Morocco

Mitigating toxic content is critical for maintaining a healthy social platform, yet existing detoxification systems face significant limitations: overcorrection from uniformly processing all toxic comments, and parallel data scarcity in paraphrasing model training. To tackle these challenges, we propose Detoxifiability-Aware Detoxification (DID), a novel paradigm that adaptively conducts filtering or paraphrasing for each toxic comment based on its detoxifiability, namely whether it can be paraphrased into a benign comment in essence. Specifically, DID integrates three core modules: (1) an unsupervised detoxifiability discriminator, (2) a semantic purification module that extracts harmful intents and then performs targeted paraphrasing only on detoxifiable comments and (3) a feedback-adaptive refinement loop that processes remaining harmful contents only when they are detoxifiable. Experimental results demonstrate that DID significantly outperforms existing approaches on academic data and an industrial platform, establishing a novel and practical modeling paradigm for comment detoxification.

EACL 2026

To Paraphrase or Not: Efficient Comment Detoxification with Unsupervised Detoxifiability Discrimination

comment moderation

large language model

toxicity detection

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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EMNLP 2024

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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. 

Despite advances in large language models (LLMs), Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems often fall short in delivering personalized, context-rich responses, especially in low-resource, code-mixed, and multimodal settings like Hinglish (Hindi-English). To bridge this gap, we introduce HiVisTask, the first Hinglish multimodal, multidomain, persona-based TOD dataset that captures user-agent interactions across text and visual modalities. We also propose G 3 TOD, a generalizable framework that enhances personalization using three structured knowledge graphs: entity context, user persona, and commonsense reasoning, all extracted from conversation history. Extensive experiments with LLMs (e.g., LLaMA3.2, Phi3, GPT4, Mistral7b, Qwen3, Gemma3) show that G 3 TOD consistently outperforms both standard and ablated baselines. We observe substantial gains across evaluation metrics (both quantitative: BLEU and qualitative: Human Eval) over existing models. The observed improvements strongly underscore the value of structured and selective contextualization in generating personalized and engaging multimodal responses.

I know you are different! Towards Persona Driven Knowledge-infused Dialogue Assistant

Large audio-language models (LALMs) benefit from Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting for audio question answering (AQA), but acquiring audio CoT examples is particularly challenging as it requires sequential listening and careful integration of acoustic and linguistic information. Surprisingly, our experiments reveal that standard few-shot prompting yields inconsistent results compared to zero-shot CoT, with several models showing degraded accuracy. Moreover, few-shot prompting incurs substantially higher inference costs by processing multiple audio demonstrations per inference. We propose Audio-Induct, which induces reusable textual task instructions from few audio examples once per task, requiring no additional demonstrations at inference. Evaluated on 9 LALMs across two benchmarks, Audio-Induct outperforms state-of-the-art prompting methods while maintaining low inference costs. Inducted Task Instructions transfer effectively across models, enabling scalable deployment.

Task-Level Instructions Induction for Audio Question Answering from Few Examples

Ensuring Large Language Models (LLMs) are aligned with human valuesвЂ”being helpful, harmless, and honest (HHH)вЂ”is crucial for safe deployment. Existing methods use supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to align LLMs. However, these methods face challenges in multi-objective settings: SFT leads to interference between conflicting goals, while MoEs suffer from miscalibrated routing. We term this failure mode Axis Collapse, marked by (1) disjoint feature spaces causing catastrophic forgetting, and (2) unreliable inference from misrouted experts. To address this, we propose AlignX, a two-stage alignment framework. Stage 1 uses prompt-injected fine-tuning to extract axis-specific task features, mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Stage 2 deploys a MoCaE module that calibrates expert routing using fractal and natural geometry, improving inference reliability. AlignX achieves significant gains on Alpaca (Helpfulness), BeaverTails (Harmlessness), and TruthfulQA (Honesty), with +171.5% win rate, +110.1% in truthfulness-informativeness, and 4.3% fewer safety violations. It also reduces latency and memory usage by over 35% compared to prior MoEs. Results across four LLMs validate its generalizability. Code and data are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AlignX-40BE/README.md

When the Model Said "No Comment", We Knew Helpfulness Was Dead, Honesty Was Alive, and Safety Was Terrified

Autoregressive (AR) models excel at generating temporally coherent audio by producing tokens sequentially, yet they often falter in faithfully following complex textual promptsвЂ”especially those describing complex sound events. We uncover a surprising capability in AR audio generators: their early prefix tokens implicitly encode global semantic attributes of the final output, such as event count and sound-object category, revealing a form of implicit planning. Building on this insight, we propose Plan-Critic, a lightweight auxiliary model trained with a Generalized Advantage Estimation (GAE)-inspired objective to predict final instruction-following quality from partial generations. At inference time, Plan-Critic enables guided exploration: it evaluates candidate prefixes early, prunes low-fidelity trajectories, and reallocates computation to high-potential planning seeds. Our Plan-Critic-guided sampling achieves up to a 10 points improvement in CLAP score over the AR baselineвЂ”establishing a new state of the art in AR text-to-audio generationвЂ”while maintaining computational parity with standard best-of-N decoding. This work bridges the gap between causal generation and global semantic alignment, demonstrating that even strictly autoregressive models can plan ahead.

Guided by the Plan: Enhancing Faithful Autoregressive Text-to-Audio Generation with Guided Decoding

Does the prior knowledge of the vision encoder constrain the capability boundary of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs)? While most existing research treats MLLMs as unified systems optimized through end-to-end training, the impact of vision encoder's prior knowledge is seldom investigated. In this work, we introduce a novel metric Rank e to quantify the effect of prior knowledge of the vision encoder on MLLM performance. Our analysis reveals a positive correlation between prior knowledge and MLLM performance. Moreover, we find that domain-specific fine-tuning using solely end-to-end visual question answering (VQA) data is insufficient, particularly for entities with low inherent visual prior knowledge. To address this issue, we propose VisPRE (Vision Prior Remediation), a two-stage training framework that explicitly incorporates prior knowledge at the vision encoder level. Experimental results demonstrate that augmenting vision encoder's prior knowledge substantially boosts the visual understanding capabilities of MLLMs, offering a novel and effective strategy for improving performance, especially in scenarios involving uncommon visual entities.

Expanding the Boundaries of Vision Prior Knowledge in Multi-modal Large Language Models

Fine-grained image-caption alignment is crucial for vision-language models (VLMs), especially in socially critical contexts such as identifying real-world risk scenarios or distinguishing cultural proxies, where correct interpretation hinges on subtle visual or linguistic clues and where minor misinterpretations can lead to significant real-world consequences. We present MiSCHiEF, a set of two benchmarking datasets (MiC and MiS) based on a contrastive pair design in the domains of safety and culture, and evaluate four VLMs on tasks requiring fine-grained differentiation of paired images and captions. In both datasets, each sample contains two minimally differing captions and corresponding minimally differing images. In MiS, the image-caption pairs depict a safe and an unsafe scenario, while in MiC, they depict cultural proxies in two distinct cultural contexts. We find that models generally perform better at confirming the correct image-caption pair than rejecting incorrect ones. Additionally, models achieve higher accuracy when selecting the correct caption from two highly similar captions for a given image, compared to the converse task. The results, overall, highlight persistent modality misalignment challenges in current VLMs, underscoring the difficulty of precise cross-modal grounding required for applications with subtle semantic and visual distinctions.

MiSCHiEF: A Benchmark in Minimal-Pairs of Safety and Culture for Holistic Evaluation of Fine-Grained Image-Caption Alignment

Hateful speech detection is a key component of content moderation, yet current evaluation frameworks rarely assess why a text is deemed hateful. We introduce \textsf{HateXScore}, a four-component metric suite designed to evaluate the reasoning quality of model explanations. It assesses (i) conclusion explicitness, (ii) faithfulness and causal grounding of quoted spans, (iii) protected group identification (policy-configurable), and (iv) logical consistency among these elements. Evaluated on six diverse hate speech datasets, \textsf{HateXScore} reveals interpretability failures and annotation inconsistencies that are invisible to standard metrics like Accuracy or F1. Moreover, human evaluation shows strong agreement with \textsf{HateXScore}, validating it as a practical tool for trustworthy and transparent moderation. \textcolor{red}{Disclaimer: This paper contains sensitive content that may be disturbing to some readers.}

HateXScore: A Metric Suite for Evaluating Reasoning Quality in Hate Speech Explanations

Human cognition, driven by complex neurochemical processes, oscillates between imagination and reality and learns to self-correct whenever such subtle drifts lead to hallucinations or unsafe associations. In recent years, LLMs have demonstrated remarkable performance in a wide range of tasks. However, they still lack human cognition to balance factuality and safety. Bearing the resemblance, we argue that both factual and safety failures in LLMs arise from a "concept misalignment'' in their internal representations rather than addressing those as entirely separate alignment issues. We hypothesize that an external network, trained to understand the fluctuations, can selectively intervene in the model to regulate falsehood into truthfulness and unsafe output into safe output without fine-tuning the model parameters themselves. Reflecting the hypothesis, we propose ARREST (Adversarial Resilient Regulation Enhancing Safety and Truth), a unified framework that identifies and corrects drifted features, engaging both soft and hard refusals in addition to factual corrections. Our empirical results show that ARREST not only regulates misalignment but is also more versatile compared to the RLHF-aligned modelsin generating soft refusals due to adversarial training. We make our codebase available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ARREST-LLM .

ARREST: Adversarial Resilient Regulation Enhancing Safety and Truth in Large Language Models

Administrative phone tasks drain roughly 1 trillion annually from U.S. healthcare, with over 500 million insurance–benefit verification calls manually handled in 2024. We introduce INSURE-Dial, to our knowledge the first public benchmark for developing and assessing compliance-aware voice agents for phase-aware call auditing with span-based compliance verification. The corpus includes 50 de-identified, AI-initiated calls with live insurance representatives (mean 71 turns/call) and 1,000 synthetically generated calls that mirror the same workflow. All calls are annotated with a phase-structured JSON schema covering IVR navigation, patient identification, coverage status, medication checks (up to two drugs), and agent identification (CRN), and each phase is labeled for Information and Procedural compliance under explicit ask/answer logic. We define two novel evaluation tasks: (1) Phase Boundary Detection (span segmentation under phase-specific acceptance rules) and (2) Compliance Verification (IC/PC decisions given fixed spans). Per-phase scores are strong across small, low-latency baselines, but end-to-end reliability is constrained by span-boundary errors. On real calls, full-call exact segmentation is low, showing a gap between conversational fluency and audit-grade evidence.

INSURE-Dial: A Phase-Aware Conversational Dataset & Benchmark for Compliance Verification and Phase Detection

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising accuracy in predicting survey responses and policy preferences, which has increased interest in their potential to represent human interests in various domains. Most existing research has focused on "behavioral cloning", effectively evaluating how well models reproduce individuals' expressed preferences. Drawing on theories of political representation, we highlight an underexplored design trade-off: whether AI systems should act as "delegates", mirroring expressed preferences, or as "trustees", exercising judgment about what best serves an individual's interests. This trade-off is closely related to issues of LLM sycophancy, where models can encourage behavior or validate beliefs that may be aligned with a user's short-term preferences, but is detrimental to their long-term interests. Through a series of experiments simulating votes on various policy issues in the U.S. context, we apply a temporal utility framework that weighs short and long-term interests (simulating a trustee role) and compare voting outcomes to behavior-cloning models (simulating a delegate). We find that trustee-style predictions weighted toward long-term interests produce policy decisions that align more closely with expert consensus on well-understood issues, but also show greater bias toward models' default stances on topics lacking clear agreement. These findings reveal a fundamental trade-off in designing AI systems to represent human interests. Delegate models better preserve user autonomy but may diverge from well-supported policy positions, while trustee models can promote welfare on well-understood issues yet risk paternalism and bias on subjective topics.

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Next from EACL 2026

I know you are different! Towards Persona Driven Knowledge-infused Dialogue Assistant

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DetoxLLM: A Framework for Detoxification with Explanations

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