United States

Humor generation remains difficult not only because producing fluent, novel jokes is hard, but because &quot;funny&quot; 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 &quot;generate-many -&gt; select-best&quot; 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&#39;&#39; 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.

ACL 2026

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

preference model

humor generation

semeval

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. <br>
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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.

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.

workshop paper

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.

AILS-NTUA at SemEval-2026 Task 3: Efficient Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

This paper presents the NYCU-NLP system for SemEval-2026 Task 9 on online polarization analysis. Our approach explores the effectiveness of instruction-tuned small language models (SLMs), including Phi-4 (14B), Mistral-small-3.2 (24B), and Gemma-3 (27B), with task-specific prompting strategies and combined them via a stacking ensemble to leverage complementary modeling capacities. Evaluated across 22 languages and three subtasks, our system achieved macro-averaged F1 scores of 0.8071 for Polarization Detection (Subtask 1), 0.6108 for Polarization Type Classification (Subtask 2), and 0.5111 for Polarization Manifestation Identification (Subtask 3). Notably, our approach ranked first in 15, second in 12, and third in 10 of the 62 language-specific leaderboards, demonstrating the robustness and competitiveness of stacking-based SLM ensembles in multilingual settings.

NYCU-NLP at SemEval-2026 Task 9: Stacking Small Language Models for Multilingual, Multicultural and Multievent Polarization Detection

We describe the AILS-NTUA system for SemEval-2026 Task 8 (MTRAGEval), addressing all three subtasks of multi-turn retrieval-augmented generation: passage retrieval (A), reference-grounded response generation (B), and end-to-end RAG (C).

Our approach is based on two main design principles. First, we adopt a query-diversity-over-retriever-diversity strategy, where multiple complementary LLM-based query reformulations are issued to a single corpus-aligned sparse retriever and combined using a variance-aware nested Reciprocal Rank Fusion scheme. Second, we employ an agentic generation pipeline that decomposes grounded response generation into evidence span extraction, dual-candidate drafting, and calibrated multi-judge selection.

The proposed system achieves strong performance across subtasks, ranking first in Task A and second in Task B in the official evaluation. Our empirical findings indicate that query diversity over a well-aligned retriever is more effective than heterogeneous retriever ensembling, and that answerability calibration—rather than retrieval coverage—emerges as the primary bottleneck in end-to-end performance.

AILS-NTUA at SemEval-2026 Task 8: Evaluating Multi-Turn RAG Conversations

This paper presents our system for SemEval-
2026 Task 3, which identifies four-part opinion
details in product reviews. We used a sequence
of pairs of BERT encoder models connected
by cross-attention layers. The cross-attention
mechanism provided marginally better results
than a self-attention equivalent, failing to show-
case a significant improvement. Error propaga-
tion through the pipeline hurt the correctness of
the outputs, with certain stages collapsing the
scores. The pipeline architecture's performance
was largely independent of model size, sug-
gesting that small modular encoders for down-
stream tasks are an efficient alternative to large
decoder models. Our best model got a cF1
score of 0.53 on restaurant data and 0.26 on
laptop data.

Team BOBW (Best Of Both Worlds) at SemEval-2026 Task 3: Modular Cross-Attention Encoders for Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

This paper describes our system for SemEval-2026 Task 3, which focuses on predicting continuous valence and arousal scores. The task poses significant challenges due to variations in data scale and pragmatic ambiguities across languages. To address these disparities, we propose an Adaptive Dual-Track Framework that dynamically selects modeling strategies based on task characteristics. For semantically stable tasks, we apply a robust single baseline optimized with layer-wise learning rate decay (LLRD) to ensure stability. For high-ambiguity scenarios such as the Environmental Protection domain, we adopt a heterogeneous ensemble strategy to mitigate prediction variance. Experimental results demonstrate that our system consistently outperforms the initial standard baseline across all subtasks. Furthermore, our lightweight approach exhibits remarkable parameter efficiency, achieving highly competitive performance against newly introduced large language model (LLM) baselines. Additionally, ablation studies reveal that under regression settings, conventional regularization techniques, cross-lingual data transfer, and homogeneous ensemble learning can lead to negative transfer, confirming the necessity of strategically diverging approaches tailored to linguistic characteristics.

SCU_Mesclab at SemEval-2026 Task 3: An Adaptive Dual-Track Framework for Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

This paper describes our system for the SemEval-2026 Task 3: Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (DimABSA). We participate in Track A (DimABSA) and Track B (DimStance), both of which involve Subtask 1 – predicting continuous valence–arousal (VA) scores for given text–aspect pairs in English and Chinese.
Our system combines pre-trained multilingual transformers with aspect-marker input encoding and dual regression heads for VA prediction, trained with a 5-fold cross-validation ensemble. We select XLM-RoBERTa-large as the backbone for Track A and mDeBERTa-v3-base for Track B based on systematic model comparison on the development sets. On the official test sets, our system substantially outperforms the organizer-provided baselines across all language domain settings. On the unofficial postevaluation leaderboard, the system achieves strong results on Chinese subsets, ranking 1st on zho-env (Track B) and 2nd on zho-fin (Track A).

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Next from ACL 2026

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

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SemEval-2026 Task 1: MWAHAHA, Models Write Automatic Humor And Humans Annotate

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

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COMPANY

RESOURCES

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