fine-grained multi-label classification of polarization manifestations (Vilification, Dehumanization, Extreme Language, Lack of Empathy, Invalidation, Stereotype) in English and Hausa social media texts.
# DeepSemantics at SemEval-2026 Task 9: Label-Wise Optimization with Adaptive Focal Loss for Polarization Manifestation Identification
> **Team:** DeepSemantics β African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), South Africa
> **Competition:** SemEval-2026 Task 9 β Detecting Multilingual Online Polarization (POLAR)
> **Subtask:** Subtask 3 β Manifestation Identification (English & Hausa)
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## π Abstract
This repository contains the code for our system submitted to **SemEval-2026 Task 9, Subtask 3: Polarization Manifestation Identification**. We address fine-grained multi-label classification of polarization manifestations (Vilification, Dehumanization, Extreme Language, Lack of Empathy, Invalidation, Stereotype) in English and Hausa social media texts.
Our approach combines:
- **Transformer encoders** (RoBERTa-base for English, Afro-XLM-R-small for Hausa)
- **One-vs-Rest (OvR) framework** for label-wise modeling
- **Adaptive Focal Loss** (English) and **Weighted Binary Cross-Entropy** (Hausa)
- **Controlled oversampling** with Easy Data Augmentation (EDA)
- **Label-wise threshold optimization** via stratified K-fold validation
**Official test results:**
| Language | Macro-F1 | Leaderboard Rank |
|----------|----------|-----------------|
| English | 0.464 | 14th |
| Hausa | 0.192 | 5th |
---
## π Repository Structure
```
βββ substack_3_final.ipynb # Full pipeline: preprocessing, training, evaluation, error analysis
βββ README.md
```
The notebook contains the entire pipeline end-to-end:
- Data loading and exploratory analysis
- Controlled oversampling + Easy Data Augmentation (EDA)
- One-vs-Rest training with Adaptive Focal Loss (EN) / Weighted BCE (HA)
- Label-wise threshold optimization via stratified K-fold
- Evaluation and error analysis
---
## π Data
Data comes from the **POLAR SemEval-2026 shared task**. Download the dataset from the official repository:
π **Polar-SemEval/data-public**
Once downloaded, updat β¦