that strong comprehension does not translate into human-level creativity: models often produce literal or contextually inappropriate renderings, with particularly large gaps for the more distant English–Chinese language pair. Creativity-oriented prompts yield only modest gains, and only one model, Mistral-Large, comes close to human-level creativity (0.167 vs. 0.246). Across all model–prompt combinations, only three exceed a creativity score of 0.1, while the rest remain at or near zero.

Beyond Reproduction: A Paired-Task Framework for Assessing LLM Comprehension and Creativity in Literary Translation

Large language models (LLMs), despite strong performance on complex mathematical problems, exhibit systematic limitations in counting tasks. This issue arises from the architectural limits of transformers, where counting is performed across layers, leading to degraded precision for larger counting problems due to depth constraints. To address this limitation, we propose a simple test-time strategy inspired by System-2 cognitive processes that decomposes large counting tasks into smaller, independent sub-problems that the model can reliably solve. We evaluate this approach using observational and causal mediation analyses to understand the underlying mechanism of this System-2-like strategy. Our mechanistic analysis identifies key components: latent counts are computed and stored in the final item representations of each part, transferred to intermediate steps via dedicated attention heads, and aggregated in the final stage to produce the total count. Experimental results demonstrate that this strategy enables LLMs to surpass architectural limitations and achieve higher accuracy on large-scale counting tasks. This work provides mechanistic insight into System-2 counting in LLMs and presents a generalizable approach for improving and understanding their reasoning behavior.

Mechanistic Interpretability of Large-Scale Counting in LLMs through a System-2 Strategy

We study how large language models recall relational knowledge during text generation, with a focus on identifying latent representations suitable for relation classification via linear probes.
Prior work shows how attention heads and MLPs interact to resolve subject, predicate, and object, but it remains unclear which representations support faithful linear relation classification and why some relation types are easier to capture linearly than others.
We systematically evaluate different latent representations derived from attention head and MLP contributions, showing that per-head attention contributions to the residual stream are comparatively strong features for linear relation classification.
Feature attribution analyses of the trained probes, as well as characteristics of the different relation types, reveal clear correlations between probe accuracy and relation specificity, entity connectedness, and how distributed the signal on which the probe relies is across attention heads.
Finally, we show how token-level feature attribution of probe predictions can be used to reveal probe behavior in further detail.

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SPENCE: A Syntactic Probe for Detecting Contamination in NL2SQL Benchmarks

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