Cross-lingual emotion detection faces challenges such as imbalanced label distribution, data scarcity, cultural and linguistic differences, figurative language, and the opaqueness of pre-trained language models. This paper presents our approach to the EXALT shared task at WASSA 2024, focusing on emotion transferability across languages and trigger word identification. We employ data augmentation techniques, including back-translation and synonym replacement, to address data scarcity and imbalance issues in the emotion detection sub-task. For the emotion trigger identification sub-task, we utilize token and label mapping to capture emotional information at the subword level. Our system achieves competitive performance, ranking 13th, 1st, and 2nd in the Emotion Detection, Binary Trigger Word Detection, and Numerical Trigger Word Detection tasks.

Lay summaries play a crucial role in making scientific research accessible to a wider audience. However, generating lay summaries from lengthy articles poses significant challenges. We consider two approaches to address this issue: Hard Truncation, which preserves the most informative initial portion of the article, and Text Chunking, which segments articles into smaller, manageable chunks. Our workflow encompasses data preprocessing, augmentation, prompt engineering, and fine-tuning large language models. We explore the influence of pretrained model selection, inference prompt design, and hyperparameter tuning on summarization performance. Our methods demonstrate effectiveness in generating high-quality, informative lay summaries, achieving the second-best performance in the BioLaySumm shared task at BioNLP 2024.