AlphaLyrae at SemEval-2026 Task 9: Metric Learning and Asymmetric Loss for Chinese Polarization Analysis

Minh-Hoang Le, Khoan Phung


Abstract
For the Chinese track of SemEval-2026 Task 9 (Detecting Online Polarization), we address two key challenges: polarized content frequently uses implicit language (e.g., homophones and coded terms) to evade moderation, and class distributions exhibit severe long-tail imbalance. We propose a metric learning approach that frames polarization detection as semantic similarity matching, which captures implicit language patterns better than linear decision boundaries. We fine-tune an ERNIE-3.0 encoder with SoftTriple loss and apply ik/iNN retrieval for binary detection (Subtask 1). For multi-label categorization (Subtasks 2 and 3), we transfer learned representations from the detection model and fine-tune with Asymmetric Loss. A priority-based stratified cross-validation strategy ensures minority classes appear across all training folds despite extreme label skew. Evaluated on the official 1,927-sample test set using an end-to-end pipeline, our system achieved Macro-F1 scores of 0.9190 (Rank 6) on Polarization Detection, 0.8244 (Rank 5) on Type Classification, and 0.6670 (Rank 4) on Manifestation Identification.
Anthology ID:
2026.semeval-1.72
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:
503–508
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.semeval-1.72/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Minh-Hoang Le and Khoan Phung. 2026. AlphaLyrae at SemEval-2026 Task 9: Metric Learning and Asymmetric Loss for Chinese Polarization Analysis. In Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026), pages 503–508, San Diego, California, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AlphaLyrae at SemEval-2026 Task 9: Metric Learning and Asymmetric Loss for Chinese Polarization Analysis (Le & Phung, SemEval 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.semeval-1.72.pdf
Supplementarymaterial:
 2026.semeval-1.72.SupplementaryMaterial.zip