--- title: "ttda704 at SemEval-2026 Task 6 — paper by Tan and Dinh (2026)" description: "Politicians often sidestep interview questions, and detecting this automatically is difficult because evasion depends on… 3 references." authors: ["Tai Tran Tan", "An Dinh"] year: 2026 venue: "Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)" source: "https://aclanthology.org/2026.semeval-1.355/" doi: "10.18653/v1/2026.semeval-1.355" 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/tan-2026-ttda704-semeval-2026-task-6/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/tan-2026-ttda704-semeval-2026-task-6/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2026/page/46/) / ttda704 at SemEval-2026 Task 6: Structured Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Political Evasion Detection # ttda704 at SemEval-2026 Task 6: Structured Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Political Evasion Detection **Authors:** [Tai Tran Tan](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/tai-tran-tan/) and An Dinh · **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-1.355/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2026.semeval-1.355.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/2026.semeval-1.355](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.semeval-1.355) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7166873451) **Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) ## Summary Politicians often sidestep interview questions, and detecting this automatically is difficult because evasion depends on pragmatic inference rather than obvious wording. This system paper for SemEval-2026 Task 6 (CLARITY) addresses two nested subtasks on English question–answer pairs from U.S. presidential interviews. Subtask 1 is a three-way clarity classification, and Subtask 2 is a nine-way evasion-strategy classification. Both are scored with Macro F1. The authors compare two paradigms: - **Fine-tuning:** Qwen3 models (4B–32B) adapted with QLoRA, using upsampling of rare classes and weighted cross-entropy to counter label imbalance. - **Prompting:** reasoning-capable APIs (DeepSeek-V3.2, Grok-4-Fast) given structured CoT templates. These templates ask the model to assess directness and topic fidelity before choosing a label. Variants optionally arrange labels as a hierarchical taxonomy and add few-shot exemplars. Prompting clearly outperforms the fine-tuning baseline, and enabling extended reasoning modes brings the biggest improvement. However, the top prompt variants are not statistically separable. Error analysis shows persistent confusion among Dodging, Deflection, General and Implicit. The study suggests that explicit reasoning scaffolds help with pragmatically subtle classification. ## Key points - **Data:** 3,448 training and 308 test samples, heavily skewed. Explicit makes up 30.5% and Dodging 20.5%, while Partial/half-answer (2.3%) and Clarification (2.7%) are rare. - **Best system:** Grok-4-Fast with reasoning and few-shot hierarchical CoT scored Macro F1 0.5147 on Subtask 2 and 0.7979 on Subtask 1 on the 308-sample test split. - On the official leaderboard it ranked 8/33 on Subtask 2 (0.56) and 13/41 on Subtask 1 (0.79). - The revised organizer baseline is 0.57 and 0.82. - **Fine-tuning results:** the best Qwen3 PEFT model (Qwen3-32B, few-shot CoT) reached only 0.3630 on Subtask 2. In a 100-sample diagnostic, turning on Qwen3 thinking mode raised evasion F1 from 0.0734 to 0.2362. - **Significance testing:** the top three systems have overlapping 95% CIs, and approximate randomization finds no significant difference (p > 0.19). McNemar's test (p = 0.015) suggests Grok and DeepSeek make complementary errors. The best open-weight option is DeepSeek-V3.2 at 0.5115. - **Error patterns:** Dodging recall is only 0.1852, 42% of Implicit answers are labelled Explicit, and Partial/half-answer F1 is 0.125. Code and prompts are released on GitHub (taitran501/SemEval-2026-Task6). *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* ## Institutions - [Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/vietnam-national-university-ho-chi-minh-city/) — University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam · 21 works · 14 citations - [University of Information Technology](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-information-technology/) — University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam · 13 works · 7 citations 📚 Shelves (4): [🖥️ Computer Science](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/) · 16,667 works · [🤖 Artificial Intelligence](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/artificial-intelligence/) · 16,194 works · [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 16,039 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 15,891 works 🧭 Topics (1): [🧮 Reasoning](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/reasoning/) · 1,426 works ## Cite Cite as: Tai Tran Tan and An Dinh. 2026. ttda704 at SemEval-2026 Task 6: Structured Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Political Evasion Detection. 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{tan2026ttda704, title = {{ttda704 at SemEval-2026 Task 6: Structured Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Political Evasion Detection}}, author = {Tai Tran Tan and An Dinh}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)}, year = {2026}, doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.semeval-1.355}, url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.semeval-1.355} } ``` - [← previous tt501 at ArchEHR-QA 2026: Few-Shot Prompting with Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Grounded Clinical EHR Question Answering](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/tran-2026-tt501-archehr-qa-2026-few/) - [next → TTLab at AraSentEval: SARF( صرف) Sentiment Analysis via Root-based Fusion for Multi-Dialectal Arabic](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/abusaleh-2026-ttlab-arasenteval-sarf-sentiment-analysis/) - [↑ back to papers of 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2026/page/46/) ## References 3 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Peter Bull. 2003. The Microanalysis of Political Communication: Claptrap and Ambiguity. Routledge. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Peter+Bull%2E+2003%2E+The+Microanalysis+of+Political+Communication%3A+Claptrap+and+Ambiguity%2E+Routledge%2E) 2. Peter Bull and Kate Mayer. 1993. How not to answer questions in political interviews. Political Psychology, 14(4):651–666. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Peter+Bull+and+Kate+Mayer%2E+1993%2E+How+not+to+answer+questions+in+political+interviews%2E+Political+Psychology%2C+14%284%29%3A651%E2%80%93666%2E) 3. Steven E. Clayman. 2001. Answers and evasions. Language in Society, 30(3):403–442. \#\# Conclusion [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Steven+E%2E+Clayman%2E+2001%2E+Answers+and+evasions%2E+Language+in+Society%2C+30%283%29%3A403%E2%80%93442%2E+%5C%23%5C%23+Conclusion) *Updated 1 November 2026*