Morocco

While large language models (LLMs) are generally considered proficient in generating language, how similar their language usage is to that of humans remains understudied. In this paper, we test whether models exhibit linguistic convergence, a core pragmatic element of human language communication, asking: do models adapt, or converge, to the linguistic patterns of their user? To answer this, we systematically compare model completions of exisiting dialogues to the original human responses across sixteen language models, three dialogue corpora, and a variety of stylometric features. We find that models strongly converge to the conversation&#39;s style, often significantly overfitting relative to the human baseline. While convergence patterns are often feature-specific, we observe consistent shifts in convergence across modeling settings, with instruction-tuned and larger models converging less than their pretrained counterparts. Given the differences between human and model convergence patterns, we hypothesize that the underlying mechanisms for these behaviors are very different.

EACL 2026

Do language models accommodate their users? A study of linguistic convergence

linguistic analysis

accommodation

language models

dialogue

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EMNLP 2024

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While large language models (LLMs) are generally considered proficient in generating language, how similar their language usage is to that of humans remains understudied. In this paper, we test whether models exhibit linguistic convergence, a core pragmatic element of human language communication, asking: do models adapt, or converge, to the linguistic patterns of their user? To answer this, we systematically compare model completions of exisiting dialogues to the original human responses across sixteen language models, three dialogue corpora, and a variety of stylometric features. We find that models strongly converge to the conversation's style, often significantly overfitting relative to the human baseline. While convergence patterns are often feature-specific, we observe consistent shifts in convergence across modeling settings, with instruction-tuned and larger models converging less than their pretrained counterparts. Given the differences between human and model convergence patterns, we hypothesize that the underlying mechanisms for these behaviors are very different.

technical paper

#### *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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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. 

Large language models demonstrate promising long-context processing capabilities, with recent models touting context windows close to one million tokens. However, the evaluations supporting these claims often involve simple retrieval tasks or synthetic tasks padded with irrelevant text, which models may easily detect and discard. In this work, we generate lengthy, simplified English text with first-order logic representations spanning up to 2048 sentences (~25 k GPT-4 tokens). We formulate an evaluation task with evidence retrieval for contradiction detection. The long, homogeneous text is filled with distractors that are both hard to distinguish from relevant evidence and provably non-interfering. Our evaluation of evidence retrieval reveals that the effective context window is much smaller with such realistic distractors, already crumbling at 128 sentences.

Logic Haystacks: Probing LLMs' Long-Context Logical Reasoning (Without Easily Identifiable Unrelated Padding)

Despite major advances in multilingual modeling, large quality disparities persist across languages. Besides the obvious role of training data representation, typological properties have also been proposed to determine the intrinsic difficulty of modeling a language. The existing evidence, however, is mostly based on small monolingual language models or bilingual translation models trained from scratch. We expand on this line of work by analyzing two large pre-trained multilingual translation models, NLLB-200 and Tower+, which are state-of-the-art representatives of encoder-decoder and decoder-only machine translation, respectively. Based on a broad set of languages, we find that target language typology drives translation quality of the NLLB model, even after controlling for more trivial factors, such as data resourcedness and writing script. Additionally, languages with certain typological properties benefit more from a wider search of the output space, suggesting that such languages could benefit from alternative decoding strategies beyond the standard left-to-right beam search. By contrast, variations in translation quality of the LLM-based Tower+ model remain largely unexplained by our predictors. To facilitate further research in this area, we release a set of fine-grained typological properties for 212 languages of the FLORES+ MT evaluation benchmark.

Assessing the Impact of Typological Features on Multilingual Machine Translation in the Age of Large Language Models

Decomposition-based multi-hop retrieval methods rely on many autoregressive steps to break down complex queries, which breaks end-to-end differentiability and is computationally expensive. Decomposition-free methods tackle this, but current approaches struggle with longer multi-hop problems and generalization to out-of-distribution data. To address these challenges, we introduce GRITHopper-7B, a novel multi-hop dense retrieval model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks. GRITHopper-7B combines generative and representational instruction tuning by integrating causal language modeling with dense retrieval training. Through controlled studies, we find that incorporating additional context after the retrieval process, referred to as post-retrieval language modeling, enhances dense retrieval performance. By including elements such as final answers during training, the model learns to better contextualize and retrieve relevant information. GRITHopper-7B offers a robust, scalable, and generalizable solution for multi-hop dense retrieval, and we release it to the community for future research and applications requiring complex reasoning and retrieval capabilities.

GRITHopper: Decomposition-Free Multi-Hop Dense Retrieval

Language changes faster than dictionaries can be revised, yet automatic tools still struggle to spot the subtle, short term shifts in meaning that precede a formal update. We present a language independent pipeline that detects word sense shifts in large, timestamped web corpora. The method couples a robust reimplementation of the Adaptive Skip-Gram model, which induces multiple sense vectors per lemma without any external inventory, with a second stage that tracks each sense through time under three alternative frequency normalizations. Linear Regression and the robust Mann-Kendall/Theil-Sen estimator then test whether a sense’s frequency slope deviates significantly from zero, producing a ranked list of headwords whose semantics are drifting.
                                                                              
We evaluate the system on the English (12 B tokens) and Czech (1 B tokens) Timestamped corpora for May 2023-May 2025. Expert annotation of the top-100 candidates for each model variant shows that 50.7% of Czech and 25.7% of English headwords exhibit genuine sense shifts, despite web-scale noise.

Detecting Subtle Sense Shift with Polysemy-Aware Trends

We expose a critical limitation in current approaches to machine unlearning in language models: despite the apparent success of unlearning algorithms, information about the forgotten data remains linearly decodable from internal representations. To systematically assess this discrepancy, we introduce an interpretable, information-theoretic framework for auditing unlearning using Partial Information Decomposition (PID). By comparing model representations before and after unlearning, we decompose the mutual information with the forgotten data into distinct components, formalizing the notions of unlearned and residual knowledge. Our analysis reveals that redundant information, shared across both models, constitutes residual knowledge that persists post-unlearning and correlates with susceptibility to known adversarial reconstruction attacks. Leveraging these insights, we propose a representation-based risk score that can guide abstention on sensitive inputs at inference time, providing a practical mechanism to mitigate privacy leakage. Our work introduces a principled, representation-level audit for unlearning, offering theoretical insight and actionable tools for safer deployment of language models.

Auditing Language Model Unlearning via Information Decomposition

Detecting hyperpartisan narratives and Population Replacement Conspiracy Theories is essential to addressing the spread of misinformation. However, existing resources are scarce, predominantly English-centric, and often analyze hyperpartisanship, stance, and rhetorical bias in isolation rather than as interrelated aspects of political discourse. To bridge this gap, we introduce PartisanLens, the first multilingual dataset of 1617 hyperpartisan news headlines in Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. We first evaluate the classification performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on this dataset, establishing new baselines and showing that LLMs outperform mBERT. In addition, we assess the viability of using LLMs as automatic annotators for this task, analyzing their ability to approximate human annotation. Results highlight both their potential and current limitations. Finally, moving beyond standard judgements, we explore whether LLMs can emulate human annotation patterns by conditioning them on socio-economic and ideological profiles that simulate annotator perspectives. By providing this resource and evaluation, PartisanLens supports future research on detecting partisan and conspiratorial narratives in European contexts.

PartisanLens: A Multilingual Dataset of Hyperpartisan and Conspiratorial Immigration Narratives in European Media

Entity representation learning on hypergraphs is hindered by degree bias, where nodes with sparse connections suffer from limited structural information for aggregation. Prevailing “attribute-as-feature“ approaches, which treat rich textual attributes (e.g., titles, abstracts, keywords) merely as node features, fail to address this structurally rooted problem as they do not create new aggregation pathways. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel “attribute-as-structure“ approach specifically designed for heterogeneous hypergraphs. Our approach integrates attributes directly into the hypergraph topology as distinct node types, creating new structural pathways to enrich sparsely connected entities while preserving semantic distinctiveness within complex many-to-many hyperedge interactions. We introduce an entity-attribute aware learning framework featuring two key innovations: (1) a specialized heterogeneous hypergraph encoder with dual attention mechanisms—self-attention for entity-entity relationships and cross-type attention for entity-attribute relevance, and (2) Attribute-Attentive Contrastive Learning (AACL), a novel objective that dynamically weighs attribute importance while explicitly aligning entity representations with their structural attributes. Experiments on multiple hypergraph datasets demonstrate consistent improvements in node classification performance, with particularly significant gains for structurally sparse nodes, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach for degree bias mitigation.

Mitigating Degree Bias in Hypergraphs via Attribute-as-Structure Approach

Test-time scaling (TTS) has enhanced the performance of Reasoning Models (RMs) on various tasks such as math and coding, yet its efficacy in machine translation (MT) remains underexplored. This paper investigates whether increased inference-time computation improves translation quality. We evaluate 12 RMs across a diverse suite of MT benchmarks spanning multiple domains, examining three scenarios: direct translation, forced-reasoning extrapolation, and post-editing. Our findings show that for general-purpose RMs, TTS provides limited and inconsistent benefits for direct translation, with performance quickly plateauing. However, the effectiveness of TTS is unlocked by domain-specific fine-tuning, which aligns a model's reasoning process with task requirements, leading to consistent improvements up to an optimal, self-determined reasoning depth. We also find that forcing a model to reason beyond its natural stopping point consistently degrades translation quality. In contrast, TTS proves highly effective in a post-editing context, reliably turning self-correction into a beneficial process. These results indicate that the value of inference-time computation in MT lies not in enhancing single-pass translation with general models, but in targeted applications like multi-step, self-correction workflows and in conjunction with task-specialized models.

Test-Time Scaling of Reasoning Models for Machine Translation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a prevalent approach for building LLM-based question-answering systems that can take advantage of external knowledge databases. Due to the complexity of real-world RAG systems, there are many potential causes for erroneous outputs. Understanding the range of errors that can occur in practice is crucial for robust deployment. We present a new taxonomy of the error types that can occur in realistic RAG systems, examples of each, and practical advice for addressing them. Additionally, we curate a dataset of erroneous RAG responses annotated by error types. We then propose an auto-evaluation method aligned with our taxonomy that can be used in practice to track and address errors during development. Code and data have been released publicly.

Classifying and Addressing the Diversity of Errors in Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems

Zero-shot dense retrieval is a challenging setting where a document corpus is provided without relevant queries, necessitating a reliance on pretrained dense retrievers (DRs). However, since these DRs are not trained on the target corpus, they struggle to represent semantic differences between similar documents. To address this failing, we introduce a training-free representation sharpening framework that augments a document's representation with information that helps differentiate it from similar documents in the corpus. On over twenty datasets spanning multiple languages, the representation sharpening framework proves consistently superior to traditional retrieval, setting a new state-of-the-art on the BRIGHT benchmark. We show that representation sharpening is compatible with prior approaches to zero-shot dense retrieval and consistently improves their performance. Finally, we address the performance-cost tradeoff presented by our framework and devise an indexing-time approximation that preserves the majority of our performance gains over traditional retrieval, yet suffers no additional inference-time cost.

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Logic Haystacks: Probing LLMs' Long-Context Logical Reasoning (Without Easily Identifiable Unrelated Padding)

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Next from EACL 2026

Logic Haystacks: Probing LLMs' Long-Context Logical Reasoning (Without Easily Identifiable Unrelated Padding)

Similar lecture

Tending Towards Stability: Convergence Challenges in Small Language Models

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

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