HALELab-NITK at #SMM4H-HeaRD2026: Inclusion of Feature Engineering for Detection of Patient Metadata in SARS-CoV2 Sequencing Articles

Aakarsh Bansal, Abhishek Srinivas, Sowmya Kamath S.


Abstract
This article presents a system description for our work as part of Task 5 of the SMM4H-HeaRD 2026 workshop. We fine-tune pretrained BERT and BiomedBERT models and further enhance them using custom feature augmentation techniques. Incorporating these engineered features results in improved performance, with the best model achieving a validation F1 score of 0.8419 and an evaluation phase F1 score of 0.753.
Anthology ID:
2026.smm4h-1.35
Volume:
Proceedings of the 11th Social Media Mining for Health Research and Applications (SMM4H-HeaRD 2026) Workshop and Shared Tasks
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, United States
Editors:
Guillermo Lopez-Garcia, Graciela Gonzalez-Hernandez
Venues:
SMM4H | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
222–224
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.smm4h-1.35/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aakarsh Bansal, Abhishek Srinivas, and Sowmya Kamath S.. 2026. HALELab-NITK at #SMM4H-HeaRD2026: Inclusion of Feature Engineering for Detection of Patient Metadata in SARS-CoV2 Sequencing Articles. In Proceedings of the 11th Social Media Mining for Health Research and Applications (SMM4H-HeaRD 2026) Workshop and Shared Tasks, pages 222–224, San Diego, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
HALELab-NITK at #SMM4H-HeaRD2026: Inclusion of Feature Engineering for Detection of Patient Metadata in SARS-CoV2 Sequencing Articles (Bansal et al., SMM4H 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.smm4h-1.35.pdf