Polarization refers to the division of opinions into two sharply contrasting groups, often accompanied by hostility, intolerance, or exclusion. In today's digital era, polarization is intensifying across platforms and geographies, influencing public discourse, exacerbating conflicts, and contributing to societal fragmentation.
This shared task is the first SemEval initiative focused on polarization, aiming to advance the computational understanding of how polarization manifests in text across multiple languages, cultures, and event types. Participants will develop models capable of detecting and interpreting polarization in a variety of online contexts.
The task centers on textual data collected from real-world events such as elections, international conflicts, social protests, and ideological debates. The primary goal is to evaluate systems’ ability to identify polarized content and classify its targets.
To promote global inclusivity and cross-cultural representation, the dataset encompasses multiple languages, including many mid/low-resource and underrepresented ones in mainstream NLP research.
Participants may choose to compete in one or more of three subtasks:
The dataset is sourced from news websites, Reddit, blogs, Bluesky, and regional forums, covering event types like elections, conflicts, gender rights, migration, and more. Each language includes between 3,000 and 5,000 annotated instances.
Annotation tools used include Label Studio, Prolific, Potato, and Mechanical Turk.
This task aims to advance socially responsible AI by supporting NLP for low-resource languages and fostering explainable and inclusive NLP systems. It will help establish multilingual benchmarks for polarization detection, promoting fair and transparent computational approaches to understanding societal divisions.
This task welcomes participation from:
The POLAR task is organized by researchers from:
For questions or to join the community, reach out via email at polarization-semeval-2026-organisers@googlegroups.com. Stay connected through the Discord channel, mailing list, and GitHub repository (links to be announced soon).