X-NLP at SemEval-2026 Task 12: Prompting LLMs for Abductive Event Reasoning

AbstractIn this work, we applied two different systems to the SemEval 2026 Shared Task 12, which explores abductive event reasoning. Specifically, this task involves determining the cause of an event from a list of candidate causes. Instances are accompanied with documents that can provide applicable knowledge for the target event. Both of our systems involve prompting LLMS and our best performing system leverages retrieval-augmented generation. Our best performing system achieved a score of 84% and ranked 40th out of the 221 total submissions.