Dear all,
We are excited to announce that the Evaluation Campaign for the HISEMOTIONS at IberLEF 2026 is officially underway.
All dataset subsets—including training, development, and the newly released test sets—are now available for download.
You can find the data and the information about our shared task below:
Task Overview
HISEMOTIONS 2026 focuses on emotion detection in Early Modern Spanish epistolary texts (16th–17th centuries). Unlike most existing emotion detection tasks that target modern languages or contemporary genres (e.g., social media, reviews), this challenge explores historical linguistic variation and semantic shift, raising a new challenge for NLP systems.
Participants are tasked with developing systems that automatically identify emotional content in fragments of historical Spanish letters, addressing issues such as diachronic language variation, historical semantic shifting, and domain adaptation. The shared task aims to foster methodological progress at the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Digital Humanities.
🔗 Task pages / resources:
https://github.com/albinasarymsakova/HISEMOTIONS_2026
https://www.codabench.org/competitions/14140/?secret_key=c6ae8bdb-dd2f-4908-...
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Why Participate?
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Advance emotion detection methods in low-resource and historical domains. -
Explore semantic change effects on automatic classification. -
Benchmark systems on a novel historical dataset with expert human annotation. -
Cutting-edge research into the computational study of cultural heritage.
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Shared Task Details
Task: Multi-label emotion detection Each text fragment should be labelled with one or more of the following emotions: • joy • sadness • fear • anger • surprise • hope
Participants will predict binary labels for each emotion per fragment. Systems will be evaluated against hidden gold labels using standard metrics such as precision, recall, and macro-F1 score.
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Important Dates
Task announcement
February 9, 2026
Development data release
February 12, 2026
Training data release
March 11, 2026
Test data release & evaluation start
March 26, 2026
Deadline for system submissions
April 30, 2026
Official results published
May 4, 2026
System description papers due
May 20, 2026
Review notification
June 19, 2026
Camera-ready papers due
July 1, 2026
IberLEF Workshop (presentations)
September 22, 2026
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Contact & Submission
For updates, questions, or discussions about the task, please open issues in the task GitHub repository or contact the organisers. Detailed submission guidelines will be published alongside the data releases.
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We look forward to your participation and contribution to this exciting challenge!
— HISEMOTIONS 2026 Organising Committee
Dra. Albina Sarymsakova, CSIC-IEGPS-XuGa
Dra. Patricia Martín Rodilla, CSIC-IEGPS-XuGa
Dr. Eugenio Martínez Cámara, Universidad de Jaén
Dr. Alfonso Ureña López, Universidad de Jaén