Archaeology at BEA 2025 Shared Task: Are Simple Baselines Good Enough?

AbstractThis paper describes our approach for 5 classification tasks from Building Educational Applications (BEA) 2025 Shared Task.Our methods range from classical machine learning models to large-scale transformers with fine-tuning and prompting strategies. Despite the diversity of approaches, performance differences were often minor, suggesting a strong surface-level signal and the limiting effect of annotation noise—particularly around the “To some extent” label. Under lenient evaluation, simple models perform competitively, showing their effectiveness in low-resource settings. Our submissions ranked in the top 10 in four of five tracks.