Morocco

This paper introduces the concept of multimodal oxymorons. Multimodal oxymorons extend the traditional oxymoron theory by constructing and communicating meaning through the interplay of multiple modalities (such as visual and textual) rather than relying solely on language. The paper argues that multimodal oxymorons are central mechanisms of meaning-making in contemporary communication, as evidenced by the use of memes as an example. While textual oxymorons have long been the subject of analysis in order to ascertain their role in shaping thought and meaning, multimodal oxymorons demonstrate how human cognitive process transcends linguistic boundaries, integrating different modalities (e.g., visual) in order to convey complex ideas. To encourage further study, we present a curated multilingual dataset of Multimodal OXYmoron (MOXY), which can be used as a foundation for further analysis and experimentation. Furthermore, we propose a methodical approach for the identification of multimodal oxymorons along with a pipeline for automated generation. Through illustrative examples and a detailed methodology, this work establishes a comprehensive framework for understanding, identifying, and generating multimodal oxymorons, paving the way for advancements in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, and figurative language studies.

EACL 2026

Multimodal OXYmorons: A Comprehensive Introduction and Computational Analysis Using a Dataset of Oxymoronic Memes in Italian and Spanish

multimodal oxymorons

multimodal figurative language

large language models (llms)

memes

italian

spanish

#### *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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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. 

technical paper

Many research areas rely on data from the
web to gain insights and test their methods.
However, collecting comprehensive research
datasets often demands manually reviewing
many web pages to identify and record relevant
data points, which is labor-intensive and sus-
ceptible to error. While the emergence of large
language models (LLM)-powered web agents
has begun to automate parts of this process,
they often struggle to ensure the validity of the
data they collect. Indeed, these agents exhibit
several recurring failure modes—including hal-
lucinating or omitting values, misinterpreting
page semantics, and failing to detect invalid
information—which are subtle and difficult
to detect and correct manually. To address
this, we introduce the AI Committee, a novel
model-agnostic multi-agent system that auto-
mates the process of validating and remediating
web-sourced datasets. Each agent is special-
ized in a distinct task in the data quality assur-
ance pipeline, from source scrutiny and fact-
checking to data remediation and integrity val-
idation. The AI Committee leverages various
LLM capabilities—including in-context learn-
ing for dataset adaptation, chain-of-thought rea-
soning for complex semantic validation, and a
self-correction loop for data remediation—all
without task-specific training. We demonstrate
the effectiveness of our system by applying
it to three real-world datasets, showing that it
generalizes across LLMs and significantly out-
performs baseline approaches, achieving data
completeness up to 73.3% and precision up to
97.3%. We additionally conduct an ablation
study demonstrating the contribution of each
agent to the Committee’s performance. This
work is released as an open-source tool for the
research community

The AI Committee: A Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Validation and Remediation of Web-Sourced Data (presented virtually)

Public debates surrounding infrastructure and energy projects involve complex networks of stakeholders, arguments, and evolving narratives. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for anticipating controversies and informing engagement strategies, yet existing tools in media intelligence largely rely on descriptive analytics with limited transparency. This paper presents **Stakeholder Suite**, a framework deployed in operational contexts for mapping actors, topics, and arguments within public debates. The system combines actor detection, topic modeling, argument extraction and stance classification in a unified pipeline. Tested on multiple energy infrastructure projects as a case study, the approach delivers fine-grained, source-grounded insights while remaining adaptable to diverse domains. The framework achieves strong retrieval precision and stance accuracy, producing arguments judged relevant in 75\% of pilot use cases. Beyond quantitative metrics, the tool has proven effective for operational use: helping project teams visualize networks of influence, identify emerging controversies, and support evidence-based decision-making.

Stakeholder Suite: A Unified AI Framework for Mapping Actors, Topics and Arguments in Public Debates

For clinical data integration and healthcare services, the HL7 FHIR standard has established itself as a desirable format for interoperability between complex health data. Previous attempts at automating the translation from free-form clinical notes into structured FHIR resources address narrowly defined tasks and rely on modular approaches or LLMs with instruction tuning and constrained decoding. As those solutions frequently suffer from limited generalizability and structural inconformity, we propose an end-to-end framework powered by LLM agents, code execution, and healthcare terminology database tools to address these issues. Our solution, called Infherno, is designed to adhere to the FHIR document schema and competes well with a human baseline in predicting FHIR resources from unstructured text. The implementation features a front end for custom and synthetic data and both local and proprietary models, supporting clinical data integration processes and interoperability across institutions. Gemini 2.5-Pro excels in our evaluation on synthetic and clinical datasets, yet ambiguity and feasibility of collecting ground-truth data remain open problems.

Infherno: End-to-end Agent-based FHIR Resource Synthesis from Free-form Clinical Notes

Large language models (LLMs) can now solve entire exams directly from uploaded PDF assessments, raising urgent concerns about academic integrity and the reliability of grades and credentials. Existing watermarking techniques either operate at the token level or assume control over the model's decoding process, making them ineffective when students query proprietary black-box systems with instructor-provided documents. We present Integrity Shield, a document-layer watermarking system that embeds schema-aware, item-level watermarks into assessment PDFs while keeping their human-visible appearance unchanged. These watermarks consistently prevent MLLMs from answering shielded exam PDFs and encode stable, item-level signatures that can be reliably recovered from model or student responses. Across 30 multi-page exams spanning STEM, humanities, and medical reasoning, Integrity Shield achieves exceptionally high prevention (91–94% exam-level blocking) and strong detection reliability (89–93% signature retrieval) across four commercial MLLMs. Our demo showcases an interactive interface where instructors upload an exam, preview watermark behavior, and inspect pre/post AI performance and authorship evidence.

Integrity Shield A System for Ethical AI Use & Authorship Transparency in Assessments

We introduce QSTN, an open-source Python framework for systematically generating responses from questionnaire-style prompts to support in-silico surveys and annotation tasks with large language models (LLMs). QSTN enables robust evaluation of questionnaire presentation, prompt perturbations, and response generation methods. Our extensive evaluation (>40 million survey responses) shows that question structure and response generation methods have a significant impact on alignment of generated survey responses to human answers and can be obtained for a fraction of the compute cost. In addition, we offer a no-code user interface, which allows researchers to set up robust experiments with LLMs without coding knowledge. We hope that QSTN will support the reproducibility and reliability of LLM-based research in the future.

QSTN: A Modular Framework for Robust Questionnaire Inference with Large Language Models

The five idioms (i.e., varieties) of the Romansh language are largely standardized and are taught in the schools of the respective communities in Switzerland. In this paper, we present the first parallel corpus of Romansh idioms. The corpus is based on 291 schoolbook volumes, which are comparable in content for the five idioms. We use automatic alignment methods to extract 207k multi-parallel segments from the books, with more than 2M tokens in total. A small-scale human evaluation confirms that the segments are highly parallel, making the dataset suitable for NLP applications such as machine translation between Romansh idioms. We release the dataset under a CC-BY-NC-SA license and demonstrate its utility for machine translation by training and evaluating an LLM on a sample of the dataset.

The Mediomatix Corpus: Parallel Data for Romansh Language Varieties via Comparable Schoolbooks

Diacritics are orthographic marks added to letters to specify pronunciation, disambiguate lexical meanings, or indicate grammatical distinctions. Diacritics can significantly influence language processing tasks, especially in languages like Arabic, where diacritic usage varies widely across domains and contexts. While diacritics provide valuable linguistic information, their presence can increase subword fragmentation during tokenization, potentially degrading the performance of NLP models. In this paper, we systematically analyze the impact of diacritics on tokenization and benchmark task performance across major Large Language Models (LLMs). Our results demonstrate that while modern LLMs show robustness to the limited diacritics naturally found in texts, full diacritization leads to substantially increased token fragmentation and degraded performance, highlighting the need for careful handling of diacritics in the future development of Arabic LLMs.

Do Diacritics Matter? Evaluating the Impact of Arabic Diacritics on Tokenization and LLM Benchmarks

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful candidates for complex decision-making, leveraging vast encoded knowledge and remarkable zero-shot abilities. However, their adoption in high-stakes environments is hindered by their opacity; their outputs lack faithful explanations and cannot be effectively contested to correct errors, undermining trustworthiness. In this paper, we propose ART (Adaptive Reasoning Trees), a hierarchical method for claim verification. The process begins with a root claim, which branches into supporting and attacking child arguments. An argument's strength is determined bottom-up via a pairwise tournament of its children, adjudicated by a judge LLM, allowing a final, transparent and contestable verdict to be systematically derived which is missing in methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). We empirically validate ART on multiple datasets, analyzing different argument generators and comparison strategies. Our findings show that ART's structured reasoning outperforms strong baselines, establishing a new benchmark for explainable claim verification which is more reliable and ensures clarity in the overall decision making step.

ART: Adaptive Reasoning Trees for Explainable Claim Verification

Despite advances in multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR), code-switching (CS), the mixing of languages within an utterance common in daily speech, remains a severely underexplored challenge. In this paper, we introduce HiKE: the Hierarchical Korean-English code-switching benchmark, the first globally accessible evaluation framework for Korean-English CS, aiming to provide a means for the precise evaluation of multilingual ASR models and to foster research in the field. The proposed framework not only consists of high-quality, natural CS data across various topics, but also provides meticulous loanword labels and a hierarchical CS-level labeling scheme (word, phrase, and sentence) that together enable a systematic evaluation of a model's ability to handle each distinct level of code-switching. Through evaluations of diverse multilingual ASR models and fine-tuning experiments, this paper demonstrates that while most multilingual ASR models initially struggle with CS-ASR, this capability can be enabled through fine-tuning with both natural and synthetic CS data.

HiKE: Hierarchical Evaluation Framework for Korean-English Code-Switching Speech Recognition

We present a novel approach to bias mitigation in large language models (LLMs) by applying steering vectors to modify model activations in forward passes. We compute 8 steering vectors, each corresponding to a different social bias axis, such as age, gender, or race, on a training subset of the BBQ dataset and compare the effectiveness of these to 3 additional bias mitigation methods across 4 datasets. When optimized on the BBQ dataset, our individually tuned steering vectors achieve average improvements of 12.8% on BBQ, 8.3% on CLEAR-Bias, and 1% on StereoSet, and show improvements over prompting and Self-Debias in all cases, and improvements over fine-tuning in 12 out of 17 evaluations. In addition, steering vectors showed the lowest impact on MMLU scores of the four bias mitigation methods tested. The work presents the first systematic investigation of steering vectors for bias mitigation, and we demonstrate that they are a powerful and computationally efficient strategy for reducing bias in LLMs, with broader implications for enhancing AI safety.

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The AI Committee: A Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Validation and Remediation of Web-Sourced Data (presented virtually)

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Next from EACL 2026

The AI Committee: A Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Validation and Remediation of Web-Sourced Data (presented virtually)

Similar lecture

Towards Multimodal Cultural Context Modeling for African Languages in Large Language Models

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