YEREVAN, Armenia — The American University of Armenia (AUA) Zaven P. and Sonia Akian College of Science and Engineering (ACSE) is pleased to share that alumna Marina Igitkhanian (BSDS ’25) presented her research at the Generation, Evaluation and Metrics (GEM) Workshop, held during the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) in San Diego, California. Her research was initially introduced during her studies at ACSE.
ACL is one of the world’s leading international conferences in natural language processing and computational linguistics and is recognized as an A*-ranked conference. The 2026 conference brought together researchers from universities, research institutions, and technology companies to share recent advances in language technologies and artificial intelligence.
Igitkhanian presented the paper “More Yap, Less Meaning: Uncovering Self-Improvement Behavior in Small Language Models (SLMs),” co-authored with Dr. Erik Arakelyan, senior researcher at NVIDIA. The research stemmed from her capstone project during her studies in the Bachelor of Science in Data Science (BSDS) program.
The study investigates whether small language models can recognize flaws in their own reasoning and use self-generated feedback to correct an initially wrong answer. The authors introduced a three-step evaluation framework in which a model first answers a reasoning problem, then receives its incorrect reasoning together with the ground-truth answer and generates a hint, and finally attempts to solve the same problem again using that hint.
The models were evaluated across mathematical, logical, and commonsense reasoning tasks. Despite being given the correct answer during the hint-generation stage, they showed only limited self-correction ability. On average, the self-generated hints improved accuracy by 4.4 percentage points. The study also found that longer hints were often less effective, as they tended to include repetition, irrelevant content, or inconsistent reasoning.
During the workshop, Igitkhanian presented the methodology and findings to an international audience and discussed the work with researchers studying language model reasoning, evaluation, and reliability. She also attended talks and poster sessions on recent developments in natural language processing and artificial intelligence.
“Presenting our work at ACL was an important and rewarding experience,” she said. “It gave me the opportunity to receive feedback from researchers, exchange ideas with people working on related problems, build new professional connections, and become more familiar with the latest research directions presented at ACL. It also helped me think about how our study could be extended. I am especially grateful to Dr. Arakelyan for his guidance and collaboration throughout the project,” she added.
Dr. Reza Malekian, dean of ACSE, reflected on Igitkhanian’s achievement. “The GEM Workshop is organized as part of the ACL 2026, one of the top premier international conferences for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and computational linguistics research,” he remarked. “We are proud of the outstanding work carried out by Marina Igitkhanian, our data science alumna, during her studies at ACSE, together with Dr. Erik Arakelyan, our adjunct faculty member and senior researcher at NVIDIA,” he added.
“Seeing an undergraduate capstone project evolve into a peer-reviewed publication and presentation at a top-tier international conference is a testament to the quality of our students, faculty mentorship, and research environment,” Dr. Malekian emphasized. “We congratulate Ms. Igitkhanian and Dr. Arakelyan on this remarkable achievement and look forward to many more successes from our students and faculty. I would also like to express our sincere gratitude to the H. Hovnanian Family Foundation and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation for their continued generous support of our students and faculty members,” he added.
Igitkhanian’s participation in ACL 2026 was supported by the H. Hovnanian Family Foundation and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Their support enabled her to travel to San Diego and present the research at the GEM Workshop. The presentation highlights how an undergraduate capstone project can grow into research shared with the international scientific community. It also reflects the value of mentorship and philanthropic support in creating opportunities for emerging researchers from Armenia.
Founded in 1991, the American University of Armenia (AUA) is a private, independent university located in Yerevan, Armenia, affiliated with the University of California, and accredited by the WASC Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC) in the United States. AUA provides local and international students with Western-style education through top-quality undergraduate and graduate degree and certificate programs, promotes research and innovation, encourages civic engagement and community service, and fosters democratic values.
