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Agentic systems are becoming more capable: agents define strategies, take actions, and interact with different environments. This freedom poses serious challenges to overseeing and assessing the agent&#39;s behavior. Most current tools are limited, focusing on observability with basic evaluation or creating a static taxonomy of agent errors. To address this gap, we present Agentic CLEAR, an automatic, dynamic, and easy-to-use evaluation framework. It produces textual insights into the agent behavior on three levels of granularity: system, trace, and node. Agentic CLEAR operates above the observability layer, enabling seamless integration and featuring an intuitive UI that makes agent evaluation highly accessible. In our experiments on four benchmarks, seven agentic settings, and tens of thousands of LLM calls, we show that Agentic CLEAR produces high-quality, data-dependent, insightful feedback. Our analysis shows strong alignment with human-annotated errors and the ability to predict task success rate.

ACL 2026

Agentic CLEAR: Automating Multi-Level Evaluation of LLM Agents

#### *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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EACL 2026

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. 

Agentic systems are becoming more capable: agents define strategies, take actions, and interact with different environments. This freedom poses serious challenges to overseeing and assessing the agent's behavior. Most current tools are limited, focusing on observability with basic evaluation or creating a static taxonomy of agent errors. To address this gap, we present Agentic CLEAR, an automatic, dynamic, and easy-to-use evaluation framework. It produces textual insights into the agent behavior on three levels of granularity: system, trace, and node. Agentic CLEAR operates above the observability layer, enabling seamless integration and featuring an intuitive UI that makes agent evaluation highly accessible. In our experiments on four benchmarks, seven agentic settings, and tens of thousands of LLM calls, we show that Agentic CLEAR produces high-quality, data-dependent, insightful feedback. Our analysis shows strong alignment with human-annotated errors and the ability to predict task success rate.

demo

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>
[Full Message from General Chair Philipp Koehn](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QiJFOmMjvDgsDo3i1XzlQnImxe3RU_Cy/view?usp=sharing) <br><br><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.

Clinicians exploring oncology trial repositories often need ad-hoc, multi-constraint queries over biomarkers, endpoints, interventions, and time, yet writing SQL requires schema expertise. We demo FD-NL2SQL, a feedback-driven clinical NL2SQL assistant for SQLite-based oncology databases. Given a natural-language question, a schema-aware LLM decomposes it into predicate-level sub-questions, retrieves semantically similar expert-verified NL2SQL exemplars via sentence embeddings, and synthesizes executable SQL conditioned on the decomposition, retrieved exemplars, and schema, with post-processing validity checks. To improve with use, FD-NL2SQL incorporates two update signals: (i) clinician edits of generated SQL are approved and added to the exemplar bank; and (ii) lightweight logic-based SQL augmentation applies a single atomic mutation (e.g., operator or column change), retaining variants only if they return non-empty results. A second LLM generates the corresponding natural-language question and predicate decomposition for accepted variants, automatically expanding the exemplar bank without additional annotation. The demo interface exposes decomposition, retrieval, synthesis, and execution results to support interactive refinement and continuous improvement.

FD-NL2SQL: Feedback-Driven Clinical NL2SQL that Improves with Use

Diagram question answering (Diagram QA) requires reasoning-level attribution that links each question–answer pair to all visual regions needed to derive the answer, rather than only the region containing the final response. Creating such structured evidence across diagrams, charts, maps, circuits, and infographics is time-consuming, and existing annotation tools tightly couple their interfaces to dataset-specific formats. We present **DIAGRAMS**, a lightweight, schema-driven review framework that decouples interface logic from dataset-specific JSON structures through an internal meta-schema and dataset adapters. Given an image and QA pair with optional candidate regions, the system performs QA-conditioned evidence selection and proposes the regions required for reasoning. When QA pairs or candidate regions are missing, it generates them and supports human verification and refinement. Across six Diagram QA datasets, model-suggested evidence achieves 85.39\% precision and 75.30\% recall against reviewer-final selections (micro-averaged). These results indicate that the review-first framework reduces manual region creation while maintaining high agreement with final reasoning-level attributions. We release a public demo and installable package to support dataset auditing, grounded supervision creation, and grounded evaluation.

DIAGRAMS : A Review Framework for Reasoning-Level Attribution in Diagram QA

High-quality time-aligned annotation is fundamental to speech processing and animal vocalization research, yet precise boundary localization and consistent labeling remain challenging in collaborative settings. We present Praat++, a web-based multimedia annotation system designed for collaborative, video-informed, and AI-assisted timeline labeling of audio and video data. The system tightly synchronizes waveform, spectrogram, pitch, intensity, and time-aligned video playback with fine-grained region-based editing, enabling precise boundary refinement and improved label accuracy within a unified interface. Praat++ further incorporates role-aware workflow management and human-in-the-loop AI-assisted pre-annotation to enhance inter-annotator consistency and reduce labeling time. Through real-world multimodal speech and animal vocalization annotation scenarios, we demonstrate that Praat++ provides an integrated infrastructure for improving annotation quality and efficiency in dataset construction workflows. The demo video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YboCoBRF5lg) and website (https://redgiant.uta.edu/praat) are now publicly available.

Praat++: Multimedia Annotation System for Speech and Vocalization

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, significant effort is spent on manually crafting prompts to unlock their full potential. While existing prompt optimization methods automate this process, they often underperform due to their reliance on learning exclusively from incorrect samples. We propose the Learning from Contrastive Prompts (LCP) framework, which leverages contrastive prompts to distinguish between high- and low-performing cases. By identifying and amplifying the differences that make prompts effective, LCP systematically extracts principles underlying successful prompt design. On the Big-Bench Hard benchmark, LCP achieves an 87.5\% win rate on Claude-3-Sonnet and 75.7\% on Claude-4-Sonnet. Experiments on DeepSeek-R1 (88.2\% win rate) and SuperGLUE further confirm that LCP generalizes across both proprietary and open-source models and diverse NLU benchmarks.
The framework offers a principled and scalable foundation for automated prompt engineering, reducing manual intervention in adapting LLMs to diverse applications.

 Learning from Contrastive Prompts: An Automated Prompt Optimization Framework

Recent video generation models can produce smooth and visually appealing clips, but they often struggle to synthesize complex dynamics with a coherent chain of consequences. Accurately modeling visual outcomes and state transitions over time remains a core challenge. In contrast, large language and multimodal models (e.g., GPT-4o) exhibit strong visual state reasoning and future prediction capabilities. To bridge these strengths, we introduce VChain, a novel inference-time chain-of-visual-thought framework that injects visual reasoning signals from multimodal models into video generation. Specifically, VChain contains a dedicated pipeline that leverages large multimodal models to generate a sparse set of critical keyframes as snapshots, which are then used to guide the sparse inference-time visual-state adaptation of a pre-trained video generator only at these key moments. Our approach is tuning-efficient, introduces minimal overhead and avoids dense supervision. Extensive experiments on complex, multi-step scenarios show that VChain significantly enhances the quality of generated videos.

VChain: Chain-of-Visual-Thought for Reasoning in Video Generation

The adoption of large language models (LLMs) is transforming the peer review process, from assisting reviewers in writing detailed evaluations to generating entire reviews automatically. While these capabilities offer new opportunities, they also raise concerns about fairness and reliability. In this paper, we investigate bias in LLM-generated peer reviews through controlled interventions on author metadata, including affiliation, gender, seniority, and publication history. Our analysis consistently shows a strong affiliation bias favoring authors from highly ranked institutions. We also identify directional preferences associated with seniority and prior publication record, which can influence acceptance decisions for borderline papers. Gender effects are smaller but present in several models. Notably, implicit biases become more pronounced when examining token-level soft ratings, suggesting that alignment may mask but not fully eliminate underlying preferences.

Justice in Judgment: Unveiling (Hidden) Bias in LLM-assisted Peer Reviews

Wikipedia is a critical resource for modern NLP, serving as a rich repository of up-to-date and citation-backed information on a wide variety of subjects. The reliability of Wikipedia---its groundedness in its cited sources---is vital to this purpose. This work analyzes both how grounded Wikipedia is and how readily fine-grained grounding evidence can be retrieved. To this end, we introduce PeopleProfiles---a large-scale, multi-level dataset of claim support annotations on biographical Wikipedia articles. We show that: ~22% of claims in Wikipedia *lead* sections are unsupported by the article body; ~30% of annotated claims in the article *body* are unsupported by their (publicly accessible) sources; and real-world Wikipedia citation practices often differ from documented standards. Finally, we show that complex evidence retrieval remains a challenge---even for recent reasoning rerankers.

How Grounded is Wikipedia? A Study on Structured Evidential Support and Retrieval

Recent Long-Context Language Models (LCLMs) can process hundreds of thousands of tokens in a single prompt, enabling new opportunities for knowledge-intensive multi-hop reasoning by integrating large sets of retrieved documents or, in some cases, directly all necessary information. However, simply feeding more documents into the context window fails to capture how evidence should be connected. We address this gap with thought templates, reusable reasoning patterns derived from prior problem solving that structure how evidence is combined and guide multi-hop inference alongside factual documents. To keep these templates effective, we propose an update strategy that iteratively refines templates derived from training data through natural-language feedback. Across diverse benchmarks and LCLM families, our approach delivers consistent gains over strong baselines in both retrieval-based and retrieval-free settings. Furthermore, we show that optimized templates can be distilled into relatively smaller open-source models, demonstrating its broad applicability. We refer to our framework as Thought Template Augmented LCLMs (ToTAL).

When Thoughts Meet Facts: Reusable Reasoning for Long-Context LMs

Recently, Large Language Models (LLM) have emerged as a promising paradigm for sequential recommendation. In sequential recommendation, effectively integrating diverse user preferences is essential for improving LLM performance, as users often exhibit multiple interests across different contexts. However, most existing LLM-based methods rely primarily on item descriptions or utilize user preferences independently. As a result, they overlook the relationships among preferences and fail to filter out less-relevant items that introduce noise. This makes it difficult to accurately capture the user's interests, leading to suboptimal recommendations. To overcome these limitations, we propose UCGRec (User-Centric Graph Learning for LLM-based Sequential Recommendation), a novel method that effectively integrates diverse user-relevant preference signals into a unified user-centric graph. Then, we inject the graph-based knowledge into the LLM through end-to-end training with graph neural networks. We conduct extensive experiments on four widely used sequential real-world recommendation datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that UCGRec significantly outperforms conventional and state-of-the-art LLM-based methods.

UCGRec: User-Centric Graph Learning for LLM-based Sequential Recommendation

The evaluation of societal biases in NLP models is critically hindered by a geo-cultural gap. This leaves regions such as Latin America severely underserved, making it impossible to adequately assess or mitigate the perpetuation of harmful regional stereotypes in language technologies. 

This paper presents LACES, a stereotype association dataset, for 15 Latin American countries. This dataset includes 4,789 stereotype associations\footnote{The de-identified dataset can be accessed via \href{https://github.com/fvialibre/LACES}{GitHub}}, manually created and annotated by 83 participants. The dataset was developed through targeted community partnerships across Latin America. 

Additionally, in this paper, we propose a novel adaptive data collection methodology that uniquely integrates the sourcing of new stereotype entries and the validation of existing data within a single, unified workflow. This approach results in a resource with more unique stereotypes than previous static collection methods, enabling a more efficient stereotype collection. The paper further supports the quality of LACES by demonstrating reduced efficacy of debiasing methods on this dataset in comparison to existing popular stereotype benchmarks.

Content Warning: This research involves the study of social biases. Consequently, the paper contains examples of discriminatory language and stereotypes that may be sensitive or upsetting to readers. These examples are included for the purpose of scientific analysis and do not reflect the views of the authors.

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