GUNLP at SemEval-2026 Task 10: Psycholinguistic Conspiracy Marker Extraction and Detection (PsyCoMark)

Rojin Ziaei, Mahsa Khoshnoodi, Nazli Goharian


Abstract
This paper presents the Georgetown University NLP (GUNLP) system developed for SemEval 2026 Task 10: Psycholinguistic Conspiracy Marker Extraction and Detection, addressing the classification of conspiratorial beliefs in Reddit posts (Subtask 2). Our approach leverages COVID-Twitter-BERT v2 (CT-BERT-v2) within a multi-task learning framework that jointly optimizes conspiracy classification and emotion label prediction through a dual-head architecture. To address data scarcity, we enrich the training set using paraphrasing-based data augmentation and GPT-5-generated chain-of-thought emotion annotations, effectively doubling the training corpus to approximately 8,600 examples. We evaluate two input configurations: text only and text concatenated with emotion labels. The emotion-aware configuration achieves the strongest performance with an F1 score of 0.87 on the official development set, outperforming the text-only baseline by five F1 points and demonstrating the value of paraphrased samples and affective auxiliary supervision for conspiracy detection in social media text.
Anthology ID:
2026.semeval-1.342
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:
2715–2722
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.semeval-1.342/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rojin Ziaei, Mahsa Khoshnoodi, and Nazli Goharian. 2026. GUNLP at SemEval-2026 Task 10: Psycholinguistic Conspiracy Marker Extraction and Detection (PsyCoMark). In Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026), pages 2715–2722, San Diego, California, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GUNLP at SemEval-2026 Task 10: Psycholinguistic Conspiracy Marker Extraction and Detection (PsyCoMark) (Ziaei et al., SemEval 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.semeval-1.342.pdf