Meredith Gibbons


2026

This paper presents our findings for SemEval-2026 Task 9. We submit to all three subtasks using an LLM-as-an-annotator strategy, simulating the data annotation process with large language models. We created 30 LLM annotators using persona injection (also known as sociodemographic prompting) and experimented with various annotation aggregation methods, including Dawid-Skene and MACE. To further increase the variability in annotator responses, we used the hatefulness detection task as proxy for identifying polarisation. Our findings indicate that this reframing of the problem is effective for the binary classification of polarisation, but is less effective for finer-grained polarisation detection. For subtasks 2 and 3, majority voting yielded the best overall performance. While our unsupervised approach does not rank as highly as supervised ones, this work provides insight into the utility of persona-based prompting and the issue of LLM annotators exhibiting high intra-model agreement.

2024

This paper presents our findings for SemEval2024 Task 4. We submit only to subtask 1, applying the text-to-text framework using a FLAN-T5 model with a combination of parameter efficient fine-tuning methods - low-rankadaptation and prompt tuning. Overall, we find that the system performs well in English, but performance is limited in Bulgarian, North Macedonian and Arabic. Our analysis raises interesting questions about the effects of labelorder and label names when applying the text-to-text framework.