mdok-style at SemEval-2026 Task 9: Finetuning LLMs for Multilingual Polarization Detection

Dominik Macko, Alok Debnath, Jakub Simko


Abstract
SemEval-2026 Task 9 is focused on multilingual polarization detection. Specifically, it covers the identification of multilingual, multicultural and multievent polarization along three axes (in subtasks), namely detection, type, and manifestation. Online polarization presents a concern, because it is often followed by hate speech, offensive discourse, and social fragmentation. Therefore, its detection before it escalates is crucial for a safer and more inclusive online space. We have coped with this SemEval task by finetuning mid-size LLMs for the sequence-classification task using the QLoRA parameter-efficient finetuning technique. The training data augmented the multilingual (22 languages) training sets by anonymized, lower-cased, upper-cased, and homoglyphied counterparts, making the detection more robust.
Anthology ID:
2026.semeval-1.46
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:
314–321
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.semeval-1.46/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dominik Macko, Alok Debnath, and Jakub Simko. 2026. mdok-style at SemEval-2026 Task 9: Finetuning LLMs for Multilingual Polarization Detection. In Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026), pages 314–321, San Diego, California, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
mdok-style at SemEval-2026 Task 9: Finetuning LLMs for Multilingual Polarization Detection (Macko et al., SemEval 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.semeval-1.46.pdf