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EACL 2026 Main Conference

March 29, 2026

Rabat, Morocco

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Language models exhibit systematic performance gaps when processing text in non-standard language varieties, yet their ability to comprehend variety-specific slang remains underexplored for several languages. We present a comprehensive evaluation of slang awareness in Indian English (en-IN) and Australian English (en-AU) across seven state-of-the-art language models. We construct two complementary datasets: WEB, containing 377 web-sourced usage examples from Urban Dictionary, and GEN, featuring 1,492 synthetically generated usages of these slang terms, across diverse scenarios. We assess language models on three tasks: target word prediction (TWP), guided target word prediction (TWP) and target word selection (TWS). Our results reveal four key findings: (1) Higher average model performance TWS versus TWP and TWP, with average accuracy score increasing from 0.03 to 0.49 respectively (2) Stronger average model performance on WEB versus GEN datasets, with average similarity score increasing by 0.03 and 0.05 across TWP and TWP* tasks respectively (3) en-IN tasks outperform en-AN when averaged across all models and datasets, with TWS demonstrating the largest disparity, increasing average accuracy from 0.44 to 0.54. Through systematic failure analysis of 120 worst-performing cases, we identify five distinct error categories, revealing that models frequently exhibit `cultural and idiomatic blindness'--producing semantically plausible but regionally inappropriate responses through literalization, generic substitution, semantic drift and contextual misinterpretation. These findings underscore fundamental asymmetries between generative and discriminative competencies for variety-specific language, particularly in the context of slang expressions despite being in a technologically rich language such as English.

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Next from EACL 2026 Main Conference

Effects of Speaker Bias in Dialect Identification and Automatic Transcription with Self-Supervised Speech Models
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Effects of Speaker Bias in Dialect Identification and Automatic Transcription with Self-Supervised Speech Models

EACL 2026 Main Conference

Olli Kuparinen

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