Ankit Dash
2026
Semantic Vectors at SemEval-2026 Task 9: Robust Multilingual Polarization Detection via Dual-Encoder Fusion and Expert Ensembling
Ankit Dash | Priyanshu Mittal | Piyush Prashant | Sunil Saumya
Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)
Ankit Dash | Priyanshu Mittal | Piyush Prashant | Sunil Saumya
Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)
We present SEMANTIC VECTORS, our system for POLAR@SemEval-2026 Task 9 on multilingual online polarization detection across 22 typologically diverse languages. Polarization is frequently conveyed through implicit rhetorical framing, making cross-lingual detection highly challenging. We address this with a Siamese dual-encoder jointly fine-tuning mDeBERTa-v3-base and XLM-ROBERTa-large via 4-bit QLoRA, fused with language-specific expert models (GBERT, Italian BERT, Swahili BERT) through an XGBoost meta-stacker with per-language Platt calibration. Rather than addressing class imbalance, focal loss functions as a hard-example miner, concentrating gradients on subtly framed instances rather than lexically obvious ones. Combined with per-language threshold optimization, our system achieves macro-F1=0.797 and accuracy=0.827 across all 22 languages.