Shared Task
This is ALTA’s seventeenth Language Technology Programming Competition. It is a shared task: all teams solve the same research problem, and the winner is the team with the best results. Processing must be fully automatic (no human intervention). There are no restrictions on team size or composition. To qualify for the prize of $500 (AUD), teams must submit results and present their system at ALTA 2026.
Task Overview
This year’s task focuses on sentiment and sarcasm classification for text in Australian (en-AU) and British (en-UK) English, using the en-AU and en-UK subsets of BESSTIE. Systems must classify both the sentiment and the sarcasm of a given text, and remain robust across the two English varieties. The competition runs on CodaBench. Full details on data formats, submission, and evaluation are on the shared task website.
Important Dates
| Milestone | Date |
|---|---|
| Release of training data | On registration |
| Release of test data | 22 September 2026 |
| Deadline for submission of results over test data | 28 September 2026 |
| Notification of results | 1 October 2026 |
| Deadline for submission of system description | 26 October 2026 |
| Deadline for submission of camera-ready version | 2 November 2026 |
| Presentation of results at ALTA 2026 | 30 November – 2 December 2026 |
How to Register
Email shared.task@alta.asn.au with:
- Name of your team
- Name and current studies of each team member (year, degree, and university, for e.g. “third year of the Bachelor of IT at Macquarie University”)
You will receive a confirmation message and the training data.
Organisers
- Coordinator / main contact (shared.task@alta.asn.au): Diego Molla-Aliod (Macquarie University)
- Data: Aditya Joshi and Dipankar Srirag (UNSW, Sydney)