Gabriel Ștefan

Author directory

Also published as: Gabriel Stefan


2026

We describe our system for SemEval-2026 Task 6 (CLARITY: Unmasking Political Question Evasions), which classifies English political interview responses by coarse-grained clarity (3-way) and fine-grained evasion strategy (9-way). Since responses frequently exceed the 512-token limit of standard Transformer encoders, we apply an overlapping sliding-window chunking strategy with element-wise Max-Pooling aggregation over chunk representations. A shared RoBERTa-large encoder supplies two task-specific heads trained jointly via a multi-task objective, with inference-time ensembling over 7-fold stratified cross-validation. Our system achieves a Macro-F1 of 0.80 on Subtask 1 and 0.51 on Subtask 2, ranking 11th in both subtasks.
Political evasion refers to responses that engage with a question while withholding the requested information. Recent NLP work frames political evasion as a classification task using a two-level taxonomy of response clarity and fine-grained evasion strategies. Existing work on response clarity and evasion classification is limited to English, leaving open whether the taxonomy and model behavior transfer across languages and political contexts. We introduce PolERo, a dataset of 3,574 human-annotated question-answer pairs extracted from official transcripts of five Romanian presidents. We evaluate multiple classification approaches on both datasets under matched conditions, including TF-IDF baselines, fine-tuned encoder models, a proposed sliding-window encoder, and zero/few-shot LLM prompting. We study cross-lingual transfer through joint bilingual training and machine-translation-based data augmentation. Our results indicate that fine-tuned encoders are competitive, cross-lingual transfer is asymmetric, and ambivalent evasion categories involving pragmatic cues remain the main challenge across all model families.