HCMUS_TheFangs at NakbaVirality Shared Task: The Audience is the Message: Escaping the Deep Learning Trap in Conflict-Domain Virality Prediction
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: We present HCMUS_TheFangs's system for the Nakba-NLP 2026 Virality Shared Task, which achieves Rank #1 on the final leaderboard with a test Macro-F1 of 0.7062, placing first among all competing teams.Our winning system is deliberately simple: a single Community Target Encoding feature-the smoothed historical virality rate of the posting subreddit-combined with TF-IDF text features and an XGBoost classifier.This design emerged from a hard-won insight: virality in conflict reporting is determined not by what is posted but by where it is posted.We spend the majority of this paper showing why this holds.Through 18 ablation experiments we trace the journey from deep learning failure (cross-attention XLM-R+CLIP scoring 0.2935) to SOTA (0.7062), documenting the "Deep Learning Trap" that ensnares practitioners who apply representation-centric models to domains governed by sociological rather than semantic dynamics.An equally surprising finding emerges along the way: posts with fewer hashtags and cleaner prose consistently outperform heavily tagged, promotional content, a "Less is More" paradox that challenges conventional social media optimization wisdom.All code and experiments are publicly available.
Author: Duy Minh Dao Sy
Institution: Ho Chi Minh City University of Science
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7166519924