NYCU-NLP at SemEval-2026 Task 9: Stacking Small Language Models for Multilingual, Multicultural and Multievent Polarization Detection

Ding-Xiang Lin, Po-Chun Chu, Lung-Hao Lee


Abstract
This paper presents the NYCU-NLP system for SemEval-2026 Task 9 on online polarization analysis. Our approach explores the effectiveness of instruction-tuned small language models (SLMs), including Phi-4 (14B), Mistral-small-3.2 (24B), and Gemma-3 (27B), with task-specific prompting strategies and combined them via a stacking ensemble to leverage complementary modeling capacities. Evaluated across 22 languages and three subtasks, our system achieved macro-averaged F1 scores of 0.8071 for Polarization Detection (Subtask 1), 0.6108 for Polarization Type Classification (Subtask 2), and 0.5111 for Polarization Manifestation Identification (Subtask 3). Notably, our approach ranked first in 15, second in 12, and third in 10 of the 62 language-specific leaderboards, demonstrating the robustness and competitiveness of stacking-based SLM ensembles in multilingual settings.
Anthology ID:
2026.semeval-1.166
Volume:
Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, USA
Editors:
Ekaterina Kochmar, Debanjan Ghosh, Kai North, Mamoru Komachi
Venues:
SemEval | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1258–1267
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.semeval-1.166/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ding-Xiang Lin, Po-Chun Chu, and Lung-Hao Lee. 2026. NYCU-NLP at SemEval-2026 Task 9: Stacking Small Language Models for Multilingual, Multicultural and Multievent Polarization Detection. In Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026), pages 1258–1267, San Diego, California, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NYCU-NLP at SemEval-2026 Task 9: Stacking Small Language Models for Multilingual, Multicultural and Multievent Polarization Detection (Lin et al., SemEval 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.semeval-1.166.pdf
Supplementarymaterial:
 2026.semeval-1.166.SupplementaryMaterial.zip