United States

The Dimensional ABSA (DimABSA) shared
task extends traditional aspect-based sentiment
analysis from categorical polarity to continuous
valence–arousal (VA) prediction. We present
our system for all three subtasks: Dimensional
Aspect Sentiment Regression (DimASR),
Dimensional Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extrac-
tion (DimASTE), and Dimensional Aspect
Sentiment Quad Prediction (DimASQP).
Due to the cascading nature of the different
subtasks, we built a modular interlocking
pipeline that uses classical Machine Learning
and NLP methods.
Experiments across domains show consistent
gains in regression accuracy and structured
extraction performance. Our results demon-
strate the effectiveness of distribution-aware
regression, retrieval-augmented generation, and
contrastive prototype learning for dimensional
sentiment analysis.

ACL 2026

SokraTUM at SemEval-2026 Task 3: A hybrid cascade of Label Distribution Learning, RAG supported generative extraction and contrastive metric learning for dimensional sentiment analysis

dimabsa

supervised contrastive learning

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

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workshop paper

This paper presents our winning system for SemEval-2026 Task 5 on rating the plausibility of word senses in ambiguous stories. Unlike traditional Word Sense Disambiguation, the task requires predicting continuous plausibility scores that reflect human variability rather than selecting a single correct sense. We propose a multi-target fine-tuning framework for decoder-only large language models that jointly optimizes regression for score prediction and text generation for interpretable explanations. To address inter-annotator variability, we adopt objective-level strategies to enhance robustness. Our system achieves first place, demonstrating the effectiveness of unified regressive–generative modeling for fine-grained plausibility estimation.

SRCB at SemEval-2026 Task 5 A Multi-Target Finetuning Framework for Large Language Models with Joint Regression and Text Generation

We propose a CodeBERT-based system for detecting AI-generated code under severe cross-language and cross-domain distribution shift. Our approach conducts a controlled comparison between a fully frozen backbone and a partially fine-tuned configuration that unfreezes only the final transformer layer with discriminative learning rates. While partial fine-tuning substantially improves in-domain performance, the frozen backbone demonstrates stronger robustness under out-of-distribution evaluation. Our results highlight a trade-off between task adaptation and cross-language generalization in machine-generated code detection.

Team_Omega at SemEval-2026 Task 13: Frozen vs. Trainable Representations for Out-of-Distribution AI-Generated Code Detection: A CodeBERT Fine-Tuning Study

The Narrative Story Similarity and Narrative Representation Learning (NSNRL) task measures the narrative similarity between two stories based on three core aspects: the abstract theme, the course of action, and the outcomes. Our system leverages LLMs both for extracting high-level aspects and to encode them with state-of-the-art generalist embedding models. We then apply a series of embedding post-processing steps and learn to fit the embedding space with a Mahalanobis-like diagonal metric. We show that some of these techniques should not be applied universally, as they do not necessarily increase performance or overfit, depending on the base encoder. Our system outperforms the baseline only in Track B, ranking twelfth out of twenty-seven on the final leaderboard, while performing lower than the baseline accuracy in Track A.

Team UBSE at SemEval-2026 Task 4: Adapting Generalist Embeddings for Narrative Representations

This paper presents a neuro-symbolic ensemble for determining narrative similarity by moving beyond surface-level text matching toward structural and causal alignment. The architecture fuses three primary signals: action-focused neural embeddings that isolate event trajectories , a symbolic Structural Survival Ratio (SSR) that measures the preservation of discrete event tuples via dependency parsing , and high-level structural comparisons conducted by the gpt-5-mini model. Evaluated on the SemEval-2026 Task 4 test set, the integrated ensemble achieved an accuracy of 68.25%.

harapalb at SemEval-2026 Task 4: Multi-Signal Neuro-Symbolic Ensembles for Narrative Similarity

We describe the Seals-NLP system for SemEval-2026 Task 9 (POLAR) Subtask 1, binary polarization detection. Our study compares (i) fully fine-tuned encoder-only transformers, (ii) QLoRA-based fine-tuned open-weight LLMs, and (iii) zero-shot prompted LLMs. ModernBERT-large emerges as the most cost-effective option, matching or surpassing larger fine-tuned and zero-shot LLMs in macro-F1 while requiring substantially less memory and lower latency. An error analysis by failure mode and polarization subtype reveals systematic over-triggering on political cue words and under-detection of sarcastic vilification and multifaceted attacks in the POLAR dataset across all models.

Seals-NLP at SemEval-2026 Task 9: A Comparative Study of Transformer Architectures for Polarization Detection

This paper describes our submission to SemEval-2026 Task 8 on multi-turn retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We propose a hybrid multi-stage pipeline that combines high-recall lexical retrieval, dual-embedding dense re-ranking with reciprocal rank fusion, LLM-based relevance judging, and strictly constrained evidence-grounded generation. Our design emphasizes robustness and faithfulness across the full retrieval-to-generation pipeline. Our results suggest that relevance-aware filtering and constrained generation are important for improving faithfulness and overall RAG performance.

GenAIus at SemEval-2026 Task 8: Beyond Retrieval with Relevance-Aware RAG for Faithful Multi-Turn Generation

We first use Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct model to generate hard negatives from three
narrative dimensions. We then train a Qwen3-Embedding-8B model with a multi-negative
contrastive objective and use self-distllation.

Team HITS at SemEval-2026 Task 4:Enhancing narrative text embedding model training with hard negatives generation and self-distillation

We describe our system for predicting sense plausibility in short narratives. Our approach centers on task decomposition: instead of predicting a score directly, we break the problem into simpler subtasks and combine their outputs. We further improve performance by ensembling complementary signals, including word sense disambiguation and fine-tuned embedding models. We also find empirical support for the one-homonym-per-translation principle of Hauer and Kondrak (2020a). Our best ensemble system achieves competitive performance in the official evaluation. Our code and data are available on GitHub.

UAlberta at SemEval-2026 Task 5: Disambiguating Stories via Task Decomposition

Our submission presented in this paper is for SemEval-2026 Task 9: Multilingual Text Classification Challenge - Polarization Detection and it covers all three subtasks: (1) binary polarization detection, (2) polarization type classification and (3) polarization manifestation identification. We adopt a systematic approach of research on short designed prompts by considering twelve designed prompts that are different in terminology clarity, detail of the definition, guidance of reasoning and in-context examples use. The experiments are conducted using aya-101 and Gemma3-27B, with the latter chosen for the submission at the end of the development through performance considerations. Our system has an average macro level \textbf{F1-score of 0.762 on Subtask 1, 0.587 on Subtask 2 and 0.444 on Subtask 3} with the average accuracy of 0.819, 0.678 and 0.498, respectively, on the official test set averaged among 22 languages, respectively. With cross-task and cross-lingual analysis, we demonstrate that prompt-based approaches can be used effectively to detect coarse-grained polarization but encounter more and more difficulties as far as fine-grained and multi-label sociolinguistic classification is concerned.

Lingo_Research_Group at SemEval-2026 Task 9: Evaluating Prompt Variants for Polarization Detection

We present a hybrid system for SemEval 2026
Task 5: Rating Plausibility of Word Senses in
Ambiguous Stories. Our approach reframes
LLMs as feature generators rather than direct
predictors. We combine two subsystems: one
that appends LLM-generated hints to the in-
put context and trains an encoder-based regres-
sion model, and another that feeds structured
hints from multiple LLM configurations into a
lightweight regression ensemble. We generate
multilingual enrichments to probe LLMs for
complementary signals and take advantage of
the fact that translation into certain languages
implicitly disambiguates word senses, making
the encoder more robust. The 50/50 ensem-
ble achieves 859/930 (92.37%) accuracy with
Spearman ρ= 0.8384 on the test set, exceed-
ing the estimated human ceiling of 89.2%. The
same LLM enrichments, processed through fun-
damentally different paradigms (tabular regres-
sion vs. full-text encoding), produce comple-
mentary errors that cancel under ensembling.
Notably, simple 50/50 averaging captures this
gain without any learned combiner, suggest-
ing that

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