Master of Data Science Students and Researchers Shine at ACL 2025, the World’s Leading NLP Conference
Associate Professor Derry Wijaya (wearing a hijab) with Master of Data Science students and researchers at ACL 2025 Conference
Vienna, Austria – A six-member delegation from the Data Science Program, particularly, the Natural Language Processing (NLP) research lab at Monash University, Indonesia showcased the nation's rising NLP talent at ACL 2025 in Vienna, Austria, the world's premier conference for Natural Language Processing. Led by Associate Professor Derry Wijaya, the team comprised Research Assistants Lucky Susanto, Musa Wijanarko, Mohammad Rifqi Farhansyah, and Master of Data Science (MDS) students Iwan Darmawan and Fariz Akyas.
Two MDS theses supervised by Associate Professor Derry Wijaya were accepted for publication and presented at ACL—an achievement that signals their scholarly excellence. Iwan Darmawan introduced Unggah-Ungguh, a dataset that captures Javanese honorific levels and tests whether current large language models (LLMs) can recognize and generate context-appropriate speech levels. The verdict: today's models struggle and show bias toward certain honorific levels, highlighting an urgent research gap. Fariz Akyas presented a multi-label dataset for Indonesian online discourse—annotated for toxicity, polarization, and annotator demographics—demonstrating that jointly modeling toxicity and polarization improves the performance of AI models for toxicity and polarization detection, and that demographic context further boosts performance, offering practical benefits for healthier online debate in Indonesia.
NLP Research Lab's research assistants, Musa Izzanardi Wijanarko and Lucky Susanto, presenting their poster at ACL 2025 Conference
Monash University, Indonesia's NLP research group also presented two additional papers. NusaAksara—a collaboration with MBZUAI—builds the first multimodal benchmark to preserve Indonesia's indigenous scripts, covering 8 scripts (Jawa, Bali, Sunda, Batak, Lampung, Lontara, Jawi, and Pegon) and 7 languages with expert-validated tasks from image segmentation and OCR/transcription to transliteration, translation, and language identification. Curated from 75 books (7,137 pages) and evaluated across leading LLMs/Visual Language Models (VLMs), the study shows that most large language models perform near-zero on these scripts, revealing a major gap in "multilingual" AI and an urgent need for inclusive standards. The lab's works on Unggah-Ungguh and NusaAksara are evidence of the lab's strength in culturally grounded AI.
The fourth paper, "Insights into Climate Change Narratives: Emotional Alignment and Engagement Analysis on TikTok," earned the Best Paper Award at ACL's NLP for Positive Impact Workshop, highlighting how emotion-aware communication can increase engagement with climate content in social media platforms such as TikTok.
MDS students, Iwan Darmawan (left) and Fariz Akyas (right) presenting their poster at ACL 2025 Conference
Adding to the celebrations, Iwan Darmawan and Mohammad Rifqi Farhansyah received ACL's Diversity & Inclusion Award (sponsored by Apple), which covered flights and accommodation to travel and present in person at the conference.
Beyond the research presentations, the Monash University, Indonesia students met researchers from industry and academic labs around the world, opening pathways to research collaborations, internships, and PhD placements.
What this means for prospective students? The Master of Data Science at Monash University, Indonesia offers hands-on, world-class research with internationally recognized scholars. Students don't just learn current methods—they push the state of the art and bring Indonesia's linguistic and societal challenges into the global conversation. Our research lab's track record, from Unggah-Ungguh and NusaAksara's culturally grounded AI, to the contextual AI models for toxicity and polarization detection, to award-winning work on climate communication underscore a core lesson: how world-class research at Monash University, Indonesia, which grounds AI in Indonesia's languages and realities leads to research with global relevance and local impact.
About Master of Data Science Program at Monash University, Indonesia
Our Master of Data Science program is developed in collaboration with Monash Australia, the curriculum provides foundational knowledge and hands-on skills in areas such as data analysis, visualisation, big data modelling, and machine learning, equipping students to thrive as versatile data professionals across private and public sectors. Through industry partnerships, the program offers practical, real-world applications, ensuring students receive a comprehensive and industry-relevant education that can be immediately applied in their careers. Students also have the opportunity to pursue a research pathway that will enable them to contribute to research that pushes the boundary of knowledge in data science and machine learning.