July 16, 2026
From July 2–7, 2026, the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) took place in San Diego, California. ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig contributed four papers to the conference. Furthermore, Zhan Qu and Prof. Michael Färber were honored with an Outstanding Paper Award for their paper MediEval: A Unified Medical Benchmark for Patient-Contextual and Knowledge-Grounded Reasoning in LLMs.
Knowing a medical fact is not the same as applying it correctly in a real-world medical scenario. As large language models are increasingly being explored for clinical decision support, this distinction becomes increasingly important. In clinical care, a decision must be medically correct and appropriate for the individual patient. A treatment may be valid in general but unsafe or unsuitable for someone with a particular medical condition. At the same time, diseases, medications, and procedures may all appear in the same long, noisy patient record without forming a genuine clinical relationship, making reliable clinical reasoning a fundamental challenge for language models.
To examine whether language models can reason reliably from such noisy clinical data while maintaining medical correctness, Zhan Qu and Prof. Michael Färber developed MediEval, a benchmark that evaluates medical knowledge and patient specific evidence within a unified framework.
The results reveal safety critical reasoning errors that conventional benchmarks can easily overlook. Models may claim that a patient’s record supports a medical statement when it does not (Hallucinated Support Error), or treat a false clinical relationship as correct simply because the relevant concepts appear together in the patient’s record (Truth Inversion Error). MediEval highlights why trustworthy medical AI must reason correctly about both medical knowledge and patient specific medical records.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to medicine, yet their adoption is limited by concerns over reliability and safety. Existing evaluations either test factual medical knowledge in isolation or assess patient-level reasoning without verifying correctness, leaving a critical gap. We introduce MediEval, a benchmark that links MIMIC-IV electronic health records (EHRs) to a unified knowledge base built from UMLS and other biomedical vocabularies. MediEval generates diverse factual and counterfactual medical statements within real patient contexts, enabling systematic evaluation across a 4-quadrant framework that jointly considers knowledge grounding and contextual consistency. Using this framework, we identify critical failure modes, including hallucinated support and truth inversion, that current proprietary, open-source, and domain-specific LLMs frequently exhibit. To address these risks, we propose Counterfactual Risk-Aware Fine-tuning (CoRFu), a DPO-based method with an asymmetric penalty targeting unsafe confusions. CoRFu improves by +16.4 macro-F1 points over the base model and eliminates truth inversion errors, demonstrating both higher accuracy and substantially greater safety.
The paper MediEval: A Unified Medical Benchmark for Patient-Contextual and Knowledge-Grounded Reasoning in LLM has been awarded with the Outstanding Paper Award. Zhan Qu accepted the award at the conference. Read the full paper here. An overview of all awarded papers of ACL 2026 is available here.

Tobias Schreieder, Tim Schopf, and Michael Färber. 2026. Attribution, Citation, and Quotation: A Survey of Evidence-based Text Generation with Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 30956–31000, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
The increasing adoption of large language models (LLMs) has raised serious concerns about their reliability and trustworthiness. As a result, a growing body of research focuses on evidence-based text generation with LLMs, aiming to link model outputs to supporting evidence to ensure traceability and verifiability. However, the field is fragmented due to inconsistent terminology, isolated evaluation practices, and a lack of unified benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we systematically analyze 134 papers, introduce a unified taxonomy of evidence-based text generation with LLMs, and investigate 300 evaluation metrics across seven key dimensions. Thereby, we focus on approaches that use citations, attribution, or quotations for evidence-based text generation. Building on this, we examine the distinctive characteristics and representative methods in the field. Finally, we highlight open challenges and outline promising directions for future work.
Nicholas Popovič and Michael Färber. 2026. Tracing Relational Knowledge Recall in Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 43490–43509, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
We study how large language models recall relational knowledge during text generation, with a focus on identifying latent representations suitable for relation classification via linear probes.Prior work shows how attention heads and MLPs interact to resolve subject, predicate, and object, but it remains unclear which representations support faithful linear relation classification and why some relation types are easier to capture linearly than others.We systematically evaluate different latent representations derived from attention head and MLP contributions, showing that per-head attention contributions to the residual stream are comparatively strong features for linear relation classification.Feature attribution analyses of the trained probes, as well as characteristics of the different relation types, reveal clear correlations between probe accuracy and relation specificity, entity connectedness, and how distributed the signal on which the probe relies is across attention heads.Finally, we show how token-level feature attribution of probe predictions can be used to reveal probe behavior in further detail.
Klaudia Thellmann, Bernhard Stadler, Michael Färber, and Jens Lehmann. 2026. Quantifying the Impact of Translation Errors on Multilingual LLM Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 41311–41334, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Machine-translated benchmarks are widely used to assess the multilingual capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet translation errors in these benchmarks remain underexplored, raising concerns about the reliability and comparability of multilingual evaluation. We address two practical gaps: (i) how well automatic MQM-style error spans from LLM judges and a span-aware QE baseline (xCOMET-XXL) match expert human span annotations on benchmark translations, and (ii) how strongly translation errors (as opposed to source-side issues in the English original) explain accuracy drops on translated benchmarks. We find that span agreement is non-trivial on naturally occurring benchmark translations, and that target-side translation errors are consistently associated with measurable, percentage-point drops in translated accuracy even after controlling for English correctness and source-side anomalies.
The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is an A*-ranked flagship conference. Its thematic focus is research on AI and natural language processing (NLP). Learn more about the conference on its official website.