Khoan Phung
2026
AlphaLyrae at SemEval-2026 Task 9: Metric Learning and Asymmetric Loss for Chinese Polarization Analysis
Minh-Hoang Le | Khoan Phung
Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)
Minh-Hoang Le | Khoan Phung
Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)
For the Chinese track of SemEval-2026 Task 9 (Detecting Online Polarization), we address two key challenges: polarized content frequently uses implicit language (e.g., homophones and coded terms) to evade moderation, and class distributions exhibit severe long-tail imbalance. We propose a metric learning approach that frames polarization detection as semantic similarity matching, which captures implicit language patterns better than linear decision boundaries. We fine-tune an ERNIE-3.0 encoder with SoftTriple loss and apply ik/iNN retrieval for binary detection (Subtask 1). For multi-label categorization (Subtasks 2 and 3), we transfer learned representations from the detection model and fine-tune with Asymmetric Loss. A priority-based stratified cross-validation strategy ensures minority classes appear across all training folds despite extreme label skew. Evaluated on the official 1,927-sample test set using an end-to-end pipeline, our system achieved Macro-F1 scores of 0.9190 (Rank 6) on Polarization Detection, 0.8244 (Rank 5) on Type Classification, and 0.6670 (Rank 4) on Manifestation Identification.