Arefeh Kazemi


2025

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BullyBench: Youth & Experts-in-the-loop Framework for Intrinsic and Extrinsic Cyberbullying NLP Benchmarking
Kanishk Verma | Sri Balaaji | Joachim Wagner | Arefeh Kazemi | Darragh Mccashin | Isobel Walsh@dcu | Sayani Basak | Sinan Asci | Yelena Cherkasova | Alexandros Poulis | James Ohiggins Norman | Rebecca Umbach Umbach | Tijana Milosevic | Brian Davis
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track

Cyberbullying (CB) involves complex relational dynamics that are often oversimplified as a binary classification task. Existing youth-focused CB datasets rely on scripted role-play, lacking conversational realism and ethical youth involvement, with little or no evaluation of their social plausibility. To address this, we introduce a youth-in-the-loop dataset “BullyBench” developed by adolescents (ages 15–16) through an ethical co-research framework. We introduce a structured intrinsic quality evaluation with experts-in-the-loop (social scientists, psychologists, and content moderators) for assessing realism, relevance, and coherence in youth CB data. Additionally, we perform extrinsic baseline evaluation of this dataset by benchmarking encoder- and decoder-only language models for multi-class CB role classification for future research. A three-stage annotation process by young adults refines the dataset into a gold-standard test benchmark, a high-quality resource grounded in minors’ lived experiences of CB detection. Code and data are available for review

2016

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Using Wordnet to Improve Reordering in Hierarchical Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation
Arefeh Kazemi | Antonio Toral | Andy Way
Proceedings of the 8th Global WordNet Conference (GWC)

We propose the use of WordNet synsets in a syntax-based reordering model for hierarchical statistical machine translation (HPB-SMT) to enable the model to generalize to phrases not seen in the training data but that have equivalent meaning. We detail our methodology to incorporate synsets’ knowledge in the reordering model and evaluate the resulting WordNet-enhanced SMT systems on the English-to-Farsi language direction. The inclusion of synsets leads to the best BLEU score, outperforming the baseline (standard HPB-SMT) by 0.6 points absolute.

2015

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Dependency-based Reordering Model for Constituent Pairs in Hierarchical SMT
Arefeh Kazemi | Antonio Toral | Andy Way | Amirhassan Monadjemi | Mohammadali Nematbakhsh
Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation