JOKER

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CLEF 2026 JOKER Track:

Humour Detection, Search, and Translation

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

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).

Best of Labs, 2025 (Lecture Room 3)

12:05 - 12:30 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).

Thursday 24th September

JOKER Track Session 1/2 (Room ???)

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, 4116-4129 (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, 4130-4144 (Paper).
Liana Ermakova, Yael Naud, Lilian Binet, Jaap Kamps Overview of the CLEF 2026 JOKER Task 3: Onomastic Wordplay Translation from English to French, 4145-4153 (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, 4154-4179 (Paper).
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, 4307-4319 (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, 4237-4245 (Paper).

JOKER Track Session 2/2 (Room ???)

14:00 – 15:30 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, 4246-4262 (Paper).
📶 Arjun Mukherjee, Krishna Tewari, Jasvindar Singh, Sukomal Pal From Words to Wit: Humor-Aware Information Retrieval in English and Hinglish, 4263-4272 (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, 4295-4306 (Paper).
Edward Ajayi, Prasenjit Mitra Cross-Lingual Cognitive Synergy for Constrained Humor Generation in LLMs: SaLT Lab at CLEF 2026 JOKER Track, 4180-4195 (Paper).
To be announced.
(Time for additional talks, depending on demand, from the JOKER track.)
15:15 - 15:30 CLEF 2027 JOKER Planning Session:
- We want to hear from you!
- What was great about 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, 4116-4129 (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, 4130-4144 (Paper).
Liana Ermakova, Yael Naud, Lilian Binet, Jaap Kamps Overview of the CLEF 2026 JOKER Task 3: Onomastic Wordplay Translation from English to French, 4145-4153 (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, 4154-4179 (Paper).
Edward Ajayi, Prasenjit Mitra Cross-Lingual Cognitive Synergy for Constrained Humor Generation in LLMs: SaLT Lab at CLEF 2026 JOKER Track, 4180-4195 (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, 4196-4220 (Paper).
Fatimah Emad Eldin Cairo University at the CLEF 2026 JOKER Track Heuristic Pun-Morphology Features and Tree Ensembles for Humor-Aware Information Retrieval, 4221-4236 (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, 4237-4245 (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, 4246-4262 (Paper).
Arjun Mukherjee, Krishna Tewari, Jasvindar Singh, Sukomal Pal From Words to Wit: Humor-Aware Information Retrieval in English and Hinglish, 4263-4272 (Paper).
Ruslan Pylypiv, Maksym Kuznietsov, Martina Szabóová TUKE Satira at the CLEF 2026 JOKER Track: Constant-Variable Optimization for English-French Pun Translation, 4273-4286 (Paper).
Xinrui Qiu, Huihui Chen, Jinghe Zhai CLEF 2026 JOKER Track: Relevance-Aware Multilingual Retrieval for Humorous Wordplay, 4287-4294 (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, 4295-4306 (Paper).
Jesse van Bakel, Robin Flier, Ezra Smink, Jan Bakker, Jaap Kamps University of Amsterdam at the CLEF 2026 JOKER Track, 4307-4319 (Paper).