@inproceedings{kumari-etal-2026-polyticstamil,
    title = "{P}oly{T}ics{T}amil{\_}{A}lchemists@{D}ravidian{L}ang{T}ech@{ACL} 2026: An Augmentation-Driven Focal Ensemble Model for Political Sentiment Analysis in {T}amil",
    author = "Kumari, Jyoti  and
      Francis, Meclin A  and
      Ulli, Vinay Babu  and
      Sreekumar, Malavika  and
      Johnson, Joel",
    editor = "Chakravarthi, Bharathi Raja  and
      Priyadharshini, Ruba  and
      Madasamy, Anand Kumar  and
      Thavareesan, Sajeetha  and
      Rajiakodi, Saranya  and
      Navaneethakrishnan, Subalalitha  and
      Chinnappa, Dhivya  and
      Palani, Balasubramanian  and
      Subramanian, Malliga  and
      Shanmugavadivel, Kogilavani  and
      Rajalakshmi, Ratnavel",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for {D}ravidian Languages",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Underline (Virtual)",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.dravidianlangtech-1.50/",
    pages = "326--330",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-401-9",
    abstract = "This paper describes our system submitted to the DravidianLangTech@ACL 2026 shared task on Political Multiclass Sentiment Analysis of Tamil X (Twitter) Comments. The task requires classifying Tamil political tweets into seven sentiment categories. We address two key challenges, severe class imbalance and semantic overlap between categories, through a three-stage pipeline. First, we balance the training set by augmenting minority classes via back-translation and transformer-based paraphrasing. Second, we fine-tune XLM-RoBERTa-base using a class-weighted Focal Loss ($\gamma{=}2$), which directs learning towards hard, ambiguous samples. Third, we train five models under Stratified 5-Fold Cross-Validation and average their softmax outputs at inference time. On the official test set, the system achieves a Macro-F1 of 0.3539. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/meclin2345/PolyTicsTamil{\_}Alchemists"
}