United States

We present EvalMORAAL, a transparent chain-of-thought (CoT) framework that uses two scoring methods (log-probabilities and direct ratings) plus a model-as-judge peer review to evaluate moral alignment in 20 large language models. We assess models on the World Values Survey (55 countries, 19 topics) and the PEW Global Attitudes Survey (39 countries, 8 topics). With EvalMORAAL, top models align closely with survey responses (Pearson&#39;s $r \approx 0.90$ on WVS). Yet we find a clear regional difference: Western regions average $r=0.82$ while non-Western regions average $r=0.61$ (a 0.21 absolute gap), indicating a persistent regional alignment gap. Our framework adds three parts: (1) two scoring methods for all models to enable fair comparison, (2) a structured CoT protocol with self-consistency checks, and (3) a model-as-judge peer review that flags 348 conflicts using a data-driven threshold. Peer agreement relates to WVS survey alignment ($r=0.74$, $p&lt;.001$; PEW $r=0.39$, n.s.), supporting automated quality checks. These results show real progress toward culture-aware AI while highlighting open challenges for use across regions.

ACL 2026

EvalMORAAL: Interpretable Chain-of-Thought and LLM-as-Judge Evaluation for Moral Alignment in Large Language Models

llm-as-judge

moral alignment

cultural alignment

chain-of-thought

model evaluation

large language models

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

We present EvalMORAAL, a transparent chain-of-thought (CoT) framework that uses two scoring methods (log-probabilities and direct ratings) plus a model-as-judge peer review to evaluate moral alignment in 20 large language models. We assess models on the World Values Survey (55 countries, 19 topics) and the PEW Global Attitudes Survey (39 countries, 8 topics). With EvalMORAAL, top models align closely with survey responses (Pearson's $r \approx 0.90$ on WVS). Yet we find a clear regional difference: Western regions average $r=0.82$ while non-Western regions average $r=0.61$ (a 0.21 absolute gap), indicating a persistent regional alignment gap. Our framework adds three parts: (1) two scoring methods for all models to enable fair comparison, (2) a structured CoT protocol with self-consistency checks, and (3) a model-as-judge peer review that flags 348 conflicts using a data-driven threshold. Peer agreement relates to WVS survey alignment ($r=0.74$, $p<.001$; PEW $r=0.39$, n.s.), supporting automated quality checks. These results show real progress toward culture-aware AI while highlighting open challenges for use across regions.

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

How to defend large language models (LLMs) from generating toxic content is an important research area. Yet, most research focused on various model training techniques to remediate LLMs by updating their weights. A typical related research area is safety alignment. This however is often costly and tedious and can expose the model to even more problems such as catastrophic forgetting if the trainings are not carefully handled by experienced NLP practitioners. We thus propose a simple yet effective and novel algorithm, namely \textbf{Tox}ic Subword \textbf{Prun}ing (ToxPrune) to prune the subword contained by the toxic words from BPE in trained LLMs. In contrast to the previous work that demonstrates pruning BPE tokens as harmful to the task of machine translation, we surprisingly found its usefulness in preventing toxic content from being generated on LLMs. Fortunately, our findings suggest that ToxPrune simultaneously improves the toxic language model NSFW-3B on the task of dialogue response generation obviously. We surprisingly found that ToxPrune can even obviously improve official Llama-3.1-6B in the metric of dialogue diversity. Extensive automatic results and human evaluation indicate that ToxPrune could be helpful for both remediating toxic LLMs and improving non-toxic LLMs on the task of dialogue response generation.

Toxic Subword Pruning for Dialogue Response Generation on Large Language Models

There are two shortages in the current Large Language Models (LLMs) era. The first is short of multilingual models, where most LLMs are English-centric and performance is limited on multilingual reasoning. The second is the place of external knowledge to be used, where most retrieved knowledge is prepended to the user queries (maybe sub-optimal). This paper presents a novel and simple yet effective method called \textbf{D}ictionary \textbf{I}nsertion \textbf{P}rompting (\textbf{DIP}). When providing a non-English prompt, DIP looks up a word dictionary and inserts words' English counterparts into the middle of the prompt for LLMs. It then enables better translation into English and better English model thinking steps which leads to obviously better results. We experiment with 10 to 200 languages from FLORES-200.\footnote{The number of languages varies on the datasets, and we experiment with 200 languages on GSM8K as in Appendix} Since there are no adequate datasets, we use the NLLB translator to create synthetic multilingual benchmarks from the existing 4 English reasoning benchmarks such as GSM8K and AQuA. The synthetic benchmarks are translated back into English for quality assurance with manual annotation. Interestingly, the place for injecting the dictionary plays an important factor in the performance gains, and we found that interleaving the dictionary with the original words gives a better performance compared to prepending/appending the dictionary, under the same dictionary constructed.

Dictionary Insertion Prompting for Multilingual Reasoning on Multilingual Large Language Models

We propose NTNU-SMIL's system for SemEval-2026 Task 3 Track B Subtask 1 Dimensional Stance Analysis (DimStance). Our approach models target-conditioned valence–arousal regression using sentence-pair encoding, dual regression heads, and a logistic-loss regression formulation. For English and Chinese, we further leverage same-language transfer from Track A and apply lightweight out-of-fold calibration with multi-seed ensembling to reduce cross-lingual scale mismatch. Post-hoc analysis shows that same-language transfer and logistic-loss regression are the main drivers of performance gains, while arousal variance collapse remains a challenge in low-resource settings such as Swahili.

NTNU-SMIL at SemEval-2026 Task 3: Logistic-Loss Regression with Same-Language Transfer for Valence--Arousal Stance Prediction in Dimensional Stance Analysis (DimStance)

Conspiracy narratives on social media often hide in subtle word cues and quiet reasoning patterns, making their detection a challenging task for natural language processing systems. SemEval-2026 Task 10 PsyCoMark introduces a benchmark for studying these phenomena, pairing binary conspiracy detection with the extraction of five key psycholinguistic markers: Actor, Action, Effect, Victim, and Evidence. In this paper, we examine how modern transformer-based models can grasp both the conspiratorial intent and the deeper reasoning structures behind such narratives, using rehydrated Reddit comments annotated by experts in psychology and linguistics. We test five models across these subtasks, emphasizing the gap that exists between classification and deeper discourse-level interpretation. Our best system reaches 0.80 weighted F1 on conspiracy detection and 0.16 macro F1 on marker extraction, with per-marker F1 ranging from 0.36 (Actor) to 0.00 (Victim). This work also contributes to the growing call for explainable NLP methods that integrate psycholinguistic insights to better illuminate misinformation and conspiratorial thinking online.

MindMiner at SemEval-2026 Task 10: Multi-Model Approaches to Conspiracy Detection and Psycholinguistic Marker Extraction

Humor generation remains difficult not only because producing fluent, novel jokes is hard, but because "funny" is audience-dependent and supervision is noisy—preferences vary with audience, context, and culture, and annotator agreement is often low.
In this paper, we describe our system for the SemEval-2026 Task~1 (MWAHAHA), which focuses on humor generation under explicit constraints. The task evaluates submitted systems via human preference judgments in 1-on-1 arena-style comparisons.

We adopt a "generate-many -> select-best" strategy. First, we generate a diverse pool of candidates per instance using multi-step prompting, model ensembling, and diversity-oriented decoding. Second, we select outputs using a preference model that approximates a ``reader'' by learning from human comparisons rather than absolute funniness scores. To support this approach, we release 2.5K human pairwise judgments collected through the Humor Arena prototype. We further propose an interpretable pipeline that converts labeled comparisons into a preference model. Across three preference datasets, our models consistently outperform baselines and show stronger cross-domain transfer. Finally, we apply the learned preference model to rank candidates for the MWAHAHA setting and release intermediate artifacts (candidate pools and rankings) to facilitate follow-up work. 

Our system ranked 1st in the English and Chinese subtasks of MWAHAHA and 2nd in the Spanish subtask.

lmfaoooo at SemEval-2026 Task 1: Humor Is an Audience. Preference Modeling for Constrained Humor Generation

Large language models have transformed code generation, raising concerns around authorship, assessment integrity, and software trust. SemEval-2026 Task 13 Subtask A operationalizes detection as binary classification over code snippets, with a particular emphasis on out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization across unseen programming languages and application domains. We propose a SALSA-style formulation, Single-pass Autoregressive LLM Structured Classification, that maps each class to a dedicated output token and trains the model to emit a single-token label in a structured response. Rather than engineering hand-crafted features or decision rules, this formulation delegates the authorship decision to the model. To improve OOD robustness, we combine balanced sampling across languages with parameter-efficient fine-tuning and conservative training (low learning rate, single epoch) to avoid overfitting to the training domain. Our best system achieves OOD F1 = 0.789 on the official leaderboard, substantially outperforming the CodeBERT baseline (F1 = 0.305).

Dream at SemEval-2026 Task 13: SALSA for Single-Pass Machine-Generated Code Detection

Our approach combines a diverse ensemble for Subtask 1 with a context-aware transformer aggregation architecture for temporal forecasting in Subtasks 2A and 2B. The ensemble achieved state-of-the-art performance for the Subtask 1 Valence metric, ranking first in Valence prediction. Our Subtask 2B independent architecture ranked second in Valence prediction and fourth in Arousal prediction among competitive submissions. We also report results for Subtask 2A, analyzing challenges our architecture faced with next-entry affect forecasting. These findings underscore the significance of our methodology for affective prediction, achieved without reliance on external affective datasets.

NLPGroup8 at SemEval-2026 Task 2: Diverse Ensembles and Hierarchical Transformers for Emotional State Prediction

We present H-RAG, our submission to SemEval-2026 Task 8 (MTRAGEval), addressing both Task A (Retrieval) and Task C (Generation with Retrieved Passages). Task A evaluates standalone retrieval quality, while Task C assesses end-to-end retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in multi-turn conversational settings, requiring both accurate answer generation and faithful grounding in retrieved evidence. Our approach implements a hierarchical parent--child RAG pipeline that separates fine-grained child-level retrieval from parent-level context reconstruction during generation. Documents are segmented into overlapping sentence-based child chunks, while full documents are preserved as parent units to provide coherent context. weighting, and embedding-based similarity rescoring over child chunks. Retrieved evidence is aggregated at the parent level and supplied to an instruction-tuned language model for response generation. H-RAG achieves an nDCG@5 score of 0.4271 on Task A and a harmonic mean score of 0.3241 on Task C (RB_agg: 0.2488, RL_F: 0.2703, RB_llm: 0.6508), underscoring the importance of retrieval configuration and parent-level aggregation in multi-turn RAG performance.

H-RAG at SemEval-2026 Task 8: Hierarchical Parent–Child Retrieval for Multi-Turn RAG Conversations

This paper presents a novel agentic LLM pipeline for SemEval-2026 Task 10 that jointly extracts psycholinguistic conspiracy markers and detects conspiracy endorsement. Unlike traditional classifiers that conflate semantic reasoning with structural localization, our decoupled design isolates and addresses these challenges separately. For marker extraction, we propose Dynamic Discriminative Chain-of-Thought (DD-CoT) with deterministic anchoring to resolve semantic ambiguity and character-level brittleness. For conspiracy detection, an ``Anti-Echo Chamber`` architecture, consisting of an adversarial Parallel Council adjudicated by a Calibrated Judge, overcomes the ``Reporter Trap``, where models falsely penalize objective reporting. Our system achieves 0.24 Macro F1 (+100% over baseline) on S1 and 0.79 Macro F1 (+49%) on S2, ranking 3rd on the S1 development leaderboard and 8th on the test set, demonstrating that structured agentic deliberation is an effective alternative to fine-tuning for interpretable psycholinguistic NLP.

AILS-NTUA at SemEval-2026 Task 10: Agentic LLMs for Psycholinguistic Marker Extraction and Conspiracy Endorsement Detection

In this paper, we present AILS-NTUA system for Track-A of SemEval-2026 Task 3 on Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (DimABSA), which encompasses three complementary problems: Dimensional Aspect Sentiment Regression (DimASR), Dimensional Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (DimASTE), and Dimensional Aspect Sentiment Quadruplet Prediction (DimASQP) within a multilingual and multi-domain framework. Our methodology combines fine-tuning of language-appropriate encoder backbones for continuous aspect-level sentiment prediction with language-specific instruction tuning of large language models using LoRA for structured triplet and quadruplet extraction. This unified yet task-adaptive design emphasizes parameter-efficient specialization across languages and domains, enabling reduced training and inference requirements while maintaining strong effectiveness. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed models achieve competitive performance and consistently surpass the provided baselines across most evaluation settings.

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Toxic Subword Pruning for Dialogue Response Generation on Large Language Models

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From Generation to Judgment: Opportunities and Challenges of LLM-as-a-judge

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