[Sorry for cross-posting] HISEMOTIONS 2026 focuses on emotion detection in Early Modern Spanish epistolary texts (16th–17th centuries). Unlike most existing emotion detection tasks that target modern languages or contemporary genres (e.g., social media, reviews), this challenge explores historical linguistic variation and semantic shift, raising a new challenge for NLP systems. Participants are tasked with developing systems that automatically identify emotional content in fragments of historical Spanish letters, addressing issues such as diachronic language variation, historical semantic shifting, and domain adaptation. The shared task aims to foster methodological progress at the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Digital Humanities. 🔗 *Task page / resources*: https://github.com/albinasarymsakova/HISEMOTIONS_2026 https://github.com/albinasarymsakova/HISEMOTIONS_2026?utm_source=chatgpt.com ------------------------------ Why Participate? - Advance emotion detection methods in low-resource and historical domains. - Explore semantic change effects on automatic classification. - Benchmark systems on a novel historical dataset with expert human annotation. - Cutting-edge research into the computational study of cultural heritage. ------------------------------ Shared Task Details Task: Multi-label emotion detection Each text fragment should be labelled with one or more of the following emotions: • joy • sadness • fear • anger • surprise • hope Participants will predict binary labels for each emotion per fragment. Systems will be evaluated against hidden gold labels using standard metrics such as precision, recall, and macro-F1 score. ------------------------------ Important Dates Task announcement February 9, 2026 Development data release February 12, 2026 Training data release March 12, 2026 Test data release & evaluation start March 27, 2026 Deadline for system submissions April 30, 2026 Official results published May 4, 2026 System description papers due May 20, 2026 Review notification June 19, 2026 Camera-ready papers due July 1, 2026 IberLEF Workshop (presentations) September 22, 2026 ------------------------------ Contact & Submission For updates, questions, or discussions about the task, please open issues in the task GitHub repository or contact the organisers. Detailed submission guidelines will be published alongside the data releases. ------------------------------ We look forward to your participation and contribution to this exciting challenge! — HISEMOTIONS 2026 Organising Committee Dra. Albina Sarymsakova, CSIC-IEGPS-XuGa Dra. Patricia Martín Rodilla, CSIC-IEGPS-XuGa Dr. Eugenio Martínez Cámara, Universidad de Jaén Dr. Alfonso Ureña López, Universidad de Jaén -- [image: image.png] *Patricia Martín Rodilla, Ph.D.* Científica Titular/ Tenured Scientist Instituto de Estudios Gallegos Padre Sarmiento CONSEJO SUPERIOR DE INVESTIGACIONES CIENTÍFICAS ✆ 981 54 02 37 @ [email protected] ✉ Rúa San Roque 2 15704 Santiago de Compostela