title: SemEval-2026 Awards
SemEval-2026: Best Task, Best Paper!!
SemEval-2026 features several awards.
We are very pleased to announce the winners of these awards for SemEval-2026!
Best Task Description Paper Award
The Best Task Description Paper award, for organizers of an individual shared task, recognizes a task that stands out for making an important intellectual contribution to empirical computational semantics, as demonstrated by a creative, interesting, and scientifically rigorous dataset and evaluation design, and a well-written task overview paper.
Best Task Paper: SemEval-2026 Task 2: Predicting Variation in Emotional Valence and Arousal over Time from Ecological Essays
Nikita Soni, H. Andrew Schwartz, Ryan L. Boyd, Phi Long Bui, Syeda Mahwish, August Håkan Nilsson, Adithya V Ganesan, Lyle Ungar, Niranjan Balasubramanian and Saif M. Mohammad
Honorable Mention: SemEval-2026 Task 9: Detecting Multilingual, Multicultural and Multievent Online Polarization
Usman Naseem, Robert Geislinger, Ada Ren, Sarah Kohail, Rudy Alexandro Garrido Veliz, P SAM SAHIL, Yiran Zhang, Marco Antonio Stranisci, Idris Abdulmumin, Özge Alacam, Cengiz Acarturk, Aisha Jabr, Saba Anwar, Abinew Ali Ayele, Elena Tutubalina, Aung Kyaw Htet, Xintong Wang, Surendrabikram Thapa, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dheeraj Kodati, Sahar Moradizeyveh, Firoj Alam, Ye Kyaw Thu, Shantipriya Parida, Ihsan Ayyub Qazi, Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare, Nelson Odhiambo, Clemencia Siro, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Adem Chanie Ali, Martin Semmann, Chris Biemann, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad and Seid Muhie Yimam
Best System Description Papers Per Task
The Best System Description Paper award, for task participants, recognizes a system description paper that advances our understanding of a problem and available solutions with respect to a task. It need not describe the highest-scoring system in the task, but it must have a strong analysis component in the evaluation, as well as a clear and reproducible description of the problem, algorithms, and methodology.
Task 1: Humor Generation
RAGthoven: A Multi-Stage Pipeline Walks Into a Benchmark and Barely Clears the Bar Marek Suppa, Viktória Ondrejová, Lucia Ganajová, Gregor Karetka and Daniel Skala
Task 2: Predicting Variation in Emotional Valence and Arousal over Time
UKP_Psycontrol: Modeling Valence and Arousal Dynamics from Text Darya Hryhoryeva, Amaia Zurinaga, Hamidreza Jamalabadi, and Iryna Gurevych
Task 3: Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis
Takoyaki: Ensembling LLM Predictions using Demonstration Retrieval for Dimensional Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis Kosuke Yamada, Sho Takase, and Ryosuke Kohita
Task 4: Narrative Story Similarity
COGNAC: Evaluating Narrative Components with LLMs for Hard Story Similarity Cases
Tisa Islam Erana, Azwad Anjum Islam, Anshu Kiran Sharma, and Mark A. Finlayson
Task 5: Rating Plausibility of Word Senses
UAlberta: Disambiguating Stories via Task Decomposition
David Basil, Junhyeon Cho, Chirooth Girigowda, Guoqing Luo, Sahir Momin, Sevryn Robinson, Ning Shi, and Grzegorz Kondrak
Task 6: CLARITY - Unmasking Political Question Evasions
CSE-UOI: A Two-Stage Heterogeneous Ensemble with Deliberative Complexity Gating for Political Evasion Detection
Christos Tzouvaras, Konstantinos Skianis and Athanasios Voulodimos
Task 7: Everyday Knowledge Across Diverse Languages and Cultures
GUIR: Probing Cultural Knowledge in LLMs via Multi-Agent Debate Reihaneh Iranmanesh, Ophir Frieder, and Nazli Goharian
Task 8: MTRAGEval: Evaluating Multi-Turn RAG Conversations
IIMAS-RAG: Hybrid Sparse-Dense Retrieval and Answerability-Conditioned Generation for Multi-Turn RAG Vania Raya-Rios, Helena Gomez-Adorno, Leon Hecht, Pedro Vázquez-Osorio, Erick Fabián-Sandoval, Jesús Vázquez-Osorio and Diego Hernández-Bustamante
Task 9: Detecting Multilingual, Multicultural and Multievent Online Polarization
UTokyo Tsuruoka Lab: Efficient Single Forward Pass Inference for Multi-Label Polarization Classification Howard Tangkulung and Yoshimasa Tsuruoka
Task 10: PsyCoMark -- Psycholinguistic Conspiracy Marker Extraction and Detection
NJUST_KMG PsyCoMark: Conspiracy Detection Yuhan Zheng and Yang Yang
Task 11: Disentangling Content and Formal Reasoning in Large Language Models
HABIB_TAZ: Disentangling Formal Logic from Content via Synthetic Training and Multi-Objective Optimization Abdullah Shaikh, Zain Naqi, Taha Zahid, Sandesh Kumar, and Abdul Samad
Task 12: Abductive Event Reasoning
AILS-NTUA: Graph-Based Retrieval and Reflective Prompting for Abductive Event Reasoning Nikolaos Karafyllis, Maria Lymperaiou, Giorgos Filandrianos, Athanasios Voulodimos and Giorgos Stamou
Task 13: Detecting Machine-Generated Code
WWTC@UniA: BERT-based Code Authorship Detection and Qualitative Analysis Linda Kupfer, Lisa Hader, Christian Jaumann and Annemarie Friedric
Best Performing Team Overall
Team AILS-NTUA Nikolaos Karafyllis, Panagiotis Alexios Spanakis, Dimosthenis Athanasiou, Maria Lymperaiou, Giorgos Filandrianos, Athanasios Voulodimos, and Giorgos Stamou