George Mikros

Gagan Bhatia, Hamdy Mubarak, Mustafa Jarrar et al.

LLMs are increasingly used for Islamic question answering, where ungrounded responses may carry serious religious consequences. Yet standard MCQ/MRC-style evaluations do not capture key real-world failure modes, notably free-form hallucinations and whether models appropriately abstain when evidence is lacking. To shed a light on this aspect we introduce ISLAMICFAITHQA, a 3,810-item bilingual (Arabic/English) generative benchmark with atomic single-gold answers, which enables direct measurement of hallucination and abstention. We additionally developed an end-to-end grounded Islamic modelling suite consisting of (i) 25K Arabic text-grounded SFT reasoning pairs, (ii) 5K bilingual preference samples for reward-guided alignment, and (iii) a verse-level Qur'an retrieval corpus of $\sim$6k atomic verses (ayat). Building on these resources, we develop an agentic Quran-grounding framework (agentic RAG) that uses structured tool calls for iterative evidence seeking and answer revision. Experiments across Arabic-centric and multilingual LLMs show that retrieval improves correctness and that agentic RAG yields the largest gains beyond standard RAG, achieving state-of-the-art performance and stronger Arabic-English robustness even with a small model (i.e., Qwen3 4B). We will make the experimental resources and datasets publicly available for the community.

Wajdi Zaghouani, Md. Rafiul Biswas, Mabrouka Bessghaier et al.

We present ClimateChat-300K, a large-scale dataset of 299,329 public Facebook posts about climate change collected between May 2020 and May 2024 through the CrowdTangle platform. The dataset contains 41 metadata features including post content, engagement metrics, and page attributes, covering material from more than 26,000 global pages. Each post includes rich contextual information such as language, timestamp, page category, and interaction counts, enabling comprehensive analyses of public discourse around climate communication. Using topic modeling and sentiment analysis, we identify ten main themes grouped into five domains: policy, activism, cooperation, science, and conservation. The results reveal that emotional tone, post format, and page identity strongly influence audience engagement, with visually rich and emotionally charged content receiving the highest levels of interaction. The dataset also demonstrates how online discussions evolved in response to major events such as international climate summits and the COVID-19 pandemic period. ClimateChat-300K provides an open resource for reproducible and interdisciplinary research on polarization, misinformation, and the dynamics of digital climate discourse. By releasing this dataset, we aim to support transparent, data-driven research and contribute to a deeper un-derstanding of how public engagement with climate issues develops across time, geography, and institutional contexts.

George Mikros, Fotios Fitsilis

Katharevousa Greek remains poorly served by contemporary NLP pipelines despite its importance for legal, administrative, and parliamentary archives. We present a reproducible workflow for building and evaluating a Universal Dependencies-style parsing resource for Katharevousa parliamentary questions from Greece's early post-junta period. The pipeline links OCR-aware reconstruction, schema-constrained LLM-assisted annotation, automatic validation, deterministic CoNLL-U snapshotting, fixed-split evaluation, and model-family comparison. The frozen automatically validated reference set contains 1{,}697 sentences, split into 1{,}357 training sentences and 340 held-out test sentences. We compare off-the-shelf Greek and Ancient Greek parsers, a feature-based parser, mBERT, XLM-R, and custom Stanza training under the same scoring protocol. Off-the-shelf systems show substantial register mismatch: the strongest external baseline, spaCy Greek, reaches 0.4183 LAS. The best structural parser, an XLM-R model, reaches 0.8893 UPOS accuracy, 0.7250 dependency-relation F1, 0.6098 UAS, and 0.5162 LAS, an absolute LAS gain of 0.0980 over the best external baseline. The feature-based model remains competitive for UPOS and relation labeling, indicating that transparent lexical-context features still matter at this data scale. Beyond scores, the paper contributes an auditable methodology for turning difficult historical parliamentary OCR into reusable syntactic NLP infrastructure. The entire pipeline -- code, schema, frozen reference annotations, fixed train/test split, and per-model benchmark reports -- is released as an open-access companion to this paper.

George Mikros

Large language models (LLMs) present a dual challenge for forensic linguistics. They serve as powerful analytical tools enabling scalable corpus analysis and embedding-based authorship attribution, while simultaneously destabilising foundational assumptions about idiolect through style mimicry, authorship obfuscation, and the proliferation of synthetic texts. Recent stylometric research indicates that LLMs can approximate surface stylistic features yet exhibit detectable differences from human writers, a tension with significant forensic implications. However, current AI-text detection techniques, whether classifier-based, stylometric, or watermarking approaches, face substantial limitations: high false positive rates for non-native English writers and vulnerability to adversarial strategies such as homoglyph substitution. These uncertainties raise concerns under legal admissibility standards, particularly the Daubert and Kumho Tire frameworks. The article concludes that forensic linguistics requires methodological reconfiguration to remain scientifically credible and legally admissible. Proposed adaptations include hybrid human-AI workflows, explainable detection paradigms beyond binary classification, and validation regimes measuring error and bias across diverse populations. The discipline's core insight, i.e., that language reveals information about its producer, remains valid but must accommodate increasingly complex chains of human and machine authorship.

Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Hind Almerekhi, Mucahid Kutlu et al.

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the first edition of the Academic Essay Authenticity Challenge, organized as part of the GenAI Content Detection shared tasks collocated with COLING 2025. This challenge focuses on detecting machine-generated vs. human-authored essays for academic purposes. The task is defined as follows: "Given an essay, identify whether it is generated by a machine or authored by a human.'' The challenge involves two languages: English and Arabic. During the evaluation phase, 25 teams submitted systems for English and 21 teams for Arabic, reflecting substantial interest in the task. Finally, seven teams submitted system description papers. The majority of submissions utilized fine-tuned transformer-based models, with one team employing Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Llama 2 and Llama 3. This paper outlines the task formulation, details the dataset construction process, and explains the evaluation framework. Additionally, we present a summary of the approaches adopted by participating teams. Nearly all submitted systems outperformed the n-gram-based baseline, with the top-performing systems achieving F1 scores exceeding 0.98 for both languages, indicating significant progress in the detection of machine-generated text.