This study examines the capability of LLMs to predict emotional ratings of Russian words by comparing their assessments with both native speakers’ ratings and expert evaluations. The research utilises two datasets: the ENRuN database containing associative emotional ratings of Russian nouns by native speakers, and RusEmoLex, an expert-compiled lexicon. Various open-source LLMs were evaluated, including international models (Llama-3, Qwen 2.5), Russian-developed models, and Russian-adapted variants, representing three parameter scales. The findings reveal distinct patterns in model performance: Russian-adapted models demonstrated superior alignment with native speakers’ ratings, whilst model size was not a decisive factor. Conversely, larger models showed better performance in matching expert assessments, with language adaptation having minimal impact. Emotional or sensitive lexis with strong connotations produce a more substantial human-model gap.

We present the SemEval-2026 shared task on Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (DimABSA), which improves traditional ABSA by modeling sentiment along valence–arousal (VA) dimensions rather than using categorical polarity labels. To extend ABSA beyond consumer reviews to public-issue discourse (e.g., political, energy, and climate issues), we introduce an additional task, Dimensional Stance Analysis (DimStance), which treats stance targets as aspects and reformulates stance detection as regression in the VA space. The task consists of two tracks: Track A (DimABSA) and Track B (DimStance). Track A includes three subtasks: (1) dimensional aspect sentiment regression, (2) dimensional aspect sentiment triplet extraction, and (3) dimensional aspect sentiment quadruplet extraction, while Track B includes only the regression subtask for stance targets. We also introduce a continuous F1 (cF1) metric to jointly evaluate structured extraction and VA regression.The task attracted more than 400 participants, resulting in 112 final submissions and 42 system description papers. We report baseline results, discuss top-performing systems, and analyze key design choices to provide insights into dimensional sentiment analysis at the aspect and stance-target levels. All resources are available on our GitHub repository.

Nested named entity recognition identifies entities contained within other entities, but requires expensive multi-level annotation. While flat NER corpora exist abundantly, nested resources remain scarce. We investigate whether models can learn nested structure from flat annotations alone, evaluating four approaches: string inclusions (substring matching), entity corruption (pseudo-nested data), flat neutralization (reducing false negative signal), and a hybrid fine-tuned + LLM pipeline. On NEREL, a Russian benchmark with 29 entity types where 21% of entities are nested, our best combined method achieves 26.37% inner F1, closing 40% of the gap to full nested supervision. Code is available at https://github.com/fulstock/Learning-from-Flat-Annotations.

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) focuses on extracting sentiment at a fine-grained aspect level and has been widely applied across real-world domains. However, existing ABSA research relies on coarse-grained categorical labels (e.g., positive, negative), which limits its ability to capture nuanced affective states. To address this limitation, we adopt a dimensional approach that represents sentiment with continuous valence–arousal (VA) scores, enabling fine-grained analysis at both the aspect and sentiment levels. To this end, we introduce DimABSA, the first multilingual, dimensional ABSA resource annotated with both traditional ABSA elements (aspect terms, aspect categories, and opinion terms) and newly introduced VA scores. This resource contains 76,958 aspect instances across 42,590 sentences, spanning six languages and four domains. We further introduce three subtasks that combine VA scores with different ABSA elements, providing a bridge from traditional ABSA to dimensional ABSA. Given that these subtasks involve both categorical and continuous outputs, we propose a new unified metric, continuous F1 (cF1), which incorporates VA prediction error into standard F1. We provide a comprehensive benchmark using both prompted and fine-tuned large language models across all subtasks. Our results show that DimABSA is a challenging benchmark and provides a foundation for advancing multilingual dimensional ABSA. We publicly released the DimABSA dataset, which was used for Track A of SemEval-2026 Task 3, attracting over 300 participants.