*TextDetox CLEF 2025*

Toxicity in online communication is a growing concern, and NLP has the power to make a difference! Our Text Detoxification Shared Task invites researchers and practitioners to develop innovative methods for transforming harmful language into neutral or constructive text while preserving meaning. This multilingual challenge spans 15 languages, pushing the boundaries of responsible AI and ethical NLP. Whether you're an expert in text style transfer, toxicity detection, or multilingual NLP, this is your chance to contribute to a safer, more inclusive digital space!

https://pan.webis.de/clef25/pan25-web/text-detoxification.html

https://huggingface.co/textdetox

TL;DR

Task formulation: transfer a text style from toxic to neutral (i.e. what a f**k is this about? -> what is this about?)

15 very diverse languages: English, Spanish, Italian, French, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Hinglish, Arabic, German, Russian, Ukrainian, Amharic, Hebrew, Tatar

Tasks and phases:

The second edition of TextDetox focuses on advancing multilingual and cross-lingual text detoxification. The challenge is to develop a model that, using training data from nine diverse languages – English, Spanish, German, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Ukrainian, Russian, and Amharic – can generalize effectively to *new languages* -- *Italian, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, and Tatar *-- while maintaining consistent performance across all.

The shared task will be split in two phases – dev and test with more data to challenge your models!

The final leaderboard will be built on more advanced evaluation – we will release the details later.

In the end, you will have an opportunity to write and then present a paper

at CLEF 2024 (https://clef2025.clef-initiative.eu/index.php) which will take place in sunny Madrid, Spain!

Important Dates

Now: join our google group for all updates: https://groups.google.com/g/textdetox-clef2025 Register officially to CLEF competition: https://clef2025.clef-initiative.eu/index.php?page=Pages/registration.html

April 25, 2025: Registration closes. May 1st, 2025: Test phase starts May 10, 2025: End of evaluation cycle. May 30, 2025: Participants paper submission. June 27, 2025: Notification of acceptance. July 7, 2025: Camera-ready due. September 9-12, 2025: CLEF Conference in Madrid, Spain!

On behalf of TextDetox Shared Task Organizers, Daryna Dementieva https://dardem.github.io/