VAP-GameController at SemEval-2026 Task 2: Lexical-based and Emotion-Aware Approaches for Longtitudinal Emotion Prediction

Huy Le, Truong Phu, Trung Tran, Nga Nguyen, Monojit Choudhury


Abstract
In this work, we participate in SemEval-2026 Task 2, which focuses on predicting continuous valence and arousal trajectories from longitudinal ecological essays. To model fine-grained emotional dynamics, we explore three approaches: (1) hierarchical encoder-based models to capture contextual emotional patterns, (2) a lexicon-based pipeline with linguistic rules and a dual-level calibration mechanismfor personalized estimation, and (3) a hybrid framework that integrates lexical emotional signals into neural encoders. Experiments on the official dataset, evaluated using Pearson correlation (r) and MAE, show consistent improvements over baseline methods, highlighting the complementary strengths of neural representations and calibrated lexical features.
Anthology ID:
2026.semeval-1.37
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:
256–262
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.semeval-1.37/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Huy Le, Truong Phu, Trung Tran, Nga Nguyen, and Monojit Choudhury. 2026. VAP-GameController at SemEval-2026 Task 2: Lexical-based and Emotion-Aware Approaches for Longtitudinal Emotion Prediction. In Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026), pages 256–262, San Diego, California, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
VAP-GameController at SemEval-2026 Task 2: Lexical-based and Emotion-Aware Approaches for Longtitudinal Emotion Prediction (Le et al., SemEval 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.semeval-1.37.pdf
Supplementarymaterial:
 2026.semeval-1.37.SupplementaryMaterial.zip