Leon Hecht


2026

This paper presents IIMAS-RAG, our system for SemEval-2026 Task 8 on evaluating multi-turn retrieval-augmented generation. Our approach combines LLM-based query rewriting, hybrid sparse-dense retrieval with SPLADE and Voyage-3-large fused via Reciprocal Rank Fusion, and answerability-conditioned generation with GPT-4.1. The system ranked 4th out of 38 teams in Subtask A (Retrieval) and 13th out of 29 teams in Subtask C (Full RAG). Our results show that query rewriting is the most impactful retrieval component, while generation remains challenging in low-context and partially answerable scenarios.

2024

We present our approach to solving the task of identifying the effect of outdoor activities on social anxiety based on reddit posts. We employed state-of-the-art transformer models enhanced with a combination of advanced loss functions. Data augmentation techniques were also used to address class imbalance within the training set. Our method achieved a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.655 on the test data, surpassing the workshop’s mean F1-Score of 0.519. These findings suggest that integrating weighted loss functions improves the performance of transformer models in classifying unbalanced text data, while data augmentation can improve the model’s ability to generalize.