Lacuna Inc. at SemEval-2026 Task 4: Structurally Gated State-Space Models for Disentangling Narrative Similarity

In this paper, we present the Invariant-Variant Disentangled State-Space Model (IVD-SSM), our submission to SemEval-2026 Task 4 on Narrative Story Similarity and Narrative Representation Learning. Evaluating narrative similarity is a profound computational challenge that requires models to look past concrete, superficial elements such as specific names, actors, objects, or settings to isolate and compare abstract patterns of causality and plot progression. To model these extended causal chains without the quadratic bottlenecks of standard Transformers, we leverage a hybrid State-Space Model (Jamba-1.5-Mini). Building upon this backbone, we introduce the Structurally Gated Alignment (SGA) head, a novel, differentiable algorithmic architecture. The SGA head operates on two scales: a heavily strided Macro-path maps the coarse structural skeleton of a story, which then acts as a gating mechanism to filter a full-resolution Micro-path, actively suppressing semantic noise and superficial keyword overlaps. Evaluated on both pairwise comparative judgments (Track A) and dense representation learning (Track B), our approach demonstrates that explicitly disentangling structural invariants from lexical variants provides a robust, principled framework for deep narrative understanding.

The Classics at SemEval-2026 Task 3: Combining Transformer Models and LLM-Generated Annotations for Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

This paper presents an approach to the SemEval-2026 Task 3: Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis. We investigate methods for moving beyond traditional categorical sentiment (e.g., positive or negative) to predict fine-grained, real-valued scores for sentiment "valence" (positivity) and "arousal" (intensity). We participate in two subtasks: predicting these scores for given aspects (Subtask 1) and extracting full sets of sentiment details, including aspects, categories, and opinions alongside their scores (Subtask 3). Our approach for the regression task involves a weighted ensemble of transformer-based encoder models. For the Russian language, we further enhance the input by using a large language model (LLM) to generate synthetic sentiment descriptions. For the extraction task, we fine-tune a decoder LLM to perform structured prediction, allowing the system to identify sentiment elements and estimate their numerical scores simultaneously.