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AIxcellent Vibes at GermEval 2025 Shared Task on Candy Speech Detection: Improving Model Performance by Span-Level Training
Christian Rene Thelen, Patrick Gustav Blaneck, Tobias Bornheim, Niklas Grieger, Stephan Bialonski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07459

AIxcellent Vibes at GermEval 2025 Shared Task on Candy Speech Detection: Improving Model Performance by Span-Level Training
Positive, supportive online communication in social media (candy speech) has the potential to foster civility, yet automated detection of such language remains underexplored, limiting systematic analysis of its impact. We investigate how candy speech can be reliably detected in a 46k-comment German YouTube corpus by monolingual and multilingual language models, including GBERT, Qwen3 Embedding, and XLM-RoBERTa. We find that a multilingual XLM-RoBERTa-Large model trained to detect candy speech a…