Narrlangen at SemEval-2025 Task 10: Comparing (mostly) simple multilingual approaches to narrative classification

Andreas Blombach, Bao Minh Doan Dang, Stephanie Evert, Tamara Fuchs, Philipp Heinrich, Olena Kalashnikova, Naveed Unjum


Abstract
Our team focused on Subtask 2 (narrative classification) and tried several conceptually straightforward approaches: (1) prompt engineering of LLMs, (2) a zero-shot approach based on sentence similarities, (3) direct classification of fine-grained labels using SetFit, (4) fine-tuning encoder models on fine-grained labels, and (5) hierarchical classification using encoder models with two different classification heads. We list results for all systems on the development set, which show that the best approach was to fine-tune a pre-trained multilingual model, XLM-RoBERTa, with two additional linear layers and a softmax as classification head.
Anthology ID:
2025.semeval-1.291
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Sara Rosenthal, Aiala Rosá, Debanjan Ghosh, Marcos Zampieri
Venues:
SemEval | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2240–2248
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/transition-to-people-yaml/2025.semeval-1.291/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andreas Blombach, Bao Minh Doan Dang, Stephanie Evert, Tamara Fuchs, Philipp Heinrich, Olena Kalashnikova, and Naveed Unjum. 2025. Narrlangen at SemEval-2025 Task 10: Comparing (mostly) simple multilingual approaches to narrative classification. In Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025), pages 2240–2248, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Narrlangen at SemEval-2025 Task 10: Comparing (mostly) simple multilingual approaches to narrative classification (Blombach et al., SemEval 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/transition-to-people-yaml/2025.semeval-1.291.pdf