United States

Tokenization is central to modern language models, yet its effects on cross-script efficiency, input cost, and truncation behavior remain underexplored. We study this issue through aligned comparisons of Urdu and Roman Urdu, asking whether semantically equivalent content incurs systematically different tokenization costs across scripts. We introduce Token Cost Inequality (TCI), a metric for quantifying relative tokenization efficiency under semantic alignment, and propose a multi-axis framework spanning token cost, fragmentation, and fixed-budget retention. Across three tokenizer families (cl100k, mT5, and ByT5), we find that tokenization disparities are strongly tokenizer-dependent, with substantial differences in token cost and segmentation behavior across scripts. We further identify an efficiency-retention paradox: token cost alone does not fully explain truncation behavior. Under fixed token budgets, Roman Urdu preserves more character-level content than native Urdu, reflecting differences in character-per-token density and fragmentation. Lightweight normalization yields minimal gains, suggesting that the observed disparities arise primarily from tokenizer design rather than superficial orthographic variation. These findings provide controlled evidence that fixed token budgets can produce unequal surface-coverage conditions across scripts, with implications for input-side cost estimation, benchmark design, and multilingual evaluation under constrained token budgets.

ACL 2026

Token Cost Inequality: Measuring Tokenization Disparities Across Scripts in Roman Urdu and Urdu

script variation

tokenizer fairness

fixed-budget retention

token cost inequality

roman urdu

multilingual evaluation

nlp evaluation

gem benchmark

tokenization

urdu

#### *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. 

workshop paper

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.

Reference-free evaluation of LLM-generated code is essential when execution-based testing is unavailable or costly. We compare two paradigms: $\textbf{explicit LLM-as-a-Judge}$ scoring, which assigns a quality score to a solution, and $\textbf{log-probability scoring}$, which uses $\log P_\theta(\text{code} \mid \text{task})$ as an instruction-free signal. Across HumanEval-X, we find that the two approaches capture $\textit{qualitatively different aspects}$ of code correctness. Explicit judges — particularly larger models — perform strongly on generated code, reflecting their ability to reason about task-solution alignment, but fail to distinguish correct solutions from minimally mutated ones. Log-probability exhibits the opposite pattern: weaker performance on generated code, but consistent pairwise separation of canonical from mutated solutions. These results reveal a $\textbf{discrimination-ranking dissociation}$ and show that the two paradigms provide complementary, non-interchangeable signals: explicit judges capture semantic correctness, while log-probability captures local structural consistency.

Semantic vs. Structural Signals: Log-Probability and LLM-as-a-Judge for Reference-Free Code Evaluation

LLM-as-judge evaluation is widely used in benchmarking pipelines, where model outputs are compared and ranked using automated evaluators. These pipelines typically assume that judgments are stable properties of fixed inputs. We show that this assumption does not hold under interaction. We study post-decision manipulability: the extent to which an evaluation outcome can be altered through subsequent conversation with the judge after an initial decision has been made. Across controlled experiments on MT-Bench and AlpacaEval, we find that LLM judges are highly stable under repeated and neutral reevaluation, yet become substantially reversible under targeted post-decision challenge. An anti-baseline challenge protocol shows that stable judgments can be overturned through motivated interaction, while a counterbalanced target-validation protocol separates this reversibility from net target-directed steering. These reversals have practical consequences: they can degrade agreement with human preferences, shift benchmark rankings, and produce harmful evaluation changes despite high self-reported confidence. Authority framing is especially destabilizing, and revised judgments are often accompanied by low-overlap justifications, suggesting post hoc rationalization rather than reliable error correction. We introduce the Evaluation Robustness Score (ERS) to quantify interactional robustness by combining reversal susceptibility with counterbalanced directional effects. Our findings identify post-decision interaction as a distinct failure mode for LLM-as-judge evaluation and motivate evaluation protocols that measure not only static agreement, but robustness under challenge.

Stability vs. Manipulability: Evaluating Robustness Under Post-Decision Interaction in LLM Judges

Large language models (LLMs) are now widely used as judges, yet their decisions can change under presentation choices that should be irrelevant. We study one such source of instability: candidate-order sensitivity in listwise factuality evaluation, where several answers can look similarly polished while differing substantially in hallucination risk. We introduce PCFJudge, an inference-time method that reruns the same factuality-first listwise prompt over multiple orderings of the same candidate set and aggregates the resulting scores, ranks, and uncertainty signals into a single consensus decision. On RewardBench 2 Factuality, the final seven-permutation aggregate (K=7) improves top-1 selection accuracy from 86.00\% to 91.33\% with GPT-5.4 and from 86.33\% to 89.67\% with Claude Sonnet 4.6. These results suggest that candidate order can be a meaningful source of factuality-judging error and that marginalizing over this nuisance variation can improve the reliability of LLM evaluation.

Permutation-Consensus Listwise Judging for Robust Factuality Evaluation

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in medical applications requires rigorous fact-checking to ensure patient safety and regulatory compliance. We introduce **MedFact**, a challenging Chinese medical fact-checking benchmark with 2,116 expert-annotated instances from diverse real-world texts, spanning 13 specialties, 8 error types, 4 writing styles, and 5 difficulty levels. Construction uses a hybrid AI-human framework where iterative expert feedback refines AI-driven, multi-criteria filtering to ensure high quality and difficulty. We evaluate 20 leading LLMs on veracity classification and error localization, and results show that models can often determine whether text contains errors but struggle to localize them precisely, with top performers falling short of human performance. Our analysis reveals an "over-criticism" phenomenon, where models misidentify correct information as erroneous, a tendency that is aggravated by advanced reasoning techniques such as multi-agent collaboration and inference-time scaling. MedFact highlights the challenges of deploying medical LLMs and provides resources to develop factually reliable medical AI systems.

MedFact: Benchmarking the Fact-Checking Capabilities of Large Language Models on Chinese Medical Texts

Evaluating reasoning quality in multi-agent LLM systems is challenging, especially for open-ended tasks without reference answers. We investigate whether intrinsic confidence signals, token-level log-probabilities from decoding, can predict reasoning quality as assessed by LLM-as-judge evaluation. Using a debate-based essay scoring framework, we compare confidence proxies against rubric-based judge scores across two ASAP essay sets. We find that early-token confidence, particularly within the first few generated tokens, is consistently the strongest predictor of reasoning quality, outperforming full-sequence statistics. Analysis of log-probability trajectories shows that the opening phase of generation is the most heterogeneous and therefore most informative. We also observe a systematic asymmetry between agent roles, with stronger alignment between confidence and quality for supportive reasoning than for adversarial critique. These results suggest that early decoding dynamics provide a lightweight and effective signal for estimating reasoning reliability in multi-agent LLM systems.

Early-Token Confidence Predicts Reasoning Quality in Multi-Agent LLM Debate

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges of chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably assess process faithfulness rather than merely answer plausibility. We introduce C2-Faith, a benchmark built from PRM800K that explicitly decomposes faithfulness into two complementary dimensions: causality (whether each step logically follows from prior context) and coverage (whether essential intermediate inferences are present). Using controlled perturbations, we construct examples with known causal error positions by replacing a single step with a logically inconsistent variant, and with controlled coverage deletions at varying rates, enabling direct measurement against reference labels. We evaluate three frontier LLM judges across three tasks: binary causal detection, causal step localization, and coverage scoring. Our results reveal that judge reliability is highly task-dependent, with no single model dominating across settings. While models often detect that an error exists, they struggle to accurately localize it, indicating a substantial gap between detection and attribution. Moreover, all judges systematically overestimate reasoning completeness, assigning high coverage scores even when substantial portions of intermediate reasoning are missing. These findings expose fundamental limitations of LLM judges in process-level evaluation and highlight the need for more reliable and calibrated methods when using LLMs to assess reasoning quality.

C2-Faith: Benchmarking LLM Judges for Causal and Coverage Faithfulness in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

We present a multilingual study of sentiment evaluation on Wikipedia articles from various topics in five languages (German, English, Spanish, Polish, and Russian). In this paper, we compare three large language models (Gemini Pro 3.1, Claude Opus 4.6, and GPT 5.2), each queried three times per sentence, with two popular multilingual sentiment classifiers. This setup allows us to analyze not only inter-model differences but also intra-model stability as a proxy for confidence. To support systematic evaluation, we construct a benchmark dataset based on strict consensus across evaluators and analyze sentiment distributions across topics and languages. We show substantial variation in sentiment distributions, agreement, and consistency across models and languages. Our results suggest that sentiment evaluation on encyclopedic text remains an underexplored challenge for multilingual NLP.

Evaluating Multilingual Sentiment Classifiers Using an LLM-Annotated Wikipedia Benchmark

Recent advances in language modeling have led to a growing number of papers related to finance in top-tier Natural Language Processing (NLP) venues. To systematically examine this trend, we review 374 NLP research papers published between 2017 and 2024 across 38 conferences and workshops, with a focused analysis of 221 papers that directly address finance-related tasks. We evaluate these papers across 11 quantitative and qualitative dimensions, with particular attention to evaluation practices, metric choices, dataset coverage, and reproducibility in a high-stakes applied LM domain. Our study identifies the following opportunities for NLP researchers: (i) expanding the scope of forecasting tasks; (ii) enriching evaluation with finance-specific metrics; (iii) leveraging multilingual and crisis-period datasets for robustness-oriented evaluation; and (iv) balancing PLMs with efficient or interpretable alternatives. We identify actionable directions supported by dataset and tool recommendations, with implications for both academic evaluation practices and industry deployment.

Language Modeling for the Future of Finance: A Survey into Metrics, Tasks, and Data Opportunities

We introduce EconWebArena, a benchmark for evaluating autonomous agents on complex, multimodal economic tasks in realistic web environments. The benchmark comprises 360 curated tasks from 82 authoritative websites spanning domains such as macroeconomics, labor, finance, trade, and public policy. Each task challenges agents to navigate live websites, interpret structured and visual content, interact with real interfaces, and extract precise, time-sensitive data through multi-step workflows. We construct the benchmark by prompting multiple large language models (LLMs) to generate candidate tasks, followed by rigorous human curation to ensure clarity, feasibility, and source reliability. Unlike prior work, EconWebArena emphasizes fidelity to authoritative data sources and the need for grounded web-based economic reasoning. We evaluate a diverse set of state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs as web agents, analyze failure cases, and conduct ablation studies to assess the impact of visual grounding, plan-based reasoning, and interaction design. Our results reveal substantial performance gaps and highlight persistent challenges in grounding, navigation, and multimodal understanding, positioning EconWebArena as a rigorous testbed for economic web intelligence.

EconWebArena: Benchmarking Autonomous Agents on Economic Tasks in Realistic Web Environments

LLMs have demonstrated exceptional proficiency in a wide range of NLP tasks. However, a notable gap remains in practical data analysis scenarios, particularly when LLMs are required to process long sequences of unstructured documents, such as news feeds or, as specifically addressed in this paper, social media posts. To empirically assess the effectiveness of LLMs in this setting, we introduce a question-based evaluation framework comprising 470 manually curated questions designed to evaluate LLMs' semantic understanding and reasoning abilities over aggregated text data. We apply our benchmark on diverse Twitter datasets covering various NLP tasks, including sentiment analysis, hate speech detection, and emotion recognition. Our results reveal that the performance depends heavily on input scale and the complexity of the data sources, declining noticeably in multi-label or target-dependent scenarios. In addition, as task complexity increases, performance drops progressively from basic semantic existence identification to more demanding operations such as comparison, counting, and calculation. Furthermore, as the input size grows beyond 500 instances, we identify a common limitation across LLMs, particularly Open-weights models: performance degrades substantially, especially on numerical tasks. These findings highlight critical architectural bottlenecks in current LLMs for performing rigorous quantitative analysis over large text collections.

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Semantic vs. Structural Signals: Log-Probability and LLM-as-a-Judge for Reference-Free Code Evaluation

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