ConTexT at SemEval-2026 Task 5: Rating Plausibility of Word Senses in Ambiguous Stories through Narrative Understanding

Abstract

Here, we report our system for SemEval-2026 Task 5 (Gehring et al., 2026), which predicts graded plausibility scores for target word senses in narrative context. We explore embedding-based similarity, transformer fine-tuning, and a three-stage curriculum combining WiC pretraining, Wasserstein distribution learning, and KL-based calibration. Our best model, DeBERTa-xLarge with curriculum training, achieves 78% accuracy within one standard deviation and a Spearman Correlation of 0.70 , with an overall test score of 0.74. Results show that distribution modeling better aligns with human plausibility judgments than single-score prediction.