We present SemEval-2026 Task 9, a shared task on online polarization detection, covering 22 languages and comprising over 110K annotated instances. Each data instance is multi-labeled with the presence of polarization, polarization type, and polarization manifestation. Participants were asked to predict labels in three subtasks: (1) detecting the presence of polarization, (2) identifying the type of polarization, and (3) recognizing the polarization manifestation. The three tasks attracted over 1,000 participants worldwide and more than 10k submissions on Codabench. We received final submissions from 67 teams and 69 system description papers. We report the baseline results and analyze the performance of the best-performing systems, highlighting the most common approaches and the most effective methods across different subtasks and languages. The dataset and other resources for this task are publicly available.

Online polarization poses a growing challenge for democratic discourse, yet most computational social science research remains monolingual, culturally narrow, or event-specific. We introduce POLAR, a multilingual, multicultural, and multi-event dataset with over 110K instances in 22 languages drawn from diverse online platforms and real-world events. Polarization is annotated along three axes, namely detection, type, and manifestation, using a variety of annotation platforms adapted to each cultural context. We conduct two main experiments: (1) fine-tuning six pretrained small language models; and (2) evaluating a range of open and closed large language models in few-shot and zero-shot settings. Results show that while most models perform well on binary polarization detection, they achieve substantially lower performance when predicting polarization types and manifestations. These findings highlight the complex, highly contextual nature of polarization and underscore the need for robust, adaptable approaches in NLP and computational social science. All resources will be released to support further research and effective mitigation of digital polarization globally.

Despite regulations imposed by nations and social media platforms, e.g. (Government of India, 2021; European Parliament and Council of the European Union, 2022), inter alia, hateful content persists as a significant challenge. Existing approaches primarily rely on reactive measures such as blocking or suspending offensive messages, with emerging strategies focusing on proactive measurements like detoxification and counterspeech. In our work, which we call HATEPRISM, we conduct a comprehensive examination of hate speech regulations and strategies from three perspectives: country regulations, social platform policies, and NLP research datasets. Our findings reveal significant inconsistencies in hate speech definitions and moderation practices across jurisdictions and platforms, alongside a lack of alignment with research efforts. Based on these insights, we suggest ideas and research direction for further exploration of a unified framework for automated hate speech moderation incorporating diverse strategies.

People worldwide use language in subtle and complex ways to express emotions. Although emotion recognition–an umbrella term for several NLP tasks–impacts various applications within NLP and beyond, most work in this area has focused on high-resource languages. This has led to significant disparities in research efforts and proposed solutions, particularly for under-resourced languages, which often lack high-quality annotated datasets.In this paper, we present BRIGHTER–a collection of multi-labeled, emotion-annotated datasets in 28 different languages and across several domains. BRIGHTER primarily covers low-resource languages from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, with instances labeled by fluent speakers. We highlight the challenges related to the data collection and annotation processes, and then report experimental results for monolingual and crosslingual multi-label emotion identification, as well as emotion intensity recognition. We analyse the variability in performance across languages and text domains, both with and without the use of LLMs, and show that the BRIGHTER datasets represent a meaningful step towards addressing the gap in text-based emotion recognition.

This paper presents LECTURE4ALL, a web application developed to improve the search experience of educational video platforms. Lecture2Go provides a vast collection of recorded lectures, but locating specific content within videos can be time-consuming. LECTURE4ALL addresses this issue by leveraging a vector database and a streamlined user interface to enable direct retrieval of precise video timestamps. By enhancing search accuracy and efficiency, LECTURE4ALL significantly improves the accessibility and usability of educational video platforms.

In this system demonstration paper, we present the Concept Over Time Analysis extension for the Discourse Analysis Tool Suite.The proposed tool empowers users to define, refine, and visualize their concepts of interest within an interactive interface. Adhering to the Human-in-the-loop paradigm, users can give feedback through sentence annotations. Utilizing few-shot sentence classification, the system employs Sentence Transformers to compute representations of sentences and concepts. Through an iterative process involving semantic similarity searches, sentence annotation, and fine-tuning with contrastive data, the model continuously refines, providing users with enhanced analysis outcomes. The final output is a timeline visualization of sentences classified to concepts. Especially suited for the Digital Humanities, Concept Over Time Analysis serves as a valuable tool for qualitative data analysis within extensive datasets. The chronological overview of concepts enables researchers to uncover patterns, trends, and shifts in discourse over time.