United States

A recent study~\cite{kuribayashi2025largelanguagemodelshumanlike} has shown that human sentence processing behavior, typically measured on syntactically unchallenging constructions, can be effectively modeled using surprisal from early layers of large language models (LLMs). 
This raises the question of whether such advantages of internal layers extend to more syntactically challenging constructions, where surprisal has been reported to underestimate human cognitive effort.
In this paper, we begin by exploring internal layers that better estimate human cognitive effort observed in syntactic ambiguity processing in English.
Our experiments show that, in contrast to naturalistic reading, later layers better estimate such a cognitive effort, but still underestimate the human data. 
This \textit{dual alignment} sheds light on different modes of sentence processing in humans and LMs: naturalistic reading employs a somewhat weak prediction akin to earlier layers of LMs, while syntactically challenging processing requires more fully-contextualized representations, better modeled by later layers of LMs.
Motivated by these findings, we also explore several probability-update measures using shallow and deep layers of LMs, showing a complementary advantage to single-layer&#39;s surprisal in reading time modeling.

ACL 2026

Dual Alignment Between Language Model Layers and Human Sentence Processing

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields 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.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. <br>
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The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

A recent study~\cite{kuribayashi2025largelanguagemodelshumanlike} has shown that human sentence processing behavior, typically measured on syntactically unchallenging constructions, can be effectively modeled using surprisal from early layers of large language models (LLMs). 
This raises the question of whether such advantages of internal layers extend to more syntactically challenging constructions, where surprisal has been reported to underestimate human cognitive effort.
In this paper, we begin by exploring internal layers that better estimate human cognitive effort observed in syntactic ambiguity processing in English.
Our experiments show that, in contrast to naturalistic reading, later layers better estimate such a cognitive effort, but still underestimate the human data. 
This \textit{dual alignment} sheds light on different modes of sentence processing in humans and LMs: naturalistic reading employs a somewhat weak prediction akin to earlier layers of LMs, while syntactically challenging processing requires more fully-contextualized representations, better modeled by later layers of LMs.
Motivated by these findings, we also explore several probability-update measures using shallow and deep layers of LMs, showing a complementary advantage to single-layer's surprisal in reading time modeling.

poster

The Subregular Hypothesis posits that phonological patterns in natural languages occupy a restricted region of the formal language hierarchy, yet the cognitive basis for this restriction remains unclear. We propose an information-theoretic characterization: Strictly Local languages, when formalized as shifts of finite type, are exactly those admitting stationary Markov sources, which exhibit zero conditional mutual information between distant positions given intervening symbols. We prove that certain non-subregular patterns such as first-last assimilation admit no such Markov realization, explaining their unlearnability. Empirical validation on English phonotactics versus Finnish, Turkish, and Hungarian vowel harmony confirms that MI profiles statistically distinguish SL-like from TSL-like patterns ($p < 0.001$, $r = 0.84$). This work bridges formal language theory and information theory, offering a unified framework for understanding computational restrictions on natural language phonology.

An Information-Theoretic Foundation for the Subregular Hierarchy

Limited access to mental healthcare, extended wait times, and increasing capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led individuals to turn to LLMs for fulfilling their mental health needs. However, examining the multi-turn mental health conversation capabilities of LLMs remains under-explored. Existing evaluation frameworks typically focus on diagnostic accuracy and win-rates and often overlook alignment with patient-specific goals, values, and personalities required for meaningful conversations. To address this, we introduce MedAgent, a novel framework for synthetically generating realistic, multi-turn mental health sensemaking conversations and use it to create the Mental Health Sensemaking Dialogue (MHSD) dataset, comprising over 2,200 patient–LLM conversations. Additionally, we present MultiSenseEval, a holistic framework to evaluate the multi-turn conversation abilities of LLMs in healthcare settings using human-centric criteria. Our findings reveal that frontier reasoning models yield below-par performance for patient-centric communication and struggle at precise ("hard") diagnostic capabilities with average accuracy of ~31%. Additionally, we observed variation in model performance based on patient's persona and performance drop with increasing turns in the conversation. Our work provides a comprehensive synthetic data generation framework, a dataset and evaluation framework for assessing LLMs in multi-turn mental health conversations.

Reasoning Is Not All You Need: Examining LLMs for Multi-Turn Mental Health Conversations

Retrieving music using natural language descriptions has improved with contrastive audio–text models such as CLAP, but current systems remain limited to coarse semantic queries. When descriptions specify fine-grained musical attributes such as tempo, key, chord progression, or rhythmic structure, existing models often fail to retrieve the correct audio. We show that this limitation stems from the contrastive learning objective itself: despite being trained on long captions, CLAP-based models effectively utilize only the first few tokens, discarding much of the information encoded in detailed prompts. Then, we propose FIGMA (Fine-Grained Music Retrieval), a multi-view contrastive architecture that addresses this limitation by jointly optimizing global audio–text alignment and frame-level, token-wise alignment. This design enables FIGMA to capture both high-level semantic context and fine-grained musical attributes within a unified representation space. Moreover, we formalize the task of Fine-Grained Music Retrieval and construct Fine-Grained Music Caption dataset (FGMCaps), a large-scale dataset of 380K music–caption pairs for training along with a 10K test set, both annotated with tempo, key, chord progression, beat count, as well as genre and mood. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FIGMA consistently outperforms existing CLAP-based music retrieval models across multiple music retrieval benchmarks, including out-of-domain evaluations, with relative improvements of up to 73.3%.

FIGMA: Towards FIne-Grained Music retrievAl

Power differences shape human communication through well-documented socio-cognitive effects, including language coordination, pronoun usage, authority bias, and harmful compliance. We examine whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit similar behaviors when assigned high- or low-status personas. Using personas from diverse professions, we simulate multi-turn, power-asymmetric dialogues (e.g., principal–teacher, justice–lawyer) and measure (i) linguistic coordination, (ii) pronoun usage, (iii) persuasion success, and (iv) compliance with unsafe requests. Our results show that LLMs show key socio-cognitive effects of power, albeit with nuances and variability, linking simulated interactions to both desirable and unsafe behaviors.

Do LLM Agents Mirror Socio-Cognitive Effects in Power-Asymmetric Conversations?

One of the expected abilities of vision-language models (VLMs) is spatial reasoning ability based on a given text and image. To evaluate the spatial reasoning abilities of VLMs, we focus on the use of spatial deictic expressions, which are defined as spatial expressions whose referent is determined by their situational context, such as this and that. To handle spatial deictic expressions, VLMs must jointly reason over language and visual space, grounding context-dependent references in the image's spatial structure. In addition, selecting appropriate spatial deictic expressions across languages requires VLMs to understand the language-specific spatial distinctions encoded by these expressions. In this paper, we develop a benchmark to evaluate the multilingual ability of VLMs to use spatial deictic expressions in four languages. Our experiments using this benchmark reveal that the tested models use demonstratives in a manner different from that of humans, particularly in selecting the appropriate demonstratives based on the distance from the object.

Evaluation of Multilingual Ability to Use Spatial Deictic Expressions in Vision-Language Models

Although diffusion language models (DLMs) are evolving quickly, many recent models converge on a set of shared components. These components, however, are distributed across ad-hoc research codebases or lack transparent implementations, making them difficult to reproduce or extend. As the field accelerates, there is a clear need for a unified framework that standardizes these common components while remaining flexible enough to support new methods and architectures.

To address this gap, we introduce dLLM, an open-source framework that unifies the core components of diffusion language modeling—training, inference, and evaluation—and makes them easy to customize for new designs. With dLLM}}, users can reproduce, finetune, deploy, and evaluate open-source large DLMs such as LLaDA and Dream through a standardized pipeline.
The framework also provides minimal, reproducible recipes for building small DLMs from scratch with accessible compute—including converting any BERT-style encoder or autoregressive LM into a DLM. We also release the checkpoints of these small DLMs to make DLMs more accessible and accelerate future research.

G-D1 dLLM: Simple Diffusion Language Modeling

Understanding and extracting structured insights from unstructured documents remains a foundational challenge in industrial NLP. While Large Language Models (LLMs) enable zero-shot extraction, traditional pipelines often fail to handle multi-document packets, complex reasoning, and strict compliance requirements. We present IDP (Intelligent Document Processing) Accelerator, a framework enabling agentic AI for end-to-end document intelligence with four key components: (1) DocSplit, a novel benchmark dataset and multimodal classifier using BIO tagging to segment complex document packets; (2) configurable Extraction Module leveraging multimodal LLMs to transform unstructured content into structured data; (3) Agentic Analytics Module, compliant with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) providing data access through secure, sandboxed code execution; and (4) Rule Validation Module replacing deterministic engines with LLM-driven logic for complex compliance checks. The interactive demonstration enables users to upload document packets, visualize classification results, and explore extracted data through an intuitive web interface. We demonstrate effectiveness across industries, highlighting a production deployment at a leading healthcare provider achieving 98% classification accuracy, 80% reduced processing latency, and 77% lower operational costs over legacy baselines. IDP Accelerator is open-sourced with a live demonstration available to the community.

G-D2 IDP Accelerator: Agentic Document Intelligence from Extraction to Compliance Validation

Systematic reviews rely on forest plots to synthesise quantitative evidence across biomedical studies, but generating them remains a fragmented and labour-intensive process. Researchers must interpret complex clinical texts, manually extract outcome data from trials, define appropriate interventions and comparators, harmonise inconsistent study designs, and carry out meta-analytic computations—typically using specialised software that demands structured inputs and domain expertise. 

While recent work has demonstrated that large language models can extract study-level data from unstructured text, no existing system automates the complete pipeline from raw documents to synthesised forest plots. To address this gap, we introduce AutoForest, the first end-to-end system that generates publication-ready forest plots directly from biomedical papers. Given one or more study papers, AutoForest automatically suggests ICO (Intervention, Comparator, Outcome) elements, extracts outcome data, performs statistical synthesis, and renders the final forest plot. 

We describe the system architecture, user interface and demonstrate its effectiveness on real-world examples through a user study involving clinicians, showing how AutoForest accelerates evidence synthesis and substantially lowers the barrier to conducting meta-analyses.

G-D3 AutoForest: Automatically Generating Forest Plots from Biomedical Studies with End-to-End Evidence Extraction and Synthesis

LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed for mental-health support and crisis coun- selling, yet recent evaluations reveal that com- mercial therapy chatbots respond appropriately only about half the time in clinical scenarios. Clinicians and safety engineers are called upon to audit these systems, but existing tools do not surface the subtler psychosocial harms (manip- ulation, discrimination, psychological distress) nor produce the explainable rationales that prac- titioners need. We present DialogGuard, an open-source system that lets practitioners in- spect, stress-test, and create audit trails for prompted LLM agents across five psychosocial safety dimensions. The system wraps around arbitrary generative models through four LLM- as-a-judge pipelines (single-agent scoring, dual- agent correction, multi-agent debate, and ma- jority voting), each grounded in shared three- level rubrics. Through its web interface, practitioners evaluate agents in two modes (Live Chat and Manual Input) and review per- dimension risk scores with natural-language rationales. Experiments on PKU-SafeRLHF show that dual-agent correction provides the best accuracy–robustness trade-off, and a for- mative study with 12 practitioners confirms that the system supports prompt auditing, safety inspection, and supervisory decision-making. Code and demo: https://anonymous.4open. science/r/dialogguard-web-CE7E.

G-D5 DialogGuard: Multi-Agent Psychosocial Safety Evaluation Interface of Sensitive LLM Responses

Many disciplines pose natural-language research questions over large document collections whose answers typically requires structured evidence, traditionally obtained by manually designing an annotation schema and exhaustively labeling the corpus, a slow and error-prone process. We introduce ScheMatiQ, which leverages calls to a backbone LLM to take a question and a corpus to produce a schema and a grounded database, with a web interface that lets steer and revise the extraction. In collaboration with domain experts, we show that ScheMatiQ yields outputs that support real-world analysis in law and computational biology. We release ScheMatiQ as open source with a public web interface, and invite experts across disciplines to use it with their own data. All resources, including the website, source code, and demonstration video, are available at: www.ScheMatiQ-ai.com.

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An Information-Theoretic Foundation for the Subregular Hierarchy

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