CLEF 2026 JOKER Track Humour Detection, Search, and Translation

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 (Humour-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, and Task 4 (Humour Generation): Guided Creativity.