@inproceedings{bagheri-nezhad-2026-signals,
    title = "Signals Are Not States: Neuro-Symbolic Safeguards for Culturally Aware Classroom {AI}",
    author = "Bagheri Nezhad, Sina",
    editor = "Ma, Weicheng  and
      Vosoughi, Soroush  and
      Gillani, Nabeel  and
      Coto-Solano, Rolando",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Stereotypes Across Cultures in Language Technologies ({S}tere{AC}u{LT} 2026)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.stereacult-1.9/",
    pages = "88--100",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-408-8",
    abstract = "Classroom AI systems increasingly infer high-level educational states such as engagement, confusion, collaboration, participation, and instructional quality from multimodal and linguistic signals. In multicultural and multilingual classrooms, such inferences can translate culturally situated behavior into stereotyped claims: silence may be read as disengagement, gaze aversion as inattention, code-switching as low proficiency, or indirect help-seeking as confusion. We argue that stereotype-aware classroom AI should separate observable evidence from culturally loaded interpretation and should treat unsupported construct-level claims as safety risks. We introduce NSCR, a culturally grounded neuro-symbolic framework that converts video, audio, ASR, lesson artifacts, and contextual metadata into typed facts with uncertainty, provenance, and cultural scope, then composes them through executable reasoning and policy constraints. We define a taxonomy of stereotype-prone classroom inferences and propose a benchmark agenda covering culture-conditioned state inference, evidence-grounded claim verification, multilingual and code-switched reasoning, collaboration analysis, counterfactual cultural robustness, and culture-conditioned red-teaming. We further specify metrics for stereotype leakage, unsupported attribution, cultural calibration gaps, abstention under cultural ambiguity, and evidence faithfulness. The contribution is methodological: a concrete framework and evaluation agenda for mitigating stereotyped reasoning in classroom AI, with education as a high-stakes, culturally variable deployment setting."
}