@inproceedings{cai-etal-2025-ustnlp16,
    title = "Ustnlp16 at {S}em{E}val-2025 Task 9: Improving Model Performance through Imbalance Handling and Focal Loss",
    author = "Cai, Zhuoang  and
      Li, Zhenghao  and
      Liu, Yang  and
      Guo, Liyuan  and
      Song, Yangqiu",
    editor = "Rosenthal, Sara  and
      Ros{\'a}, Aiala  and
      Ghosh, Debanjan  and
      Zampieri, Marcos",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-08/2025.semeval-1.200/",
    pages = "1522--1527",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-273-2",
    abstract = "Classification tasks often suffer from imbal- anced data distribution, which presents chal- lenges in food hazard detection due to severe class imbalances, short and unstructured text, and overlapping semantic categories. In this paper, we present our system for SemEval- 2025 Task 9: Food Hazard Detection, which ad- dresses these issues by applying data augmenta- tion techniques to improve classification perfor- mance. We utilize transformer-based models, BERT and RoBERTa, as backbone classifiers and explore various data balancing strategies, including random oversampling, Easy Data Augmentation (EDA), and focal loss. Our ex- periments show that EDA effectively mitigates class imbalance, leading to significant improve- ments in accuracy and F1 scores. Furthermore, combining focal loss with oversampling and EDA further enhances model robustness, par- ticularly for hard-to-classify examples. These findings contribute to the development of more effective NLP-based classification models for food hazard detection."
}