Multilingual Euphemism Detection https://www.codabench.org/competitions/1959/ Multilingual Euphemism Detection Shared Task https://www.codabench.org/competitions/1959/ https://www.codabench.org/competitions/1959/ for the Fourth Workshop on Figurative Language Processing https://sites.google.com/view/figlang2024/call-for-papers co-located with NAACL 2024 https://2024.naacl.org/.

Euphemisms are a linguistic device used to soften or neutralize language that may otherwise be harsh or awkward to state directly (e.g. "between jobs" instead of "unemployed", "late" instead of "dead", "collateral damage" instead of "war-related civilian deaths"). By acting as alternative words or phrases, euphemisms are used in everyday language to maintain politeness, mitigate discomfort, or conceal the truth. While they are culturally-dependent, the need to discuss sensitive topics in a non-offensive way is universal, suggesting similarities in the way euphemisms are used across languages and cultures.

Terms which may be used euphemistically sometimes require context to determine a euphemistic usage:

*"Asked to choose between jobs and the environment, a majority -- at least in our warped, first-past-the-post system -- will pick jobs."* [ non-euphemistic]

vs.

*"This summer, the budding talent agent was between jobs and free to babysit pretty much any time."* [euphemistic]

In this shared task, participants are invited to develop approaches and models to disambiguate texts (in multiple languages) as either euphemistic or not. Participants are encouraged to develop multilingual and cross-lingual approaches.

Important dates:

- 1/25/24: Competition opens; participants develop approaches on training data and labels - 2/15/24: Test data is released; performances will be tracked on Codabench dashboard - 2/25/24: Last day to submit predictions on test data - 3/10/24: Papers describing approaches are due - 4/14/24: Notification of acceptance - 4/24/24: Final paper submission - 6/21/24 or 6/22/24: FigLang 2024 Workshop