Team Vivek Dhayaal at SemEval-2026 Task 13 Subtask B: Multi-Class Authorship Detection
Summary
A system developed for SemEval-2026 Task 10 Subtask 2 addresses conspiracy detection, employing a progressive modeling strategy. This approach compares traditional lexical representations, such as Bag-of-Words and TF-IDF features combined with Logistic Regression and Ridge classifiers, against a fine-tuned DistilRoBERTa transformer model for binary classification. All experiments were conducted using only the official task data in a CPU-only environment, without external datasets or data augmentation. The objective was to achieve acceptable performance while minimizing computational resources and model complexity. The DistilRoBERTa transformer model improved the best lexical baseline's performance from 0.67 to 0.75, demonstrating that competitive conspiracy detection is possible with lightweight and reproducible configurations.
Key takeaway
For NLP engineers developing text classification systems, especially in resource-constrained environments, this work demonstrates that you can achieve competitive performance without extensive computational resources or external datasets. By fine-tuning a lightweight transformer like DistilRoBERTa, you can improve classification accuracy significantly over lexical baselines, even on CPU-only setups. Consider this approach to build efficient, reproducible models for tasks like conspiracy detection, optimizing for both performance and operational cost.
Key insights
Competitive conspiracy detection is achievable with lightweight DistilRoBERTa models and minimal resources.
Principles
- Transformer models outperform lexical baselines in conspiracy detection.
- Resource-constrained environments can yield competitive NLP results.
- Reproducible configurations are key for reliable system development.
Method
A progressive modeling strategy compares Bag-of-Words/TF-IDF with Logistic Regression/Ridge classifiers against a fine-tuned DistilRoBERTa transformer for binary classification on official task data.
In practice
- Fine-tune DistilRoBERTa for binary text classification tasks.
- Utilize CPU-only environments for resource-efficient NLP.
- Prioritize official task data to ensure reproducibility.
Topics
- Conspiracy Detection
- DistilRoBERTa
- Transformer Models
- Text Classification
- Resource-Efficient NLP
- SemEval-2026
Best for: Research Scientist, AI Scientist, NLP Engineer
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Editorial summary, takeaway, and curation by AIssential. Original article published by Paper Index on ACL Anthology.