---
title: "HU at SemEval-2026 Task 6 — paper by Munawar et al. (2026)"
description: "This SemEval-2026 Task 6 (CLARITY) system from Habib University labels political interview question–answer pairs at two… 20 references."
authors: ["Taha Munawar", "Basil Khan", "Arsal Jangda", "Sarfaraz Baig", "Sandesh Kumar", "Abdul Samad"]
year: 2026
venue: "Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2026.semeval-1.34/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/2026.semeval-1.34"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/munawar-2026-hu-semeval-2026-task-6/"
---
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# HU at SemEval-2026 Task 6: A Hybrid Discriminative Modeling of Political Clarity and Evasion

**Authors:** Taha Munawar, Basil Khan, Arsal Jangda, Sarfaraz Baig, [Sandesh Kumar](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/sandesh-kumar/) and [Abdul Samad](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/abdul-samad/) · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/semeval/) ([SemEval 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/semeval/2026/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2026.semeval-1.34/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2026.semeval-1.34.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/2026.semeval-1.34](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.semeval-1.34) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7166864780)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
This SemEval-2026 Task 6 (CLARITY) system from Habib University labels political interview question–answer pairs at two levels. Subtask 1 assigns a coarse clarity label, and Subtask 2 assigns a fine-grained evasion technique. The data come from 287 White House presidential interviews (2006–2023), split by ChatGPT-3.5 Turbo into single QA pairs: 3,450 for training and 308 for testing. Both label sets are heavily imbalanced.

The authors compared six families of models on limited hardware:
- long-input ModernBERT classifiers
- attention-pooled multiple instance learning (MIL) over answer chunks
- an NLI reformulation
- a QLoRA-tuned Llama-3.2-3B
- a hierarchical multi-task gating model
- HiAGM

For clarity, the best system treats the answer as a premise and checks whether it entails a hypothesis that the question was explicitly answered. Adversarial weight perturbation and blended probability calibration further improve this model. On the hidden test set, the submission reached macro-F1 0.81 (Subtask 1) and 0.45 (Subtask 2).

The work shows that entailment framing and chunk-level reasoning outperform generative and strongly hierarchy-constrained models under tight compute. Data augmentation did not help.

## Key points
- **NLI model for clarity:** MoritzLaurer/DeBERTa-v3-large-mnli-fever-anli-ling-wanli with inputs up to 2048 tokens. NLI labels map to clarity classes:
  - Entailment → Clear Reply
  - Neutral → Ambivalent Reply
  - Contradiction → Clear Non-Reply
- **Gains on the development set:** AWP lifted macro-F1 from 0.70 to 0.74. Blending Isotonic Regression with Temperature Scaling (T = 1.23, w_iso = 0.59) raised it to 0.79.
- **Best Subtask 2 model:** attention-based MIL with a frozen encoder, reaching 0.43 dev macro-F1. Answers are split into 256-token chunks with a 160-token stride, up to 16 chunks per answer.
- **Weaker alternatives on Subtask 1:** Llama-3.2-3B (QLoRA, LoRA r=16, alpha=32) scored 0.57 and overfit early. MTL gating scored 0.64 and HiAGM 0.52.
- **No-gain experiments:**
  - None of the augmentation methods (word deletion, oversampling, contextual replacement, back-translation via Gemini 2.5 Flash, few-shot synthetic data) beat the unaugmented best models.
  - Domain pre-training on Canadian parliamentary QA data also gave no measurable improvement.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: Taha Munawar, Basil Khan, Arsal Jangda, Sarfaraz Baig, Sandesh Kumar and Abdul Samad. 2026. HU at SemEval-2026 Task 6: A Hybrid Discriminative Modeling of Political Clarity and Evasion. Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{munawar2026hu,
  title = {{HU at SemEval-2026 Task 6: A Hybrid Discriminative Modeling of Political Clarity and Evasion}},
  author = {Taha Munawar, Basil Khan, Arsal Jangda, Sarfaraz Baig, Sandesh Kumar and Abdul Samad},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.semeval-1.34},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.semeval-1.34}
}
```

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## References

20 references, 10 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 1 November 2026*