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:
- 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)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.mwe-1.16.pdf