CLEF 2026 SimpleText Track Simplify Scientific Text (and Nothing More)

Over the last few years, the SimpleText Track has created an active community of NLP and IR researchers collaborating to improve access to scientific text. Its benchmarks on scientific passage retrieval, scientific terminology detection and explanation, and scientific text simplification have become standard references. Following a similar track design from 2021 to 2024, we introduced substantial changes to the track’s structure and tasks in 2025. We plan to continue this successful setup in 2026, plus add a new (pilot) task on research area classification of scientific papers. Hence, the CLEF 2026 SimpleText track will contain the following 3 tasks. Task 1 (Text Simplification): Simplify Scientific Text. Task 2 (Controlled Creativity): Identify and Avoid Hallucination. Task 3 (Research Area Classification): Classification of scientific articles by research area.