Keenan Samway
2026
Test of Time: Rethinking Temporal Signal of Benchmark Contamination
Terry Jingchen Zhang | Gopal Dev | Ning Wang | Max Obreiter | Wenyuan Jiang | Punya Syon Pandey | Keenan Samway | Yinya Huang | Bernhard Sch\"olkopf | Mrinmaya Sachan | Zhijing Jin
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Terry Jingchen Zhang | Gopal Dev | Ning Wang | Max Obreiter | Wenyuan Jiang | Punya Syon Pandey | Keenan Samway | Yinya Huang | Bernhard Sch\"olkopf | Mrinmaya Sachan | Zhijing Jin
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Post-cutoff performance decay has been widely interpreted as a temporal signal for benchmark contamination.We critically examine this belief and demonstrate that this temporal signal is highly sensitive to how benchmark questions are constructed.Specifically, we show that LLM-generated questions can produce remarkably different temporal patterns compared to fill-in-the-blank questions directly retrieved from the very same materials.We validated this finding on previous benchmarks that reported clear post-cutoff performance decay such as LiveCodeBench and further showed simple LLM transformation could effectively remove this temporal pattern when evaluated on the same models.We also provide a mechanistic understanding of our observation using influence function analysis.Overall, this work offers a new perspective on the sensitivity of temporal contamination signal and highlights the need for more robust contamination detection methods for reliable AI evaluation.
When Do Language Models Endorse Limitations on Human Rights Principles?
Keenan Samway | Miu Nicole Takagi | Rada Mihalcea | Bernhard Schölkopf | Ilias Chalkidis | Daniel Hershcovich | Zhijing Jin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Keenan Samway | Miu Nicole Takagi | Rada Mihalcea | Bernhard Schölkopf | Ilias Chalkidis | Daniel Hershcovich | Zhijing Jin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly mediate global information access with the potential to shape public discourse, their alignment with universal human rights principles becomes important to ensure that these rights are abided by in high stakes AI-mediated interactions. In this paper, we evaluate how LLMs navigate trade-offs involving the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), leveraging 1,152 synthetically generated scenarios across 24 rights articles and eight languages. Our analysis of eleven major LLMs reveals systematic biases where models: (1) accept limiting Economic, Social, and Cultural rights more often than Political and Civil rights, (2) demonstrate significant cross-linguistic variation with elevated endorsement rates of rights-limiting actions in Chinese and Hindi compared to English or Romanian, (3) show substantial susceptibility to prompt-based steering, and (4) exhibit noticeable differences between Likert and open-ended responses, highlighting critical challenges in LLM preference assessment.
NLP for Social Good: A Survey and Outlook of Challenges, Opportunities and Responsible Deployment
Antonia Karamolegkou | Angana Borah | Eunjung Cho | Sagnik Ray Choudhury | Martina Galletti | Pranav Gupta | Oana Ignat | Priyanka Kargupta | Neema Kotonya | Hemank Lamba | Sun-Joo Lee | Arushi Mangla | Ishani Mondal | Fatima Zahra Moudakir | Deniz Nazar | Poli Nemkova | Dina Pisarevskaya | Naquee Rizwan | Nazanin Sabri | Keenan Samway | Dominik Stammbach | Anna Steinberg Schulten | David Tomás | Steven R Wilson | Bowen Yi | Jessica H Zhu | Arkaitz Zubiaga | Anders Søgaard | Alexander Fraser | Zhijing Jin | Rada Mihalcea | Joel R. Tetreault | Daryna Dementieva
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Antonia Karamolegkou | Angana Borah | Eunjung Cho | Sagnik Ray Choudhury | Martina Galletti | Pranav Gupta | Oana Ignat | Priyanka Kargupta | Neema Kotonya | Hemank Lamba | Sun-Joo Lee | Arushi Mangla | Ishani Mondal | Fatima Zahra Moudakir | Deniz Nazar | Poli Nemkova | Dina Pisarevskaya | Naquee Rizwan | Nazanin Sabri | Keenan Samway | Dominik Stammbach | Anna Steinberg Schulten | David Tomás | Steven R Wilson | Bowen Yi | Jessica H Zhu | Arkaitz Zubiaga | Anders Søgaard | Alexander Fraser | Zhijing Jin | Rada Mihalcea | Joel R. Tetreault | Daryna Dementieva
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Natural language processing (NLP) now shapes many aspects of our world, yet its potential for positive social impact is underexplored. This paper surveys work in “NLP for Social Good" (NLP4SG) across nine domains relevant to global development and risk agendas, summarizing principal tasks and challenges. We analyze ACL Anthology trends, finding that inclusion and AI harms attract the most research, while domains such as poverty, peacebuilding, and environmental protection remain underexplored. Guided by our review, we outline opportunities for responsible and equitable NLP and conclude with a call for cross-disciplinary partnerships and human-centered approaches to ensure that future NLP technologies advance the public good.
2025
Are Language Models Consequentialist or Deontological Moral Reasoners?
Keenan Samway | Max Kleiman-Weiner | David Guzman Piedrahita | Rada Mihalcea | Bernhard Schölkopf | Zhijing Jin
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Keenan Samway | Max Kleiman-Weiner | David Guzman Piedrahita | Rada Mihalcea | Bernhard Schölkopf | Zhijing Jin
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
As AI systems increasingly navigate applications in healthcare, law, and governance, understanding how they handle ethically complex scenarios becomes critical. Previous work has mainly examined the moral judgments in large language models (LLMs), rather than their underlying moral reasoning process. In contrast, we focus on a large-scale analysis of the moral reasoning traces provided by LLMs. Furthermore, unlike prior work that attempted to draw inferences from only a handful of moral dilemmas, our study leverages over 600 distinct trolley problems as probes for revealing the reasoning patterns that emerge within different LLMs. We introduce and test a taxonomy of moral rationales to systematically classify reasoning traces according to two main normative ethical theories: consequentialism and deontology. Our analysis reveals that LLM chains-of-thought favor deontological principles based on moral obligations, while post-hoc explanations shift notably toward consequentialist rationales that emphasize utility. Our framework provides a foundation for understanding how LLMs process and articulate ethical considerations, an important step toward safe and interpretable deployment of LLMs in high-stakes decision-making environments.
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- Zhijing Jin 4
- Rada Mihalcea 3
- Bernhard Schölkopf 3
- Angana Borah 1
- Ilias Chalkidis 1
- Eunjung Cho 1
- Sagnik Ray Choudhury 1
- Daryna Dementieva 1
- Gopal Dev 1
- Alexander Fraser 1
- Martina Galletti 1
- Pranav Gupta 1
- Daniel Hershcovich 1
- Yinya Huang 1
- Oana Ignat 1
- Wenyuan Jiang 1
- Antonia Karamolegkou 1
- Priyanka Kargupta 1
- Max Kleiman-Weiner 1
- Neema Kotonya 1
- Hemank Lamba 1
- Sun-Joo Lee 1
- Arushi Mangla 1
- Ishani Mondal 1
- Fatima Zahra Moudakir 1
- Deniz Nazar 1
- Poli Nemkova 1
- Max Obreiter 1
- Punya Syon Pandey 1
- David Guzman Piedrahita 1
- Dina Pisarevskaya 1
- Naquee Rizwan 1
- Nazanin Sabri 1
- Mrinmaya Sachan 1
- Anna Steinberg Schulten 1
- Dominik Stammbach 1
- Anders Søgaard 1
- Miu Nicole Takagi 1
- Joel Tetreault 1
- David Tomás 1
- Ning Wang 1
- Steven R Wilson 1
- Bowen Yi 1
- Terry Jingchen Zhang 1
- Jessica H Zhu 1
- Arkaitz Zubiaga 1