*MER-TRANS-2026: https://lastus-taln-upf.github.io/mertrans-iberlef-2026/ https://lastus-taln-upf.github.io/mertrans-iberlef-2026/IBERLEF 2026: https://sites.google.com/view/iberlef-2026 https://sites.google.com/view/iberlef-2026Apologies for cross-postingWe are pleased to announce the launching of the Shared Task: Multilingual Easy to Read Translation (MER-TRANS) in the context of the IberLef 2026 Evaluation Forum. - Context*
*Linguistic access to information is increasingly recognised as a fundamental citizens’ right. For example, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) includes accessibility as one key enabler for a more inclusive society, while the European Union adopted the European Accessibility Act (EAA) in 2019, which requires that many everyday products and services, including digital information services, comply with accessibility standards. The UNCRPD and the EAA stress that information has to be provided in accessible language, such as plain language or easy-to-read language in order to allow the different population segments with language comprehension difficulties to exercise their recognized right to participate in society and public life. Providing information in easy language in a real-world setting is challenging. High-quality, easy-to-read content must typically be written or translated by human experts following specialized guidelines, and then often validated by target readers. This manual process requires considerable effort, time, and expertise, which limits how much content can be produced or translated into easy formats. Therefore, this MER-TRANS shared task aims at advancing the state of the art in the field of automatic easy-to-read translation with specific emphasis on Romance languages, more concretely, in Catalan, Italian, and Spanish. *
* - Task OverviewIn this shared task, we invite participating teams to automatically produce easy to read versions of texts and/or sentences. The texts will be sampled from the iDEM corpus, a multilingual corpus in the domain of democratic participation, which has been simplified by human experts following easy-to-read recommendations and high-quality validation procedures. There will also be a surprise language task to be revealed closer to the release of the test data. Up to three submissions per language will be allowed per participant team. - Data and EvaluationUnlike previous challenges where the data remained of restricted use, the iDEM corpus, with original and adapted versions, will be made fully available to the community, the documents for participants to produce adaptations will be provided during the test phase, and the full dataset during the IberLef workshop in September 2026. A small trial dataset will be released; it will be sampled from the iDEM corpus, considering the occurrence of different difficulties addressed by the easy-to-read adaptations. The examples will contain both the original text excerpts and easy-to-read versions. The test datawill consist of only the original complex text excerpts. Evaluation will be carried out with automatic metrics borrowed from current text simplification evaluation research, such as SARI and/or BLEUE and semantic similarity scores when appropriate. - System Description Papers and ProceedingsAll participating teams will be invited to submit a system description paper describing their methods, models, and experimental findings: further information about formatting and length will be given in due time. Submitted papers will be reviewed by at least two peer reviewers.Papers will be required to describe fully Reproducible solutions which contribute to Open Science. Accepted system description papers will be published at no cost in the Proceedings of the Iberian Languages Evaluation Forum (IberLEF 2026), hosted by CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org).Authors of accepted papers will be invited to present their work at the IberLEF 2026 workshop. Presentation at the workshop is encouraged but not mandatory for publication in the proceedings. - Who Should Participate?Participation is open to all. - Important DatesRegistration opens: Open nowRegistration closes: 28 Feb 2026Trial data release: 06 Mar 2026Test data release: 06 Apr 2026System outputs submission deadline : 13 Apr 2026Evaluation results published: 27 Apr 2026System Description Papers: 01 Jun 2026Papers acceptance: 14 Jun 2026Camera-ready papers due: 21 Jun 2026IberLEF 2026 Workshop: 22 Sept 2026 - How to ParticipateIn order to participate, teams must register using the registration form available at the task website https://lastus-taln-upf.github.io/mertrans-iberlef-2026/ https://lastus-taln-upf.github.io/mertrans-iberlef-2026/Note that registration is mandatory in order to access the data and submit system outputs. - Task OrganizersHoracio Saggion — Universitat Pompeu Fabra, SpainNelson Pérez Rojas — Universidad de Costa Rica, Costa RicaStefan Bott — Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain Nouran Khallaf — University of Leeds, UKMehrzad Tareh — Universitat Pompeu Fabra, SpainDaniel Adanza — Universitat Pompeu Fabra, SpainAlmudena Rascon — Plena Inclusion Madrid, SpainSandra Szasz — Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain*