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Oana Ignat

14 accepted papers

2026

Culture Affordance Atlas: Reconciling Object Diversity Through Functional Mapping

AAAI 2026technical

Culture shapes the objects people use and for what purposes, yet mainstream Vision-Language (VL) datasets frequently exhibit cultural biases, disproportionately favoring higher-income, Western contexts. This imbalance reduces model generalizability and perpetuates performance disparities, especially

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

BRIGHTER: BRIdging the Gap in Human-Annotated Textual Emotion Recognition Datasets for 28 Languages

ACL 2025long

People worldwide use language in subtle and complex ways to express emotions. Although emotion recognition–an umbrella term for several NLP tasks–impacts various applications within NLP and beyond, most work in this area has focused on high-resource languages. This has led to significant disparities…

2025

MAiDE-up: Multilingual Deception Detection of AI-generated Hotel Reviews

NAACL 2025findings

Deceptive reviews are becoming increasingly common, especially given the increase in performance and the prevalence of LLMs. While work to date has addressed the development of models to differentiate between truthful and deceptive human reviews, much less is known about the distinction between real…

2025

The Power of Many: Multi-Agent Multimodal Models for Cultural Image Captioning

NAACL 2025long

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) exhibit impressive performance across various multimodal tasks. However, their effectiveness in cross-cultural contexts remains limited due to the predominantly Western-centric nature of most data and models. Conversely, multi-agent models have shown significant capabi…

2025

Uplifting Lower-Income Data: Strategies for Socioeconomic Perspective Shifts in Large Multi-modal Models

NAACL 2025long

Recent work has demonstrated that the unequal representation of cultures and socioeconomic groups in training data leads to biased Large Multi-modal (LMM) models. To improve LMM model performance on underrepresented data, we propose and evaluate several prompting strategies using non-English, geogra…

2025

Why AI Is WEIRD and Shouldn't Be This Way: Towards AI for Everyone, with Everyone, by Everyone

AAAI 2025technical

This paper presents a vision for creating AI systems that are inclusive at every stage of development, from data collection to model design and evaluation. We address key limitations in the current AI pipeline and its WEIRD* representation, such as lack of data diversity, biases in model performance…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

Annotations on a Budget: Leveraging Geo-Data Similarity to Balance Model Performance and Annotation Cost

COLING 2024main

Current foundation models have shown impressive performance across various tasks. However, several studies have revealed that these models are not effective for everyone due to the imbalanced geographical and economic representation of the data used in the training process. Most of this data comes f…

2024

CVQA: Culturally-diverse Multilingual Visual Question Answering Benchmark

NeurIPS 2024oral

Visual Question Answering~(VQA) is an important task in multimodal AI, which requires models to understand and reason on knowledge present in visual and textual data. However, most of the current VQA datasets and models are primarily focused on English and a few major world languages, with images th…

Cited by 34SourcePDFScholar
2024

Has It All Been Solved? Open NLP Research Questions Not Solved by Large Language Models

COLING 2024main

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has enabled the deployment of many generative NLP applications. At the same time, it has also led to a misleading public discourse that “it’s all been solved.” Not surprisingly, this has, in turn, made many NLP researchers – especially those at the beg…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2024

Towards Algorithmic Fidelity: Mental Health Representation across Demographics in Synthetic vs. Human-generated Data

COLING 2024main

Synthetic data generation has the potential to impact applications and domains with scarce data. However, before such data is used for sensitive tasks such as mental health, we need an understanding of how different demographics are represented in it. In our paper, we analyze the potential of produc…

2023

Bridging the Digital Divide: Performance Variation across Socio-Economic Factors in Vision-Language Models

EMNLP 2023long main

Despite the impressive performance of current AI models reported across various tasks, performance reports often do not include evaluations of how these models perform on the specific groups that will be impacted by these technologies. Among the minority groups under-represented in AI, data from low…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2022

FIBER: Fill-in-the-Blanks as a Challenging Video Understanding Evaluation Framework

ACL 2022long

We propose fill-in-the-blanks as a video understanding evaluation framework and introduce FIBER – a novel dataset consisting of 28,000 videos and descriptions in support of this evaluation framework. The fill-in-the-blanks setting tests a model’s understanding of a video by requiring it to predict a…

2022

OCR Improves Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages

ACL 2022findings

We aim to investigate the performance of current OCR systems on low resource languages and low resource scripts. We introduce and make publicly available a novel benchmark, OCR4MT, consisting of real and synthetic data, enriched with noise, for 60 low-resource languages in low resource scripts. We e…

2021

WhyAct: Identifying Action Reasons in Lifestyle Vlogs

EMNLP 2021main

We aim to automatically identify human action reasons in online videos. We focus on the widespread genre of lifestyle vlogs, in which people perform actions while verbally describing them. We introduce and make publicly available the WhyAct dataset, consisting of 1,077 visual actions manually annota…