@inproceedings{bubus-etal-2026-xplainlp,
    title = "{X}plai{NLP} at {S}em{E}val-2026 Task 1: {BVAHAHA} - Benign Violation Algorithm for Humor and Harmless Absurdity",
    author = "Bubus, Berk  and
      Soyal, Nebi  and
      Schmitt, Vera  and
      Feldhus, Nils  and
      Solopova, Veronika",
    editor = "Kochmar, Ekaterina  and
      Ghosh, Debanjan  and
      North, Kai  and
      Komachi, Mamoru",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 20th {I}nternational {W}orkshop on {S}emantic {E}valuation (2026)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.semeval-1.195/",
    pages = "1501--1510",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-414-9",
    abstract = "We present BVAHAHA, a humor generationsystem for SemEval-2026 Task 1 (MWAHAHASubtask A), which frames constrained joke generation through the lens of Benign ViolationTheory (BVT). Given either two rare words ora news headline, the system generates contextually appropriate jokes while avoiding memorization and unsafe outputs. Our approachcombines BVT-guided humor generation witha parallel moderation pipeline ({''}Gatekeepers'')that detects excessive emotional intensity andhate speech, triggering iterative revisions whennecessary. Finally, we employ an LLM-as-aJudge framework with persona-based rankingto approximate human humor preferences."
}