Morocco

In an era of rapid misinformation spread, LLMs have emerged as tools for assessing news credibility at scale. However, the assessments are influenced by social and cultural biases. Studies investigating political bias, compare model credibility ratings with expert credibility ratings. Comparing LLMs to the perceptions of political camps extends this approach to detecting similarities in their biases. We compare LLM-generated credibility and bias ratings of news outlets with expert assessments and stratified political opinions collected through surveys. We analyse three models (Llama 3.3 70B, Mixtral 8x7B, and GPT-OSS 120B) across 47 news outlets from two countries (U.S. and Germany). We found that models demonstrated consistently high alignment with expert ratings, while showing weaker and more variable alignment with public opinions. For US-American news outlets all models showed stronger alignment with center-left perceptions, while for German news outlets the alignment is more diverse.

EACL 2026

News Credibility Assessment by LLMs and Humans: Implications for Political Bias

credibility

llms

political bias

news

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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)* 

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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 (LLMs) are rapidly being adopted by users across the globe, who interact with them in a diverse range of languages. At the same time, there are well-documented imbalances in the training data and optimisation objectives of this technology, raising doubts as to whether LLMs can accurately represent the cultural diversity of their broad user base. In this study, we look at LLMs and cultural values in particular, and examine how prompt language and cultural framing influence model responses and their alignment with human values in different countries.We do so by probing 10 LLMs with 63 items from the Hofstede Values Survey Module and World Values Survey, translated into 11 languages, and formulated as prompts with and without different explicit cultural perspectives.; Our study confirms that both prompt language and cultural perspective produce variation in LLM outputs, but with an important caveat: While targeted prompting can, to a certain extent, steer LLM responses in the direction of the predominant values of the corresponding countries, it does not overcome the modelsâ systematic bias toward the values associated with a restricted set of countries in our dataset: the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, and Japan. All tested models, regardless of their origin, exhibit remarkably similar patterns: They produce fairly neutral responses on most topics, with selective progressive stances on issues such as social tolerance. Alignment with cultural values of human respondents is improved more with an explicit cultural perspective than with a targeted prompt language. Unexpectedly, combining both approaches is no more effective than cultural framing with an English prompt. These findings reveal that LLMs occupy an uncomfortable middle ground: They are responsive enough to changes in prompts to produce variation, but they are also too firmly anchored to specific cultural defaults to adequately represent cultural diversity.

LLMs and Cultural Values: The Impact of Prompt Language and Explicit Cultural Framing

The transition of Large Language Models (LLMs) from exploratory tools to active "silicon subjects" in social science lacks extensive validation of operational validity. This study introduces Conditioned Comment Prediction (CCP), a task in which a model predicts how a user would comment on a given stimulus by comparing generated outputs with authentic digital traces. This framework enables a rigorous evaluation of current LLM capabilities with respect to the simulation of social media user behavior. We evaluated open-weight 8B models (Llama-3.1, Qwen3, Ministral) in English, German, and Luxembourgish language scenarios. By systematically comparing prompting strategies (explicit vs. implicit) and the impact of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), we identify a critical form vs. content decoupling in low-resource settings: while SFT aligns the surface structure of the text output (length and syntax), it degrades semantic grounding. Furthermore, we demonstrate that explicit conditioning (generated biographies) becomes redundant under fine-tuning, as models successfully perform latent inference directly from behavioral histories. Our findings challenge current "naive prompting" paradigms and offer operational guidelines prioritizing authentic behavioral traces over descriptive personas for high-fidelity simulation.

Towards Simulating Social Media Users with LLMs: Evaluating the Operational Validity of Conditioned Comment Prediction

We propose an agentic data augmentation method for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) that uses iterative generation and verification to produce high-quality synthetic training examples. To isolate the effect of agentic structure, we also develop a closely matched prompting-based baseline using the same model and instructions. Both methods are evaluated across three ABSA subtasks—Aspect Term Extraction (ATE), Aspect Sentiment Classification (ATSC), and Aspect Sentiment Pair Extraction (ASPE)—four SemEval datasets, and two encoder–decoder models: T5-Base and Tk-Instruct. Our results show that the agentic augmentation outperforms raw prompting in label preservation of the augmented data, especially when the tasks require aspect term generation. In addition, when combined with real data, agentic augmentation provides higher gains, consistently outperforming prompting-based generation. These benefits are most pronounced for T5-Base, while the more heavily pretrained Tk-Instruct exhibits smaller improvements. As a result, augmented data helps T5-Base achieve comparable performance with its counterpart.

Label-Consistent Data Generation for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis Using LLM Agents

Antisocial behavior (ASB) on social media encompasses online behaviors that harm individuals, groups, or platform ecosystems, including hate speech, harassment, cyberbullying, trolling, and coordinated abuse. While most prior work has focused on detecting harm after it occurs, a growing body of research on ASB prediction seeks to forecast future harmful outcomes before they materialize, including—but not limited to—hate-speech diffusion, conversational derailment, and user recidivism. However, this emerging field remains fragmented, with limited conceptual grounding and few integrative frameworks. This paper establishes a foundation for ASB prediction by introducing a structured taxonomy spanning temporal, structural, and behavioral dimensions. Drawing on 49 machine learning studies identified through a literature review, we map predictive goals to datasets, modeling choices, and evaluation practices, and identify key challenges, including the lack of standardized benchmarks, the dominance of text-centric representations, and trade-offs between accuracy and interpretability. We conclude by outlining actionable directions toward more robust, generalizable, and responsible ASB prediction systems.

Antisocial Behavior Prediction: A Survey and Practical Guide

Speech emotion recognition (SER) is a compelling yet challenging research area with substantial practical relevance, particularly in enhancing human–machine interaction. Despite considerable progress in the field, the scarcity of realistic datasets that reflect real-world conditions makes it difficult to analyze system behavior in practice and can lead to degraded performance in industrial applications. In this study, we propose a system that detects negative emotions at each turn in a conversation by leveraging both linguistic and acoustic features. The approach is evaluated on real-world data, with a particular focus on identifying and responding to negative emotion in customer support scenarios. Designed for real-time application, the system is suitable for live deployment in call center environments. Furthermore, we propose an effective prompting strategy for using large language models (LLMs) as annotators, generating labeled data used to fine-tune small language models that achieve performance on par with the LLM used for annotation, while remaining suitable for real-time deployment.

Real-Time Mitigation of Negative Emotion in Customer Care Calls

Alongside its literal meaning, text also carries implicit social signals: information that is used by the reader to assign the author of the text a specific identity or make assumptions about the author's character. The reader creates a mental image of the author which influences the interpretation of the presented information. This is especially relevant for argumentative text, where the credibility of the information might depend on who provides it. We therefore focus on the question: How do readers of an argument imagine its author? Using the ContArgA corpus, we study arguments annotated for convincingness and perceived author properties (level of education and Big Five personality traits). We find that annotators perceive an author to be similar to themselves when they agree with the stance of the argument. We also find that the envisioned personality traits and education level of the author are statistically significantly correlated with the argument's convincingness. We conduct experiments with four generative LLMs and a RoBERTa-based regression model showing that LLMs do not replicate the annotators judgments. Argument convincingness can however provide a useful signal for modeling perceived author personality when it is explicitly used during training.

Says Who? Argument Convincingness and Reader Stance Are Correlated with Perceived Author Personality

Sarcasm detection, with its figurative nature, poses unique challenges for affective systems designed to perform sentiment analysis. While these systems typically perform well at identifying direct expressions of emotion, they struggle with sarcasm's inherent contradiction between literal and intended sentiment. Since transformer-based language models (LMs) are known for their efficient ability to capture contextual meanings, we propose a method that leverages LMs and prototype-based networks, enhanced by sentiment embeddings to conduct interpretable sarcasm detection. Our approach is intrinsically interpretable without extra post-hoc interpretability techniques. We test our model on three public benchmark datasets and show that our model outperforms the current state-of-the-art. At the same time, the prototypical layer enhances the model's inherent interpretability by generating explanations through similar examples in the reference time. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of incongruity loss in the ablation study, which we construct using sentiment prototypes.

A Transformer and Prototype-based Interpretable Model for Contextual Sarcasm Detection

Automated Fact-Checking (AFC) relies on claim extraction as a first step, yet existing methods largely overlook the multimodal nature of today’s misinformation. Social media posts often combine short, informal text with images such as memes, screenshots, and photos, creating challenges that differ from both text-only claim extraction and well-studied multimodal tasks like image captioning or visual question answering. In this work, we present the first benchmark for multimodal claim extraction from social media, consisting of posts containing text and one or more images, annotated with gold-standard claims derived from real-world fact-checkers. We evaluate state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) under a three-part evaluation framework (semantic alignment, faithfulness, and decontextualization) and find that baseline MLLMs struggle to model rhetorical intent and contextual cues. To address this, we introduce MICE, an intent-aware framework which shows improvements in intent-critical cases.

Multimodal Claim Extraction for Fact-Checking

Data augmentation (DA) using large language models (LLMs) is a cost-effective method for generating synthetic data, particularly for tasks with scarce datasets. However, its potential remains largely underexplored, both in terms of augmentation configuration and evaluation of synthetic data. This paper investigates LLM-based synthetic data generation for irony and sarcasm, two subjective and context-dependent forms of figurative language. We propose a multi-aspect evaluation framework assessing synthetic data's utility-plausibility and extrinsic-intrinsic dimensions through four aspects: predictive performance, sample diversity, linguistic properties, and human judgment. Our findings indicate that other aspects of evaluation, like diversity and linguistic features, do not necessarily correlate with an increase in predictive performance, underscoring the importance of multi-faceted evaluation. This work highlights the potential of LLM-based DA for irony and sarcasm detection, offering insights into the linguistic competence of LLMs. As synthetic data becomes increasingly prevalent, our framework offers a broadly applicable and crucial evaluation method, particularly for linguistically complex tasks.

A Multi-Aspect Evaluation Framework for Synthetic Data: Case Study on Irony and Sarcasm

Over the past four decades, work at the intersection of Arabic and technology has evolved alongside major technical breakthroughs and shifting regional and global political dynamics. In this talk, I revisit the development of Arabic NLP and AI, from early foundational efforts to today’s large-scale generative systems, and highlight how each phase has engaged with distinct aspects of Arabic’s linguistic complexity. I reflect on the language’s ambiguous orthography, rich morphology, diglossic landscape, and wide geographic and historical reach, and on the growing research community committed to ensuring that AI technologies meaningfully support Arabic and its diverse cultural expressions. I conclude with a forward-looking vision for building a cohesive and sustainable ecosystem that advances Arabic in AI through strengthened training, deeper collaboration, and sustained innovation for the next generation of researchers and practitioners.

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LLMs and Cultural Values: The Impact of Prompt Language and Explicit Cultural Framing

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