LAUKIN: A Multi-jurisdictional Common Law Contract Dataset

Multinational companies increasingly require cross-jurisdictional contract review, yet existing legal NLP datasets are largely restricted to a single jurisdiction. We introduce LAUKIN (Legal equivalence dataset of Australia, UK, and INdia), a dataset of clause pairs (AU-UK, UK-IN, IN-AU) labelled for boolean legal equivalence. We develop a novel multi-stage retrieval and reranking pipeline to construct the initial clause pair mapping, with a subset of clause pairs subsequently annotated by legal experts as Equivalent or Not Equivalent. The dataset comprises 14,727 clause pairs from 204 contracts across 8 agreement types, of which 3,000 are manually labelled: 900 train, 600 dev, and 1,500 test. We evaluate 12 models across 4 techniques, achieving a best macro-F1 of 65.11%, establishing LAUKIN as a challenging benchmark. Results reveal that, despite shared legal heritage, drafting conventions diverge significantly across jurisdictions, making cross-jurisdictional equivalence classification non-trivial. LAUKIN also includes 11,727 unlabelled training pairs to support future semi-supervised learning research in legal NLP.

Paediatric-HGNN: A Hybrid Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network for Detecting Disfluency in Children's Speech via Multiscale Acoustic Fusion

Automated stuttering detection (ASD) systems struggle with paediatric speech due to high acoustic variability in developing voices and the subtle distinction between pathological stuttering and typical developmental disfluencies. We introduce Paediatric-HGNN, a framework using a Context-aware Part-whole Interaction Network (CaPIN) tailored for paediatric data. Instead of conventional 1D signal modelling, our approach builds a heterogeneous graph capturing hierarchical relationships between lexical units (word nodes) and fine-grained acoustic segments (frame nodes). Trained on curated paediatric corpora (UCLASS and FluencyBank), Paediatric-HGNN achieves 82.4% weighted accuracy and a Typical Disfluency F1-score of 0.386. Modelling hierarchical lexical-acoustic interactions captures developmental "searching" behaviour, offering a more robust and interpretable tool for early clinical intervention.

Didact: A Cross-Domain Capability Discovery System for Defence

Policymakers in defence and defence-aligned sectors must monitor rapidly evolving research alongside sector priorities relevant to operational and strategic needs. In practice, these sources are fragmented across heterogeneous formats, disjoint repositories, and siloed update streams, making capability discovery slow and difficult to audit. We present Didact, a prototype that integrates publicly available defence reports and policy documents from Australia with a purpose-built knowledge graph derived from Australian research publications. Didact provides natural language conversations for policy-oriented workflows, and leverages a composite retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline. A key feature of Didact is an interactive Evidence Rail that visualises retrieved evidence and source relationships. Our evaluation of the output quality and runtime of Didact highlights its utility. While Didact has been co-developed as an academia-industry project for the Australian context, it is adaptable to other domains where knowledge is similarly fragmented. A demonstration video is available here:

CHASE: Adversarial Red-Blue Teaming for Improving LLM Safety using Reinforcement Learning

Despite advances in safety alignment, prompt-rewriting attacks such as persona modulation, fictional framing and persuasion-based reformulation, can bypass safety filters even on frontier models. Existing defenses either rely on non-scalable human curation or white-box optimisation that overfits to specific model internals, leaving aligned models brittle against the very class of adaptive black-box adversaries they will face in deployment. To address this gap, we introduce CHASE (Co-evolutionary Hardening through Adversarial Safety-Escalation), a closed-loop red-blue teaming framework in which a black-box attacker and a safety-aligned defender co-evolve. The attacker is trained via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) under a multiplicative reward that jointly enforces bypass effectiveness and intent fidelity, while the defender is hardened on the harvested adversarial rewrites through a two-stage GRPO + rejection-sampled SFT pipeline balanced with benign data. Evaluated on BeaverTails and JailbreakBench against five held-out attack families (PAIR, TAP, AutoDAN, PAP, Translation), CHASE cuts mean StrongREJECT score by 43.2\% with 0\% false-refusal on benign prompts. Beyond the headline result, CHASE shows that template-free RL exploration recovers latent attack primitives that transfer across mechanistically distinct attack families, suggesting a path toward LLM safety hardening that generalises beyond the narrow distributions achieved thus far in adversarial training.

Evaluating Cross-lingual Knowledge Consistency in Code-Mixed vis-a-vis Indian Languages using IndicKLAR

Large language models recall knowledge reliably in English but often fail on the same query posed in a lower-resourced language -- a crosslingual consistency gap that remains underexplored for Indian languages and their code-mixed counterparts. To study this gap, we introduce IndiKLAR, an Indic extension of the KLAR-CLC benchmark covering 18 of the 22 scheduled Indian languages and pairing them with code-mixed variants for 11 widely used language pairs, with native-speaker verification of both monolingual and code-mixed variants for these 11 settings. This three-way alignment offers a unique opportunity to examine how knowledge recall consistency varies across the spectrum of English, code-mixed, and native Indian language inputs. Evaluating across nine open-weight models, we find that the native-language accuracy gap to English can reach $\sim$0.50, while code-mixed inputs close most of it -- bringing performance within $\sim$0.05 of English without any model-level intervention. Motivated by this, we evaluate several prompting strategies that vary in how language conversion is exposed, including a two-stage translate-then-answer setup, a one-stage joint translation-and-answer prompt, and Translate-in-Thought (TinT) -- a single-step strategy in which the model converts the input internally and emits only the final answer. Across the performance trajectory native $\rightarrow$ code-mixed $\rightarrow$ English, we identify a consistent flip point -- the boundary between incorrect and correct prediction -- that lies between the native and code-mixed settings. Interestingly, this holds whether the trajectory is induced by the input surface form or by the model's internal conversion process.

TeamUp: Semantic Project Matching and Team Formation for Learning at Scale

Project-based learning improves student engagement and learning outcomes, yet allocating students to appropriately challenging projects while forming cognitively diverse teams remains difficult at scale. Traditional allocation methods (manual spreadsheets, preference surveys) can't construct the cognitively diverse teams that that collaborate cognitively. This mismatch perpetuates equity issues: high-performing students self-select visible projects while under-represented students face reduced access to opportunity. We propose TeamUp, a lightweight, embedding-based team-forming system designed to improve learning outcomes and equity in large-scale project-based courses. TeamUp uses semantic embeddings from pretrained language models to match students to projects aligned with their skill level. The system employs a hybrid ranking algorithm combining cosine similarity with pedagogical constraints (difficulty alignment, domain preferences, and demand balancing) to generate personalised and transparent recommendations. Beyond individual matching, TeamUp constructs cognitively diverse teams by modelling skill complementarity through embedding variance, ensuring teams possess well-distributed capabilities rather than homogeneous strengths. We evaluated TeamUp through a virtual experiment using 250 student profiles and 60 project descriptions. Results show: (1) substantially higher match quality (mean cosine similarity of 0.74 vs. 0.43); (2) better difficulty alignment (83% placed within one level vs. 34%); (3) more diverse teams (82% covering three or more technical areas vs. 41%); and (4) sub-second recommendation latency at operational costs under $0.10 per student.

Domain-oriented RAG Assessment (DoRA): Synthetic Benchmarking for RAG-based Question Answering on Defense Documents

Open-domain RAG benchmarks over public corpora can overestimate deployment performance due to pretraining overlap and weak attribution requirements. We present DoRA (Domain-oriented RAG Assessment), a domain-grounded benchmark built from defense documents that pairs synthetic, intent-conditioned QA (question answering) with auditable evidence passages for attribution. DoRA covers five question types (find, explain, summarize, generate, provide) and contains 6.5K curated instances. In end-to-end evaluation with a fixed dense retriever, general-purpose Language Models (LMs) perform similarly, while a model trained on DoRA (DoRA SFT) yields large gains over the base model (Llama3.1-8B-Instruct): up to 26% improvement in QA task success, while reducing the hallucination rate by 47% in RAG faithfulness scores, supporting contamination-aware regression testing under domain shift.

Far Out: Evaluating Language Models on Slang in Australian and Indian English

Language models exhibit systematic performance gaps when processing text in non-standard language varieties, yet their ability to comprehend variety-specific slang remains underexplored for several languages. We present a comprehensive evaluation of slang awareness in Indian English (en-IN) and Australian English (en-AU) across seven state-of-the-art language models. We construct two complementary datasets: \textsc{web}, containing 377 web-sourced usage examples from Urban Dictionary, and \textsc{gen}, featuring 1,492 synthetically generated usages of these slang terms, across diverse scenarios. We assess language models on three tasks: target word prediction (TWP), guided target word prediction (TWP$^*$) and target word selection (TWS). Our results reveal four key findings: (1) Higher average model performance TWS versus TWP and TWP$^*$, with average accuracy score increasing from 0.03 to 0.49 respectively (2) Stronger average model performance on \textsc{web} versus \textsc{gen} datasets, with average similarity score increasing by 0.03 and 0.05 across TWP and TWP$^*$ tasks respectively (3) en-IN tasks outperform en-AU when averaged across all models and datasets, with TWS demonstrating the largest disparity, increasing average accuracy from 0.44 to 0.54. These findings underscore fundamental asymmetries between generative and discriminative competencies for variety-specific language, particularly in the context of slang expressions despite being in a technologically rich language such as English.

Retell, Reward, Repeat: Reinforcement Learning for Narrative Theory-Informed Story Generation

Despite the subjective nature of storytelling, past works on automatic story generation (ASG) have relied on limited ground truths for training and evaluation. In this work, we explore reinforcement learning (d-RLAIF) as a post-training alternative to supervised fine-tuning (SFT). We first apply Todorov's Theory of Narrative Equilibrium to establish principles that define desirable ASG qualities. We prompt 7B and 14B LLM-as-judge models with our principles to test alignment with human annotators and provide reward signals during d-RLAIF. We use Gemini-3-Flash to evaluate the output of our post-trained models and compare them to human-written stories from the TimeTravel dataset. We show that d-RLAIF offers a viable alternative to supervised fine-tuning (SFT)--producing stories that are more diverse and aligned with human narrative conventions. Our paper demonstrates the promise of reinforcement learning for linguistically grounded post-training for subjective tasks such as ASG.

In Vino Veritas and Vulnerabilities: Examining LLM Safety via Drunk Language Inducement

Humans are susceptible to undesirable behaviours and privacy leaks under the influence of alcohol. This paper investigates drunk language, i.e., text written under the influence of alcohol, as a driver for safety failures in large language models (LLMs). We investigate three mechanisms for inducing drunk language in LLMs: persona-based prompting, causal fine-tuning, and reinforcement-based post-training. When evaluated on 5 LLMs, we observe a higher susceptibility to jailbreaking on JailbreakBench (even in the presence of defences) and privacy leaks on ConfAIde, where both benchmarks are in English, as compared to the base LLMs as well as previously reported approaches. Via a robust combination of manual evaluation and LLM-based evaluators and analysis of error categories, our findings highlight a correspondence between human-intoxicated behaviour, and anthropomorphism in LLMs induced with drunk language. The simplicity and efficiency of our drunk language inducement approaches position them as potential counters for LLM safety tuning, highlighting significant risks to LLM safety.