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ACL is widely regarded as the top-tier conference in NLP, ranked above EMNLP and NAACL in terms of scholarly competitiveness. The acceptance rate is highly selective—only around 20% of submitted manuscripts make it to the Main Conference. The event is largely dominated by senior researchers from global tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple, as well as leading academics from universities like MIT, Stanford, Oxford, and Tsinghua.

Rifqi admitted he never expected to reach such a level as first author of a paper titled “Do Language Models Understand Honorific Systems in Javanese?” The study explores the honorific system in Javanese, known as Unggah-Ungguh Basa, a cultural heritage he grew up with in his hometown in Magelang Regency.

The research produced the “UNGGAH-UNGGUH” corpus, which was used to test the ability of large language models such as ChatGPT and Gemini to understand and generate Javanese with correct honorific levels. The results showed that current models still fall short, often biased toward a single honorific level.

Rifqi was also a major contributing author of a second paper titled “Crowdsource, Crawl, or Generate? Creating SEA-VL, a Multicultural Vision-Language Dataset for Southeast Asia,” a collaboration among NLP researchers across Southeast Asia. Remarkably, both papers were accepted into the ACL 2025 Main Conference while Rifqi was still an undergraduate student.

This collaboration was made possible through the Garuda Academy of Excellence (Garuda ACE) program, which connected Rifqi with Prof. Derry Tanti Wijaya of Boston University, researchers from Monash University Indonesia, Capital One (USA), and MBZUAI. Rifqi played a key role in the project, contributing to data processing, experiment design, and manuscript writing, earning him recognition as first author.

The ACL selection process follows a rigorous anonymous peer review system, including a rebuttal stage for authors to defend their work, before final evaluation by area chairs. Rifqi noted that his biggest challenge was limited computational resources for experiments, which he eventually overcame through a research grant from Boston University. He also received a Diversity and Inclusion Travel Grant from Apple to fund his trip to Austria, along with accommodation support from Monash University.

Rifqi hopes his achievement will inspire more Indonesian students to pursue research in AI and NLP.

“Research is a world full of joy and opportunities, both in academia and industry. I hope this can encourage other students to be brave enough to try,” he said. Rifqi aspires to continue his doctoral studies at a top global university and later contribute to nurturing Indonesia’s younger generation, especially those from underprivileged backgrounds, to thrive in the world of technology.