thaulab@EEUCA 2026: Who Said What to Whom? A Targeting-Aware Neural-Symbolic Pipeline for Gaming Toxicity Detection

Anmol Guragain, Marcos Estecha-Garitagoitia, Luis Fernando D’Haro, Ricardo de Córdoba


Abstract
This paper describes our system for the EEUCA 2026 Shared Task on toxicity classification in gaming chat. We implement a three-stage pipeline combining an ensemble of two compact transformers (DeBERTa-v3-base, 184M; XLM-RoBERTa-base, 278M) with a Linguistically-Informed Mediator (LIM) that resolves inter-model disagreements through corpus-backed lexical normalization, class-conditional unigram scoring, multilingual profanity detection, and agentive targeting analysis grounded in speech act theory. The LIM specifically targets the minority classes (Hate Harassment, Threats, and Extremism), which are the most safety-critical categories in real-world gaming moderation. To address the extreme class imbalance (1,450:1 Non-toxic to Extremism ratio), we introduce a two-stage data augmentation strategy using only the provided training data. Our system achieves a Macro F1 of 0.6441 and accuracy of 0.9062 on the official test set, ranking 3rd in Macro F1 and 1st in accuracy among all teams. The proposed pipeline is domain-portable: adapting to other gaming platforms requires substituting only the game-specific entity lexicon. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/Anmol2059/thaulab_EEUCA.
Anthology ID:
2026.eeuca-1.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Event Extraction and Understanding: Challenges and Applications (EEUCA 2026)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, USA
Editors:
Ali Hürriyetoğlu, Surendrabikram Thapa, Hristo Tanev
Venues:
EEUCA | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
151–160
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.eeuca-1.16/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anmol Guragain, Marcos Estecha-Garitagoitia, Luis Fernando D’Haro, and Ricardo de Córdoba. 2026. thaulab@EEUCA 2026: Who Said What to Whom? A Targeting-Aware Neural-Symbolic Pipeline for Gaming Toxicity Detection. In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Event Extraction and Understanding: Challenges and Applications (EEUCA 2026), pages 151–160, San Diego, California, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
thaulab@EEUCA 2026: Who Said What to Whom? A Targeting-Aware Neural-Symbolic Pipeline for Gaming Toxicity Detection (Guragain et al., EEUCA 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.eeuca-1.16.pdf