Morocco

NLP researchers regularly invoke abstract concepts like &quot;interpretability,&quot; &quot;bias,&quot; &quot;reasoning,&quot; and &quot;stereotypes,&quot; without defining them. Each subfield has a shared understanding or conceptualization of what these terms mean and how we should treat them, and this shared understanding is the basis on which operational decisions are made: Datasets are built to evaluate these concepts, metrics are proposed to quantify them, and claims are made about systems. But what do they mean, what _should_ they mean, and how should we measure them? I outline a seminar I created for students to explore these questions of conceptualization and operationalization, with an interdisciplinary reading list and an emphasis on discussion and critique.

EACL 2026 Main Conference

Teaching and Critiquing Conceptualization and Operationalization in NLP

NLP researchers regularly invoke abstract concepts like "interpretability," "bias," "reasoning," and "stereotypes," without defining them. Each subfield has a shared understanding or conceptualization of what these terms mean and how we should treat them, and this shared understanding is the basis on which operational decisions are made: Datasets are built to evaluate these concepts, metrics are proposed to quantify them, and claims are made about systems. But what do they mean, what _should_ they mean, and how should we measure them? I outline a seminar I created for students to explore these questions of conceptualization and operationalization, with an interdisciplinary reading list and an emphasis on discussion and critique.

workshop 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)*<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. 

Transformer models have revolutionized NLP, yet many morphologically rich languages remain underrepresented in large-scale pre-training efforts. With SindBERT, we set out to chart the seas of Turkish NLP, providing the first large-scale RoBERTa-based encoder for Turkish. Trained from scratch on 312 GB of Turkish text (mC4, OSCAR23, Wikipedia), SindBERT is released in both base and large configurations, representing the first large-scale encoder-only language model available for Turkish. We evaluate SindBERT on part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, offensive language detection, and the TurBLiMP linguistic acceptability benchmark. Our results show that SindBERT performs competitively with existing Turkish and multilingual models, with the large variant achieving the best scores in two of four tasks but showing no consistent scaling advantage overall. This flat scaling trend, also observed for XLM-R and EuroBERT, suggests that current Turkish benchmarks may already be saturated. At the same time, comparisons with smaller but more curated models such as BERTurk highlight that corpus quality and diversity can outweigh sheer data volume. Taken together, SindBERT contributes both as an openly released resource for Turkish NLP and as an empirical case study on the limits of scaling and the central role of corpus composition in morphologically rich languages. The SindBERT models are released under the MIT license and made available in both fairseq and Huggingface formats.

SindBERT, the Sailor: Charting the Seas of Turkish NLP

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on many tasks, but they still struggle with morphologically rich, low-resource languages such as Turkish. This difficulty stems from Turkish being an agglutinative language and underrepresented in multilingual training data, which causes current models to often fail at capturing its morphology, flexible word order, and formal registers. In this paper, we introduce MODA (Model Adapted for Domain Applications), a Turkish-specialized LLM built via a modular pipeline that combines continual pre-training, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and model merging. Starting from Qwen2.5-7B as the base model, we first perform large-scale continual pre-training on a Turkish web corpus to improve grammatical and morphological representations. We then apply parameter-efficient supervised fine-tuning on task-oriented instruction data, and finally merge specialized variants into a single production-ready model. We evaluate MODA on TurkishMMLU, the Turkish subset of EXAMS, and TRCLAIM-19, where it consistently outperforms both the base and instruction-tuned Qwen2.5-7B models. Our results support a training strategy that explicitly separates linguistic acquisition from task alignment when adapting LLMs to morphologically rich, underrepresented languages under realistic hardware constraints.

Building a Turkish Large Language Model via Continual Pre-Training and Parameter-Efficient

Text-to-SQL systems have achieved strong performance on English benchmarks, yet their behavior in morphologically rich, low-resource languages remains largely unexplored. We introduce BIRDTurk, the first Turkish adaptation of the BIRD benchmark, constructed through a controlled translation pipeline that adapts schema identifiers to Turkish while strictly preserving the logical structure and execution semantics of SQL queries and databases. Translation quality is validated using a CLT-based statistical framework, achieving 98.15% accuracy on human-evaluated samples. Using BIRDTurk, we evaluate inference-based prompting, agentic multi-stage reasoning, and supervised fine-tuning. Our results reveal that Turkish introduces consistent performance degradation—driven by both structural linguistic divergence and underrepresentation in LLM pretraining—while agentic reasoning demonstrates stronger cross-lingual robustness. Supervised fine-tuning remains challenging for standard multilingual baselines but scales effectively with modern instruction-tuned models. BIRDTurk provides a controlled testbed for cross-lingual Text-to-SQL evaluation under realistic database conditions. We release the training and development splits to support future research.

BIRDTurk: A Large-Scale Adaptation of the Text-to-SQL Dataset to Turkish

Most large language models (LLMs) are trained on massive datasets that include private infor- mation, which may be disclosed to third-party users in output generation. Developers put de- fences to prevent the generation of harmful and private information, but jailbreaking methods can be used to bypass them. Machine unlearn- ing aims to remove information that may be private or harmful from the model’s genera- tion without retraining the model from scratch. While machine unlearning has gained some popularity to counter the removal of private information, especially in English, little to no attention has been given to Turkish unlearn- ing paradigms or existing benchmarks. In this study, we introduce TUNE (Turkish Unlearn- ing Evaluation), the first benchmark dataset for Turkish unlearning task for personal infor- mation. TUNE consists of 9842 input-target text pairs about 50 fictitious personalities with two training task types: (1) Q&A and (2) In- formation Request. We fine-tuned the mT5 base model to evaluate various unlearning meth- ods, including our proposed approach. We find that while current methods can help unlearn unwanted private information in Turkish, they also unlearn other information we want to re- tain in the model.

TUNE: A Task For Turkish Machine Unlearning For Data Privacy

TurkBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Turkish Large Language Models

In this paper, we investigate how transformer models represent complex verb paradigms in Turkish and Modern Hebrew, focusing on how tokenization strategies shape this ability. Using the Blackbird Language Matrices task on natural data, we show that for Turkish—with its transparent morphological markers—both monolingual and multilingual models succeed either when tokenization is highly atomic or breaking words into small subword units. For Hebrew, however, a multilingual model using character-level tokenization fails to capture its non-concatenative morphology, while a monolingual model with unified morpheme-aware segmentation excels. Performance improves on more synthetic datasets, in all models.

Modelling the Morphology of Verbal Paradigms: A Case Study in the Tokenization of Turkish and Hebrew

Current interpretability methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) operate on a fundamental yet flawed assumption: that subword tokens represent independent semantic units. We prove that this assumption creates a fidelity bottleneck in Morphologically Rich Languages (MRLs), where semantic meaning is densely encoded in sub-token morphemes. We term this phenomenon the Tokenization-Morphology Misalignment (TMM). To resolve TMM, we introduce MAFEX (Morpheme-Aligned Faithful Explanations), a theoretically grounded framework that redefines feature attribution as a linear projection from the computational (token) basis to the linguistic (morpheme) basis. We evaluate our method on a diverse suite of Turkish LLMs, including BERTurk, BERTurk-Sentiment, Cosmos-BERT, and Kumru-2B. On our embedded benchmark (N=20), MAFEX achieves an average F1@1 of 91.25% compared to 13.75% for standard token-level baselines (IG, SHAP, DeepLIFT), representing a +77.5% absolute improvement, establishing it as the new standard for faithful multilingual interpretability.

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