Kamyar Moradian Zehab
2026
Perspicere at SemEval-2026 Task 2: Modeling Longitudinal Valence and Arousal via Dense Embeddings and Agentic Reasoning
Kamyar Moradian Zehab | Mohammad Sadegh Poulaei | Nasser Mozayani
Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)
Kamyar Moradian Zehab | Mohammad Sadegh Poulaei | Nasser Mozayani
Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)
This paper presents our system for SemEval 2026 Task 2 (Subtask 1), modeling affect assessment as a longitudinal trajectory. We evaluate a tripartite affective framework of escalating contextual complexity, spanning zero-context feature extraction, latent temporal modeling via LSTM, and explicit semantic reasoning via the Teacher-Guided Clinical Reasoning Agent utilizing in-context learning. Our results show that robust static extraction outperforms explicit sequence modeling. Specifically, Matryoshka-distilled embeddings (Jasper) paired with XGBoost provided the best balance of speed and accuracy when utilizing the full training corpus (Valence composite r = 0.654, a 17.4% improvement compared with the baseline), mitigating the severe overfitting observed on partitions of the dataset. Additionally, we uncover a distinct agentic advantage: although the reasoning agent trailed mathematical regressors in tracking high-frequency fluctuations, its SOTA psychological profiling yielded the highest Between-User Valence correlation (r = 0.725), demonstrating its efficacy in user-level affective profiling. Finally, a persistent "arousal bottleneck" confirms the limitations of text-only modeling for physiological activation.