Md Mohsinul Kabir

I’m a second year ELLIS PhD student at the University of Manchester. I’m supervised by Prof. Sophia Ananiadou.

My research lies at the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computational Social Science, and Culturally Adaptive NLP applications. I am particularly interested in understanding how language models can better reflect and respect human culture.

Cultural Understanding in Language Models: I am intrigued by the question- as autoregressive generators, can modern language models truly perceive and represent culture, which evolves over thousands of years, as humans do?
Culturally Adapted NLP: My recent work explores how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be adapted to culturally sensitive domains such as mental health, irony, and sarcasm, where context and cultural nuance play a crucial role.
Cultural Bias: I am also interested in understanding how cultural bias is manifested and propagated in language models. I approach this through the lens of interpretability to uncover its roots and explore ways to mitigate it.

I aim to build NLP systems that go beyond linguistic accuracy, incorporating cultural awareness and empathy into machine understanding of human language.

Recent News

Jan 23, 2026	🎉 Our work on Islamic lifestyle applications bas been accepted by the International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction . The paper is open-access and available here.
Oct 29, 2025	📝 Our collaborative work on Cross-Cultural Translation is now available on arXiv.
Oct 24, 2025	🎉 Our work on Religious Bias bas been accepted by the Jounral of AI & Society . The paper is available on arXiv.
Aug 20, 2025	🎉 Two papers accepted at EMNLP 2025 on Cultural Alignment and Cultural Bias Interpretability.

Selected Publications

NLP

Break the Checkbox: Challenging Closed-Style Evaluations of Cultural Alignment in LLMs

M Kabir, A Abrar, and S Ananiadou

Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Nov 2025

https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.2/

DOI Bib PDF

@article{kabir2025checkbox,
  author = {Kabir, M and Abrar, A and Ananiadou, S},
  journal = {Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
  year = {2025},
  month = nov,
  note = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.2/},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  title = {Break the Checkbox: Challenging Closed-Style Evaluations of Cultural Alignment in {LLMs}},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.2},
}

NLP

From n-gram to Attention: How Model Architectures Learn and Propagate Bias in Language Modeling

M Kabir, T Tahsin, and S Ananiadou

Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, Nov 2025

https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.1003/

DOI Bib PDF

@article{kabir2025attention,
  author = {Kabir, M and Tahsin, T and Ananiadou, S},
  journal = {Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025},
  year = {2025},
  month = nov,
  note = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.1003/},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  title = {From n-gram to Attention: How Model Architectures Learn and Propagate Bias in Language Modeling},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.1003},
}

NLP

Religious Bias Landscape in Language and Text-to-Image Models: Analysis, Detection, and Debiasing Strategies

Ajwad Abrar, Nafisa Tabassum Oeshy, Mohsinul Kabir, and 1 more author

AI & SOCIETY, Nov 2025

Published online

DOI Bib PDF

@article{abrar2025religious,
  author = {Abrar, Ajwad and Oeshy, Nafisa Tabassum and Kabir, Mohsinul and Ananiadou, Sophia},
  journal = {AI \& SOCIETY},
  year = {2025},
  month = nov,
  note = {Published online},
  publisher = {Springer},
  title = {Religious Bias Landscape in Language and Text-to-Image Models: Analysis, Detection, and Debiasing Strategies},
  doi = {10.1007/s00146-025-02721-z},
}

NLP

Semantic Label Drift in Cross-Cultural Translation

Mohsinul Kabir, Tasnim Ahmed, Md Mezbaur Rahman, and 2 more authors

arXiv, Oct 2025

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.25967

DOI Bib PDF

@article{kabir2025semantic,
  author = {Kabir, Mohsinul and Ahmed, Tasnim and Rahman, Md Mezbaur and Giannouris, Polydoros and Ananiadou, Sophia},
  journal = {arXiv},
  year = {2025},
  month = oct,
  note = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.25967},
  publisher = {},
  title = {Semantic Label Drift in Cross-Cultural Translation},
  doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2510.25967},
}