Ahmed Sani


2026

Detecting psychological defense mechanisms in conversational text remains a challenging clinical NLP problem. For the PsyDefDetect 2026 shared task (9-class utterance classification evaluated via macro F1), our team LinguIUTics1 achieves a macro F1-score of 0.3917 on the official positive-class leaderboard, ranking 4th out of 21 registered teams and improving over the Ministral-8B task baseline (31.48 macro F1) by +7.7 absolute points (+24.4% relative). BERT-family encoders and zero-shot LLMs proved ineffective on rare classes due to severe class imbalance, leading us to QLoRA fine-tuning of Qwen3-8B. We leverage three key strategies: grouped stratified cross-validation (preventing leakage), minority-class round-robin lexical augmentation, and a post-processing pipeline with logitbias tuning and ensemble blending. Together, these components close much of the validation–leaderboard gap and substantially improve minority-class recall, driving the critical "Unclear" class (Level 8) from near-zero performance to F1=0.797.