SubmissionNumber#=%=#264 FinalPaperTitle#=%=#AILS-NTUA at SemEval-2024 Task 9: Cracking Brain Teasers: Transformer Models for Lateral Thinking Puzzles ShortPaperTitle#=%=# NumberOfPages#=%=#14 CopyrightSigned#=%=#Ioannis Panagiotopoulos JobTitle#==#Student Organization#==#National Technical University of Athens, Heroon Polytechniou 9, 15780 Zografou, Greece Abstract#==#In this paper, we outline our submission for the SemEval-2024 Task 9 competition: 'BRAINTEASER: A Novel Task Defying Common Sense'. We engage in both sub-tasks: Sub-task A-Sentence Puzzle and Sub-task B-Word Puzzle. We evaluate a plethora of pre-trained transformer-based language models of different sizes through fine-tuning. Subsequently, we undertake an analysis of their scores and responses to aid future researchers in understanding and utilizing these models effectively. Our top-performing approaches secured competitive positions on the competition leaderboard across both sub-tasks. In the evaluation phase, our best submission attained an average accuracy score of 81.7% in the Sentence Puzzle, and 85.4% in the Word Puzzle, significantly outperforming the best neural baseline (ChatGPT) by more than 20% and 30% respectively. Author{1}{Firstname}#=%=#Ioannis Author{1}{Lastname}#=%=#Panagiotopoulos Author{1}{Username}#=%=#giannispana Author{1}{Email}#=%=#yiannispn@gmail.com Author{1}{Affiliation}#=%=#National Technical University of Athens Author{2}{Firstname}#=%=#George Author{2}{Lastname}#=%=#Filandrianos Author{2}{Username}#=%=#geofila Author{2}{Email}#=%=#geofila@islab.ntua.gr Author{2}{Affiliation}#=%=#National Technical University of Athens Author{3}{Firstname}#=%=#Maria Author{3}{Lastname}#=%=#Lymperaiou Author{3}{Username}#=%=#marialymperaiou Author{3}{Email}#=%=#marialymp@islab.ntua.gr Author{3}{Affiliation}#=%=#National Technical University of Athens Author{4}{Firstname}#=%=#Giorgos Author{4}{Lastname}#=%=#Stamou Author{4}{Username}#=%=#gstam Author{4}{Email}#=%=#gstam@cs.ntua.gr Author{4}{Affiliation}#=%=#National Technical University of Athens ========== èéáğö