@inproceedings{singhal-etal-2026-blue,
    title = "blue at {S}em{E}val-2026 Task 5: {N}arr{BERT} : Narrative-Aware {BERT} for Word Sense Disambiguation",
    author = "Singhal, Rhea  and
      Sharma, Krish  and
      Sharma, Lakksh  and
      Bedi, Jatin",
    editor = "Kochmar, Ekaterina  and
      Ghosh, Debanjan  and
      North, Kai  and
      Komachi, Mamoru",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 20th {I}nternational {W}orkshop on {S}emantic {E}valuation (2026)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.semeval-1.306/",
    pages = "2427--2431",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-414-9",
    abstract = "This paper outlines the method submitted by team blue for the SemEval-2026 Task 5: Rating Plausibility of Word Senses in Ambiguous Sentences through Narrative (AmbiStory). The task requires predicting reasonable scores that match human thoughts and judgments instead of just picking a single correct sense as the output. This means that contextual reasoning with fine-grain contextual modeling is vital. In order to tackle this problem, we suggest a BERT-based cross-encoder regression model. This model encodes the entire narrative context, which includes the precontext, the ambiguous sentence, and the ending, along with candidate sense definitions and example usages. Unlike bi-encoder sentence-level methods, our model allows for token-level interaction between story cues and sense meanings. This interaction helps capture subtle narrative disambiguation signals. We conduct a systematic exploration of model architectures and training strategies, progressing from a sentence-transformer baseline to an optimised BERT cross-encoder. On the development set, our best configuration achieves a Spearman rank correlation of 0.66. On the official test set, the system achieves a Spearman correlation of 0.4866 and an Accuracy-within-Standard-Deviation of 0.6613, substantially outperforming sentence-transformer bi-encoder baselines."
}