UZHCL_for_the_win at Touche: Encoder Fine-Tuning, Synthetic Augmentation, and an Underpowered Encoder-LLM Comparison

Abstract

Online discussions on platforms like Reddit are a productive testbed for fallacy detection: short texts, broad topical range, and the full inventory of informal fallacies. The Touche 2026 lab at CLEF formalises this as a shared task on a Reddit-derived corpus that combines fallacy detection with argument-scheme classification. This paper describes our participation in all three subtasks (ST1 binary fallacy detection, ST2 eight-way fallacy classification, ST3 four-way argument-scheme classification) and both evaluation tracks. Our submitted systems are fine-tuned RoBERTa-large encoders with task-specific heads, augmented with a small batch of LLM-generated synthetic contrastive pairs; for ST2 and ST3 on the enhanced track we additionally added confidence-filtered pseudo-labelled examples from the unlabelled pool. A wider backbone comparison spanning additional encoders (DeBERTa-v3, ModernBERT) and an LLM track (four Qwen variants from 3B to 32B, zero-shot through CoT-LoRA) showed no validated benefit over RoBERTa-large at this corpus scale, with 5-fold variance wide enough that we call the comparison underpowered rather than settled. We also characterise how much of the enhanced track's lift reflects organiser-rewritten inputs carrying label information rather than genuine argument clarification. On the official Touche 2026 test set our systems ranked first on both base-track classification cells (ST2 and ST3) and second on both binary-detection (ST1) tracks, with the two enhanced-track classification cells topped by cascaded and multitask systems. We close with the rare-class limitation on ST3 and the most useful follow-ups. Code: https://github.com/psychias/fallacy_detection_clef_2026