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    <abstract>We present BVAHAHA, a humor generationsystem for SemEval-2026 Task 1 (MWAHAHASubtask A), which frames constrained joke generation through the lens of Benign ViolationTheory (BVT). Given either two rare words ora news headline, the system generates contextually appropriate jokes while avoiding memorization and unsafe outputs. Our approachcombines BVT-guided humor generation witha parallel moderation pipeline (”Gatekeepers”)that detects excessive emotional intensity andhate speech, triggering iterative revisions whennecessary. Finally, we employ an LLM-as-aJudge framework with persona-based rankingto approximate human humor preferences.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T XplaiNLP at SemEval-2026 Task 1: BVAHAHA - Benign Violation Algorithm for Humor and Harmless Absurdity
%A Bubus, Berk
%A Soyal, Nebi
%A Schmitt, Vera
%A Feldhus, Nils
%A Solopova, Veronika
%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 bubus-etal-2026-xplainlp
%X We present BVAHAHA, a humor generationsystem for SemEval-2026 Task 1 (MWAHAHASubtask A), which frames constrained joke generation through the lens of Benign ViolationTheory (BVT). Given either two rare words ora news headline, the system generates contextually appropriate jokes while avoiding memorization and unsafe outputs. Our approachcombines BVT-guided humor generation witha parallel moderation pipeline (”Gatekeepers”)that detects excessive emotional intensity andhate speech, triggering iterative revisions whennecessary. Finally, we employ an LLM-as-aJudge framework with persona-based rankingto approximate human humor preferences.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.semeval-1.195/
%P 1501-1510

Markdown (Informal)

[XplaiNLP at SemEval-2026 Task 1: BVAHAHA - Benign Violation Algorithm for Humor and Harmless Absurdity](https://aclanthology.org/2026.semeval-1.195/) (Bubus et al., SemEval 2026)

• XplaiNLP at SemEval-2026 Task 1: BVAHAHA - Benign Violation Algorithm for Humor and Harmless Absurdity (Bubus et al., SemEval 2026)

ACL

• Berk Bubus, Nebi Soyal, Vera Schmitt, Nils Feldhus, and Veronika Solopova. 2026. XplaiNLP at SemEval-2026 Task 1: BVAHAHA - Benign Violation Algorithm for Humor and Harmless Absurdity. In Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026), pages 1501–1510, San Diego, California, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.