SemEval-2026 Task 6: CLARITY -- Unmasking Political Question Evasions

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Main Authors: Thomas, Konstantinos, Filandrianos, Giorgos, Lymperaiou, Maria, Zerva, Chrysoula, Stamou, Giorgos
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Thomas, Konstantinos
Filandrianos, Giorgos
Lymperaiou, Maria
Zerva, Chrysoula
Stamou, Giorgos
author_facet Thomas, Konstantinos
Filandrianos, Giorgos
Lymperaiou, Maria
Zerva, Chrysoula
Stamou, Giorgos
contents Political speakers often avoid answering questions directly while maintaining the appearance of responsiveness. Despite its importance for public discourse, such strategic evasion remains underexplored in Natural Language Processing. We introduce SemEval-2026 Task 6, CLARITY, a shared task on political question evasion consisting of two subtasks: (i) clarity-level classification into Clear Reply, Ambivalent, and Clear Non-Reply, and (ii) evasion-level classification into nine fine-grained evasion strategies. The benchmark is constructed from U.S. presidential interviews and follows an expert-grounded taxonomy of response clarity and evasion. The task attracted 124 registered teams, who submitted 946 valid runs for clarity-level classification and 539 for evasion-level classification. Results show a substantial gap in difficulty between the two subtasks: the best system achieved 0.89 macro-F1 on clarity classification, surpassing the strongest baseline by a large margin, while the top evasion-level system reached 0.68 macro-F1, matching the best baseline. Overall, large language model prompting and hierarchical exploitation of the taxonomy emerged as the most effective strategies, with top systems consistently outperforming those that treated the two subtasks independently. CLARITY establishes political response evasion as a challenging benchmark for computational discourse analysis and highlights the difficulty of modeling strategic ambiguity in political language.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_14027
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SemEval-2026 Task 6: CLARITY -- Unmasking Political Question Evasions
Thomas, Konstantinos
Filandrianos, Giorgos
Lymperaiou, Maria
Zerva, Chrysoula
Stamou, Giorgos
Computation and Language
Political speakers often avoid answering questions directly while maintaining the appearance of responsiveness. Despite its importance for public discourse, such strategic evasion remains underexplored in Natural Language Processing. We introduce SemEval-2026 Task 6, CLARITY, a shared task on political question evasion consisting of two subtasks: (i) clarity-level classification into Clear Reply, Ambivalent, and Clear Non-Reply, and (ii) evasion-level classification into nine fine-grained evasion strategies. The benchmark is constructed from U.S. presidential interviews and follows an expert-grounded taxonomy of response clarity and evasion. The task attracted 124 registered teams, who submitted 946 valid runs for clarity-level classification and 539 for evasion-level classification. Results show a substantial gap in difficulty between the two subtasks: the best system achieved 0.89 macro-F1 on clarity classification, surpassing the strongest baseline by a large margin, while the top evasion-level system reached 0.68 macro-F1, matching the best baseline. Overall, large language model prompting and hierarchical exploitation of the taxonomy emerged as the most effective strategies, with top systems consistently outperforming those that treated the two subtasks independently. CLARITY establishes political response evasion as a challenging benchmark for computational discourse analysis and highlights the difficulty of modeling strategic ambiguity in political language.
title SemEval-2026 Task 6: CLARITY -- Unmasking Political Question Evasions
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14027