India

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly treated as universal, general-purpose solutions across NLP tasks, particularly in English. But does this assumption hold for low-resource, morphologically rich languages such as Sanskrit? We address this question by comparing instruction-tuned and in-context-prompted LLMs with smaller task-specific encoder–decoder models on the Sanskrit poetry-to-prose conversion task. This task is intrinsically challenging: Sanskrit verse exhibits free word order combined with rigid metrical constraints, and its conversion to canonical prose (anvaya) requires multi-step reasoning involving compound segmentation, dependency resolution, and syntactic linearisation. This makes it an ideal testbed to evaluate whether LLMs can surpass specialised models.

For LLMs, we apply instruction fine-tuning on general-purpose models and design in-context learning templates grounded in Pāṇinian grammar and classical commentary heuristics. For task-specific modelling, we fully fine-tune a ByT5-Sanskrit Seq2Seq model. Our experiments show that domain-specific fine-tuning of ByT5-Sanskrit significantly outperforms all instruction-driven LLM approaches. Human evaluation strongly corroborates this result, with scores exhibiting high correlation with Kendall’s Tau scores.
Additionally, our prompting strategies provide an alternative to fine-tuning when domain-specific verse corpora are unavailable, and the task-specific Seq2Seq model demonstrates robust generalisation on out-of-domain evaluations.
Our code$^1$ and dataset$^2$ are publicly available.

IJCNLP-AACL 2025

Still Not There: Can LLMs Outperform Smaller Task-Specific Seq2Seq Models on the Poetry-to-Prose Conversion Task?

low-resource morphologically rich languages

poetry to prose conversion

llm evaluation

#### *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. 

poster

### Welcome to IJCNLP-AACL 2025! 
 It is a great honor to host this joint conference in Mumbai, India, from December 20 to 24, 2025. The joint conferences of IJCNLP and AACL are organized with alternating leadership in the Asia-Pacific region. The event is run by the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP) in odd years, and by AACL in even years, while it is organized solely by ACL when the annual ACL meeting is held in the region. This year, the conference is primarily organized by AFNLP. 
*Kentaro Inui
MBZUAI, UAE
General Chair, IJCNLP-AACL 2025* 
Read full message and download the Conference Handbook [**here**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UTwxkAqSqI-GAoJC3wE1zZt5VP1Y8GX0/view?usp=sharing).

The 14th IJCNLP & 4th AACL will be held in Mumbai, India from December 20th to December 24th, 2025.

Progress in biomedical Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Entity Linking (EL) is currently hindered by a fragmented data landscape, a lack of resources for building explainable models, and the limitations of semantically-blind evaluation metrics. To address these challenges, we present MedPath, a large-scale and multi-domain biomedical EL dataset that builds upon nine existing expert-annotated EL datasets. In MedPath, all entities are 1) normalized using the latest version of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), 2) augmented with mappings to 62 other biomedical vocabularies and, crucially, 3) enriched with full ontological paths---i.e., from general to specific---in up to 11 biomedical vocabularies. MedPath directly enables new research frontiers in biomedical NLP, facilitating training and evaluation of semantic-rich and interpretable EL systems, and the development of the next generation of interoperable and explainable clinical NLP models.

MedPath: Multi-Domain Cross-Vocabulary Hierarchical Paths for Biomedical Entity Linking

Question Generation (QG) is central to information retrieval, education, and knowledge assessment, yet its progress is bottlenecked by unreliable and non-scalable evaluation practices. Traditional metrics fall short in structured settings like document-grounded QG, and human evaluation, while insightful, remains expensive, inconsistent, and difficult to replicate at scale. We introduce AURA-QG: an Automated, Unsupervised, Replicable Assessment pipeline that scores question sets using only the source document. It captures four orthogonal dimensions i.e., answerability, non-redundancy, coverage, and structural entropy, without needing reference questions or relative baselines. Our method is modular, efficient, and agnostic to the question generation strategy. Through extensive experiments across four domains i.e., car manuals, economic surveys, health brochures, and fiction, we demonstrate its robustness across input granularities and prompting paradigms. Chain-of-Thought prompting, which first extracts answer spans and then generates targeted questions, consistently yields higher answerability and coverage, validating the pipeline’s fidelity. The metrics also exhibit strong agreement with human judgments, reinforcing their reliability for practical adoption. The complete implementation of our evaluation pipeline is publicly available.

AURA-QG: Automated Unsupervised Replicable Assessment for Question Generation

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly impacted data science workflows, giving rise to specialized data science agents designed to automate analytical tasks. Despite rapid adoption, systematic benchmarks evaluating the efficacy and limitations of these agents remain scarce. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark specifically crafted to reflect real-world user interactions with data science agents by observing usage of our commercial applications. We evaluate three LLMs: Claude-4.0-Sonnet, Gemini-2.5-Flash, and OpenAI-o4-Mini across three approaches: zero-shot with context engineering, multi-step with context engineering, and with SmolAgent. Our benchmark assesses performance across a diverse set of eight data science task categories, additionally exploring the sensitivity of models to common prompting issues, such as data leakage and slightly ambiguous instructions. We further investigate the influence of temperature parameters on overall and task-specific outcomes for each model and approach. Our findings reveal distinct performance disparities among the evaluated models and methodologies, highlighting critical factors that affect practical deployment. The benchmark dataset and evaluation framework introduced herein aim to provide a foundation for future research of more robust and effective data science agents.

DSBC : Data Science task Benchmarking with Context engineering

Although Farsi is widely spoken, no comprehensive benchmark exists for assessing commonsense reasoning in language models. We therefore present \textbf{FarSense}, a 6‑task benchmark for Farsi covering True/False judgment,  multiple-choice questions, Explanation, Cause‑Effect inference, Counterfactual reasoning, and Knowledge Completion. Starting from Farsi‑Wikipedia, we filtered noise and retained ~4,210 passages, rewrote them into realistic daily scenarios, and derived the above tasks from each scenario. Scenario and task generation quality was first judged via native‑speaker annotations on outputs from five major LLMs—GPT‑4o, Gemini-2.5-Flash, Mistral-Large, Qwen‑Plus, and DeepSeek‑Chat. Gemini-2.5-Flash demonstrated the highest performance, leading to its use in generating a large-scale dataset, subsequently finalized through meticulous two-step human validation.  Using \textbf{FarSense}, we measured the commonsense ability of the same five flagship LLMs and also fine‑tuned six compact models (1B–24B parameters) before re‑evaluating them. To ensure broad applicability, task wording was designed to minimize dialectal, cultural, or religious bias. Experiments show that targeted fine‑tuning yields substantial gains, confirming \textbf{FarSense} as a reliable, openly licensed resource for advancing reproducible commonsense understanding research in Farsi NLP. We publicly release all code and data at https://github.com/KamyarZeinalipour/FarSense.

FarSense: A Comprehensive Commonsense Benchmark and Evaluation Framework for the Farsi Language

The rapid growth of social networks has led to a surge in social bots, which often disseminate low-quality content and may manipulate public opinion, posing threats to online security. Although recent GNN-based bot detection methods perform strongly, they still face two major challenges. First, deep GNNs are prone to over-smoothing: neighbor aggregation blends bot and human node representations, obscuring bot-specific features. Second, social graphs are dominated by human–human and human–bot connections, while direct bot–bot links are scarce, making it difficult for effective bot representations to propagate within GNNs. To address these issues, we propose a Topology-Aware Gated Graph Neural Network (\framework) to detect social bots. \framework~ employs topology-aware data augmentation to synthesize realistic bot nodes that preserve the original graph structure, mitigating class imbalance; it also introduces a hierarchical gating mechanism that restructures node embeddings into a tree format, selectively filtering noise and enhancing discriminative features. Experiments on three standard benchmark datasets show that \framework consistently surpasses leading baselines in highly imbalanced settings, delivering superior accuracy and robustness.

Topology-Aware Gated Graph Neural Network for Social Bot Detection

Using a sample of $25,000$ Bing Copilot conversations, we study how the agent responds to users of varying levels of domain expertise and the resulting impact on user experience along multiple dimensions. Our findings show that across a variety of topical domains, the agent largely responds at proficient or expert levels of expertise (77\% of conversations) which correlates with positive user experience regardless of the user's level of expertise. Misalignment, such that the agent responds at a level of expertise below that of the user, has a negative impact on overall user experience, with the impact more profound for more complex tasks. We also show that users engage more, as measured by the number of words in the conversation, when the agent responds at a level of expertise commensurate with that of the user. Our findings underscore the importance of alignment between users and AI when designing human-centered AI systems, to ensure satisfactory and productive interactions.

Speaking the Right Language: The Impact of Expertise (Mis)Alignment in User-AI Interactions

Dialogue State Tracking (DST) is a key part of task-oriented dialogue systems, identifying important information in conversations. However, its accuracy drops significantly in spoken dialogue environments due to named entity errors from Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. We introduce a simple yet effective data augmentation method that targets those entities to improve the robustness of DST model. Our novel method can control the placement of errors using keyword-highlighted prompts while introducing phonetically similar errors. As a result, our method generated sufficient error patterns on keywords, leading to improved accuracy in noised and low-accuracy ASR environments.

Speak & Spell: LLM-Driven Controllable Phonetic Error Augmentation for Robust Dialogue State Tracking

Social media has become a crucial platform for information dissemination and opinion expression. The massive and continuous generation of user content has given rise to various natural language processing tasks, such as sentiment analysis and topic classification. However, existing mainstream approaches typically focus on modeling individual tasks in isolation, lacking systematic exploration of collaborative modeling across multiple tasks. This neglects the inherent correlations among social media tasks, thereby limiting the model’s ability to fully comprehend and exploit the rich, multi-dimensional semantic information embedded in text. To address this challenge, we propose $\textbf{Ta}$sk-adaptive $\textbf{C}$ontrastive $\textbf{L}$earning with $\textbf{Co}$operative $\textbf{M}$ixture $\textbf{o}$f $\textbf{E}$xperts ($\textbf{TaCL-CoMoE}$), a unified framework for social media multi-task learning. Specifically, we improve the gating mechanism by replacing the traditional softmax routing with sigmoid activation, enabling cooperative selection among multiple experts and mitigating the ``expert monopoly'' phenomenon. In addition, we introduce a task-adaptive contrastive learning strategy to further enhance the model’s ability to capture and distinguish semantic structures across different tasks. Experimental results on multiple public social media datasets demonstrate that TaCL-CoMoE consistently achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. The code is available at https://github.com/wxr2847/TaCL-CoMoE.

TaCL-CoMoE: Task-adaptive Contrastive Learning with Cooperative Mixture of Experts for Multi-task Social Media Analysis

Radiology report summarization (RRS) is critical for clinical workflows, requiring concise Impressions "distilled from detailed Findings." This paper proposes a novel prompting strategy that enhances RRS by introducing a layperson summary as an intermediate step. This summary helps normalize key observations and simplify complex terminology using communication techniques inspired by doctor–patient interactions. Combined with few-shot in-context learning, this approach improves the model’s ability to map generalized descriptions to specific clinical findings. We evaluate our method on three benchmark datasets, MIMIC-CXR, CheXpert, and MIMIC-III, and compare it against state-of-the-art open-source language models in the 7B/8B parameter range, such as Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct. Results show consistent improvements in summarization quality, with gains of up to 5% on some metrics for prompting, and more than 20% for some models when instruction tuning.

Simplified Rewriting Improves Expert Summarization

User satisfaction in dialogue systems is inherently subjective. When the same response strategy is applied across users, minority users may assign different satisfaction ratings than majority users due to variations in individual intents and preferences. However, existing alignment methods typically train one-size-fits-all models that aim for broad consensus, often overlooking minority perspectives and user-specific adaptation. We propose a unified framework that models both individual- and group-level preferences for user satisfaction estimation. First, we introduce Chain-of-Personalized-Reasoning (CoPeR) to capture individual preferences through interpretable reasoning chains. Second, we propose an expectation-maximization-based Majority-Minority Preference-Aware Clustering (M²PC) algorithm that discovers distinct user groups in an unsupervised manner to learn group-level preferences. Finally, we integrate these components into a preference-adaptive reinforcement learning framework (PAda-PPO) that jointly optimizes alignment with both individual and group preferences. Experiments on the Emotional Support Conversation dataset demonstrate consistent improvements in user satisfaction estimation, particularly for underrepresented user groups.

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MedPath: Multi-Domain Cross-Vocabulary Hierarchical Paths for Biomedical Entity Linking

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