Morocco

There has been considerable interest in using surprisal from Transformer-based language models (LMs) as predictors of human sentence processing difficulty. Recent work has observed an inverse scaling relationship between Transformers&#39; per-word estimated probability and the predictive power of their surprisal estimates on reading times, showing that LMs with more parameters and trained on more data are less predictive of human reading times. However, these studies focused on predicting latency-based measures. Tests on brain imaging data have not shown a trend in any direction when using a relatively small set of LMs, leaving open the possibility that the inverse scaling phenomenon is constrained to latency data. This study therefore conducted a more comprehensive evaluation using surprisal estimates from 17 pre-trained LMs across three different LM families on two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) datasets. Results show that the inverse scaling relationship between models&#39; per-word estimated probability and model fit on both datasets still obtains, resolving the inconclusive results of previous work and indicating that this trend is not specific to latency-based measures.

EACL 2026

Surprisal from Larger Transformer-based Language Models Predicts fMRI Data More Poorly

surprisal theory

fmri

language models

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

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Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

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EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

There has been considerable interest in using surprisal from Transformer-based language models (LMs) as predictors of human sentence processing difficulty. Recent work has observed an inverse scaling relationship between Transformers' per-word estimated probability and the predictive power of their surprisal estimates on reading times, showing that LMs with more parameters and trained on more data are less predictive of human reading times. However, these studies focused on predicting latency-based measures. Tests on brain imaging data have not shown a trend in any direction when using a relatively small set of LMs, leaving open the possibility that the inverse scaling phenomenon is constrained to latency data. This study therefore conducted a more comprehensive evaluation using surprisal estimates from 17 pre-trained LMs across three different LM families on two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) datasets. Results show that the inverse scaling relationship between models' per-word estimated probability and model fit on both datasets still obtains, resolving the inconclusive results of previous work and indicating that this trend is not specific to latency-based measures.

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. 

In a rapidly evolving labor market, detecting and addressing emerging skill needs is essential for shaping responsive education and workforce policies. Online job advertisements (OJAs) provide a real-time view of changing demands, but require first retrieving skill mentions from unstructured text and then solving the entity linking problem of connecting them to standardized skill taxonomies. To harness this potential, we present a multilingual human-in-the-loop (HITL) pipeline that operates in two steps: candidate skills are extracted from national OJA corpora using country-specific word embeddings, capturing terms that reflect each country’s labor market. These candidates are linked to ESCO using an encoder-based system and refined through a decoder large language models (LLMs) for accurate contextual alignment. Our approach is validated through both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, demonstrating that our method enables timely, multilingual monitoring of emerging skills, supporting agile policy-making and targeted training initiatives.

SkiLLens: Recognising and Mapping Novel Skills from Millions of Job Ads Across Europe Using Language Models

Extending large language models to low-resource languages is essential for global accessibility, but training separate models per language is prohibitively expensive. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures address this by adding sparse language-specific parameters, but determining how many experts each layer needs remains an open question. Current approaches allocate experts based on layer-level similarity, yet language processing exhibits fine-grained specialization at individual neurons. We propose NeuronMoE, a method that analyzes language-specific neurons across all transformer components to guide expert allocation per layer based on empirically measured cross-lingual neuron diversity. Applied to Llama-3.2-3B for low-resource languages (Greek, Turkish, and Hungarian), this approach achieves approximately 40% average parameter reduction while matching the performance of the LayerMoE baseline. We find that low-resource language experts independently develop neuron specialization patterns mirroring the high-resource language, which are concentrated in early and late layers. This reveals potential universal architectural principles in how multilingual models organize linguistic knowledge. Our approach generalizes across architectures, as validated on Qwen, and shows that allocation strategy matters more than total expert count.

NeuronMoE: Efficient Cross-Lingual Extension via Neuron-Guided Mixture-of-Experts

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in vision-language tasks such as reasoning segmentation, where models generate segmentation masks based on textual queries. While prior work has primarily focused on perturbing image inputs, semantically equivalent textual paraphrases—crucial in real-world applications where users express the same intent in varied ways—remain underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce a novel adversarial paraphrasing task: generating grammatically correct paraphrases that preserve the original query meaning while degrading segmentation performance. To evaluate the quality of adversarial paraphrases, we develop a comprehensive automatic evaluation protocol validated with human studies. Furthermore, we introduce SPARTA—a black-box, sentence-level optimization method that operates in the low-dimensional semantic latent space of a text autoencoder, guided by reinforcement learning. SPARTA achieves significantly higher success rates, outperforming prior methods by up to 2x on both the ReasonSeg and LLMSeg-40k datasets. We use SPARTA and competitive baselines to assess the robustness of advanced reasoning segmentation models. We reveal that they remain vulnerable to adversarial paraphrasing—even under strict semantic and grammatical constraints. All code and data will be released publicly upon acceptance.

SPARTA: Evaluating Reasoning Segmentation Robustness through Black-Box Adversarial Paraphrasing in Text Autoencoder Latent Space

In this work, we propose an entity type-specific and knowledge-augmented token classification framework designed to improve encoder models' performance on recipe texts. Our empirical analysis shows that this approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on 5 out of 7 benchmark recipe datasets, significantly outperforming traditional token classification methods. We introduce a novel methodology leveraging curated domain-specific knowledge contexts to guide encoder models such as BERT and RoBERTa, which we refer to as RecipeBERT-KA and RecipeRoBERTa-KA. Additionally, we release a newly reprocessed entity type-specific and knowledge-enriched dataset that merges seven widely used food datasets, making it the largest annotated food-related dataset to date. Comparative analysis with SOTA large language models (GPT-4o, Mistral-7B, LLaMA 3-13B and LLaMA 3-70B) highlights the practical advantages of our smaller and specialised models. Finally, we analyse the impact of the different knowledge contexts, our models' potential for transfer learning, the effect of combining the datasets and scenarios where traditional token classification may still perform competitively, offering nuanced insight into method selection.

Knowledge Augmentation Enhances Token Classification for Recipe Understanding

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) with high multilingual coverage is becoming increasingly important вЂ” especially when monolingual resources are scarce. Recent studies have found that LLMs process multilingual inputs in shared concept spaces, thought to support generalization and cross-lingual transfer. However, these prior studies often do not use causal methods, lack deeper error analysis or focus on the final model only, leaving open how these spaces emerge *during training*. We investigate the development of language-agnostic concept spaces during pretraining of EuroLLM through the causal interpretability method of activation patching. We isolate cross-lingual concept representations, then inject them into a translation prompt to investigate how consistently translations can be altered, independently of the language. We find that *shared concept spaces emerge early and continue to refine*, but that *alignment with them is language-dependent*. Furthermore, in contrast to prior work, our fine-grained manual analysis reveals that some apparent gains in translation quality reflect shifts in behavior вЂ” like selecting senses for polysemous words or translating instead of copying cross-lingual homographs вЂ” rather than improved translation ability. Our findings offer new insight into the training dynamics of cross-lingual alignment and the conditions under which causal interpretability methods offer meaningful insights in multilingual contexts.

When Meanings Meet: Investigating the Emergence and Quality of Shared Concept Spaces during Multilingual Language Model Training

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on mathematical, scientific, and other question-answering tasks, but their multilingual reasoning abilities remain underexplored. When presented with non-English questions, LRMs often default to reasoning in English, raising concerns about interpretability and the handling of linguistic and cultural nuances. We systematically compare an LRM's reasoning in English versus the language of the question. Our evaluation spans two tasks: MGSM and GPQA Diamond. Beyond measuring answer accuracy, we also analyze cognitive attributes in the reasoning traces. We find that English reasoning traces exhibit a substantially higher presence of these cognitive behaviors, and that reasoning in English generally yields higher final-answer accuracy, with the performance gap increasing as tasks become more complex. However, this English-centric strategy is susceptible to a key failure mode - getting "Lost in Translation," where translation steps lead to errors that would have been avoided by reasoning in the language of the question.


The Reasoning Lingua Franca: A Double-Edged Sword for Multilingual AI

Document understanding requires modeling both structural and semantic relationships between the layout elements within the document, with human-perceived reading order (RO) playing a crucial yet often neglected role compared to heuristic OCR sequences used by most existing models. Previous approaches depend on costly, inconsistent human annotations, limiting scalability and generalization. To bridge the gap, we propose a cost-effective paradigm that leverages large language models (LLMs) to infer global RO and inter-element layout relations without human supervision. By explicitly incorporating RO as structural guidance, our method captures hierarchical, document-level dependencies beyond local adjacency. Experiments on Semantic Entity Recognition, Entity Linking, and Document Question Answering show consistent improvements over baseline methods. Notably, LLM-inferred RO, even when differing from ground-truth adjacency, provides richer global structural priors and yields superior downstream performance. These results and findings demonstrate the scalability and significance of RO-aware modeling, advancing both LLMs and lightweight layout-aware models for robust document understanding.

Rethinking Reading Order: Toward Generalizable Document Understanding with LLM-based Relation Modeling

How capable are large language models (LLMs) in the domain of taxation? Although numerous studies have explored the legal domain, research dedicated to taxation remains scarce. Moreover, the datasets used in these studies are either simplified, failing to reflect the real-world complexities, or not released as open-source. To address this gap, we introduce PLAT, a new benchmark designed to assess the ability of LLMs to predict the legitimacy of additional tax penalties. PLAT comprises 300 examples: (1) 100 binary-choice questions, (2) 100 multiple-choice questions, and (3) 100 essay-type questions, all derived from 100 Korean court precedents. PLAT is constructed to evaluate not only LLMs' understanding of tax law but also their performance in legal cases that require complex reasoning beyond straightforward application of statutes. Our systematic experiments with multiple LLMs reveal that (1) their baseline capabilities are limited, especially in cases involving conflicting issues that require a comprehensive understanding (not only of the statutes but also of the taxpayer's circumstances), and (2) LLMs struggle particularly with the "AC" stages of "IRAC" even for advanced reasoning models like o3, which actively employ inference-time scaling.

Taxation Perspectives from Large Language Models: A Case Study on Additional Tax Penalties

Much recent work has shown how cross-linguistic variation is constrained by competing pressures from efficient communication. However, little attention has been paid to the role of the systematicity of forms (regularity), a key property of natural language. Here, we demonstrate the importance of regularity in explaining the shape of linguistic systems by looking at recursive numeral systems. Previous work has argued that these systems optimise the trade-off between lexicon size and average morphosyntatic complexity (Denić and Szymanik, 2024). However, showing that only natural-language-like systems optimise this trade-off has proven elusive, and existing solutions rely on ad-hoc constraints to rule out unnatural systems (Yang and Regier, 2025). Drawing on the Minimum Description Length (MDL) approach, we argue that recursive numeral systems are better viewed as efficient with regard to their regularity and processing complexity. We show that our MDL-based measures of regularity and processing complexity better capture the key differences between attested, natural systems and theoretically possible ones, including “optimal” recursive numeral systems from previous work, and that the ad-hoc constraints naturally follow from regularity. Our approach highlights the need to incorporate regularity across sets of forms in studies attempting to measure efficiency in language.

Recursive numeral systems are highly regular and easy to process

Existing challenges in misinformation exposure and susceptibility vary across demographics, as some populations are more vulnerable to misinformation than others. Large language models (LLMs) introduce new dimensions to these challenges through their ability to generate persuasive content at scale and reinforcing existing biases. This study investigates the bidirectional persuasion dynamics between LLMs and humans when exposed to misinformative content. We analyze human-to-LLM influence using human-stance datasets and assess LLM-to-human influence by generating LLM-based persuasive arguments. Additionally, we use a multi-agent LLM framework to analyze the spread of misinformation under persuasion among demographic-oriented LLM agents. Our findings show that demographic factors influence LLM susceptibility, with up to 15 percentage point differences in correctness across groups. Multi-agent LLMs also exhibit echo chamber behavior, aligning with human-like group polarization patterns. Therefore, this work highlights demographic divides in misinformation dynamics and offers insights for future interventions.

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Next from EACL 2026

SkiLLens: Recognising and Mapping Novel Skills from Millions of Job Ads Across Europe Using Language Models

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Testing the Predictions of Surprisal Theory in 11 Languages

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Next from EACL 2026

SkiLLens: Recognising and Mapping Novel Skills from Millions of Job Ads Across Europe Using Language Models

Similar lecture

Testing the Predictions of Surprisal Theory in 11 Languages

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads