China

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong performance across a wide range of NLP tasks, yet aligning their outputs with the principles of Helpfulness, Harmlessness, and Honesty (HHH) remains a persistent challenge. Existing methods often optimize for individual alignment dimensions in isolation, leading to trade-offs and inconsistent behavior. While Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures offer modularity, they suffer from poorly calibrated routing, limiting their effectiveness in alignment tasks. We propose TrinityX, a modular alignment framework that incorporates a Mixture of Calibrated Experts (MoCaE) within the Transformer architecture. TrinityX leverages separately trained experts for each HHH dimension, integrating their outputs through a calibrated, task-adaptive routing mechanism that combines expert signals into a unified, alignment-aware representation. Extensive experiments on three standard alignment benchmarks—Alpaca (Helpfulness), BeaverTails (Harmlessness), and TruthfulQA (Honesty)—demonstrate that TrinityX outperforms strong baselines, achieving relative improvements of 32.5% in win rate, 33.9% in safety score, and 28.4% in truthfulness. In addition, TrinityX reduces memory usage and inference latency by over 40% compared to prior MoE-based approaches. Ablation studies highlight the importance of calibrated routing, and cross-model evaluations confirm TrinityX’s generalization across diverse LLM backbones. Our code is available at: \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TrinityX-3265}

EMNLP 2025

Too Helpful, Too Harmless, Too Honest or Just Right?

alignment

#### *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. 

poster

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community."<br>

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*





<br>

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across diverse natural language processing tasks, but concerns persist regarding their potential political biases. While prior research has extensively explored political biases in LLMs' text generation and perception, scant attention has been devoted to biases associated with media outlet names. In this study, we systematically investigate the presence of media outlet name biases in LLMs and evaluate their impact on downstream tasks, such as political bias prediction and news summarization. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs consistently exhibit biases toward the known political leanings of media outlets, with variations across model families and scales. We propose a novel metric to quantify media outlet name biases in LLMs and leverage this metric to develop an automated prompt optimization framework. This framework effectively mitigates media outlet name biases, offering a scalable approach to enhancing the fairness of LLMs in news-related applications.

Measuring and Mitigating Media Outlet Name Bias in Large Language Models

Interaction between the learner and the feedback-giver has come into focus recently for post-training of Large Language Models (LLMs), through the use of reward models that judge the appropriateness of a model's response. In this paper, we investigate whether Dialogue Games---goal-directed and rule-governed activities driven predominantly by verbal actions---can also serve as a source of feedback signals for learning. We introduce Playpen, an environment for off- and online learning through Dialogue Game self-play, and investigate a representative set of post-training methods: supervised fine-tuning, direct alignment (DPO), and reinforcement learning with GRPO. We experiment with post-training a small LLM (Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct), evaluating performance on unseen instances of training games as well as unseen games, and on standard benchmarks. We find that imitation learning through SFT improves performance on unseen instances, but negatively impacts other skills, while interactive learning with GRPO shows balanced improvements without loss of skills. We release the framework and the baseline training setups to foster research in this promising new direction of ``learning in (synthetic) interaction''

Playpen: An Environment for Exploring Learning From Dialogue Game Feedback

Large language models (LLMs) offer a powerful opportunity to simulate the results of social science experiments. In this work, we demonstrate that finetuning LLMs directly on individual-level responses from past experiments meaningfully improves the accuracy of such simulations across diverse social science domains. We construct SocSci210 via an automatic pipeline, a dataset comprising 2.9 million responses from 400,491 participants in 210 open-source social science experiments. Through finetuning, we achieve multiple levels of generalization. In completely unseen studies, our strongest model, Socrates-Qwen-14B, produces predictions that are 26% more aligned with distributions of human responses to diverse outcome questions under varying conditions relative to its base model (Qwen2.5-14B), outperforming GPT-4o by 13%. By finetuning on a subset of conditions in a study, generalization to new unseen conditions is particularly robust, improving by 71%. Since SocSci210 contains rich demographic information, we reduce demographic parity difference, a measure of bias, by 10.6% through finetuning. Because social sciences routinely generate rich, topic-specific datasets, our findings indicate that finetuning on such data could enable more accurate simulations for experimental hypothesis screening. We release our data, models and finetuning code at stanfordhci.github.io/socrates.

Finetuning LLMs for Human Behavior Prediction in Social Science Experiments

The proliferation of multimodal content on social media presents significant challenges in understanding and moderating complex, context-dependent issues such as misinformation, hate speech, and propaganda. While efforts have been made to develop resources and propose new methods for automatic detection, limited attention has been given to label detection and the generation of explanation-based rationales for predicted labels. To address this challenge, we introduce MemeXplain, an explanation-enhanced dataset for propaganda memes in Arabic and hateful memes in English, making it the first large-scale resource for these tasks. To solve these tasks, we propose a novel multi-stage optimization approach and train Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Our results demonstrate that this approach significantly improves performance over the base model for both label detection and explanation generation, outperforming the current state-of-the-art with an absolute improvement of approximately 3% on ArMeme and 7% on Hateful Memes. For reproducibility and future research, we aim to make the MemeXplain dataset and scripts publicly available.

MemeIntel: Explainable Detection of Propagandistic and Hateful Memes

Quantization enables efficient deployment of large language models (LLMs) in resource-constrained environments by significantly reducing memory and computation costs. While quantized LLMs often maintain performance on perplexity and zero-shot tasks, their impact on truthfulness—whether generating truthful or deceptive responses—remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce TruthfulnessEval, a comprehensive evaluation framework for assessing the truthfulness of quantized LLMs across three dimensions: (1) Truthfulness on Logical Reasoning; (2) Truthfulness on Common Sense; and (3) Truthfulness on Imitative Falsehoods. Using this framework, we examine mainstream quantization techniques (ranging from 4-bit to extreme 2-bit) across several open-source LLMs. Surprisingly, we find that while quantized models retain internally truthful representations, they are more susceptible to producing false outputs under misleading prompts. To probe this vulnerability, we test 15 rephrased variants of "honest", "neutral" and "deceptive" prompts and observe that "deceptive" prompts can override truth-consistent behavior, whereas "honest" and "neutral" prompts maintain stable outputs. Further, we reveal that quantized models "know" the truth internally yet still produce false outputs when guided by "deceptive" prompts via layer-wise probing and PCA visualizations. Our findings provide insights into future designs of quantization-aware alignment and truthfulness interventions.

Quantized but Deceptive? A Multi-Dimensional Truthfulness Evaluation of Quantized LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) are prone to hallucinations and sensitive to prompt perturbations, often resulting in inconsistent or unreliable generated text. Different methods have been proposed to mitigate such hallucinations and fragility--one of them being measuring the consistency (the model's confidence in the response, or likelihood of generating a similar response when resampled) of LLM responses. In previous work, measuring consistency often relied on the probability of a response appearing within a pool of resampled responses, or internal states or logits of responses. However, it is not yet clear how well these approaches approximate how humans perceive the consistency of LLM responses. We performed a user study (n=2,976) and found current methods typically do not approximate users' perceptions of LLM consistency very well. We propose a logit-based ensemble method for estimating LLM consistency, and we show that this method matches the performance of the best-performing existing metric in estimating human ratings of LLM consistency. Our results suggest that methods of estimating LLM consistency without human evaluation are sufficiently imperfect that we suggest evaluation with human input be more broadly used.

Estimating LLM Consistency: A User Baseline vs Surrogate Metrics

Automatic toxic language detection is important for creating safe, inclusive online spaces. However, it is a highly subjective task, with perceptions of toxic language shaped by community norms and lived experience. Existing toxicity detection models are typically trained on annotations that collapse diverse annotator perspectives into a single ground truth, erasing important context-specific notions of toxicity such as reclaimed language. To address this, we introduce MODELCITIZENS, a dataset of 6.8K social media posts and 40K toxicity annotations across diverse identity groups. To reflect the impact of conversational context on toxicity, typical of social media posts, we augment MODELCITIZENS posts with LLM-generated conversational scenarios. State-of-the-art toxicity detection tools (e.g. OpenAI Moderation API, GPT-o4-mini) underperform on MODELCITIZENS with further degradation on context-augmented posts. Finally, we release LLAMACITIZEN-8B and GEMMACITIZEN-12B, LLaMA and Gemma-based models finetuned on our dataset, which outperform GPT-o4-mini by 5.5% on in-distribution evaluations. Our findings highlight the importance of community-informed annotation and modeling for inclusive content moderation. We will release all code, data and models upon publication.

ModelCitizens: Representing Community Voices in Online Safety

Despite numerous applications for fine-grained corpus analysis, researchers continue to rely on manual labeling, which does not scale, or statistical tools like topic modeling, which are difficult to control. We propose that LLMs have the potential to scale the nuanced analyses that researchers typically conduct manually to large text corpora. To this effect, inspired by qualitative research methods, we develop HICode, a two-part pipeline that first inductively generates labels directly from analysis data and then hierarchically clusters them to surface emergent themes. We validate this approach across three diverse datasets by measuring alignment with human-constructed themes and demonstrating its robustness through automated and human evaluations. Finally, we conduct a case study of litigation documents related to the ongoing opioid crisis in U.S., revealing aggressive marketing strategies employed by pharmaceutical companies and demonstrating HICode's potential for facilitating nuanced analyses in large-scale data.

HICode: Hierarchical Inductive Coding with LLMs

While large multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) models achieve remarkable performance, the internal mechanisms of the end-to-end pipeline, particularly concerning fairness and efficacy across languages, remain underexplored. This paper introduces a fine-grained analysis of Whisper’s multilingual decoder, examining its sub-token hypotheses during transcription across languages with various resource levels. Our method traces the beam search path, capturing sub-token guesses and their associated probabilities. Results reveal that higher resource languages benefit from markedly higher likelihood of the correct token being top-ranked in candidate guesses, higher confidence, lower predictive entropy, and more diverse alternative candidates. Lower resource languages fare worse on these metrics, but also exhibit distinct clustering patterns in sub-token usage sometimes influenced by typology in our PCA analysis. This sub-token probing uncovers systematic decoding disparities masked by aggregate error rates and points towards targeted interventions to ameliorate the imbalanced development of speech technology.

Beyond WER: Probing Whisper's Sub‑token Decoder Across Diverse Language Resource Levels

This paper explores the use of existing state-of-the-art speech recognition models (ASR) for the task of generating narrow phonetic transcriptions using the International Phonetic Alphabet (STIPA). Unlike conventional ASR systems focused on orthographic output for high-resource languages, STIPA can be used as a language-agnostic interface valuable for documenting under-resourced and unwritten languages. We introduce a new dataset for South Levantine Arabic and present the first large-scale evaluation of STIPA models across 51 language families. Additionally, we provide a use case on Sanna, a severely endangered language. Our findings show that fine-tuned ASR models can produce accurate IPA transcriptions with limited supervision, significantly reducing phonetic error rates even in extremely low-resource settings. The results highlight the potential of STIPA for scalable language documentation.

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