Mexico

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit positional bias in how they use context, which especially affects listwise ranking. To address this, we propose permutation self-consistency, a form of self-consistency over the ranking list outputs of black-box LLMs. Our key idea is to marginalize out different list orders in the prompt to produce an order-independent ranking with less positional bias. First, given some input prompt, we repeatedly shuffle the list in the prompt and pass it through the LLM while holding the instructions the same. Next, we aggregate the resulting sample of rankings by computing the central ranking closest in distance to all of them, marginalizing out prompt order biases in the process. Theoretically, we prove the robustness of our method, showing convergence to the true ranking under random perturbations. Empirically, on five datasets in sorting and passage reranking, our approach improves scores from conventional inference by up to 34-52% for Mistral, 7-18% for GPT-3.5, 8-16% for LLaMA v2 (70B). Our code is at https://github.com/castorini/perm-sc.

NAACL 2024

Found in the Middle: Permutation Self-Consistency Improves Listwise Ranking in Large Language Models

positional bias

sorting

listwise ranking

self-consistency

llms

passage reranking

large language models

language models

#### *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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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. 

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

Open-domain Question Answering (OpenQA) aims at answering factual questions with an external large-scale knowledge corpus. However, real-world knowledge is not static; it updates and evolves continually. Such a dynamic characteristic of knowledge poses a vital challenge for these models, as the trained models need to constantly adapt to the latest information to make sure that the answers remain accurate. In addition, it is still unclear how well an OpenQA model can transfer to completely new knowledge domains. In this paper, we investigate the generalization performance of a retrieval-augmented QA model in two specific scenarios: 1) adapting to updated versions of the same knowledge corpus; 2) switching to completely different knowledge domains. We observe that the generalization challenges of OpenQA models stem from the reader's over-reliance on memorizing the knowledge from the external corpus, which hinders the model from generalizing to a new knowledge corpus. We introduce Corpus-Invariant Tuning (CIT), a simple but effective training strategy, to mitigate the knowledge over-memorization by controlling the likelihood of retrieved contexts during training. Extensive experimental results on multiple OpenQA benchmarks show that CIT achieves significantly better generalizability without compromising the model's performance in its original corpus and domain.

Towards Better Generalization in Open-Domain Question Answering by Mitigating Context Memorization

Query expansion, pivotal in search engines, enhances the representation of user information needs with additional terms. While existing methods expand queries using retrieved or generated contextual documents, each approach has notable limitations. Retrieval-based methods often fail to accurately capture search intent, particularly with brief or ambiguous queries. Generation-based methods, utilizing large language models (LLMs), generally lack corpus-specific knowledge and entail high fine-tuning costs. To address these gaps, we propose a novel zero-shot query expansion framework utilizing LLMs for mutual verification. Specifically, we first design a query-query-document generation method, leveraging LLMs' zero-shot reasoning ability to produce diverse sub-queries and corresponding documents. Then, a mutual verification process synergizes generated and retrieved documents for optimal expansion. Our proposed method is fully zero-shot, and extensive experiments on three public benchmark datasets are conducted to demonstrate its effectiveness over existing methods. Our code is available online at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/MILL to ease reproduction.

MILL: Mutual Verification with Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Query Expansion

Metaphor detection is a challenging task for natural language processing (NLP) systems. Previous works failed to sufficiently utilize the internal and external semantic relationships between target words and their context. Furthermore, they have faced challenges in tackling the problem of data sparseness due to the very limited available training data. To address these two challenges, we propose a novel model called MiceCL. By leveraging the difference between the literal meaning of the target word and the meaning of the sentence as the sentence external difference, MiceCL can better handle the semantic relationships. Additionally, we propose a curriculum learning framework for automatically assessing difficulty of the sentence with a pre-trained model. By starting from easy examples and gradually progressing to more difficult ones, we can ensure that the model will not deal with complex data when its ability is weak so that to avoid wasting limited data. Experimental results demonstrate that MiceCL achieves competitive performance across multiple datasets, with a significantly improved convergence speed compared to other models.

Metaphor Detection with Context Enhancement and Curriculum Learning

Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent performance on various NLP tasks. To use LLMs as strong sequential recommenders, we explore the in-context learning approach to sequential recommendation. We investigate the effects of instruction format, task consistency, demonstration selection, and number of demonstrations. As increasing the number of demonstrations in ICL does not improve accuracy despite using a long prompt, we propose a novel method called LLMSRec-Syn that incorporates multiple demonstration users into one aggregated demonstration. Our experiments on three recommendation datasets show that LLMSRec-Syn outperforms state-of-the-art LLM-based sequential recommendation methods. In some cases, LLMSRec-Syn can perform on par with or even better than supervised learning methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/demoleiwang/LLMSRec_Syn.

The Whole is Better than the Sum: Using Aggregated Demonstrations in In-Context Learning for Sequential Recommendation

We present a game-theoretic model of pragmatics that we call ReCo (for Regularized Conventions). This model formulates pragmatic communication as a game in which players are rewarded for communicating successfully and penalized for deviating from a shared, “default” semantics. As a result, players assign utterances context-dependent meanings that jointly optimize communicative success and naturalness with respect to speakers’ and listeners’ background knowledge of language. By using established game-theoretic tools to compute equilibrium strategies for this game, we obtain principled pragmatic language generation procedures with formal guarantees of communicative success. Across several datasets capturing real and idealized human judgments about pragmatic implicature, ReCo matches, or slightly improves upon, predictions made by Iterated Best Response and Rational Speech Acts models of language understanding.

Regularized Conventions: Equilibrium Computation as a Model of Pragmatic Reasoning

We present the first comprehensive survey of Native Language Identification (NLI) applied to texts. NLI is the task of automatically identifying an author's native language (L1) based on their second language (L2) production. NLI is an important task with practical applications in second language teaching and NLP. The task has been widely studied for both text and speech, particularly for L2 English due to the availability of suitable corpora. Speech-based NLI relies heavily on accent modeled by pronunciation patterns and prosodic cues while text-based NLI relies primarily on modeling spelling errors and grammatical patterns that reveal properties of an individuals' L1 influencing L2 production. We survey over one hundred papers on the topic including the papers associated with the NLI and INLI shared tasks. We describe several text representations and computational techniques used in text-based NLI. Finally, we present a comprehensive account of publicly available datasets used for the task thus far.

Native Language Identification in Texts: A Survey

Language usage is related to speaker age, gender, moral concerns, political ideology, and other attributes. Current state-of-the-art methods for predicting these attributes take a speaker's utterances as input and provide a prediction per speaker attribute. Most of these approaches struggle to handle a large number of utterances per speaker. This difficulty is primarily due to the computational constraints of the models. Additionally, only a subset of speaker utterances may be relevant to specific attributes. In this paper, we formulate speaker attribute prediction as a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) problem and propose RL-MIL, a novel approach based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) that effectively addresses both of these challenges. Our experiments demonstrate that our RL-based methodology consistently outperforms previous approaches across a range of related tasks: predicting speakers' psychographics and demographics from social media posts, and political ideologies from transcribed speeches. We create synthetic datasets and investigate the behavior of RL-MIL systematically. Our results show the success of RL-MIL in improving speaker attribute prediction by learning to select relevant speaker utterances.

Reinforced Multiple Instance Selection for Speaker Attribute Prediction

We introduce GenDecider, a novel re-ranking approach for Zero-Shot Entity Linking (ZSEL), built on the Llama model. It innovatively detects scenarios where the correct entity is not among the retrieved candidates, a common oversight in existing re-ranking methods. By autoregressively generating outputs based on the context of the entity mention and the candidate entities, GenDecider significantly enhances disambiguation, improving the accuracy and reliability of ZSEL systems, as demonstrated on the benchmark ZESHEL dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/kangISU/GenDecider.

GenDecider: Integrating “None of the Candidates” Judgments in Zero-Shot Entity Linking Re-ranking

Vision-language (VL) models, pretrained on colossal image-text datasets, have attained broad VL competence that is difficult to evaluate. A common belief is that a small number of VL skills underlie the variety of VL tests. In this paper, we perform a large-scale transfer learning experiment aimed at discovering latent VL skills from data. We reveal interesting characteristics that have important implications for test suite design. First, generation tasks suffer from a length bias, suggesting benchmarks should balance tasks with varying output lengths. Second, we demonstrate that factor analysis successfully identifies reasonable yet surprising VL skill factors, suggesting benchmarks could leverage similar analyses for task selection. Finally, we present a new dataset, OLIVE$^1$, which simulates user instructions in the wild and presents challenges dissimilar to all datasets we tested. Our findings contribute to the design of balanced and broad-coverage vision-language evaluation methods. $^1$https://github.com/jq-zh/olive-dataset

What Are We Measuring When We Evaluate Large Vision-Language Models? An Analysis of Latent Factors and Biases

Visual Information Extraction (VIE), as a crucial task of Document Intelligence, involves two primary sub-tasks: Semantic Entity Recognition (SER) and Relation Extraction (RE). However, VIE faces two significant challenges. Firstly, most existing models inadequately utilize spatial information of entities, often failing to predict connections or incorrectly linking spatially distant entities. Secondly, the improper input order of tokens challenges in extracting complete entity pairs from documents with multi-line entities when text is extracted via PDF parser or OCR. To address these challenges, we propose LayoutPointer, a Spatial-Context Adaptive Pointer Network. LayoutPointer explicitly enhances spatial-context relationships by incorporating 2D relative position information and adaptive spatial constraints within self-attention. Furthermore, we recast the RE task as a specialized cycle detection problem, employing a unique tail-to-head pointer to restore the semantic order among multi-line entities. To better evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we reconstruct a multi-line dataset named MLFUD, which more accurately reflects real-world scenarios. Fine-tuning experimental results on FUNSD, XFUND, and MLFUD datasets demonstrate that LayoutPointer significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in F1 scores for RE tasks (e.g., 5.71% improvement on XFUND using LayoutPointer$_{\text{BASE-X}}$ over LayoutLMv3).

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