Austria

A persistent challenge in AI is the effective integration of material and formal inference - the former concerning the plausibility and contextual relevance of arguments, while the latter focusing on their logical and structural validity. Large Language Models (LLMs), by virtue of their extensive pre-training on large textual corpora, exhibit strong capabilities in material inference. However, their reasoning often lacks formal rigour and verifiability. At the same time, LLMs’ linguistic competence positions them as a promising bridge between natural and formal languages, opening up new opportunities for combining these two modes of reasoning.
In this paper, we introduce PEIRCE, a neuro-symbolic framework designed to unify material and formal inference through an iterative conjecture–criticism process. Within this framework, LLMs play the central role of generating candidate solutions in natural and formal languages, which are then evaluated and refined via interaction with external critique models. These critiques include symbolic provers, which assess formal validity, as well as soft evaluators that measure the quality of the generated arguments along linguistic and epistemic dimensions such as plausibility, coherence, and parsimony. While PEIRCE is a general-purpose framework, we demonstrate its capabilities in the domain of natural language explanation generation - a setting that inherently demands both material adequacy and formal correctness.

ACL 2025

PEIRCE: Unifying Material and Formal Reasoning via LLM-Driven Neuro-Symbolic Refinement

llm-symbolic models

neuro-symbolic reasoning

natural language inference

#### *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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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. 

demo

### 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.* 
[Read more](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GI_hvOpjswAuYdUTromfeDiPpCcqidwg/view?usp=sharing)

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

We introduce MERaLiON-AudioLLM, the first general-purpose audio-based large language model designed for multitask learning, with a particular focus on Singlish understanding. Trained on 62 million multimodal instruction samples comprising a total of 260k hours of audio, it exhibits strong generalization across a diverse set of tasks, including—but not limited to—automatic speech recognition, spoken question answering, speech translation, and paralinguistic analysis. Our results show significant improvements in local speech recognition and task-specific understanding, making MERaLiON-AudioLLM a leading solution for region-specific AI applications. An interactive demo has been developed to enable user-friendly interactions, supported by a backend with customized caching and load-balancing mechanisms. We benchmark the model across a broad range of multilingual and multitask scenarios, where it demonstrates competitive performance compared to other open-source models. The demo page, model weights and videos are publically accessible.

MERaLiON-AudioLLM: Advancing Speech and Language Understanding for Singapore

We introduce NameTag 3, an open-source tool and cloud-based web service for multilingual, multidataset, and multitagset named entity recognition (NER), supporting both flat and nested entities. NameTag 3 achieves state-of-the-art results on 21 test datasets in 15 languages and remains competitive on the rest, even against larger models. It is available as a command-line tool and as a cloud-based service, enabling use without local installation. NameTag 3 web service currently provides flat NER for 17 languages, trained on 21 corpora and three NE tagsets, all powered by a single 355M-parameter fine-tuned model; and nested NER for Czech, powered by a 126M fine-tuned model. The source code is licensed under open-source MPL 2.0, while the models are distributed under non-commercial CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Documentation is available at https://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/nametag, source code at https://github.com/ufal/nametag3, and trained models via LINDAT: https://lindat.cz. Demo and web application can be found at https://lindat.mff.cuni.cz/services/nametag/. A demonstration video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gaGnP0IV8A.

NameTag 3: A Tool and a Service for Multilingual/Multitagset NER

Human-model conversations provide a window into users' real-world scenarios, behavior, and needs, and thus are a valuable resource for model development and research. 
While for-profit companies collect user data through the APIs of their models, using it internally to improve their own models, the open source and research community lags behind.


We introduce the ShareLM collection, a unified set of human conversations with large language models, and its accompanying plugin, a Web extension for voluntarily contributing user-model conversations. Where few platforms share their chats, the ShareLM plugin adds this functionality, thus, allowing users to share conversations from most platforms. The plugin allows the user to rate their conversations, both at the conversation and the response levels, and delete conversations they prefer to keep private before they ever leave the user's local storage.

The ShareLM Collection and Plugin: Contributing Human-Model Chats for the Benefit of the Community

The ever-growing number of papers in natural language processing (NLP) poses the challenge of finding relevant papers. In our previous paper, we introduced GenGO, which complements NLP papers with various information, such as aspect-based summaries, to enable efficient paper exploration. While it delivers a better literature search experience, it lacks an interactive interface that dynamically produces information tailored to the user's needs. To this end, we present an extension to our previous system, dubbed GenGO Ultra, which exploits large language models (LLMs) to dynamically generate responses grounded by published papers. We also conduct multi-granularity experiments to evaluate six text encoders and five LLMs. Our system is designed for transparency -- based only on open-weight models, visible system prompts, and an open-source code base -- to foster further development and research on top of our system: https://gengo-ultra.sotaro.io/

GenGO Ultra: an LLM-powered ACL Paper Explorer

Scholar Inbox is a new open-access platform designed to address the challenges researchers face in staying current with the rapidly expanding volume of scientific literature. We provide personalized recommendations, continuous updates from open-access archives (arXiv, bioRxiv, etc.), visual paper summaries, semantic search, and a range of tools to streamline research workflows and promote open research access. The platform's personalized recommendation system is trained on user ratings, ensuring that recommendations are tailored to individual researchers' interests. To further enhance the user experience, Scholar Inbox also offers a map of science that provides an overview of research across domains, enabling users to easily explore specific topics. We use this map to address the cold start problem common in recommender systems, as well as an active learning strategy that iteratively prompts users to rate a selection of papers, 
allowing the system to learn user preferences quickly. We evaluate the quality of our recommendation system on a novel dataset of 800k user ratings, which we make publicly available, as well as via an extensive user study.

Scholar Inbox: Personalized Paper Recommendations for Scientists

Application systems using natural language interfaces to databases (NLIDBs) have democratized data analysis. This positive development has also brought forth an urgent challenge to help users who might use these systems without a background in statistical analysis to formulate bias-free analytical questions. Although significant research has focused on text-to-SQL generation accuracy, addressing cognitive biases in analytical questions remains underexplored. We present [VeriMinder](https://veriminder.ai), an interactive system for detecting and mitigating such analytical vulnerabilities. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1) a contextual semantic mapping framework for biases relevant to specific analysis contexts (2) an analytical framework that operationalizes the Hard-to-Vary principle and guides users in systematic data analysis (3) an optimized LLM-powered system that generates high-quality, task-specific prompts using an iterative process involving multiple candidates, critic feedback, and self-reflection.


User testing confirms the merits of our approach. In direct user experience evaluation, 82.5\% participants reported positively impacting the quality of the analysis. In comparative evaluation, VeriMinder scored significantly higher than alternative approaches, at least 20\% better when considered for metrics of the analysis's concreteness, comprehensiveness, and accuracy. Our system, implemented as a web application, is set to help users avoid "wrong question" vulnerability during data analysis. VeriMinder will be available as an MIT-licensed open-source software with access to our code base, evaluation datasets, and prompt library to facilitate further research and adoption within the community.

VeriMinder: Mitigating Analytical Vulnerabilities in NL2SQL

Machine translation (MT) post-editing and research data collection often rely on inefficient, disconnected workflows. We introduce **TranslationCorrect**, an integrated framework designed to streamline these tasks. **TranslationCorrect** combines MT generation using models like NLLB, automated error prediction using models like XCOMET or LLM APIs (providing detailed reasoning), and an intuitive post-editing interface within a single environment. Built with human-computer interaction (HCI) principles in mind to minimize cognitive load, as confirmed by a user study. For translators, it enables them to correct errors and batch translate efficiently. For researchers, **TranslationCorrect** exports high-quality span-based annotations in the Error Span Annotation (ESA) format, using an error taxonomy inspired by Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM). These outputs are compatible with state-of-the-art error detection models and suitable for training MT or post-editing systems. Our user study confirms that **TranslationCorrect** significantly improves translation efficiency and user satisfaction over traditional annotation methods.

TRANSLATIONCORRECT: A Unified Framework for Machine Translation Post-Editing with Predictive Error Assistance

Model merging allows combining the capabilities of existing models into a new one—post hoc, without additional training. This has made it increasingly popular thanks to its low cost and the availability of libraries that support merging on consumer GPUs. Recent work shows that pairing merging with evolutionary algorithms can boost performance, but no framework currently supports flexible experimentation with such strategies in language models. We introduce Mergenetic, an open-source library for evolutionary model merging. Mergenetic enables easy composition of merging methods and evolutionary algorithms, while incorporating lightweight fitness estimators to reduce evaluation costs. We describe its design and demonstrate that Mergenetic produces competitive results across tasks and languages using modest hardware. A video demo showcasing its main features is also provided.

Mergenetic: a Simple Evolutionary Model Merging Library

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) raises a pivotal question: How can LLMs accelerate scientific discovery? This work tackles the crucial first stage of research — generating novel hypotheses. While recent work on automated hypothesis generation focuses on multi-agent frameworks and extending test-time compute, none of the approaches effectively incorporate transparency and steerability through a synergistic Human-in-the-loop (HITL) approach. To address this gap, we introduce IRIS, the Interactive Research Ideation System, an open-source platform designed for researchers to leverage LLM-assisted scientific ideation. IRIS incorporates innovative features to enhance ideation, including adaptive test-time compute expansion via Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), fine-grained feedback mechanism, and query-based literature synthesis, designed to empower researchers with greater control and insight throughout the ideation process. We additionally conduct a user study with researchers across diverse disciplines, validating the effectiveness of our system in enhancing ideation.

IRIS: Interactive Research Ideation System for Accelerating Scientific Discovery

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) plays a pivotal role in modern large language model applications, with numerous existing frameworks offering a wide range of functionalities to facilitate the development of RAG systems.
However, we have identified several persistent challenges in these frameworks, including lack of new techniques, difficulties in algorithm reproduction and sharing, and high system overhead.
To address these limitations, we introduce **FlexRAG**, an open-source framework specifically designed for research and prototyping.
FlexRAG supports text-based, multimodal, and network-based RAG, providing comprehensive lifecycle support alongside efficient asynchronous processing and persistent caching capabilities.
By offering a robust and flexible solution, FlexRAG enables researchers to rapidly develop, deploy, and share advanced RAG systems.
Our toolkit and resources are available at https://github.com/ictnlp/FlexRAG.

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MERaLiON-AudioLLM: Advancing Speech and Language Understanding for Singapore

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