IdiomRanker-X at MWE-2026 AdMIRe 2: Multilingual Idiom-Image Alignment via Low-Rank Adaptation of Cross-Encoders

Mehmet Utku Colak


Abstract
This paper describes the system submitted for the MWE 2026 Shared Task (AdMIRe 2.0 Subtask A). The submission focused on a text-centric approach, reframing the idiom-image alignment task as a sentence-pair classification problem using mBERT (Multilingual BERT). The submitted system relied on full fine-tuning using only the English training data, achieving a Top-1 Accuracy of approximately 0.30 on the blind test set. Following the evaluation phase, significant limitations were identified in the cross-lingual generalization of the base model. In a post-evaluation study, the backbone was upgraded to XLM-RoBERTa-Large-XNLI, incorporating Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and utilizing the full multilingual dataset with hard negative mining. These improvements boosted the accuracy to 0.41, demonstrating the necessity of NLI-specific pre-training and parameter-efficient tuning for MWE-aware multimodal tasks.
Anthology ID:
2026.mwe-1.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the 22nd Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2026)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Marocco
Editors:
Atul Kr. Ojha, Verginica Barbu Mititelu, Mathieu Constant, Ivelina Stoyanova, A. Seza Doğruöz, Alexandre Rademaker
Venues:
MWE | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
134–138
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.mwe-1.16/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mehmet Utku Colak. 2026. IdiomRanker-X at MWE-2026 AdMIRe 2: Multilingual Idiom-Image Alignment via Low-Rank Adaptation of Cross-Encoders. In Proceedings of the 22nd Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2026), pages 134–138, Rabat, Marocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
IdiomRanker-X at MWE-2026 AdMIRe 2: Multilingual Idiom-Image Alignment via Low-Rank Adaptation of Cross-Encoders (Colak, MWE 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.mwe-1.16.pdf