Papers Accepted at ACL 2026!
We are delighted to share that several of our papers have been accepted at the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) - the premier conference in natural language processing and computational linguistics. The conference will be held in San Diego, California, United States, with our work also represented at the co-located SemEval-2026. The accepted papers span critical digital literacy, multi-agent QA for Islamic knowledge, Bangla hate speech detection, multilingual polarization benchmarking, and counterfactual hallucination in vision–language models.
🛡️ CritiSense: Critical Digital Literacy and Resilience Against Misinformation
Title: CritiSense: Critical Digital Literacy and Resilience Against Misinformation
Authors: Firoj Alam, Fatema Ahmad, Ali Ezzat Shahroor, Mohamed Bayan Kmainasi, Elisa Sartori, Giovanni Da San Martino, Abul Hasnat, Raian Ali
Summary: CritiSense explores how critical digital literacy can be strengthened to build resilience against misinformation, contributing tools and analyses for tackling persuasion and manipulation in online media.
Preprint: arXiv:2603.16672
Project page: https://critisense-web.digitqr.net/
🕌 Fanar-Sadiq: Multi-Agent Architecture for Grounded Islamic QA
Title: Fanar-Sadiq: A Multi-Agent Architecture for Grounded Islamic QA
Authors: Ummar Abbas, Mourad Ouzzani, Mohamed Y. Eltabakh, Omar Sinan, Gagan Bhatia, Hamdy Mubarak, Majd Hawasly, Mohammed Qusay Hashim, Kareem Darwish, Firoj Alam
Summary: Fanar-Sadiq introduces a multi-agent architecture for grounded question answering in the Islamic domain, combining retrieval, reasoning, and verification agents to produce reliable, source-grounded responses.
Preprint: arXiv:2603.08501 Data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/QCRI/Fanar-Sadiq-Bench API: https://api.fanar.qa/docs
📿 From RAG to Agentic RAG for Faithful Islamic QA
Title: From RAG to Agentic RAG for Faithful Islamic Question Answering
Authors: Gagan Bhatia, Hamdy Mubarak, Mustafa Jarrar, George Mikros, Fadi Zaraket, Mahmoud Alhirthani, Mutaz Al-Khatib, Logan Cochrane, Kareem Darwish, Rashid Yahiaoui, Firoj Alam
Summary: This work moves beyond standard retrieval-augmented generation toward an agentic RAG framework for faithful Islamic question answering, coordinating multiple specialized agents to retrieve, reason over, and verify responses grounded in authoritative sources.
Preprint: arXiv:2601.07528
Data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/QCRI/IslamicFaithQA
🗣️ Multi-Task Bangla Hate Speech Detection
Title: LLM-Based Multi-Task Bangla Hate Speech Detection: Type, Severity, and Target
Authors: Md Arid Hasan, Firoj Alam, Md Fahad Hossain, Usman Naseem, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed
Summary: This work tackles Bangla hate speech detection through a multi-task LLM framework that jointly predicts hate type, severity, and target, advancing safety-focused NLP for low-resource languages.
Preprint: arXiv:2510.01995
🌐 POLAR: Multilingual, Multicultural, Multi-Event Polarization
Title: POLAR: A Benchmark for Multilingual, Multicultural, and Multi-Event Online Polarization
Authors: Usman Naseem, Robert Geislinger, Juan Ren, Sarah Kohail, Rudy Garrido Veliz, P Sam Sahil, Yiran Zhang, Marco Antonio Stranisci, Idris Abdulmumin, Özge Alacam, Cengiz Acartürk, Aisha Jabr, Saba Anwar, Abinew Ali Ayele, Simona Frenda, Alessandra Teresa Cignarella, Elena Tutubalina, Oleg Rogov, Aung Kyaw Htet, Xintong Wang, Surendrabikram Thapa, Kritesh Rauniyar, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Arfeen Zeeshan, Dheeraj Kodati, Satya Keerthi, Sahar Moradizeyveh, Firoj Alam, Arid Hasan, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Ye Kyaw Thu, Shantipriya Parida, Ihsan Ayyub Qazi, Lilian Wanzare, Nelson Odhiambo Onyango, Clemencia Siro, Jane Wanjiru Kimani, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Adem Chanie Ali, Martin Semmann, Chris Biemann, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Seid Muhie Yimam
Summary: POLAR introduces a large-scale benchmark for analyzing online polarization across multiple languages, cultures, and events, enabling cross-cultural study of polarization dynamics in social media.
Preprint: arXiv:2505.20624
🧪 SemEval-2026 Task 9 — Polarization Detection
Title: SemEval-2026 Task 9: Detecting Multilingual, Multicultural and Multievent Online Polarization
Authors: Usman Naseem, Robert Geislinger, Juan Ren, Sarah Kohail, Rudy Garrido Veliz, P Sam Sahil, Yiran Zhang, Marco Antonio Stranisci, Idris Abdulmumin, Özge Alaçam, Cengiz Acartürk, Aisha Jabr, Saba Anwar, Abinew Ali Ayele, Elena Tutubalina, Aung Kyaw Htet, Xintong Wang, Surendrabikram Thapa, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dheeraj Kodati, Sahar Moradizeyveh, Firoj Alam, Ye Kyaw Thu, Shantipriya Parida, Ihsan Ayyub Qazi, Lilian Wanzare, Nelson Odhiambo Onyango, Clemencia Siro, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Adem Chanie Ali, Martin Semmann, Chris Biemann, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Seid Muhie Yimam
Summary: A companion SemEval-2026 shared task operationalizing the POLAR benchmark, inviting the community to develop systems for detecting multilingual, multicultural, and multi-event online polarization.
Note: Co-located with the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06817
Project page: https://polar-semeval.github.io/
👁️ Counterfactual Hallucination in Multilingual VLMs
Title: Once Correct, Still Wrong: Counterfactual Hallucination in Multilingual Vision-Language Models
Authors: Basel Mousi, Fahim Dalvi, Shammur Chowdhury, Firoj Alam, Nadir Durrani
Summary: This paper investigates counterfactual hallucination in multilingual vision–language models, showing how models that initially answer correctly can still fail under counterfactual perturbations — and what this reveals about cross-lingual robustness.
Preprint: arXiv:2602.05437
Data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/QCRI/M2CQA
📍 Venue: Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
🌎 Location: San Diego, California, United States
🏛 Publisher: Association for Computational Linguistics
Congratulations to all the co-authors and collaborators!