Baraa Hikal


2025

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MSA at BEA 2025 Shared Task: Disagreement-Aware Instruction Tuning for Multi-Dimensional Evaluation of LLMs as Math Tutors
Baraa Hikal | Mohamed Basem | Islam Oshallah | Ali Hamdi
Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2025)

We present MSA-MathEval, our submission to the BEA 2025 Shared Task on evaluating AI tutor responses across four instructional dimensions: Mistake Identification, Mistake Location, Providing Guidance, and Actionability. Our approach uses a unified training pipeline to fine-tune a single instruction-tuned language model across all tracks, without any task-specific architectural changes. To improve prediction reliability, we introduce a disagreement-aware ensemble inference strategy that enhances coverage of minority labels. Our system achieves strong performance across all tracks, ranking 1st in Providing Guidance, 3rd in Actionability, and 4th in both Mistake Identification and Mistake Location. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of scalable instruction tuning and disagreement-driven modeling for robust, multi-dimensional evaluation of LLMs as educational tutors.

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MSA at SemEval-2025 Task 3: High Quality Weak Labeling and LLM Ensemble Verification for Multilingual Hallucination Detection
Baraa Hikal | Ahmed Nasreldin | Ali Hamdi
Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025)

This paper describes our submission for SemEval-2025 Task 3: Mu-SHROOM, the Multilingual Shared-task on Hallucinations and Related Observable Overgeneration Mistakes. The task involves detecting hallucinated spans in text generated by instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) across multiple languages. Our approach combines task-specific prompt engineering with an LLM ensemble verification mechanism, where a primary model extracts hallucination spans and three independent LLMs adjudicate their validity through probability-based voting. This framework simulates the human annotation workflow used in the shared task validation and test data. Additionally, a fuzzy matching algorithm is utilized to improve span alignment. Our system ranked 1st in Arabic and Basque, 2nd in German, Swedish, and Finnish, and 3rd in Czech, Farsi, and French.