English

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

Computation and Language 2026-03-27 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.24896,
  title  = {LogSigma at SemEval-2026 Task 3: Uncertainty-Weighted Multitask Learning for Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis},
  author = {Baraa Hikal and Jonas Becker and Bela Gipp},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.24896},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:38:14.208Z