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        <title>BAHAHA at SemEval-2026 Task 1: Benchmarking-Aware Humor Authoring with Hybrid Assessment and Adaptation</title>
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    <abstract>This paper describes the BAHAHA system for SemEval-2026 Task 1: MWAHAHA, which requires generating original jokes given either a news headline or a pair of rare words. Our approach uses a generate-then-rank pipeline, combining multi-style candidate generation via comedian-inspired few-shot prompting. We perform quality assessment from a smaller model fine-tuned on synthetic rating data from the generation model. Specifically, we produce up to 50 candidates per input across 15 stylistic templates and select outputs through a mixed-initiative interface that combines automated ranking with human judgment. There were 305 participants and 180 submissions in the contest. Our system ranks 2nd on Subtask A Chinese and 5th on Subtasks B1 and B2. The system generates jokes natively in each language rather than through translation.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T BAHAHA at SemEval-2026 Task 1: Benchmarking-Aware Humor Authoring with Hybrid Assessment and Adaptation
%A Arora, Utsav
%A Hoblitzell, Andrew
%Y Kochmar, Ekaterina
%Y Ghosh, Debanjan
%Y North, Kai
%Y Komachi, Mamoru
%S Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, USA
%@ 979-8-89176-414-9
%F arora-hoblitzell-2026-bahaha
%X This paper describes the BAHAHA system for SemEval-2026 Task 1: MWAHAHA, which requires generating original jokes given either a news headline or a pair of rare words. Our approach uses a generate-then-rank pipeline, combining multi-style candidate generation via comedian-inspired few-shot prompting. We perform quality assessment from a smaller model fine-tuned on synthetic rating data from the generation model. Specifically, we produce up to 50 candidates per input across 15 stylistic templates and select outputs through a mixed-initiative interface that combines automated ranking with human judgment. There were 305 participants and 180 submissions in the contest. Our system ranks 2nd on Subtask A Chinese and 5th on Subtasks B1 and B2. The system generates jokes natively in each language rather than through translation.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.semeval-1.110/
%P 785-792

Markdown (Informal)

[BAHAHA at SemEval-2026 Task 1: Benchmarking-Aware Humor Authoring with Hybrid Assessment and Adaptation](https://aclanthology.org/2026.semeval-1.110/) (Arora & Hoblitzell, SemEval 2026)

• BAHAHA at SemEval-2026 Task 1: Benchmarking-Aware Humor Authoring with Hybrid Assessment and Adaptation (Arora & Hoblitzell, SemEval 2026)

ACL

• Utsav Arora and Andrew Hoblitzell. 2026. BAHAHA at SemEval-2026 Task 1: Benchmarking-Aware Humor Authoring with Hybrid Assessment and Adaptation. In Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026), pages 785–792, San Diego, California, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.