XplaiNLP at SemEval-2026 Task 1: BVAHAHA - Benign Violation Algorithm for Humor and Harmless Absurdity

AbstractWe present BVAHAHA, a humor generationsystem for SemEval-2026 Task 1 (MWAHAHASubtask A), which frames constrained joke generation through the lens of Benign ViolationTheory (BVT). Given either two rare words ora news headline, the system generates contextually appropriate jokes while avoiding memorization and unsafe outputs. Our approachcombines BVT-guided humor generation witha parallel moderation pipeline (“Gatekeepers”)that detects excessive emotional intensity andhate speech, triggering iterative revisions whennecessary. Finally, we employ an LLM-as-aJudge framework with persona-based rankingto approximate human humor preferences.