UAlberta at SemEval-2026 Task 5: Disambiguating Stories via Task Decomposition

AbstractWe describe our system for predicting sense plausibility in short narratives. Our approach centers on task decomposition: instead of predicting a score directly, we break the problem into simpler subtasks and combine their outputs. We further improve performance by ensembling complementary signals, including word sense disambiguation and fine-tuned embedding models. We also find empirical support for the one-homonym-per-translation principle of Hauer and Kondrak (2020a). Our best ensemble system achieves competitive performance in the official evaluation. Our code and data are available on GitHub.