Tomás Bernal-beltrán

Also published as: Tomás Bernal-Beltrán


2026

Conspiracy theories pose significant societal risks and require reliable automated detection methods. In this paper, we present our system for SemEval 2026 Task 10, addressing both conspiracy detection and psycholinguistic marker extraction. We leverage multiple pretrained transformer architectures and ensemble strategies to model conspiratorial discourse at both document and token levels. For classification, our ensemble achieves a weighted F1-score of 0.7688, indicating effective performance in distinguishing conspiratorial statements. For marker extraction, we formulate the task as a BIOES sequence labeling problem and enhance predictions through ensemble and specialist models. Our results highlight both the effectiveness of transformer-based approaches and the challenges of fine-grained conspiracy marker extraction.
Political discourse frequently involves strategically ambiguous responses, particularly in high-stakes settings such as presidential debates and interviews. Detecting whether a politician has directly answered a question, provided an ambiguous reply or issued a clear non-reply remains a challenging task due to the pragmatic and rhetorical nature of political language. This paper describes our participation in the SemEval 2026 CLARITY shared task on response ambiguity detection and classification in English. We focused exclusively on Task 1 (Clarity-level Classification) and proposed a weighted soft-voting ensemble that combines four fine-tuned encoder-only transformer models: RoBERTa-large, BERT-large-cased, DistilBERT-cased and ModernBERT-large. Each model was optimized through grid search and their predicted class probability distributions were aggregated using a weighted linear combination. On the official test set, our system achieved a macro-F1 score of 0.71, ranking 26th out of 41 participating teams. Even with the performance gap compared to top-ranked systems, our results demonstrate that a lightweight set of moderately sized encoder models can provide stable and competitive performance without relying on external data or large-scale architectures.
Customer service and incident management increasingly rely on multimodal evidence, combining text, images and audio. However, general-purpose models lack domain grounding, structured output control and reliability guarantees required in regulated enterprise environments, often leading to hallucinated responses and limiting their practical deployment. This paper presents mCS-LM, a multilingual multimodal framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs), Visual Language Models (VLMs), Audio Language Models (ALMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) within a modular and traceable architecture tailored to customer service and incident management. The system introduces complementary processing flows: (i) perception modules for visual and audio understanding aligned with LLM-based reasoning, and (ii) structured report generation from multimodal evidence through supervised fine-tuning using QLoRA and efficient adaptation techniques. To mitigate hallucinations and improve factual reliability, the framework incorporates vector databases and multimodal RAG pipelines that retrieve domain-specific knowledge from external corporate sources. Formal structural schemas and validation mechanisms enforce output consistency and syntactic correctness. The platform is deployed as a web-based system with REST API integration, enabling scalable multimodal interaction across channels such as instant messaging, email and web chat. Experimental results demonstrate that multimodal generative models can be specialized for structured, domain-constrained enterprise tasks while maintaining computational viability and robustness.
Although healthcare documentation is increasingly dependent on speech-based clinical interactions, general-purpose Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Large Language Models (LLMs) lack the domain adaptation, structured control and interoperability guarantees required in regulated medical environments. These limitations often result in transcription errors, hallucinated content, and limited alignment with standardized coding systems. This paper introduces MedicaLLM, a multilingual, end-to-end framework integrating domain-adapted ASR, LLM-based structured report generation, and ontology-driven semantic enrichment within a modular architecture for clinical documentation. MedicaLLM combines medical interview transcription with structured report generation, summarization, and error correction; Named Entity Recognition (NER); and Medical Entity Linking (MEL) to align with standards such as SNOMED-CT and ICD-10. Deployed as a secure software as a service (SaaS) platform with REST API integration, MedicaLLM aims to reduce the administrative burden, improve the quality of documentation, and enhance semantic interoperability across healthcare systems, all while maintaining computational efficiency and clinical reliability.

2025

In today’s digital age, the rapid dissemination of information through social networks poses significant challenges in verifying the veracity of shared content. The proliferation of misinformation can have serious consequences, influencing public opinion, policy decisions, and social dynamics. Fact-checking plays a critical role in countering misinformation; however, the manual verification process is time-consuming, especially when dealing with multilingual content. This paper presents our participation in the Multilingual and Crosslingual Fact-Checked Claim Retrieval task (SemEval 2025), which seeks to identify previously fact-checked claims relevant to social media posts. Our proposed system leverages XLM-RoBERTa, a multilingual Transformer model, combined with metric learning and hard negative mining strategies, to optimize the semantic comparison of posts and fact-checks across multiple languages. By fine-tuning a shared embedding space and employing a multiple similarity loss function, our approach enhances retrieval accuracy while maintaining efficiency. Evaluation results demonstrate competitive performance across multiple languages, reaching 25th place and highlighting the potential of multilingual NLP models in automating the fact-checking process and mitigating misinformation spread.
Large Language Models like GPT-4, LLaMa, Mistral, and Gemma have revolutionized Natural Language Processing, advancing language comprehension, generation, and reasoning. However, they also present challenges, particularly the tendency to hallucinate—that is, to produce false or fabricated information. This paper presents our participation in Task 3 Mu-SHROOM of SemEval 2025, which focuses on detecting hallucinations in multilingual contexts. Specifically, the task requires identifying text segments generated by LLMs that correspond to hallucinations and calculating the hallucination probability for each character in the text. To address this challenge, we adopted a token classification approach using the pre-trained XLM-RoBERTa-large model, fine-tuned on the provided training set. Additionally, we integrated context from Llama-3.1-70B to enhance hallucination detection by leveraging its broader and more up-to-date knowledge base. Our approach combines the multilingual capability of XLM-RoBERTa with the contextual understanding of Llama-3.1-70B, producing a detailed hallucination probability for each character in the text. The results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms baseline methods across multiple languages, particularly in detecting token-level hallucinations.
Idioms are non-compositional linguistic expressions whose meanings cannot be directly inferred from the individual words that compose them, posing significant challenges for natural language processing systems. This paper describes the participation of the UMUTeam in Subtask A of the AdMIRe shared task (SemEval 2025), which focuses on understanding idiomatic expressions through visual and contextual representations in English and Portuguese. Specifically, the task involves ranking a set of images according to how well they represent the sense of a potentially idiomatic nominal compound within a given contextual sentence. To address this challenge, we adopted a multimodal approach that combines textual and visual features using pre-trained language models, such as BERT and XLM-RoBERTa, along with Vision Transformers. Additionally, we explored the in-context learning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly Llama-3.1-8B, for image classification. These models are trained using a regression approach to rank images according to their semantic alignment with the contextual meaning of idioms. The results show that the Llama-3.1-8B model performs best for English, ranking 32 out of 36, while the XLM + ViT model is more effective for Portuguese, ranking 21 out of 24.

2024

In these working notes we describe the UMUTeam’s participation in SemEval-2024 shared task 6, which aims at detecting grammatically correct output of Natural Language Generation with incorrect semantic information in two different setups: model-aware and model-agnostic tracks. The task is consists of three subtasks with different model setups. Our approach is based on exploiting the zero-shot classification capability of the Large Language Models LLaMa-2, Tulu and Mistral, through prompt engineering. Our system ranked eighteenth in the model-aware setup with an accuracy of 78.4% and 29th in the model-agnostic setup with an accuracy of 76.9333%.