thaulab@EEUCA 2026: Who Said What to Whom? A Targeting-Aware Neural-Symbolic Pipeline for Gaming Toxicity Detection
For gaming moderation, this work provides a domain-portable pipeline that improves detection of rare but critical toxic categories like hate speech and extremism.
The authors developed a neural-symbolic pipeline for gaming toxicity detection, achieving 0.6441 Macro F1 and 0.9062 accuracy, ranking 3rd and 1st respectively in the EEUCA 2026 shared task.
This paper describes our system for the EEUCA 2026 Shared Task on toxicity classification in gaming chat. We implement a three-stage pipeline combining an ensemble of two compact transformers (DeBERTa-v3-base, 184M; XLM-RoBERTa-base, 278M) with a Linguistically-Informed Mediator (LIM) that resolves inter-model disagreements through corpus-backed lexical normalization, class-conditional unigram scoring, multilingual profanity detection, and agentive targeting analysis grounded in speech act theory. The LIM specifically targets the minority classes (Hate \& Harassment, Threats, and Extremism), which are the most safety-critical categories in real-world gaming moderation. To address the extreme class imbalance (1{,}450:1 Non-toxic to Extremism ratio), we introduce a two-stage data augmentation strategy using only the provided training data. Our system achieves a Macro F1 of 0.6441 and accuracy of 0.9062 on the official test set, ranking 3rd in Macro F1 and 1st in accuracy among all teams. The proposed pipeline is domain-portable: adapting to other gaming platforms requires substituting only the game-specific entity lexicon. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/Anmol2059/thaulab\_EEUCA.