Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning

Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor 2026-07 Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA text conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 conll-2026-main https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.0/ Evaluating Humanlike Memory Effects in Transformers Using Item Recognition Tasks Christian Clark author William Schuler author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 clark-schuler-2026-evaluating https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.1/ 2026-07 1 14 Information-Theoretic Storage Cost in Sentence Comprehension Kohei Kajikawa author Shinnosuke Isono author Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 kajikawa-etal-2026-information https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.2/ 2026-07 15 33 Word predictability estimates from language models are not robust to tokenizer vocabulary Kien Nguyen author Suhas Arehalli author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 nguyen-arehalli-2026-word https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.3/ 2026-07 34 44 Sense and Sensitivity: “Reasoning” Models are More Robust, but can Diverge from Human Consensus in a Legal Interpretation Task Dawson Petersen author Abhishek Purushothama author Nathan Schneider author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 petersen-etal-2026-sense https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.4/ 2026-07 45 56 Syntactically-guided Information Maintenance in Sentence Comprehension Shinnosuke Isono author Kohei Kajikawa author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 isono-kajikawa-2026-syntactically https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.5/ 2026-07 57 69 Similar Predictions, Different Processes: A Multi-Level Comparison of Human and Multimodal LLM Language Prediction Shuqi Wang author Zhenguang Cai author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 wang-cai-2026-similar https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.6/ 2026-07 70 89 Collocational bootstrapping: A hypothesis about the learning of subject-verb agreement in humans and neural networks Claire Hobbs author R Thomas McCoy author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 hobbs-mccoy-2026-collocational https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.7/ 2026-07 90 103 Cognitively Inspired Developmental Trajectories Improve Explore-Exploit Dynamics in Neural Agent Emergent Communication Jan Dziewoński author Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco author Tessa Verhoef author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 dziewonski-etal-2026-cognitively https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.8/ 2026-07 104 120 Addressing the Ecological Fallacy in Larger LMs with Human Context Nikita Soni author Dhruv Vijay Kunjadiya author Pratham Piyush Shah author Dikshya Mohanty author H Andrew Schwartz author Niranjan Balasubramanian author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 soni-etal-2026-addressing https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.9/ 2026-07 121 144 Linguistic Profiling of Transformer Embedding Geometry Lucia Domenichelli author Dominique Brunato author Felice Dell’Orletta author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 domenichelli-etal-2026-linguistic https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.10/ 2026-07 145 164 Uncovering Autoregressive LLM Knowledge of Thematic Fit in Event Representation Safeyah Khaled Alshemali author Daniel Bauer author Yuval Marton author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 alshemali-etal-2026-uncovering https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.11/ 2026-07 165 177 What Brain Data Adds to Language Model Training Gabriele Merlin author Omer Moussa author Mariya Toneva author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 merlin-etal-2026-brain https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.12/ 2026-07 178 212 A Method for Learning Large-Scale Computational Construction Grammars from Semantically Annotated Corpora Paul Van Eecke author Katrien Beuls author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 van-eecke-beuls-2026-method https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.13/ 2026-07 213 226 Child-directed speech facilitates production, not comprehension, in BabyLMs Bastian Bunzeck author Sina Zarrieß author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 bunzeck-zarriess-2026-child https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.14/ 2026-07 227 249 Language Models Learn Constructional Semantics, Not To Mention Syntax: Investigating LM Understanding of Paired-Focus Constructions Wesley Scivetti author Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox author Nathan Schneider author Kanishka Misra author Leonie Weissweiler author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 scivetti-etal-2026-language https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.15/ 2026-07 250 267 Differences in Typological Alignment in Language Models’ Treatment of Differential Argument Marking Iskar Deng author Nathalia Xu author Shane Steinert-Threlkeld author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 deng-etal-2026-differences https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.16/ 2026-07 268 283 Harnessing Linguistic Dissimilarity for Language Generalization on Unseen Low-Resource Varieties Jinju Kim author Haeji Jung author Youjeong Roh author Jong Hwan Ko author David R Mortensen author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 kim-etal-2026-harnessing https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.17/ 2026-07 284 300 Measuring the Effects of Visual Salience in Human and AI Descriptions with Image Editing Nina Gregorio author Edoardo Ponti author Sharon Goldwater author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 gregorio-etal-2026-measuring https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.18/ 2026-07 301 317 Symbolic Grounding Reveals Representational Bottlenecks in Abstract Visual Reasoning Mohit Vaishnav author Tanel Tammet author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 vaishnav-tammet-2026-symbolic https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.19/ 2026-07 318 343 Now They See It, Now They Don’t: Multimodal Reward Models Exhibit Unreliability in Physical World Constraints Sadaf Ghaffari author Nikhil Krishnaswamy author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 ghaffari-krishnaswamy-2026-now https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.20/ 2026-07 344 357 Who Generates More Empathetic Responses—Humans or LLMs? A Comparative Evaluation with Human and LLM Judges Anuradha Welivita author Fawzia Zeitoun author Pearl Pu author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 welivita-etal-2026-generates https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.21/ 2026-07 358 381 Modeling Human Adversarial Strategy Adaptation in Multi-Turn Language Model Interactions Zijun Ding author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 ding-2026-modeling https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.22/ 2026-07 382 394 CAIT: A Syntactic Parsing Toolkit for Child–Adult InTeractions Francesca Padovani author Xiulin Yang author Bastian Bunzeck author Jaap Jumelet author Yevgen Matusevych author Nathan Schneider author Arianna Bisazza author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 padovani-etal-2026-cait https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.23/ 2026-07 395 420 When transformers learn “impossible” languages, what do they learn? Ram Janarthan author Coleman Haley author Sharon Goldwater author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 janarthan-etal-2026-transformers https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.24/ 2026-07 421 434 Readers make targeted regressions to plausible errors in reanalysis of “noisy-channel garden-path” sentences Thomas Hikaru Clark author Roger P Levy author Edward Gibson author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 clark-etal-2026-readers https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.25/ 2026-07 435 451 Presupposition and Reasoning in Conditionals: A Theory-Based Study of Humans and LLMs Tara Azin author Yongan Yu author Raj Singh author Olessia Jouravlev author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 azin-etal-2026-presupposition https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.26/ 2026-07 452 470 ThinkStruct: RST-Aware Attention for Logical Reasoning in Machine Reading Comprehension Nhi Thao Tran author Tien Le author Toan Pham author Quoc Hoang Vu author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 tran-etal-2026-thinkstruct https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.27/ 2026-07 471 480 Could language models win the International Linguistics Olympiad? Jamie Garnham author Ehsan Shareghi author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 garnham-shareghi-2026-language https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.28/ 2026-07 481 500 From Sparse to Sense-Grounded: Wikipedia Training for Ukrainian Visual-WSD Yurii Laba author Rostyslav O Hryniv author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 laba-hryniv-2026-sparse https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.29/ 2026-07 501 514 Event-Guided Slot Interaction for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking Ying Xia author Wei Liu author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 xia-liu-2026-event https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.30/ 2026-07 515 525 Capturing Classic Authorial Style in Long-Form Story Generation with GRPO Fine-Tuning Jinlong Liu author Mark G Lee author Mohammed Bahja author Venelin Kovatchev author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 liu-etal-2026-capturing https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.31/ 2026-07 526 543 On the scaling relationship between cloze probabilities and language model next-token prediction Cassandra L Jacobs author Morgan Grobol author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 jacobs-grobol-2026-scaling https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.32/ 2026-07 544 554 RECAP: Resistance Capture in Text-based Mental Health Counseling with Large Language Models Anqi Li author Yuqian Chen author Yu Lu author Zhaoming Chen author Yi Zhu author Yuan Xie author Zhenzhong Lan author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 li-etal-2026-recap https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.33/ 2026-07 555 573 A framework for analyzing concept representations in neural models Burin Naowarat author Hao Tang author Sharon Goldwater author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 naowarat-etal-2026-framework https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.34/ 2026-07 574 587 A Dataset for Oral Reading in Young English Readers Madison Rose author Michael Bennie author Valeria Pagliai author Hatice Kubra Karakis author Qian Shen author Xinyi Tai author Walter L Leite author Zoey Liu author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 rose-etal-2026-dataset https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.35/ 2026-07 588 600 From Dependency to CCG to Incremental CCG: Approaches to Flexible Word Order in Turkish Özge Bakay author Oğuz Kerem Yıldız author Rajesh Bhatt author Brian Dillon author Olcay Taner Yildiz author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 bakay-etal-2026-dependency https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.36/ 2026-07 601 612 Examining Large Language Models’ form-meaning mappings of information structure constructions in Mandarin Chinese Shihui Li author Xiaojuan Tan author Jelke Bloem author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 li-etal-2026-examining https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.37/ 2026-07 613 625 Mechanistic Interpretability of Animacy Effects on Structure Choice in GPT-2 Yue Li author Yan Cong author Elaine J Francis author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 li-etal-2026-mechanistic https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.38/ 2026-07 626 640 Discovering Lexical Gaps Using Embeddings from Multilingual LLMs Yoonwon Jung author Aaron S Cohen author Ben Bergen author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 jung-etal-2026-discovering https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.39/ 2026-07 641 660 Revisiting Age of Acquisition in Curriculum Learning: Disentangling Lexical Features and Semantic Structure Ian Gifford author Aaron Shah author Catherine Chen author Taimaa Kassab Bachi author Eva Portelance author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 gifford-etal-2026-revisiting https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.40/ 2026-07 661 676 Logic-Level Evaluation of Logical Table-to-Text Generation Lena Trigg author Dean F Hougen author Ahsan Bilal author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 trigg-etal-2026-logic https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.41/ 2026-07 677 691 What Exactly do Children Receive in Language Acquisition? A Case Study on CHILDES with Automated Detection of Filler-Gap Dependencies Zhenghao Zhou author William Dai author Maya Viswanathan author Simon Charlow author R Thomas McCoy author Robert Frank author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 zhou-etal-2026-exactly https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.42/ 2026-07 692 706 An Information-Theoretic Study of RLHF-Induced Uniformity in Large Language Model Outputs Nolan Chai author Tianqi Zhang author Alex Warstadt author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 chai-etal-2026-information https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.43/ 2026-07 707 721 Bridging Linguistic Structure and Mechanistic Interpretability for Conceptual Interpretation in Language Models Nura Aljaafari author Danilo Carvalho author Andre Freitas author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 aljaafari-etal-2026-bridging https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.44/ 2026-07 722 741 Traces of Social Competence in Large Language Models Tom Kouwenhoven author Michiel T van der Meer author Max J van Duijn author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 kouwenhoven-etal-2026-traces https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.45/ 2026-07 742 759 Metric Grammars: A usage-based grammatical formalism that supports generation, parsing and morphological innovation Whitney Tabor author Hyosun Lee author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 tabor-lee-2026-metric https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.46/ 2026-07 760 770 Automated Refinement of Essay Scoring Rubrics for Language Models via Reflect-and-Revise Keno Harada author Lui Yoshida author Takeshi Kojima author Yusuke Iwasawa author Yutaka Matsuo author 2026-07 text Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning Claire Bonial editor Yevgeni Berzak editor Association for Computational Linguistics San Diego, California, USA conference publication 979-8-89176-410-1 harada-etal-2026-automated https://aclanthology.org/2026.conll-main.47/ 2026-07 771 789