Semantic Stars at MWE-2026 PARSEME 2.0 Subtask 2: Alternative Approaches for MWE Paraphrasing

Elif Bayraktar, Vedat Doğancan, Muhammed Abdullah Gümüş, Nusret Ali Kızılaslan


Abstract
This paper describes the system submitted by Semantic Stars Team for Subtask 2 of the PARSEME 2.0 shared task (Paraphrasing Multiword Expressions). Our approach addresses the challenge of paraphrasing sentences containing MWEs such that the MWE is removed while the original meaning and grammatical structure are preserved. The paper describes multiple distinct approaches powered by open-weight Large Language Models (LLMs), each employing a combination of different techniques such as prompting, multi-agent pipelines and classical NLP methods. Four distinct methods are tested on the test data in French, including a fifth one combining the results from the first four. We tested with several different open-weight LLMs including Llama3.1:8b, Qwen3:8b and gpt-oss-120b and were able to achieve significant improvements over the baseline, securing the first place on the shared task leader board.
Anthology ID:
2026.mwe-1.25
Volume:
Proceedings of the 22nd Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2026)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Marocco
Editors:
Atul Kr. Ojha, Verginica Barbu Mititelu, Mathieu Constant, Ivelina Stoyanova, A. Seza Doğruöz, Alexandre Rademaker
Venues:
MWE | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
187–195
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.mwe-1.25/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elif Bayraktar, Vedat Doğancan, Muhammed Abdullah Gümüş, and Nusret Ali Kızılaslan. 2026. Semantic Stars at MWE-2026 PARSEME 2.0 Subtask 2: Alternative Approaches for MWE Paraphrasing. In Proceedings of the 22nd Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2026), pages 187–195, Rabat, Marocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Semantic Stars at MWE-2026 PARSEME 2.0 Subtask 2: Alternative Approaches for MWE Paraphrasing (Bayraktar et al., MWE 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.mwe-1.25.pdf