@inproceedings{moradian-zehab-etal-2026-perspicere,
    title = "Perspicere at {S}em{E}val-2026 Task 2: Modeling Longitudinal Valence and Arousal via Dense Embeddings and Agentic Reasoning",
    author = "Moradian Zehab, Kamyar  and
      Poulaei, Mohammad Sadegh  and
      Mozayani, Nasser",
    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-1.97/",
    pages = "671--685",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-414-9",
    abstract = "This paper presents our system for SemEval 2026 Task 2 (Subtask 1), modeling affect assessment as a longitudinal trajectory. We evaluate a tripartite affective framework of escalating contextual complexity, spanning zero-context feature extraction, latent temporal modeling via LSTM, and explicit semantic reasoning via the Teacher-Guided Clinical Reasoning Agent utilizing in-context learning. Our results show that robust static extraction outperforms explicit sequence modeling. Specifically, Matryoshka-distilled embeddings (Jasper) paired with XGBoost provided the best balance of speed and accuracy when utilizing the full training corpus (Valence composite r = 0.654, a 17.4{\%} improvement compared with the baseline), mitigating the severe overfitting observed on partitions of the dataset. Additionally, we uncover a distinct agentic advantage: although the reasoning agent trailed mathematical regressors in tracking high-frequency fluctuations, its SOTA psychological profiling yielded the highest Between-User Valence correlation (r = 0.725), demonstrating its efficacy in user-level affective profiling. Finally, a persistent ``arousal bottleneck'' confirms the limitations of text-only modeling for physiological activation."
}