Morocco

In-context knowledge editing (IKE) is a promising technique for updating Large Language Models (LLMs) with new information. However, IKE relies on lengthy, fact-specific demonstrations which are costly to create and consume significant context window space. In this paper, we introduce persuasion tokens (P-Tokens) -- special tokens trained to replicate the effect of IKE demonstrations, enabling efficient knowledge editing without requiring fact-specific demonstrations. We evaluate P-Tokens across two editing datasets and three LLMs, demonstrating performance comparable to, and often exceeding, IKE. We further find that editing performance is robust to distractors with some negative effects to neighboring facts, and that increasing the number of P-Tokens improves performance. Our work addresses key limitations of IKE and provides a more practical and scalable alternative for editing LLMs.

EACL 2026

Persuasion Tokens for Editing Factual Knowledge in LLMs

in-context knowledge editing

knowledge editing

model editing

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#### *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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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. 

Modern conversational AI systems require sophisticated Named Entity Recognition (NER) capabilities that can handle complex, contextual dialogue patterns. While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at understanding conversational semantics, their inference latency and inability to efficiently incorporate emerging entities make them impractical for production deployment. Moreover, the scarcity of conversational NER data creates a critical bottleneck for developing effective models. We address these challenges through two main contributions. First, we introduce an automated pipeline for generating multilingual conversational NER datasets with minimal human validation, producing 4,082 English and 3,925 Spanish utterances. Second, we present a scalable framework that leverages LLMs as semantic filters combined with catalog-based entity grounding to label live traffic data, enabling knowledge distillation into faster, production-ready models. On internal conversational datasets, our teacher model demonstrates 39.55% relative F1-score improvement in English and 44.93% in Spanish compared to production systems. On public benchmarks, we achieve 97.12% F1-score on CoNLL-2003 and 83.09% on OntoNotes 5.0, outperforming prior state-of-the-art by 24.82 and 8.19 percentage points, respectively. Finally, student models distilled from our teacher approach achieve 13.84% relative improvement on English conversational data, bridging the gap between LLM capabilities and real-world deployment constraints.

When Speed Meets Intelligence: Scalable Conversational NER in an Ever-evolving World

Variation in human annotation (i.e., disagreements) is common in NLP, often reflecting important information like task subjectivity and sample ambiguity. Modeling this variation is important for applications that are sensitive to such information. Although RLVR-style reasoning (Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards) has improved Large Language Model (LLM) performance on many tasks, it remains unclear whether such reasoning enables LLMs to capture informative variation in human annotation. In this work, we evaluate the influence of different reasoning settings on LLM disagreement modeling. We systematically evaluate each reasoning setting across model sizes, distribution expression methods, and steering methods, resulting in 60 experimental setups across 3 tasks. Surprisingly, our results show that RLVR-style reasoning degrades performance in disagreement modeling, while naive Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning improves the performance of RLHF LLMs (RL from human feedback). These findings underscore the potential risk of replacing human annotators with reasoning LLMs, especially when disagreements are important.

Can Reasoning Help Large Language Models Capture Human Annotator Disagreement?

End-to-end form filling refers to automatically populating fields in a document-style form with the appropriate information derived from external data. Although prevalent and useful, no formal benchmark exists for evaluating systems' form completion accuracy. Existing datasets focus on parsing, extraction and web form interaction, rather than end-to-end completion of document-style forms. We propose FormGym, a benchmark formulation of the end-to-end form filling task that evaluates form completion and accuracy. We construct FormGym by repurposing three existing datasets and add one new dataset to achieve more challenging, diverse, and realistic test cases. Our studies show baseline vision language agents (VLAs) perform poorly on FormGym in every scenario, primarily due to poor field localization. GUI agents perform better but suffer from high latency and costs. Therefore we also introduce FieldFinder, a field localization tool that enables zero-shot VLAs to find and accurately place text in input fields. We find that VLAs augmented with FieldFinder achieve better performance compared to baselines in all models.

FormGym: Doing Paperwork with Agents

Quantization is an effective technique for reducing the storage footprint and computational costs of Large Language Models (LLMs), but it often results in performance degradation. Existing post-training quantization methods typically use small, English-only calibration sets; however, their impact on multilingual models remains underexplored. We systematically evaluate eight calibration settings (five single-language and three multilingual mixes) across two quantizers (GPTQ, AWQ) on data from 10 different languages. Our findings reveal a consistent trend: non-English and multilingual calibration sets significantly improve perplexity compared to English-only baselines. Specifically, we observe notable average perplexity gains across both quantizers on Llama3.1 8B and Qwen2.5 7B, with multilingual mixes achieving the largest overall reductions of up to 3.52 perplexity gain. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that tailoring calibration sets to the evaluation language yields the largest improvements for individual languages, underscoring the importance of linguistic alignment. We also identify specific failure cases where certain language-quantizer combinations degrade performance, which we trace to differences in activation range distributions across languages. These results highlight that static, one-size-fits-all calibration is suboptimal, and that tailoring calibration data, both in language and diversity, plays a crucial role in robustly quantizing multilingual LLMs.

Calibrating Beyond English: Language Diversity for Better Quantized Multilingual LLMs

Enterprise documents, such as forms and reports, embed critical information for downstream applications like data archiving, automated workflows, and analytics. Although generalist Vision Language Models (VLMs) perform well on established document understanding benchmarks, their ability to conduct holistic, fine-grained structured extraction across diverse document types and flexible schemas is not well studied. Existing Key Entity Extraction (KEE), Relation Extraction (RE), and Visual Question Answering (VQA) datasets are limited by narrow entity ontologies, simple queries, or homogeneous document types, often overlooking the need for adaptable and structured extraction. To address these gaps, we introduce ExStrucTiny, a new benchmark dataset for structured Information Extraction (IE) from document images, unifying aspects of KEE, RE, and VQA. Built through a novel pipeline combining manual and synthetic human-validated samples, ExStrucTiny covers more varied document types and extraction scenarios. We analyze open and closed VLMs on this benchmark, highlighting challenges such as schema adaptation, query under-specification, and answer localization. We hope our work provides a bedrock for improving generalist models for structured IE in documents.

ExStrucTiny: A Benchmark for Schema-Variable Structured Information Extraction from Document Images

Model steering, which involves intervening on hidden representations at inference time, has emerged as a lightweight alternative to finetuning for precisely controlling large language models. While steering efficacy has been widely studied, evaluations of whether interventions alter *only* the intended property remain limited, especially with respect to unintended changes in behaviors related to the target property. We call this notion specificity. We propose a framework that distinguishes three dimensions of specificity: general (preserving fluency and unrelated abilities), control (preserving related control properties), and robustness (preserving control properties under distribution shifts). We study two safety-critical use cases: steering models to reduce overrefusal and faithfulness hallucinations, and show that while steering achieves high efficacy and largely maintains general and control specificity, it consistently fails to preserve robustness specificity. In the case of overrefusal steering, for example, all steering methods reduce overrefusal without harming general abilities and refusal on harmful queries; however, they substantially increase vulnerability to jailbreaks. Our work provides the first systematic evaluation of specificity in model steering, showing that standard efficacy and specificity checks are insufficient, because without robustness evaluation, steering methods may appear reliable even when they compromise model safety.

Steering Safely or Off a Cliff? Rethinking Specificity and Robustness in Inference-Time Interventions

Large language models (LLMs) encode rich cultural knowledge learned from diverse web-scale data, offering an unprecedented opportunity to model cultural commonsense at scale. Yet this knowledge remains mostly implicit and unstructured, limiting its interpretability and use. We present an iterative, prompt-based framework for constructing a Cultural Commonsense Knowledge Graph (CCKG) that treats LLMs as cultural archives, systematically eliciting culture-specific entities, relations, and practices and composing them into multi-step inferential chains across languages. We evaluate CCKG on five countries with human judgments of cultural relevance, correctness, and path coherence. We find that the cultural knowledge graphs are better realized in English, even when the target culture is non-English (e.g., Chinese, Indonesian, Arabic), indicating uneven cultural encoding in current LLMs. Augmenting smaller LLMs with CCKG improves performance on cultural reasoning and story generation, with the largest gains from English chains. Our results show both the promise and limits of LLMs as cultural technologies and that chain-structured cultural knowledge is a practical substrate for culturally grounded NLP.

LLMs as Cultural Archives: Cultural Commonsense Knowledge Graph Extraction

In this paper, we study the expansion of pluralia tantum, i.e., defective nouns which lack a singular form, like scissors. We base our work on an annotation framework specifically developed for the study of lexicalization of pluralia tantum, namely Lexicalization profiles. On a corresponding hand-annotated testset, we show that the OpenAI and DeepSeek models provide useful annotators for semantic, syntactic and sense categories, with accuracy ranging from 51% to 89%, averaged across all feature groups and languages. Next, we turn to a large-scale investigation of pluralia tantum. Using dictionaries, we extract candidate words for Italian, Russian and English and keep those for which the changing ratio of singular and plural form is evident in a corresponding reference corpus. We use an LLM to annotate each instance from the reference corpora according to the annotation framework. We show that the large amount of automatically annotated sentences for each feature can be used to perform in-depth linguistic analysis. Focusing on the correlation between an annotated feature and the grammatical form (singular vs. plural), patterns of morpho-semantic change are noted.

Elections go bananas: a first large-scale multilingual study of pluralia tantum using LLMs

In continual learning, our aim is to learn a new task without forgetting what was learned previously. In topic models, this translates to learning new topic models without forgetting previously learned topics. Previous work either considered Dynamic Topic Models (DTMs), which learn the evolution of topics based on the entire training corpus at once, or Online Topic Models, which are updated continuously based on new data but do not have long-term memory. To fill this gap, we propose the Continual Neural Topic Model (CoNTM), which continuously learns topic models at subsequent time steps without forgetting what was previously learned. This is achieved using a global prior distribution that is continuously updated. In our experiments, CoNTM consistently outperformed the dynamic topic model in terms of topic quality and predictive perplexity while being able to capture topic changes online. The analysis reveals that CoNTM can learn more diverse topics and better capture temporal changes than existing methods.

Continual Neural Topic Model

The medical adoption of NLP tools requires interpretability by end users, yet traditional XAI methods are misaligned with clinical reasoning and lack clinician input. We introduce CHiRPE (Clinical High-Risk Prediction with Explainability), an NLP pipeline that takes transcribed semi-structured clinical interviews to (i) predict psychosis risk and (ii) generate novel SHAP explanation formats co-developed with clinicians. Trained on 944 semi-structured interview transcripts across 24 international clinics of AMP-SCZ study, the CHiRPE pipeline integrates symptom-domain mapping, LLM summarisation and BERT classification, achieving above 90% accuracies across all three BERT variants, outperforming baseline models. Evaluation of explanation formats by twenty-eight clinical experts demonstrated strong preference for our novel concept-guided explanations, especially hybrid graph and text summary formats, over standard SHAP word-level bar plots and heat map visualisations. CHiRPE demonstrates that clinically-guided model development produces both accurate and interpretable results. Our next step is focused on real-world testing across our 24 international sites.

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When Speed Meets Intelligence: Scalable Conversational NER in an Ever-evolving World

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