JOKER

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CLEF 2026 JOKER Track:

Humour Detection, Search, and Translation

JOKER Track sessions take place in Room 131, except for the plenary CLEF conference sessions in Lecture Room 3.

Remote participation links:

Lecture Room 3: Zoom Link
Lecture Room 131: Zoom Link

Monday 21st September

No track sessions.

Tuesday 22nd September

No track sessions.

Wednesday 23rd September

Lab Overviews 3 (Lecture Room 3)

11:15 - 12:05 Liana Ermakova, Igor Kuzmin, Poojan Vachharajani, Tristan Miller, Anne-Gwenn Bosser and Jaap Kamps, Overview of the CLEF 2026 JOKER Track: Humor Detection, Search, and Translation in: Proceedings of CLEF’26, LNCS, Springer, 2026 (Paper, Slides, DOI).

Thursday 24th September

Best of Labs, CLEF 2025 (Lecture Room 3)

10:20 - 10:30 Russell Taylor, Benjamin Herbert and Michael Sana, Pun Intended: Multi-Agent Translation of Wordplay with Contrastive Learning and Phonetic-Semantic Embeddings in: Proceedings of CLEF’26, LNCS, Springer, 2026 (Paper, Slides, DOI).

JOKER Track Session 1/2 (Room 131)

11:00-12:00 CLEF 2026 JOKER Task Overviews:
Poojan Vachharajani, Arjun Mukherjee, Jasvindar Singh, Krishna Tewari, Sukomal Pal, Jaap Kamps, Liana Ermakova Overview of the CLEF 2026 JOKER Task 1: Humor-Aware Information Retrieval in English and Hinglish, 4115-4128 (Paper, Slides).
Liana Ermakova, Yael Naud, Lilian Binet, Baptiste Dumas, Jaap Kamps Overview of the CLEF 2026 JOKER Task 2: Pun Translation from English to French, 4129-4143 (Paper, Slides).
Liana Ermakova, Yael Naud, Lilian Binet, Jaap Kamps Overview of the CLEF 2026 JOKER Task 3: Onomastic Wordplay Translation from English to French, 4144-4152 (Paper, Slides).
Igor Kuzmin, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, Jaap Kamps, Liana Ermakova Overview of the CLEF 2026 JOKER Task 4: Humor Generation in English, French, and Spanish, 4153-4178 (Paper, Slides).
12:00 – 12:30 CLEF 2026 JOKER Participant presentations:
Jesse van Bakel, Robin Flier, Ezra Smink, Jan Bakker, Jaap Kamps University of Amsterdam at the CLEF 2026 JOKER Track, 4290-4302 (Paper, Slides).
Liana Ermakova, Yaël Naud, Lilian Binet, Baptiste Dumas Testing LLMs on JOKER Task 3: Onomastic Wordplay Translation and Task 4: Humour Generation. UBO at CLEF 2026, 4220-4228 (Paper, Slides).

JOKER Track Session 2/2 (Room 131)

14:00 – 15:00 CLEF 2026 JOKER Participant presentations:
Ana-Maria Luisa Mocanu, Sebastian Mocanu, Ciprian-Octavian Truică, Elena-Simona Apostol IROH: Insightful Ranking Of Humor using Multi-Stage Hybrid Retrieval with Rationale-Distilled LLM Judges for JOKER 2026 Track Task 1 English, 4229-4245 (Paper, Slides).
Arjun Mukherjee, Krishna Tewari, Jasvindar Singh, Sukomal Pal From Words to Wit: Humor-Aware Information Retrieval in English and Hinglish, 4246-4255 (Paper, Slides).
Russell Taylor, Adam Brikman, Prateek Awate Searching for Sound-Meaning Collisions: Graph-Based Affordance Retrieval and Multi-Evaluator Ranking for Cross-Lingual Pun Translation at CLEF 2026 JOKER Task 2, 4278-4289 (Paper, Slides).
Edward Ajayi, Prasenjit Mitra Cross-Lingual Cognitive Synergy for Constrained Humor Generation in LLMs: SaLT Lab at CLEF 2026 JOKER Track, 4179-4194 (Paper, Slides).
(Time for additional talks, depending on demand, from the JOKER track.)
15:00 - 15:30 CLEF 2027 JOKER Planning Session:
- We want to hear from you!
- What was great about JOKER 2026, and what could we improve for you?
  - Focus on humor generation?
  - Continue humor retrieval?
  - Interest in (onomastic) wordplay translation?
- Any ideas or volunteers are welcome!
- JOKER roadmap (Slides).

Closing Ceremony and Introduction of CLEF 2027

16:00 – 17:30 Closing and plans for 2027 (including slides on the CLEF 2027 JOKER track, Slides).

All CLEF 2026 JOKER track papers

Including authors unable to present in person or online:

JOKER: Humor Detection, Search, and Translation

Poojan Vachharajani, Arjun Mukherjee, Jasvindar Singh, Krishna Tewari, Sukomal Pal, Jaap Kamps, Liana Ermakova Overview of the CLEF 2026 JOKER Task 1: Humor-Aware Information Retrieval in English and Hinglish, 4115-4128 (Paper).
Liana Ermakova, Yael Naud, Lilian Binet, Baptiste Dumas, Jaap Kamps Overview of the CLEF 2026 JOKER Task 2: Pun Translation from English to French, 4129-4143 (Paper).
Liana Ermakova, Yael Naud, Lilian Binet, Jaap Kamps Overview of the CLEF 2026 JOKER Task 3: Onomastic Wordplay Translation from English to French, 4144-4152 (Paper).
Igor Kuzmin, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, Jaap Kamps, Liana Ermakova Overview of the CLEF 2026 JOKER Task 4: Humor Generation in English, French, and Spanish, 4153-4178 (Paper).
Edward Ajayi, Prasenjit Mitra Cross-Lingual Cognitive Synergy for Constrained Humor Generation in LLMs: SaLT Lab at CLEF 2026 JOKER Track, 4179-4194 (Paper).
Georgios Arampatzis, Avi Arampatzis DUTH at CLEF JOKER 2026: Conservative Hybridisation for Humor-Aware Retrieval, Pun Translation, Onomastic Wordplay Translation, and Multilingual Humour Generation, 4195-4219 (Paper).
Fatimah Emad Eldin Cairo University at the CLEF 2026 JOKER Track Heuristic Pun-Morphology Features and Tree Ensembles for Humor-Aware Information Retrieval, (No Paper).
Liana Ermakova, Yaël Naud, Lilian Binet, Baptiste Dumas Testing LLMs on JOKER Task 3: Onomastic Wordplay Translation and Task 4: Humour Generation. UBO at CLEF 2026, 4220-4228 (Paper).
Ana-Maria Luisa Mocanu, Sebastian Mocanu, Ciprian-Octavian Truică, Elena-Simona Apostol IROH: Insightful Ranking Of Humor using Multi-Stage Hybrid Retrieval with Rationale-Distilled LLM Judges for JOKER 2026 Track Task 1 English, 4229-4245 (Paper).
Arjun Mukherjee, Krishna Tewari, Jasvindar Singh, Sukomal Pal From Words to Wit: Humor-Aware Information Retrieval in English and Hinglish, 4246-4255 (Paper).
Ruslan Pylypiv, Maksym Kuznietsov, Martina Szabóová TUKE Satira at the CLEF 2026 JOKER Track: Constant-Variable Optimization for English-French Pun Translation, 4256-4269 (Paper).
Xinrui Qiu, Huihui Chen, Jinghe Zhai CLEF 2026 JOKER Track: Relevance-Aware Multilingual Retrieval for Humorous Wordplay, 4270-4277 (Paper).
Russell Taylor, Adam Brikman, Prateek Awate Searching for Sound-Meaning Collisions: Graph-Based Affordance Retrieval and Multi-Evaluator Ranking for Cross-Lingual Pun Translation at CLEF 2026 JOKER Task 2, 4278-4289 (Paper).
Jesse van Bakel, Robin Flier, Ezra Smink, Jan Bakker, Jaap Kamps University of Amsterdam at the CLEF 2026 JOKER Track, 4290-4302 (Paper).