United States

Previous work examining the Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis has shown that while information as measured by surprisal metrics is distributed more or less evenly across documents overall, local discrepancies can arise due to functional pressures corresponding to syntactic and discourse structural constraints. However, work thus far has largely disregarded the relative salience of discourse participants. We fill this gap by studying how overall salience of entities in discourse relates to surprisal using 70K manually annotated mentions across 16 genres of English and a novel minimal-pair prompting method. Our results show that globally salient entities exhibit significantly higher surprisal than non-salient ones, even controlling for position, length, and nesting confounds. Moreover, salient entities systematically reduce surprisal for surrounding content when used as prompts, enhancing document-level predictability. This effect varies by genre, appearing strongest in topic-coherent texts and weakest in conversational contexts. Our findings refine the UID competing pressures framework by identifying global entity salience as a mechanism shaping information distribution in discourse.

ACL 2026

Expect the Unexpected? Testing the Surprisal of Salient Entities

entity salience

predictability

uniform information density

surprisal

discourse processing

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.

workshop paper

Multi-domain Dialogue State Tracking (DST) requires discourse coherence that transcends independent slot-filling. Most existing approaches rely on statistical regularities within static schemas, failing to capture the semantic coordination semantics governing simultaneous slot updates. In this paper, we propose Event-DST, which models latent events as cognitive organizing units to dynamically coordinate slot interactions. By projecting dialogue context into a continuous semantic space, our model induces a dynamic structural bias to enforce pragmatic consistency. This structural guidance is integrated via a dual-stream fusion strategy that balances top-down structural constraints with bottom-up textual precision. Experimental results on two benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our framework, providing an interpretable and parameter-efficient path toward robust dialogue understanding.

Event-Guided Slot Interaction for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking

Logical Reasoning is a novel approach to deal with challenging Machine Reading Comprehension tasks by utilizing the ability to construct logical structures in natural language. However, previous promising studies struggle with the accuracy of logical unit division and the consistency of model prediction on equivalent semantics. In this paper, we propose ThinkStruct, a new method that leverages a transformer network enhanced with the information of Rhetorical Structure Theory relations for logical reasoning. Specifically, our method uses the Rhetorical Structure Theory to split natural language text into Elementary Discourse Units (EDUs) and identify the relationship among these units. Node information is then fed into the fully connected transformer network, which is enhanced with logical relationships among the extracted units via adjacency matrix. Subsequently, the features of the transformer network are integrated before being passed into the answer prediction module. In addition, we employ a contrastive learning module for improving its understanding of the relationship between Elementary Discourse Units. Our experiments on the LogiQA and Reclor datasets demonstrate that our results outperform other state-of-the-art models.

ThinkStruct: RST-Aware Attention for Logical Reasoning in Machine Reading Comprehension

Evaluating and optimizing authorial style in long-form story generation is challenging because style judgments often rely on subjective human voting, and there is no stable automatic evaluation method. We propose a two-stage pipeline. First, we train a style-similarity judge by fine-tuning a sentence-transformer with authorship-verification supervision, and calibrate its similarity outputs into a bounded [0,1] reward. Second, we use this judge as the primary reward in Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to fine-tune an 8B story generator for style-conditioned writing, avoiding the accept/reject supervision required by Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Across four target authors (Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy), the GRPO-trained 8B model achieves higher style scores than open-weight baselines, with an average style score of 0.893 across authors. These results suggest that AV-calibrated reward modeling provides a practical mechanism for controllable long-form style transfer under moderate model size and training budget.

Capturing Classic Authorial Style in Long-Form Story Generation with GRPO Fine-Tuning

The thematic fit estimation task measures semantic arguments’ compatibility with a specific semantic role for a specific predicate. We investigate if LLMs have consistent, expressible knowledge of event arguments’ thematic fit by experimenting with various prompt designs, manipulating input context, reasoning, and output forms. We set a new state-of-the-art on thematic fit benchmarks, but show that closed and open weight LLMs respond differently to our prompting strategies: Closed models achieve better scores overall and benefit from multi-step reasoning, but they perform worse at filtering out generated sentences incompatible with the specified predicate, role, and argument.

Uncovering Autoregressive LLM Knowledge of Thematic Fit in Event Representation

Recent work has shown that language models (LMs) trained on synthetic corpora can exhibit typological preferences that resemble cross-linguistic regularities in human languages, particularly for syntactic phenomena such as word order. In this paper, we extend this paradigm to differential argument marking (DAM), a semantic licensing system in which morphological marking depends on semantic prominence. Using a controlled synthetic learning method, we train GPT-2 models on 18 corpora implementing distinct DAM systems and evaluate their generalization using minimal pairs. Our results reveal a dissociation between two typological dimensions of DAM. Models reliably exhibit human-like preferences for natural markedness direction, favoring systems in which overt marking targets semantically atypical arguments. In contrast, models do not reproduce the strong object preference in human languages, in which overt marking in DAM more often targets objects rather than subjects. These findings suggest that different typological tendencies may arise from distinct underlying sources.

Differences in Typological Alignment in Language Models' Treatment of Differential Argument Marking

CHILDES is a central resource for language acquisition studies, yet computational tools for analyzing its syntactic structure remain limited. Leveraging the recent release of the UD-English-CHILDES treebank with gold-standard Universal Dependencies (UD) annotations, we train a state-of-the-art dependency parser specifically tailored to CHILDES. The parser more accurately captures syntactic patterns in child--adult interactions, outperforming widely used off-the-shelf English parsers, including SpaCy and Stanza.
Alongside the parser, we also release a Part-of-Speech tagger and an utterance-level construction tagger, which together form the open-source Syntactic Annotation Toolkit for Child--Adult InTeractions (CAIT). Through a detailed error analysis and a case study tracking the distribution of syntactic constructions across developmental time in CHILDES, we demonstrate the practical utility of the toolkit for large-scale, reproducible research on language acquisition.

A Syntactic Annotation Toolkit for Child–Adult InTeractions (CAIT)

Understanding how neural models represent human-interpretable concepts is challenging. Prior work has explored linear concept subspaces from diverse perspectives, such as probing and concept erasure. We introduce a unified framework to study these subspaces along two axes: $\textit{containment}$, which tests if a concept is fully represented in a subspace but not outside it, and $\textit{disentanglement}$, which tests for isolation from other concepts. In experiments on both text and speech models, we first highlight that concept subspaces may not be uniquely determined, and discuss the implications for concept subspace analysis. Then, we compare properties of concept subspaces estimated using five estimators, proposed in different communities. We find that (1) the choice of estimator impacts the containment and disentanglement properties; (2) the state-of-the-art concept erasure method, LEACE, performs well on both testing axes, but still struggles to generalize to unseen data; and (3) in HuBERT speech representations, phone information is both contained and disentangled from speaker information, while speaker information is hard to contain in a compact subspace, despite being disentangled from phones.

A framework for analyzing concept representations in neural models

This paper compares the empathetic quality of responses generated by humans and large language models (LLMs). We evaluate four LLMs that were widely used at the time of study—GPT-4, LLaMA-2-70B-Chat, Gemini-1.0-Pro, and Mixtral-8×7B-Instruct—against a human baseline using a large-scale between-subjects study. A total of 1,000 human participants evaluated the empathetic quality of human- and LLM-generated responses to 2,000 dialogue prompts spanning 32 positive and negative emotions. To complement human judgments, we also employed an LLM-as-judge (GPT-4o-mini) to assess the same responses. Across emotions and evaluators, LLM-generated responses were rated as significantly more empathetic than human-written responses. We also observed that both human judges and the LLM-as-judge tended to rate responses generated by their own group more favorably, indicating self-favoring tendencies. These findings highlight both the strong performance of contemporary LLMs in empathetic responding and the need to interpret human- and LLM-based evaluations with care.

Who Generates More Empathetic Responses—Humans or LLMs? A Comparative Evaluation with Human and LLM Judges

Language model training and inference ignore a fundamental linguistic fact -- there is a dependence between multiple sequences of text written by the same person. Prior work has shown that addressing this form of \textit{ecological fallacy} can greatly improve the performance of multiple smaller (~124M) GPT-based models. In this work, we ask if addressing the ecological fallacy by modeling the author's language context with a specific LM task (called HuLM) can provide similar benefits for a larger-scale model, an 8B Llama model. To this end, we explore variants that process an author's language in the context of their other temporally ordered texts. We study the effect of pre-training with this author context using the HuLM objective, as well as using it during fine-tuning with author context (\textit{HuFT:Human-aware Fine-Tuning}). Empirical comparisons show that addressing the ecological fallacy during fine-tuning alone using QLoRA improves the performance of the larger 8B model over standard fine-tuning. Additionally, QLoRA-based continued HuLM pre-training results in a human-aware model generalizable for improved performance over eight downstream tasks with linear task classifier training alone. These results indicate the utility and importance of modeling language in the context of its original generators, the authors.

Addressing the Ecological Fallacy in Larger LMs with Human Context

Attention sinks—initial tokens that absorb disproportionate attention 
mass—are widely regarded as softmax artifacts. We show they carry a 
second function: relaying morphosyntactic features for agreement 
computation. Masking sink positions across 67 BLiMP subtasks in five 
models (three architectures) produces a selective dissociation: 
agreement collapses (Δ = −0.50) while binding, NPI licensing, and 
island constraints degrade moderately (Δ = −0.17; d = −1.89). 
Activation patching isolates a write–propagate–read circuit: L0 
attention writes subject number to sinks, intermediate MLPs maintain 
it, and cliff-layer heads consume it—early-layer restoration recovers 
77% of the effect at 1B. The read phase is sparse at 1B (3 head 
indices) and distributed at 2.8B (32 heads), yet agreement-selective 
at both scales. The relay emerges at training steps 512–2000, 
coinciding with sink formation, and attenuates beyond ~25 tokens as 
direct content-to-content pathways become available. German 
replicates both behavioral and causal signatures; Korean replicates 
the behavioral pattern. These results establish sinks as positional 
relays: emergent fixed-address loci through which transformers route 
grammatical features across structurally intervening material.

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Expect the Unexpected? Testing the Surprisal of Salient Entities

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