Detecting hate speech in memes is challenging due to their multimodal nature and subtle, culturally grounded cues such as sarcasm and context. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) enable joint reasoning over text and images, end-to-end prompting can be brittle, as a single prediction must resolve target, stance, implicitness, and irony. These challenges are amplified in multilingual settings. We propose a prompted weak supervision (PWS) approach that decomposes meme understanding into targeted, question-based labeling functions with constrained answer options for homophobia and transphobia detection in the LT-EDI 2026 shared task. Using a quantized Qwen3-VLM to extract features by answering targeted questions, our method outperforms direct VLM classification, with substantial gains for Chinese and Hindi, ranking 1st in English, 2nd in Chinese, and 3rd in Hindi. Iterative refinement via error-driven LF expansion and feature pruning reduces redundancy and improves generalization. Our results highlight the effectiveness of prompted weak supervision for multilingual multimodal hate speech detection.

Human gaze is the primary high-bandwidth interface through which we parse the semantics of our environment. While often modeled as a sequence, the degree to which gaze exhibits transferable local structure across domains remains underexplored. Using motion tokenization as a diagnostic lens across four diverse datasets, we investigate the transferability of local sequence structure. We demonstrate that while gaze can share a reusable motion-token vocabulary, identical motion tokens are organized into different local transition patterns depending on the dataset and task context. Our results show the limitations of naive data-pooling under low-semantic motion-token representations and provide a framework for evaluating behavioral sequences through information-theoretic diagnostics.

Automated scoring models are increasingly used to assign rubric-based quality ratings to complex language performances, including classroom transcripts, yet they typically provide little insight into why a particular score is produced. We propose a general framework for sentence-level interpretability of rubric-based scoring that combines model-agnostic Shapley-value attributions with rationales generated by large language models (LLMs). Instantiated on the Quality of Feedback dimension of the CLASS framework using the NCTE corpus, the framework enables systematic comparison of fine-tuned pretrained language models (PLMs) and prompted LLMs on both scoring performance and explanation faithfulness. Across 6k annotated transcript segments, fine-tuned PLMs outperform LLMs in prediction accuracy but exhibit label compression toward mid-scale scores. Deletion-based tests show that SHAP identifies sentences that reliably drive model predictions, producing typically larger and more coherent prediction shifts than LLM-generated rationales. Cross-model analyses further reveal that SHAP attributions transfer robustly across architectures, whereas LLM rationales exert limited and inconsistent influence. Overall, the findings demonstrate that SHAP provides more faithful and transferable explanations for rubric-based scoring, and that the proposed framework offers a principled basis for evaluating both scoring models and their explanations in high-stakes educational settings and other rubric-based language assessment tasks.

As large language model (LLM) chatbots become embedded in education, researchers need scalable ways to analyze what learners are actually doing in student-chatbot interactions. To address this challenge, we propose a learning theory-informed annotation framework for learner intent and engagement in educational chatbot dialogues, operationalizing solution seeking, knowledge seeking, cognitive engagement, and mental model expression through a hierarchical decision process, and apply it manually to a dataset of 2,393 learner-chatbot interactions (408 double-coded). We then evaluate two LLMs as zero-shot annotators and compare human-human, LLM-LLM, and human-LLM agreement across both intermediate decisions and final intent labels. While the two LLMs exhibit agreement patterns approaching human-human reliability on the final label (human κ = 0.73 vs. LLM κ = 0.67), their agreement with human reference labels is substantially lower (κ ≤ 0.53), indicating that automated annotation errors cannot be understood from aggregate scores alone. Through exploratory qualitative coding of disagreement cases, we find that divergences can arise from ambiguous learner intent, competing valid interpretations, and human annotation variability, rather than model failure alone.

This study investigates the alignment between large language models (LLMs) and human raters in assessing teacher questioning practices, moving beyond rating agreement to the evidence selected to justify their decisions. Findings highlight LLMs’ potential to support large-scale classroom observation through interpretable, evidence-based scoring, with possible implications for concrete teacher feedback.