Eleale Tee
2026
Khaleesiyali at SemEval-2026 Task 2: Lexicon-Augmented RoBERTa for Valence–Arousal Regression on Ecological Essays
Eleale Tee
Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)
Eleale Tee
Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)
This paper presents a lexicon-augmentedRoBERTa system for the SemEval-2026 Task2 valence–arousal regression challenge. Themodel integrates deep contextual embeddingswith a 6-dimensional feature vector derivedfrom the NRC VAD lexicon, achieving a hightoken coverage rate of 72.05%. Under officialuser-aware evaluation, the system reached acompetitive average composite correlation of0.547, significantly outperforming the ridgeregressionbaseline. The system demonstratedparticular robustness in valence (r = 0.656)and achieved strong generalization to unseenusers (rarousal = 0.519). These findings indicatethat lightweight lexicon-based statisticsprovide valuable complementary cues for longitudinalemotion modeling in modern transformerarchitectures.