Papers by Samuel Cahyawijaya

32 papers
Towards Efficient and Robust VQA-NLE Data Generation with Large Vision-Language Models (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for creating a vision question-answering with natural language explanations rely on human annotations that are time-consuming and costly.
Approach: They propose a method that generates high-quality natural language explanations using LVLMs by using visual prompts.
Outcome: The proposed method generates high-quality synthetic VQA-NLE datasets 20x faster than human annotations with minimal decrease in qualitative metrics.
VScript: Controllable Script Generation with Visual Presentation (2022.aacl-demo)

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Challenge: Using a script generation system, scriptwriters can customize their scripts using video retrieval.
Approach: They propose a controllable pipeline that generates complete scripts, including dialogues and scene descriptions, and presents visually using video retrieval.
Outcome: The proposed system outperforms baselines on both automatic and human evaluations, especially in genre control.
Automatic Speech Recognition Datasets in Cantonese: A Survey and New Dataset (2022.lrec-1)

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Challenge: In this paper, we address the problem of data scarcity for the Hong Kong Cantonese language . due to the popularization of deep learning, ASR technology has led to a significant improvement in recognizing many languages.
Approach: They propose to use a dataset to analyze the data available for the Hong Kong Cantonese language . they use zh-HK as a source and a state-of-the-art ASR model to build a powerful model .
Outcome: The proposed model improves on the biggest existing dataset, Common Voice zh-HK.
Thank You, Stingray: Multilingual Large Language Models Can Not (Yet) Disambiguate Cross-Lingual Word Senses (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing studies on multilingual large language models have raised concerns about their reliability beyond English.
Approach: They propose a benchmark for cross-lingual sense disambiguation that uses false friends to identify the limitation of cross-linguistic sense disembarrassment in LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark pinpoints the limitation of cross-lingual sense disambiguation in LLMs by using false friends in four languages.
Towards Better Understanding of Program-of-Thought Reasoning in Cross-Lingual and Multilingual Environments (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Multi-step reasoning is essential for large language models, yet multilingual performance remains challenging.
Approach: They propose a framework to evaluate Program-of-Thought (PoT) prompting by separating multilingual reasoning from code execution to examine impact of fine-tuning on question-reasoning alignment and reasoning quality.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms CoT fine-tuned models in multilingual settings and shows strong correlation between reasoning quality and answer accuracy.
What Makes for Good Image Captions? (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: a formal information-theoretic framework is developed for image captioning . the pyramid of captions is a method that generates enriched captions by integrating local and global visual information.
Approach: They propose a formal information-theoretic framework for image captioning . they propose 'Pyramid of Captions' method that generates enriched captions .
Outcome: The proposed framework provides a flexible foundation for analyzing and optimizing image captioning systems across diverse task requirements.
Re-Evaluating Evaluation for Multilingual Summarization (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies have shown that automated evaluation approaches correlate with human ratings in English, but this is unclear for other languages.
Approach: They construct a small-scale pilot dataset containing article-summary pairs and human ratings in English, Chinese and Indonesian to measure the strength of summaries.
Outcome: The results show that standard metrics are unreliable measures of quality in Chinese and Indonesian.
NusaX: Multilingual Parallel Sentiment Dataset for 10 Indonesian Local Languages (2023.eacl-main)

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Challenge: In Indonesia, many languages are endangered and some are even extinct due to the unavailability of data resources and benchmarks.
Approach: They propose a high-quality multilingual parallel corpus that covers 10 local languages from Indonesia.
Outcome: The proposed resource includes sentiment and machine translation datasets, and bilingual lexicons.
One Country, 700+ Languages: NLP Challenges for Underrepresented Languages and Dialects in Indonesia (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: There are more than 700 languages spoken in Indonesia, equal to 10% of the world's languages, second only to Papua New Guinea.
Approach: They focus on the languages spoken in Indonesia, the world's second most linguistically diverse nation, and the fourth most populous nation of the world.
Outcome: The proposed model is based on the languages spoken in Indonesia, the world's second-most linguistically diverse nation, with 273 million people spread over 17,508 islands.
IndoNLG: Benchmark and Resources for Evaluating Indonesian Natural Language Generation (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Lack of publicly available NLG benchmarks for low-resource languages poses a challenge . authors show that IndoBART and IndoGPT achieve competitive performance on all tasks .
Approach: They propose a benchmark to measure natural language generation progress in three low-resource languages of Indonesia . they use a corpus of pretraining datasets to build their models .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark measures progress in Indonesian, Javanese, and Sundanese . the results highlight the importance of pretraining on closely related, localized languages .
Multilingual Large Language Models Are Not (Yet) Code-Switchers (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing multilingual Large Language Models are not specifically trained with objectives for managing code-switching scenarios.
Approach: They propose to use multilingual Large Language Models to perform sentiment analysis, machine translation, summarization and word-level language identification to compare their performance to fine-tuned models of much smaller scales.
Outcome: The proposed models show that they underperform in comparison to fine-tuned models of much smaller scales.
NusaCrowd: Open Source Initiative for Indonesian NLP Resources (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing NLP research in Indonesian languages has been held back by factors such as language diversity, orthographic variation, resource limitation and other societal challenges.
Approach: They present a collaborative initiative to collect and unify existing resources for Indonesian languages and open access to previously non-public resources.
Outcome: The results show that the datasets are highly reliable and can be used to generate the first zero-shot benchmarks for natural language understanding and generation in Indonesian and the local languages of Indonesia.
Multi-lingual and Multi-cultural Figurative Language Understanding (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Figures permeate human communication, but are understudied in NLP.
Approach: They create a figurative language inference dataset for seven languages associated with a variety of cultures, using cultural and regional concepts for figurativ expressions.
Outcome: The results show that the most common figurative expressions are found in Hindi, Indonesian, Javanese, Kannada, Sundanese, Swahili and Yoruba.
GlobalBench: A Benchmark for Global Progress in Natural Language Processing (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: despite advances in NLP, significant disparities in performance across languages still exist . prior benchmarks focused on a limited number of tasks and languages, but now GlobalBench tracks progress on all languages.
Approach: They propose to use global benchmarks to track progress on all NLP datasets in all languages.
Outcome: a new tool tracks progress on all NLP datasets in all languages and tracks per-speaker utility and equity . globalbench is designed to identify the most under-served languages and reward research efforts . a globalbech is available at https://github.com/neulab/globalbench.
Multimodal End-to-End Sparse Model for Emotion Recognition (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing work in emotion recognition uses a two-phase pipeline, but the extracted features are fixed and cannot be fine-tuned on different tasks.
Approach: They propose a two-phase pipeline for emotion recognition and personality recognition . they propose restructured datasets to enable fully end-to-end training .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the current state-of-the-art models on emotion recognition and personality recognition tasks with half less computation in the feature extraction part.
WorldCuisines: A Massive-Scale Benchmark for Multilingual and Multicultural Visual Question Answering on Global Cuisines (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Vision Language Models struggle with cultural-specific knowledge, especially in languages other than English and in underrepresented cultural contexts.
Approach: They propose a visual question answering (VQA) dataset with text-image pairs across 30 languages and dialects and a training dataset.
Outcome: The proposed model performs better with correct location context, but struggles with adversarial contexts and predicting specific regional cuisines and languages.
LinguAlchemy: Fusing Typological and Geographical Elements for Unseen Language Generalization (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Pretrained language models have shown remarkable generalization toward multiple tasks and languages, but their generalization towards unseen languages is poor.
Approach: They propose a regularization technique that incorporates various aspects of languages to better characterize linguistics constraints.
Outcome: The proposed technique improves accuracy of mBERT and XLM-R on unseen languages by 18% and 2% compared to fully finetuned models.
GEMv2: Multilingual NLG Benchmarking in a Single Line of Code (2022.emnlp-demos)

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Challenge: Evaluations in machine learning rarely use the latest metrics, datasets, or human evaluation in favor of remaining compatible with prior work.
Approach: They propose to use the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark to integrate new evaluation methods into existing evaluations.
Outcome: The proposed evaluation infrastructure bridges the gap between the advantages of leaderboards and in-depth and evolving evaluations by allowing model developers to benefit from each other's work.
Crowdsource, Crawl, or Generate? Creating SEA-VL, a Multicultural Vision-Language Dataset for Southeast Asia (2025.acl-long)

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Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Tack Hwa Wong, Mohammad Rifqi Farhansyah, Thant Thiri Maung, Frederikus Hudi, David Anugraha, Muhammad Ravi Shulthan Habibi, Muhammad Reza Qorib, Amit Agarwal, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Vicky Feliren, Bahrul Ilmi Nasution, Manuel Antonio Rufino, Genta Indra Winata, Rian Adam Rajagede, Carlos Rafael Catalan, Mohamed Fazli Mohamed Imam, Priyaranjan Pattnayak, Salsabila Zahirah Pranida, Kevin Pratama, Yeshil Bangera, Adisai Na-Thalang, Patricia Nicole Monderin, Yueqi Song, Christian Simon, Lynnette Hui Xian Ng, Richardy Lobo Sapan, Taki Hasan Rafi, Bin Wang, null Supryadi, Kanyakorn Veerakanjana, Piyalitt Ittichaiwong, Matthew Theodore Roque, Karissa Vincentio, Takdanai Kreangphet, Phakphum Artkaew, Kadek Hendrawan Palgunadi, Yanzhi Yu, Rochana Prih Hastuti, William Nixon, Mithil Bangera, Adrian Xuan Wei Lim, Aye Hninn Khine, Hanif Muhammad Zhafran, Teddy Ferdinan, Audra Aurora Izzani, Ayushman Singh, Evan Evan, Jauza Akbar Krito, Michael Anugraha, Fenal Ashokbhai Ilasariya, Haochen Li, John Amadeo Daniswara, Filbert Aurelian Tjiaranata, Eryawan Presma Yulianrifat, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Fadil Risdian Ansori, Mahardika Krisna Ihsani, Giang Nguyen, Anab Maulana Barik, Dan John Velasco, Rifo Ahmad Genadi, Saptarshi Saha, Chengwei Wei, Isaiah Edri W. Flores, Kenneth Chen Ko Han, Anjela Gail D. Santos, Wan Shen Lim, Kaung Si Phyo, Tim Santos, Meisyarah Dwiastuti, Jiayun Luo, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Ming Shan Hee, Ikhlasul Akmal Hanif, M.Alif Al Hakim, Muhammad Rizky Sya’ban, Kun Kerdthaisong, Lester James Validad Miranda, Fajri Koto, Tirana Noor Fatyanosa, Alham Fikri Aji, Jostin Jerico Rosal, Jun Kevin, Robert Wijaya, Onno P. Kampman, Ruochen Zhang, Börje F. Karlsson, Peerat Limkonchotiwat
Challenge: Southeast Asia is underrepresented in vision-language research . SEA-VL is an open-source initiative dedicated to developing culturally relevant datasets for SEA languages.
Approach: They propose to use crowdsourced, automated image crawling and synthetic image generation to develop culturally relevant datasets for SEA languages.
Outcome: The proposed datasets capture SEA cultural nuances and contexts better than existing datasets.
LLMs Are Few-Shot In-Context Low-Resource Language Learners (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: In-context learning (ICL) empowers large language models to perform diverse tasks in underrepresented languages using only short in-contrast information.
Approach: They extensively assess the effectiveness of in-context learning with LLMs in low-resource languages . they also identify the shortcomings of in context label alignment .
Outcome: The proposed approach improves understanding quality of low-resource languages by closing the language gap in the target language.
IndoNLU: Benchmark and Resources for Evaluating Indonesian Natural Language Understanding (2020.aacl-main)

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Challenge: Despite the availability of data on Indonesian, progress on this language is slow . available datasets are scattered, with a lack of documentation and minimal community engagement.
Approach: They propose a resource for training, evaluation, and benchmarking on Indonesian natural language understanding tasks.
Outcome: The proposed resource includes 12 tasks ranging from single sentence classification to pair-sentences sequence labeling with different levels of complexity.
Belief Revision: The Adaptability of Large Language Models Reasoning (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing evaluations assume language models operate with consistent information.
Approach: They propose a dataset to test LMs' belief revision ability when presented with new evidence.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves language models’ adaptiveness to changing information, highlighting a critical trade-off.
CI-AVSR: A Cantonese Audio-Visual Speech Datasetfor In-car Command Recognition (2022.lrec-1)

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Challenge: In-car smart assistants should be able to process general as well as car-related commands and perform corresponding actions, which eases driving and improves safety.
Approach: They propose a dataset for in-car command recognition in the cantonese language with both video and audio data.
Outcome: The proposed model can achieve a considerable quality on the clean test set, but the speech recognition quality on noisy data is still inferior.
Meta-Transfer Learning for Code-Switched Speech Recognition (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Increasing number of people in the world today speak a mixed-language as a result of being multilingual.
Approach: They propose a method to transfer learn on a code-switched speech recognition system by extracting information from high-resource monolingual datasets.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines on speech recognition and language modeling tasks and is faster to converge.
ASCEND: A Spontaneous Chinese-English Dataset for Code-switching in Multi-turn Conversation (2022.lrec-1)

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Challenge: Code-switching is a speech phenomenon occurring when a speaker switches language during a conversation.
Approach: They propose to collect Mandarin Chinese-English code-switching corpus from read speech rather than spontaneous speech to address this phenomenon.
Outcome: ASCEND consists of 10.62 hours of clean speech, collected from 23 bilingual speakers of Chinese and English.
High-Dimension Human Value Representation in Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to align large language models with human values and preferences are not able to be applied to all tasks and fields.
Approach: They propose a high-dimensional representation of symbolic human value distributions in LLMs that is orthogonal to model architecture and training data.
Outcome: The proposed representations are evaluated on 15 open-source and commercial LLMs and are self-supervised from the value-relevant output of 8 LLM models.
Which One Are You Referring To? Multimodal Object Identification in Situated Dialogue (2023.eacl-srw)

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Challenge: a demand for multimodal dialogue systems is increasing for situated dialogues, where a dialogue agent shares a co-observed vision or physical space with the user.
Approach: They propose three methods to solve multimodal object identification problem using situated dialogue dataset SIMMC 2.1.
Outcome: The proposed method improves by 20% F1-score on the largest situated dialogue dataset, SIMMC 2.1.
Linguistic Minimal Pairs Elicit Linguistic Similarity in Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: a new analysis leverages linguistic minimal pairs to probe the internal linguistic representations of Large Language Models (LLMs).
Approach: They propose to use linguistic minimal pairs to probe the internal linguistic representations of Large Language Models (LLMs).
Outcome: The proposed analysis reveals that linguistic similarity is significantly influenced by training data exposure, leading to higher cross-LLM agreement in higher-resource languages.
Lost in Simulation: LLM-Simulated Users are Unreliable Proxies for Human Users in Agentic Evaluations (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Agentic benchmarks rely on LLM-simulated users to evaluate agent performance . however, the robustness, validity, and fairness of this approach remain unexamined .
Approach: They investigate whether LLM-simulated users are reliable proxies for real human users . they find that agent success rates vary up to 9 percentage points across different LLMs .
Outcome: The results show that simulated users underestimate success on challenging tasks while miscalibrate performance on moderately difficult tasks.
SEACrowd: A Multilingual Multimodal Data Hub and Benchmark Suite for Southeast Asian Languages (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Southeast Asia (SEA) is home to over 1,300 indigenous languages and 671 million people . prevailing AI models suffer from a significant lack of representation of texts, images, and audio datasets from SEA .
Approach: They propose to provide a resource center that provides standardized corpora in nearly 1,000 SEA languages across three modalities.
Outcome: a new benchmark assesses the quality of AI models on 36 SEA languages across 13 tasks . the results highlight the importance of SEA as a culturally diverse region .
Learning Knowledge Bases with Parameters for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: End-to-end systems rely on dialogue state tracking and annotations to fulfill user requests . modularized systems require multiple steps, including a direct interaction with the KB .
Approach: They propose a method to embed the KB directly into the model parameters . they evaluate five task-oriented dialogue datasets with small, medium, and large KBs .
Outcome: The proposed model can embed the KB directly into the model parameters without any DST or template responses, nor the kb as input.
Integrating Question Rewrites in Conversational Question Answering: A Reinforcement Learning Approach (2022.acl-srw)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to improve QR performance dependencies among dialogue history dependencies are limited.
Approach: They propose a reinforcement learning approach that integrates QR and CQA tasks without corresponding labeled QR datasets.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves existing pipeline approaches in conversational question answering (QA) existing methods depend on assumption of corresponding QR datasets for every CQA dataset, resulting in poor performance.

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