Morocco

Tracking financial investments in climate adaptation is complex and expertise-intensive, particularly for Early Warning Systems (EWS), where multilateral development bank (MDB) and fund reports lack standardized financial reporting and appear as heterogeneous PDFs with complex tables and inconsistent layouts.


We introduce an agent-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system that uses hybrid retrieval and internal chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to extract relevant financial data, classify EWS investments, and allocate budgets with grounding evidence spans. While these components are individually established, our contribution is their integration into a domain-specific workflow tailored to heterogeneous MDB reports and numerically grounded EWS budget allocation. On a manually annotated CREWS Fund corpus, our system outperforms four alternatives (zero-shot classifier, few-shot ``zero rule&#39;&#39; classifier, fine-tuned transformer-based classifier, and few-shot CoT+ICL classifier) on multi-label classification and budget allocation, achieving 87% accuracy, 89% precision, and 83% recall. We further benchmark against the Gemini 2.5 Flash AI Assistant on an expert-annotated MDB evidence set co-curated with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), enabling a comparative analysis of glass-box agents versus black-box assistants in transparency and performance. The system is publicly deployed and accessible at https://ews-front.vercel.app/ (see Appendix A for demonstration details and Appendix B for dataset statistics and splits). We will open-source all code, LLM generations, and human annotations to support further work on AI-assisted climate finance.

EACL 2026

AI for Climate Finance: Agentic Retrieval and Multi-Step Reasoning for Early Warning System Investments

agentic retrieval

climate finance

multi-step reasoning

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.<br><br>

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Tracking financial investments in climate adaptation is complex and expertise-intensive, particularly for Early Warning Systems (EWS), where multilateral development bank (MDB) and fund reports lack standardized financial reporting and appear as heterogeneous PDFs with complex tables and inconsistent layouts.


We introduce an agent-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system that uses hybrid retrieval and internal chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to extract relevant financial data, classify EWS investments, and allocate budgets with grounding evidence spans. While these components are individually established, our contribution is their integration into a domain-specific workflow tailored to heterogeneous MDB reports and numerically grounded EWS budget allocation. On a manually annotated CREWS Fund corpus, our system outperforms four alternatives (zero-shot classifier, few-shot ``zero rule'' classifier, fine-tuned transformer-based classifier, and few-shot CoT+ICL classifier) on multi-label classification and budget allocation, achieving 87% accuracy, 89% precision, and 83% recall. We further benchmark against the Gemini 2.5 Flash AI Assistant on an expert-annotated MDB evidence set co-curated with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), enabling a comparative analysis of glass-box agents versus black-box assistants in transparency and performance. The system is publicly deployed and accessible at https://ews-front.vercel.app/ (see Appendix A for demonstration details and Appendix B for dataset statistics and splits). We will open-source all code, LLM generations, and human annotations to support further work on AI-assisted climate finance.

demo

#### *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. 

Translation Memory (TM) systems are core components of commercial computer-aided translation (CAT) tools. However, traditional fuzzy matching methods often fail to retrieve semantically relevant content when surface similarity is low. We introduce SmartMatch, an open-source semantic retrieval system for TM that connects modern sentence encoders with a vector database and exposes the full retrieval pipeline through an interactive web-based User Interface (UI). The demo allows users to (i) enter a query segment, (ii) switch between embedding backends, and (iii) inspect the top retrieved matches with similarity scores and qualitative cues, and also observe end-to-end latency in real time. We provide a reproducible benchmark on multilingual TM data, reporting retrieval quality using reference-based MT metrics (COMET, BERTScore, METEOR, chrF), together with coverage and latency/throughput trade-offs relevant to production CAT workflows. On DGT-TM, encoder-based retrieval achieves full coverage (100%) with millisecond-level latency (p50/p90 $\leq$ 6--20\,ms) and attains the strongest semantic-quality scores on the shared query set (e.g., BERTScore up to 0.91 at $k{=}10$), while BM25 remains a strong lightweight lexical baseline with very low latency. Overall, SmartMatch bridges recent advances in sentence encoders with the real-time constraints of translation memory retrieval

SmartMatch: Real-Time Semantic Retrieval for Translation Memory Systems

Architectural design relies on 3D modeling procedures, generally carried out in Building Information Modeling (BIM) formats. In this setting, architects and designers collaborate on building designs, iterating over many possible versions until a final design is agreed upon. However, this iteration is complicated by the fact that any changes need to be made by manually introducing changes to the complex BIM files, which lengthens the design process and makes it difficult to quickly prototype changes. 


To speed up prototyping, we propose VR-Arch, a virtual assistant that allows users to interact with the BIM file in a virtual reality (VR) environment. This framework enables users to 1) make changes directly in the VR environment, 2) make complex queries about the BIM, and 3) combine these to perform more complex actions. All of this is done via voice commands and processed through a ReAct-based agentic system that selects appropriate tools depending on the query context.
This multi-tool approach enables real-time, contextualized interaction through natural language, allowing for a faster and more natural prototyping experience.

A Virtual Assistant for Architectural Design in a VR Environment

Real-time multimodal auto-completion is essential for digital assistants, chatbots, design tools, and healthcare consultations, where user inputs rely on shared visual context. We introduce Multimodal Auto-Completion (MAC), a task that predicts upcoming characters in live chats using partially typed text and visual cues. Unlike traditional text-only auto-completion (TAC), MAC grounds predictions in multimodal context to better capture user intent. To enable this task, we adapt MMDialog and ImageChat to create benchmark datasets. We evaluate leading vision-language models (VLMs) against strong textual baselines, highlighting trade-offs in accuracy and efficiency. We present Router-Suggest, a router framework that dynamically selects between textual models and VLMs based on dialog context, along with a lightweight variant for resource-constrained environments. Router-Suggest achieves a 2.3x to 10x speedup over the best-performing VLM. A user study shows that VLMs significantly excel over textual models on user satisfaction, notably saving user typing effort and improving the quality of completions in multi-turn conversations. These findings underscore the need for multimodal context in auto-completions, leading to smarter, user-aware assistants.

Router-Suggest: A Router-based Framework for Auto-Completions in Visually-Grounded Conversations

Attention regularization aims to supervise the attention patterns in language models like BERT. Various studies have shown that using human-annotated rationales, in the form of highlights that explain why a text has a specific label, can have positive effects on model generalizability. In this work, we address a current gap in the literature: Does attention regularization using human-annotated rationales truly make the model rely more on the tokens that are part of the human-annotated rationale? Our results suggest that oftentimes, attention regularization with randomly selected tokens yields similar improvements as attention regularization with human-annotated rationales. Nevertheless, we find that human-annotated rationales surpass randomly selected tokens when it comes to reducing model sensitivity to strong spurious correlations.

BERT, are you paying attention? Attention regularization with human-annotated rationales

Lexical semantics is concerned with both the multiple senses a word can adopt in different contexts, and the semantic relations that exist between meanings of different words. To investigate them, Contextualized Language Models are a valuable tool that provides context-sensitive representations that can be used to investigate lexical meaning. Recent works like XL-LEXEME have leveraged the task of Word-in-Context to fine-tune them to get more semantically accurate representations, but Word-in-Context only compares occurrences of the same lemma, limiting the range of captured information. In this paper, we propose an extension, Concept Differentiation, to include inter-words scenarios. We provide a dataset for this task, derived from SemCor data. Then we fine-tune several representation models on this dataset. We call these models Concept-Aligned Embeddings (CALE). By challenging our models and other models on various lexical semantic tasks, we demonstrate that the proposed models provide efficient multi-purpose representations of lexical meaning that reach best performances in our experiments. We also show that CALE's fine-tuning brings valuable changes to the spatial organization of embeddings.

CALE : Concept-Aligned Embeddings for Both Within-Lemma and Inter-Lemma Sense Differentiation

Mental models can play a critical role in assessing students' conceptual understanding of a topic. They not only offer insights into what students know but also into how effectively they can apply, relate to, and integrate concepts across various contexts. Thus, students' responses are critical markers of the quality of their understanding and not entities that should be merely graded. However, inferring mental models from student answers is challenging as it requires deep reasoning skills. We propose MMGrader, an approach that infers the quality of students' mental models from their multimodal responses using concept graphs as an analytical framework. In our evaluation with 9 openly available models, we found that the best-performing models fall short of human-level performance. This is because they only achieved an accuracy of approximately 40%, a prediction error of 1.1 units, and a scoring distribution fairly aligned with human scoring patterns. With improved accuracy, these can be highly effective assistants to teachers in inferring the mental models of their entire classrooms, enabling them to do so efficiently and help improve their pedagogies more effectively by designing targeted help sessions and lectures that strengthen areas where students collectively demonstrate lower proficiency.

How effective are VLMs in assisting humans in inferring the quality of mental models from Multimodal short answers?

Reliably ensuring Large Language Models (LLMs) follow complex instructions is a critical challenge, as existing benchmarks often fail to reflect real-world use or isolate compliance from task success. We introduce a modular framework that uses a dynamically generated dataset with up to 20 application-oriented generation constraints to enable a granular and independent analysis of this capability. Our evaluation of five LLMs from different families based on this new benchmark demonstrates that compliance is not a monolithic capability but varies significantly with constraint type, quantity, and position. The analysis reveals model-specific weaknesses, uncovers synergistic and conflicting interactions between instructions, and identifies distinct positional biases such as primacy and recency effects. These granular insights are critical for diagnosing model failures and developing more reliable LLMs for systems that demand strict adherence to complex instructions.

Deconstructing Instruction-Following: A New Benchmark for Granular Evaluation of Large Language Model Instruction Compliance Abilities

In many real-world applications, users rely on natural language instructions to guide large language models (LLMs) across a wide range of tasks. These instructions are often complex, diverse, and subject to frequent change. However, LLMs do not always attend to these instructions reliably, and users lack simple mechanisms to emphasize their importance beyond modifying prompt wording or structure. To address this, we present an inference-time method that enables users to emphasize specific parts of their prompt by steering the model's attention toward them, aligning the model's perceived importance of different prompt tokens with user intent. Unlike prior approaches that are limited to static instructions, require significant offline profiling, or rely on fixed biases, we dynamically update the proportion of model attention given to the user-specified parts--ensuring improved instruction following without performance degradation. We demonstrate that our approach improves instruction following across a variety of tasks involving multiple instructions and generalizes across models of varying scales.

Spotlight Your Instructions: Instruction-following with Dynamic Attention Steering

Efficient long-context processing remains a crucial challenge for contemporary large language models (LLMs), especially in resource-constrained environments. Soft compression architectures promise to extend effective context length by replacing long token sequences with smaller sets of learned compressed tokens. Yet, the limits of compressibility -- and when compression begins to erase task-relevant content -- remain underexplored. In this paper, we define token overflow as a regime in which compressed representations no longer contain sufficient information to answer a given query, and propose a methodology to characterize and detect it. In the xRAG soft-compression setting, we find that query-agnostic saturation statistics reliably separate compressed from uncompressed token representations, providing a practical tool for identifying compressed tokens but showing limited overflow detection capability. Lightweight probing classifiers over both query and context xRAG representations detect overflow with 0.72 AUC-ROC on average on HotpotQA, SQuADv2, and TriviaQA datasets, demonstrating that incorporating query information improves detection performance. These results advance from query-independent diagnostics to query-aware detectors, enabling low-cost pre-LLM gating to mitigate compression-induced errors.

Detecting Overflow in Compressed Token Representations for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Subliminal learning is a recently observed phenomenon in which a student model acquires behavioral traits from a teacher by fine-tuning on teacher-generated data that contains no explicit mention of those traits. This is surprising because the setup resembles hard knowledge distillation: the student only sees the teacher’s final tokens rather than soft probability targets. In this work, we provide a systematic empirical study of subliminal learning in language models, focusing on its generality, sensitivity to training conditions and system prompts, and the adequacy of token-level explanations as underlying mechanisms. We reproduce the subliminal learning pipeline across multiple model families, finding that the phenomenon is model-dependent and not general. We then characterize how transfer strength varies with dataset size, dataset diversity, and fine-tuning time. We also study the stability of transferred traits under multiple rounds of distillation as well as the transfer of multiple traits at once, where stronger traits tend to dominate. Finally, we test token-level accounts, using token entanglement as a representative hypothesis. We find that specific tokens do not standalone carry trait-specific information, suggesting that token-level explanations alone are incomplete. Together, our results delineate key boundary conditions for subliminal learning and motivate further work toward a mechanistic account of how traits are encoded in seemingly unrelated data. The code for our experiments is available at Github Repository: https://github.com/YagneshV/subliminal-learning-codebase.

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SmartMatch: Real-Time Semantic Retrieval for Translation Memory Systems

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Hierarchical Reranking for Scalable Financial RAG System

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Next from EACL 2026

SmartMatch: Real-Time Semantic Retrieval for Translation Memory Systems

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Hierarchical Reranking for Scalable Financial RAG System

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PRESENTATIONS

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