Wenchen Shi
2026
Culturally-Aware Image Captioning for Guaraní with Multimodal Prompting: IUHoosiers at AmericasNLP 2026
Wenchen Shi | Phakphum Artkaew | Luke Gessler
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP)
Wenchen Shi | Phakphum Artkaew | Luke Gessler
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on NLP for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP)
The AmericasNLP 2026 shared task challenges systems to generate culturally grounded image captions in indigenous languages of the Americas, a setting that demands both cultural awareness and linguistic accuracy for severely underresourced languages. We present IUHoosiers, Indiana University’s system for the Guaraní track. Rather than fine-tuning, our approach centers on inference-time knowledge injection: for each test image, we retrieve relevant Guaraní grammatical and cultural resources using BM25 and inject them into a large vision language model’s prompt alongside the image, enabling language-specific cultural and linguistic grounding without any parameter updates. IUHoosiers placed first for Guaraní in both automatic evaluation (24.67 chrF++) and human evaluation (3.45/5), outperforming all other participating systems.