
CLEF 2026 JOKER track: Humour detection, search, and translation.
In Avishek Anand, Zhaochun Ren, Suzan Verberne, Adam Jatowt, Ricardo Campos, Yanyan Lan, Sean MacAvaney, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Christine Bauer, and Masoud Mansoury, editors, Advances in Information Retrieval: 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2026, Delft, The Netherlands, March 30–April 1, Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Cham, Switzerland, 2026. Springer. To appear.
Over the last few years, the JOKER Track has created an
active community of researchers in NLP and IR working together on the
non-literal use of language in text—which is still challenging for both AI
models and humans, as it requires understanding implicit cultural references
and double meanings. Its benchmarks on humorous text analysis, retrieval, and
translation have become standard references. We made significant changes to
the track’s setup and tasks in 2024 and 2025, and propose continuing these
to complete the test collections. The CLEF 2026 JOKER track will contain the
following four tasks. Task 1 (Humor-aware Information Retrieval): retrieve
short humorous texts for a query. Task 2 (Pun Translation): translate puns
from English to French and Spanish. Task 3 (Onomastic Wordplay Translation):
translate onomastic wordplay from English to French. Task 4 (Humor
Generation): guided creativity.
@inproceedings{ermakova2026clef,
author = {Liana Ermakova and Igor Kuzmin and Poojan
Vachharajani and Tristan Miller and Anne-Gwenn Bosser and Jaap
Kamps},
editor = {Avishek Anand and Zhaochun Ren and Suzan Verberne and
Adam Jatowt and Ricardo Campos and Yanyan Lan and Sean MacAvaney and Mohammad
Aliannejadi and Christine Bauer and Masoud Mansoury},
title = {{CLEF} 2026 {JOKER} Track: Humour Detection, Search,
and Translation},
booktitle = {Advances
in Information Retrieval: 48th {European} {Conference} on {Information}
{Retrieval}, {ECIR}~2026, {Delft}, {The} {Netherlands},
{March}~30–{April}~1, Proceedings},
series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Springer},
address = {Cham, Switzerland},
issn = {0302-9743},
note = {To appear},
}























































































