Mind the Gap Between Spatial Reasoning and Acting! Step-by-Step Evaluation of Agents With Spatial-Gym

Spatial reasoning is central to navigation and robotics, yet measuring model capabilities on these tasks remains difficult. Existing benchmarks evaluate models in a one-shot setting, requiring full solution generation in a single response, unlike humans, who work in interactive environments step-by-step. We introduce Spatial-Gym, a Gymnasium environment that isolates spatial constraint reasoning by testing pathfinding in 2D-grid puzzles as a sequential decision task with optional backtracking. We evaluate eight models in three settings (one-shot, step-by-step, step-by-step with backtracking) against human, random, and A* baselines on 500 episodes. The best model, GPT-OSS 120B, achieves a solve rate of 16.0%, 82 points below the human baseline (98.0%). Step-by-step format helps weaker models (up to +5.4%) by removing formatting errors, but hurts stronger models (up to 5.6%) by constraining global planning. Backtracking improves episode completion, but increases solve rate only for weaker models; stronger models rarely backtrack and do not benefit from it. Our experiments have three key findings: (1) models fail to scale reasoning effort with difficulty, (2) vision models receiving images of the spatial environment reduce solve rate by 73%, and (3) extended chain-of-thought reasoning retains a 3-5x accuracy advantage over standard inference even in the step-by-step setting. Spatial-Gym enables diagnosis of model limitations and provides a framework for improving spatial reasoning through reinforcement learning.

SemEval-2026 Task 3: Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (DimABSA)

We present the SemEval-2026 shared task on Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (DimABSA), which improves traditional ABSA by modeling sentiment along valence-arousal (VA) dimensions rather than using categorical polarity labels. To extend ABSA beyond consumer reviews to public-issue discourse (e.g., political, energy, and climate issues), we introduce an additional task, Dimensional Stance Analysis (DimStance), which treats stance targets as aspects and reformulates stance detection as regression in the VA space. The task consists of two tracks: Track A (DimABSA) and Track B (DimStance). Track A includes three subtasks: (1) dimensional aspect sentiment regression, (2) dimensional aspect sentiment triplet extraction, and (3) dimensional aspect sentiment quadruplet extraction, while Track B includes only the regression subtask for stance targets. We also introduce a continuous F1 (cF1) metric to jointly evaluate structured extraction and VA regression. The task attracted more than 400 participants, resulting in 112 final submissions and 42 system description papers. We report baseline results, discuss top-performing systems, and analyze key design choices to provide insights into dimensional sentiment analysis at the aspect and stance-target levels. All resources are available on our GitHub repository.

LogSigma at SemEval-2026 Task 3: Uncertainty-Weighted Multitask Learning for Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

This paper describes LogSigma, our system for SemEval-2026 Task 3: Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (DimABSA). Unlike traditional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), which predicts discrete sentiment labels, DimABSA requires predicting continuous Valence and Arousal (VA) scores on a 1-9 scale. A central challenge is that Valence and Arousal differ in prediction difficulty across languages and domains. We address this using learned homoscedastic uncertainty, where the model learns task-specific log-variance parameters to automatically balance each regression objective during training. Combined with language-specific encoders and multi-seed ensembling, LogSigma achieves 1st place on five datasets across both tracks. The learned variance weights vary substantially across languages due to differing Valence-Arousal difficulty profiles-from 0.66x for German to 2.18x for English-demonstrating that optimal task balancing is language-dependent and cannot be determined a priori.

Piecing Together Cross-Document Coreference Resolution Datasets: Systematic Dataset Analysis and Unification

Research in CDCR remains fragmented due to heterogeneous dataset formats, varying annotation standards, and the predominance of the CDCR definition as the event coreference resolution (ECR). To address these challenges, we introduce uCDCR, a unified dataset that consolidates diverse publicly available English CDCR corpora across various domains into a consistent format, which we analyze with standardized metrics and evaluation protocols. uCDCR incorporates both entity and event coreference, corrects known inconsistencies, and enriches datasets with missing attributes to facilitate reproducible research. We establish a cohesive framework for fair, interpretable, and cross-dataset analysis in CDCR and compare the datasets on their lexical properties, e.g., lexical composition of the annotated mentions, lexical diversity and ambiguity metrics, discuss the annotation rules and principles that lead to high lexical diversity, and examine how these metrics influence performance on the same-head-lemma baseline. Our dataset analysis shows that ECB+, the state-of-the-art benchmark for CDCR, has one of the lowest lexical diversities, and its CDCR complexity, measured by the same-head-lemma baseline, lies in the middle among all uCDCR datasets. Moreover, comparing document and mention distributions between ECB+ and uCDCR shows that using all uCDCR datasets for model training and evaluation will improve the generalizability of CDCR models. Finally, the almost identical performance on the same-head-lemma baseline, separately applied to events and entities, shows that resolving both types is a complex task and should not be steered toward ECR alone. The uCDCR dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/AnZhu/uCDCR, and the code for parsing, analyzing, and scoring the dataset is available at https://github.com/anastasia-zhukova/uCDCR.

Diverse Word Choices, Same Reference: Annotating Lexically-Rich Cross-Document Coreference

Cross-document coreference resolution (CDCR) identifies and links mentions of the same entities and events across related documents, enabling content analysis that aggregates information at the level of discourse participants. However, existing datasets primarily focus on event resolution and employ a narrow definition of coreference, which limits their effectiveness in analyzing diverse and polarized news coverage where wording varies widely. This paper proposes a revised CDCR annotation scheme of the NewsWCL50 dataset, treating coreference chains as discourse elements (DEs) and conceptual units of analysis. The approach accommodates both identity and near-identity relations, e.g., by linking "the caravan" - "asylum seekers" - "those contemplating illegal entry", allowing models to capture lexical diversity and framing variation in media discourse, while maintaining the fine-grained annotation of DEs. We reannotate the NewsWCL50 and a subset of ECB+ using a unified codebook and evaluate the new datasets through lexical diversity metrics and a same-head-lemma baseline. The results show that the reannotated datasets align closely, falling between the original ECB+ and NewsWCL50, thereby supporting balanced and discourse-aware CDCR research in the news domain.

DimStance: Multilingual Datasets for Dimensional Stance Analysis

Stance detection is an established task that classifies an author's attitude toward a specific target into categories such as Favor, Neutral, and Against. Beyond categorical stance labels, we leverage a long-established affective science framework to model stance along real-valued dimensions of valence (negative-positive) and arousal (calm-active). This dimensional approach captures nuanced affective states underlying stance expressions, enabling fine-grained stance analysis. To this end, we introduce DimStance, the first dimensional stance resource with valence-arousal (VA) annotations. This resource comprises 11,746 target aspects in 7,365 texts across five languages (English, German, Chinese, Nigerian Pidgin, and Swahili) and two domains (politics and environmental protection). To facilitate the evaluation of stance VA prediction, we formulate the dimensional stance regression task, analyze cross-lingual VA patterns, and benchmark pretrained and large language models under regression and prompting settings. Results show competitive performance of fine-tuned LLM regressors, persistent challenges in low-resource languages, and limitations of token-based generation. DimStance provides a foundation for multilingual, emotion-aware, stance analysis and benchmarking.

Affect, Body, Cognition, Demographics, and Emotion: The ABCDE of Text Features for Computational Affective Science

Work in Computational Affective Science and Computational Social Science explores a wide variety of research questions about people, emotions, behavior, and health. Such work often relies on language data that is first labeled with relevant information, such as the use of emotion words or the age of the speaker. Although many resources and algorithms exist to enable this type of labeling, discovering, accessing, and using them remains a substantial impediment, particularly for practitioners outside of computer science. Here, we present the ABCDE dataset (Affect, Body, Cognition, Demographics, and Emotion), a large-scale collection of over 400 million text utterances drawn from social media, blogs, books, and AI-generated sources. The dataset is annotated with a wide range of features relevant to computational affective and social science. ABCDE facilitates interdisciplinary research across numerous fields, including affective science, cognitive science, the digital humanities, sociology, political science, and computational linguistics.

Contrastive Learning Using Graph Embeddings for Domain Adaptation of Language Models in the Process Industry

Recent trends in NLP utilize knowledge graphs (KGs) to enhance pretrained language models by incorporating additional knowledge from the graph structures to learn domain-specific terminology or relationships between documents that might otherwise be overlooked. This paper explores how SciNCL, a graph-aware neighborhood contrastive learning methodology originally designed for scientific publications, can be applied to the process industry domain, where text logs contain crucial information about daily operations and are often structured as sparse KGs. Our experiments demonstrate that language models fine-tuned with triplets derived from GE outperform a state-of-the-art mE5-large text encoder by 9.8-14.3% (5.4-8.0p) on the proprietary process industry text embedding benchmark (PITEB) while being 3-5 times smaller in size.

Re-FRAME the Meeting Summarization SCOPE: Fact-Based Summarization and Personalization via Questions

Meeting summarization with large language models (LLMs) remains error-prone, often producing outputs with hallucinations, omissions, and irrelevancies. We present FRAME, a modular pipeline that reframes summarization as a semantic enrichment task. FRAME extracts and scores salient facts, organizes them thematically, and uses these to enrich an outline into an abstractive summary. To personalize summaries, we introduce SCOPE, a reason-out-loud protocol that has the model build a reasoning trace by answering nine questions before content selection. For evaluation, we propose P-MESA, a multi-dimensional, reference-free evaluation framework to assess if a summary fits a target reader. P-MESA reliably identifies error instances, achieving >= 89% balanced accuracy against human annotations and strongly aligns with human severity ratings (r >= 0.70). On QMSum and FAME, FRAME reduces hallucination and omission by 2 out of 5 points (measured with MESA), while SCOPE improves knowledge fit and goal alignment over prompt-only baselines. Our findings advocate for rethinking summarization to improve control, faithfulness, and personalization.

Link Prediction for Event Logs in the Process Industry

Knowledge management (KM) is vital in the process industry for optimizing operations, ensuring safety, and enabling continuous improvement through effective use of operational data and past insights. A key challenge in this domain is the fragmented nature of event logs in shift books, where related records, e.g., entries documenting issues related to equipment or processes and the corresponding solutions, may remain disconnected. This fragmentation hinders the recommendation of previous solutions to the users. To address this problem, we investigate record linking (RL) as link prediction, commonly studied in graph-based machine learning, by framing it as a cross-document coreference resolution (CDCR) task enhanced with natural language inference (NLI) and semantic text similarity (STS) by shifting it into the causal inference (CI). We adapt CDCR, traditionally applied in the news domain, into an RL model to operate at the passage level, similar to NLI and STS, while accommodating the process industry's specific text formats, which contain unstructured text and structured record attributes. Our RL model outperformed the best versions of NLI- and STS-driven baselines by 28% (11.43 points) and 27% (11.21 points), respectively. Our work demonstrates how domain adaptation of the state-of-the-art CDCR models, enhanced with reasoning capabilities, can be effectively tailored to the process industry, improving data quality and connectivity in shift logs.