COGNAC at SemEval-2025 Task 10: Multi-level Narrative Classification with Summarization and Hierarchical Prompting

Azwad Anjum Islam, Mark Finlayson


Abstract
We present our approach to solving the Narrative Classification portion of the Multilingual Characterization and Extraction of Narratives SemEval-2025 challenge (Task 10, Subtask 2). This task is a multi-label, multi-class document classification task, where the classes were defined via natural language titles, descriptions, short examples, and annotator instructions, with only a few (and sometime no) labeled examples for training. Our approach leverages a text-summarization, binary relevance with zero-shot prompts, and hierarchical prompting using Large Language Models (LLM) to identify the narratives and subnarratives in the provided news articles. Notably, we did not use the labeled examples to train the system. Our approach well outperforms the official baseline and achieves an F1 score of 0.55 (narratives) and 0.43 (subnarratives), and placed 2nd in the test-set leaderboard at the system submission deadline. We provide an in-depth analysis of the construction and effectiveness of our approach using both open-source (LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct) and proprietary (GPT 4o-mini) Large Language Models under different prompting setups.
Anthology ID:
2025.semeval-1.190
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Sara Rosenthal, Aiala Rosá, Debanjan Ghosh, Marcos Zampieri
Venues:
SemEval | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1442–1449
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-08/2025.semeval-1.190/
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Cite (ACL):
Azwad Anjum Islam and Mark Finlayson. 2025. COGNAC at SemEval-2025 Task 10: Multi-level Narrative Classification with Summarization and Hierarchical Prompting. In Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025), pages 1442–1449, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
COGNAC at SemEval-2025 Task 10: Multi-level Narrative Classification with Summarization and Hierarchical Prompting (Islam & Finlayson, SemEval 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-08/2025.semeval-1.190.pdf