Zhicong Lu
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2026
Multi-Agent Comedy Club: Investigating Community Discussion Effects on LLM Humor Generation
Shiwei Hong | Lingyao Li | Ethan Z. Rong | Chenxinran Shen | Zhicong Lu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Shiwei Hong | Lingyao Li | Ethan Z. Rong | Chenxinran Shen | Zhicong Lu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Prior work has explored multi-turn interaction and feedback for LLM writing, but evaluations still largely center on prompts and localized feedback, leaving persistent public reception in online communities underexamined. We test whether broadcast community discussion improves stand-up comedy writing in a controlled multi-agent sandbox: in the discussion condition, critic and audience threads are recorded, filtered, stored as social memory, and later retrieved to condition subsequent generations, whereas the baseline omits discussion. Across 50 rounds (250 paired monologues) judged by five expert annotators using A/B preference and a 15-item rubric, discussion wins 75.6% of instances and improves Craft/Clarity (Δ = 0.440) and Social Response (Δ = 0.422), with occasional increases in aggressive humor.
You Really Didn’t Get That? Benchmarking Social Pragmatic Inference for Indirect and Playful Chinese Online Comments
Shiwei Hong | Junjie Ma | Emma Jiren Wang | Ethan Z. Rong | Siying Hu | Haichang Li | Ziying Wang | Zhicong Lu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Shiwei Hong | Junjie Ma | Emma Jiren Wang | Ethan Z. Rong | Siying Hu | Haichang Li | Ziying Wang | Zhicong Lu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Chinese online comments often convey social meaning through indirect and playful language that is hard to interpret without context. Existing evaluations largely organize items around predefined phenomena or controlled pragmatic categories, leaving open whether models can distinguish plausible readings of what a naturally occurring comment is doing in a particular exchange. We introduce a benchmark for evaluating whether LLMs can recover such situated pragmatic meanings. From more than 200,000 public Chinese social media interaction records, we construct 4,735 human-validated diagnostic items, each pairing a target comment with reconstructed preceding context and plausible misreadings. We evaluate eight LLMs as both question writers and solvers in a cross-writer setting. The task is challenging: the strongest model achieves 81.42% leave-writer-out accuracy. Across all eight models, the mean leave-writer-out accuracy is 68.70% while human accuracy was 90.8%. Case analysis shows that models often recognize broad irony or playfulness while misidentifying the mechanism or interactional move.