Ensuring food safety requires effective detection of potential hazards in food products. This paper presents the participation of VerbaNexAI in the SemEval-2025 Task 9 challenge, which focuses on the automatic identification and classification of food hazards from descriptive texts. Our approach employs a machine learning-based strategy, leveraging a Random Forest classifier combined with TF-IDF vectorization and character n-grams (n=2-5) to enhance linguistic pattern recognition. The system achieved competitive performance in hazard and product classification tasks, obtaining notable macro and micro F1 scores. However, we identified challenges such as handling underrepresented categories and improving generalization in multilingual contexts. Our findings highlight the need to refine preprocessing techniques and model architectures to enhance food hazard detection. We made the source code publicly available to encourage reproducibility and collaboration in future research.

Emotion detection in text has become a highly relevant research area due to the growing interest in understanding emotional states from human interaction in the digital world. This study presents an approach for emotion detection in text using a RoBERTa-based model, optimized for multi-label classification of the emotions joy, sadness, fear, anger, and surprise in the context of the SemEval 2025 - Task 11: Bridging the Gap in Text-Based Emotion Detection competition. Advanced preprocessing strategies were incorporated, including the augmentation of the training dataset through automatic translation to improve the representativeness of less frequent emotions. Additionally, a loss function adjustment mechanism was implemented to mitigate class imbalance, enabling the model to enhance its detection capability for underrepresented categories. The experimental results reflect competitive performance, with a macro F1 of 0.6577 on the development set and 0.6266 on the test set. In the competition, the model ranked 47th, demonstrating solid performance against the challenge posed.

Emotion intensity prediction plays a crucial role in affective computing, allowing for a more precise understanding of how emotions are conveyed in text. This study proposes a system that estimates emotion intensity levels by integrating contextual language representations with numerical emotion-based features derived from Valence, Arousal, and Dominance (VAD). The methodology combines BERT embeddings, predefined VAD values per emotion, and machine learning techniques to enhance emotion detection, without relying on external lexicons. The system was evaluated on the SemEval-2025 Task 11 Track B dataset, predicting five emotions (anger, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise) on an ordinal scale.The results highlight the effectiveness of integrating contextual representations with predefined VAD values, enabling a more nuanced representation of emotional intensity. However, challenges arose in distinguishing intermediate intensity levels, affecting classification accuracy for certain emotions. Despite these limitations, the study provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses of combining deep learning with numerical emotion modeling, contributing to the development of more robust emotion prediction systems. Future research will explore advanced architectures and additional linguistic features to enhance model generalization across diverse textual domains.

This paper presents the VerbaNexAi Lab system for SemEval-2025 Task 2: Entity-Aware Machine Translation (EA-MT), focusing on translating named entities from English to Spanish across categories such as musical works, foods, and landmarks. Our approach integrates detailed data preprocessing, enrichment with 240,432 Wikidata entity pairs, and fine-tuning of the MarianMT model to enhance entity translation accuracy. Official results reveal a COMET score of 87.09, indicating high fluency, an M-ETA score of 24.62, highlighting challenges in entity precision, and an Overall Score of 38.38, ranking last among 34 systems. While Wikidata improved translations for common entities like “Águila de San Juan,” our static methodology underperformed compared to dynamic LLM-based approaches.

Thefirst approach leverages advanced LLMs, employing a chain-of-thought prompting strategywith one-shot learning and Google snippets forcontext retrieval, demonstrating superior performance. The second approach utilizes traditional NLP analysis techniques, including semantic ranking, token-level extraction, and rigorous data cleaning, to identify hallucinations

The automatic identification of medical errors in clinical notes is crucial for improving the quality of healthcare services.LLMs emerge as a powerful artificial intelligence tool for automating this task. However, LLMs present vulnerabilities, high costs, and sometimes a lack of transparency. This article addresses the detection of medical errors through the fine-tuning approach, conducting a comprehensive comparison between various models and exploring in depth the components of the machine learning pipeline. The results obtained with the fine-tuned ClinicalBert and Gated recurrent units (Gru) models show an accuracy of 0.56 and 0.55, respectively. This approach not only mitigates the problems associated with the use of LLMs but also demonstrates how exhaustive iteration in critical phases of the pipeline, especially in feature selection, can facilitate the automation of clinical record analysis.

This study introduces an innovative approach to emotion recognition and reasoning about emotional shifts in code-mixed conversations, leveraging the NRC VAD Lexicon and computational models such as Transformer and GRU. Our methodology systematically identifies and categorizes emotional triggers, employing Emotion Flip Reasoning (EFR) and Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC). Through experiments with the MELD and MaSaC datasets, we demonstrate the model’s precision in accurately identifying emotional shift triggers and classifying emotions, evidenced by a significant improvement in accuracy as shown by an increase in the F1 score when including VAD analysis. These results underscore the importance of incorporating complex emotional dimensions into conversation analysis, paving new pathways for understanding emotional dynamics in code-mixed texts.

This study delineates our participation in the SemEval-2024 Task 3: Multimodal Emotion Cause Analysis in Conversations, focusing on developing and applying an innovative methodology for emotion detection and cause analysis in conversational contexts. Leveraging logistic regression, we analyzed conversational utterances to identify emotions per utterance. Subsequently, we employed a dependency analysis pipeline, utilizing SpaCy to extract significant chunk features, including object, subject, adjectival modifiers, and adverbial clause modifiers. These features were analyzed within a graph-like framework, conceptualizing the dependency relationships as edges connecting emotional causes (tails) to their corresponding emotions (heads). Despite the novelty of our approach, the preliminary results were unexpectedly humbling, with a consistent score of 0.0 across all evaluated metrics. This paper presents our methodology, the challenges encountered, and an analysis of the potential factors contributing to these outcomes, offering insights into the complexities of emotion-cause analysis in multimodal conversational data.

This paper presents an artificial intelligence model designed to detect semantic relationships in natural language, addressing the challenges of SemEval 2024 Task 1. Our goal is to advance machine understanding of the subtleties of human language through semantic analysis. Using a novel combination of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, and an attention mechanism, our model is trained on the STR-2022 dataset. This approach enhances its ability to detect semantic nuances in different texts. The model achieved an 81.92% effectiveness rate and ranked 24th in SemEval 2024 Task 1. These results demonstrate its robustness and adaptability in detecting semantic relationships and validate its performance in diverse linguistic contexts. Our work contributes to natural language processing by providing insights into semantic textual relatedness. It sets a benchmark for future research and promises to inspire innovations that could transform digital language processing and interaction.

Nowadays, persuasive messages are more and more frequent in social networks, which generates great concern in several communities, given that persuasion seeks to guide others towards the adoption of ideas, attitudes or actions that they consider to be beneficial to themselves. The efficient detection of news genre categories, detection of framing and detection of persuasion techniques requires several scientific disciplines, such as computational linguistics and sociology. Here we illustrate how we use lexical features given a news article, determine whether it is an opinion piece, aims to report factual news, or is satire. This paper presents a novel strategy for news based on Lexical Weirdness. The results are part of our participation in subtasks 1 and 2 in SemEval 2023 Task 3.