Darya Hryhoryeva
2026
UKPPsycontrol at SemEval-2026 Task 2: Modeling Valence and Arousal Dynamics from Text
Darya Hryhoryeva | Amaia Zurinaga | Hamidreza Jamalabadi | Iryna Gurevych
Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)
Darya Hryhoryeva | Amaia Zurinaga | Hamidreza Jamalabadi | Iryna Gurevych
Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)
This paper presents our system developed for SemEval-2026 Task 2. The task requires modeling both current affect and short-term affective change in chronologically ordered user-generated texts. We explore three complementary approaches: (1) LLM prompting under user-aware and user-agnostic settings, (2) a pairwise Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) model with Ising-style interactions for structured transition modeling, and (3) a lightweight neural regression model incorporating recent affective trajectories and trainable user embeddings. Our findings indicate that LLMs effectively capture static affective signals from text, whereas short-term affective variation in this dataset is more strongly explained by recent numeric state trajectories than by textual semantics.