Faculty of Science Assistant Professor receives two paper awards at 2025 North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics conference
Dr. En-Shiun Annie Lee, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Science, and her research team from the Lee Language Lab recently received two top paper awards at the 2025 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL). The NAACL is one of the most competitive and high-impact conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing.
Awarded papers:
Best Theme Paper Award
WorldCuisines: A Massive-Scale Benchmark for Multilingual and Multicultural Visual Question Answering on Global Cuisines
In collaboration with an international team of researchers, Dr. Lee co-authored the WorldCuisines paper, which introduces the largest multicultural visual question-answering (VQA) benchmark to date, featuring more than one million data points across 30 languages and dialects from nine language families. The benchmark challenges artificial intelligence (AI) systems to recognize dishes, identify cultural origins, and understand multicultural contexts, advancing responsible AI that respects linguistic and cultural diversity worldwide.
Outstanding Paper Award
IrokoBench: A New Benchmark for African Languages in the Age of Large Language Models
Dr. Lee and her collaborators were also recognized for IrokoBench, the first human-translated benchmark covering 17 low-resource African languages. The benchmark supports tasks such as natural language inference, mathematical reasoning, and multi-choice knowledge-based question-answering, filling a critical gap in AI evaluation. This work highlights the performance gaps between high- and low-resource languages, and advocates for building more inclusive and equitable AI systems.
Global Impact and Recognition
Held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, NAACL 2025 attracted a record 3,185 submissions, with 719 papers accepted. This year’s theme, "NLP in a Multicultural World," spotlighted the importance of research that addresses linguistic and cultural diversity, perfectly aligned with Dr. Lee’s groundbreaking work. These accomplishments not only showcase Â鶹´«Ã½ University’s leadership in multilingual and multicultural AI research but also reinforce the university’s commitment to advancing equity, diversity, and inclusion on a global scale.
Congratulations to Dr. Lee, her collaborators, and the Â鶹´«Ã½ research community for their remarkable contributions to the future of AI.
