Aleksandar Pramov

Maximilian Heil, Aleksandar Pramov

Numerical claims, statements involving quantities, comparisons, and temporal references, pose unique challenges for automated fact-checking systems. In this study, we evaluate modeling strategies for veracity prediction of such claims using the QuanTemp dataset and building our own evidence retrieval pipeline. We investigate three key factors: (1) the impact of more evidences with longer input context windows using ModernBERT, (2) the effect of right-to-left (R2L) tokenization, and (3) their combined influence on classification performance. Contrary to prior findings in arithmetic reasoning tasks, R2L tokenization does not boost natural language inference (NLI) of numerical tasks. A longer context window does also not enhance veracity performance either, highlighting evidence quality as the dominant bottleneck. Our best-performing system achieves competitive macro-average F1 score of 0.57 and places us among the Top-4 submissions in Task 3 of CheckThat! 2025. Our code is available at https://github.com/dsgt-arc/checkthat-2025-numerical.

Ritesh Mehta, Aleksandar Pramov, Shashank Verma

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is characterized as a rapidly progressive neurodegenerative disease that presents individuals with limited treatment options in the realm of medical interventions and therapies. The disease showcases a diverse range of onset patterns and progression trajectories, emphasizing the critical importance of early detection of functional decline to enable tailored care strategies and timely therapeutic interventions. The present investigation, spearheaded by the iDPP@CLEF 2024 challenge, focuses on utilizing sensor-derived data obtained through an app. This data is used to construct various machine learning models specifically designed to forecast the advancement of the ALS Functional Rating Scale-Revised (ALSFRS-R) score, leveraging the dataset provided by the organizers. In our analysis, multiple predictive models were evaluated to determine their efficacy in handling ALS sensor data. The temporal aspect of the sensor data was compressed and amalgamated using statistical methods, thereby augmenting the interpretability and applicability of the gathered information for predictive modeling objectives. The models that demonstrated optimal performance were a naive baseline and ElasticNet regression. The naive model achieved a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.20 and a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.49, slightly outperforming the ElasticNet model, which recorded an MAE of 0.22 and an RMSE of 0.50. Our comparative analysis suggests that while the naive approach yielded marginally better predictive accuracy, the ElasticNet model provides a robust framework for understanding feature contributions.

Aleksandar Pramov

This paper addresses the prediction of commercial (brand) memorability as part of "Subtask 2: Commercial/Ad Memorability" within the "Memorability: Predicting movie and commercial memorability" task at the MediaEval 2025 workshop competition. We propose a multimodal fusion system with a Gemma-3 LLM backbone that integrates pre-computed visual (ViT) and textual (E5) features by multi-modal projections. The model is adapted using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). A heavily-tuned ensemble of gradient boosted trees serves as a baseline. A key contribution is the use of LLM-generated rationale prompts, grounded in expert-derived aspects of memorability, to guide the fusion model. The results demonstrate that the LLM-based system exhibits greater robustness and generalization performance on the final test set, compared to the baseline. The paper's codebase can be found at https://github.com/dsgt-arc/mediaeval-2025-memorability

Aleksandar Pramov, Jiangqin Ma, Bina Patel

Claim normalization is an integral part of any automatic fact-check verification system. It parses the typically noisy claim data, such as social media posts into normalized claims, which are then fed into downstream veracity classification tasks. The CheckThat! 2025 Task 2 focuses specifically on claim normalization and spans 20 languages under monolingual and zero-shot conditions. Our proposed solution consists of a lightweight \emph{retrieval-first, LLM-backed} pipeline, in which we either dynamically prompt a GPT-4o-mini with in-context examples, or retrieve the closest normalization from the train dataset directly. On the official test set, the system ranks near the top for most monolingual tracks, achieving first place in 7 out of of the 13 languages. In contrast, the system underperforms in the zero-shot setting, highlighting the limitation of the proposed solution.

Chloe Pomeroy, Aleksandar Pramov, Karishma Thakrar et al.

This paper explores the applications of quantum annealing (QA) and classical simulated annealing (SA) to a suite of combinatorial optimization problems in machine learning, namely feature selection, instance selection, and clustering. We formulate each task as a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem and implement both quantum and classical solvers to compare their effectiveness. For feature selection, we propose several QUBO configurations that balance feature importance and redundancy, showing that quantum annealing (QA) produces solutions that are computationally more efficient. In instance selection, we propose a few novel heuristics for instance-level importance measures that extend existing methods. For clustering, we embed a classical-to-quantum pipeline, using classical clustering followed by QUBO-based medoid refinement, and demonstrate consistent improvements in cluster compactness and retrieval metrics. Our results suggest that QA can be a competitive and efficient tool for discrete machine learning optimization, even within the constraints of current quantum hardware.