SubmissionNumber#=%=#296 FinalPaperTitle#=%=#SemEval Task 1: Semantic Textual Relatedness for African and Asian Languages ShortPaperTitle#=%=# NumberOfPages#=%=#16 CopyrightSigned#=%=#Nedjma Ousidhoum JobTitle#==#Assistant Professor Organization#==#Cardiff University, UK. Abstract#==#We present the first shared task on Semantic Textual Relatedness (STR). While earlier shared tasks primarily focused on semantic similarity, we instead investigate the broader phenomenon of semantic relatedness across 14 languages: Afrikaans, Algerian Arabic, Amharic, English, Hausa, Hindi, Indonesian, Kinyarwanda, Marathi, Moroccan Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Punjabi, Spanish, and Telugu. These languages originate from five distinct language families and are predominantly spoken in Africa and Asia -- regions characterised by the relatively limited availability of NLP resources. Each instance in the datasets is a sentence pair associated with a score that represents the degree of semantic textual relatedness between the two sentences. Participating systems were asked to rank sentence pairs by their closeness in meaning (i.e., their degree of semantic relatedness) in the 14 languages in three main tracks: (a) supervised, (b) unsupervised, and (c) crosslingual. The task attracted 163 participants. We received 70 submissions in total (across all tasks) from 51 different teams, and 38 system description papers. We report on the best-performing systems as well as the most common and the most effective approaches for the three different tracks. Author{1}{Firstname}#=%=#Nedjma Author{1}{Lastname}#=%=#Ousidhoum Author{1}{Username}#=%=#nousidhoum Author{1}{Email}#=%=#OusidhoumN@cardiff.ac.uk Author{1}{Affiliation}#=%=#Cardiff University Author{2}{Firstname}#=%=#Shamsuddeen Hassan Author{2}{Lastname}#=%=#Muhammad Author{2}{Username}#=%=#shmuhammad Author{2}{Email}#=%=#shmuhammad.csc@buk.edu.ng Author{2}{Affiliation}#=%=#Bayero University, Kano Author{3}{Firstname}#=%=#Mohamed Author{3}{Lastname}#=%=#Abdalla Author{3}{Username}#=%=#msa Author{3}{Email}#=%=#mohamed.abdalla@mail.utoronto.ca Author{3}{Affiliation}#=%=#University of Toronto Author{4}{Firstname}#=%=#Idris Author{4}{Lastname}#=%=#Abdulmumin Author{4}{Username}#=%=#abumafrim Author{4}{Email}#=%=#abumafrim@gmail.com Author{4}{Affiliation}#=%=#Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria Author{5}{Firstname}#=%=#Ibrahim Said Author{5}{Lastname}#=%=#Ahmad Author{5}{Username}#=%=#isab7070 Author{5}{Email}#=%=#isahmad.it@buk.edu.ng Author{5}{Affiliation}#=%=#Northeastern University Author{6}{Firstname}#=%=#Sanchit Author{6}{Lastname}#=%=#Ahuja Author{6}{Username}#=%=#sanchitahuja205 Author{6}{Email}#=%=#sanchitahuja205@gmail.com Author{6}{Affiliation}#=%=#Microsoft Research Author{7}{Firstname}#=%=#Alham Fikri Author{7}{Lastname}#=%=#Aji Author{7}{Username}#=%=#afaji321 Author{7}{Email}#=%=#afaji321@gmail.com Author{7}{Affiliation}#=%=#MBZUAI Author{8}{Firstname}#=%=#Vladimir Author{8}{Lastname}#=%=#Araujo Author{8}{Username}#=%=#vgaraujov Author{8}{Email}#=%=#vgaraujo@uc.cl Author{8}{Affiliation}#=%=#KU Leuven Author{9}{Firstname}#=%=#Meriem Author{9}{Lastname}#=%=#Beloucif Author{9}{Username}#=%=#mbeloucif Author{9}{Email}#=%=#meriem.beloucif@lingfil.uu.se Author{9}{Affiliation}#=%=#Uppsala University Author{10}{Firstname}#=%=#Christine Author{10}{Lastname}#=%=#de Kock Author{10}{Username}#=%=#christinedekock Author{10}{Email}#=%=#christinedekock11@gmail.com Author{10}{Affiliation}#=%=#University of Melbourne Author{11}{Firstname}#=%=#Oumaima Author{11}{Lastname}#=%=#Hourrane Author{11}{Username}#=%=#oumaimahourrane Author{11}{Email}#=%=#oumaima.hourrane@gmail.com Author{11}{Affiliation}#=%=#University of Hassan 2 Author{12}{Firstname}#=%=#Manish Author{12}{Lastname}#=%=#Shrivastava Author{12}{Username}#=%=#manshri Author{12}{Email}#=%=#m.shrivastava@iiit.ac.in Author{12}{Affiliation}#=%=#International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad Author{13}{Firstname}#=%=#Thamar Author{13}{Lastname}#=%=#Solorio Author{13}{Username}#=%=#solorio Author{13}{Email}#=%=#thamar.solorio@gmail.com Author{13}{Affiliation}#=%=#University of Houston Author{14}{Firstname}#=%=#Nirmal Author{14}{Lastname}#=%=#Surange Author{14}{Username}#=%=#nsurange Author{14}{Email}#=%=#nirmal.surange@research.iiit.ac.in Author{14}{Affiliation}#=%=#International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad Author{15}{Firstname}#=%=#Krishnapriya Author{15}{Lastname}#=%=#Vishnubhotla Author{15}{Username}#=%=#krishnapriya22 Author{15}{Email}#=%=#vkpriya@cs.toronto.edu Author{15}{Affiliation}#=%=#University of Toronto Author{16}{Firstname}#=%=#Seid Muhie Author{16}{Lastname}#=%=#Yimam Author{16}{Username}#=%=#seidm Author{16}{Email}#=%=#seidymam@gmail.com Author{16}{Affiliation}#=%=#Universität Hamburg Author{17}{Firstname}#=%=#Saif M. Author{17}{Lastname}#=%=#Mohammad Author{17}{Username}#=%=#saifm Author{17}{Email}#=%=#uvgotsaif@gmail.com Author{17}{Affiliation}#=%=#NRC ========== èéáğö