GermEval 2025 Shared Task: Candy Speech Detection

GermEval 2025 Shared Task: Candy Speech Detection – Participate in the shared task on candy speech detection and contribute to the development of NLP for the German language.

We are pleased to announce the GermEval Shared Task on Candy Speech Detection („Flausch-Erkennung“).

This is the second call to participate in the shared task on candy speech detection („Flausch-Erkennung“). We invite everyone from academia and industry to participate in the shared task.

The workshop discussing the results of this shared task is planned to be held in conjunction with the Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS) in September 2025.

Introduction

• Numerous methods have been developed for detecting and censoring negative speech (e.g., hate speech or offensive or harmful language) on social media platforms.
• However, there is much less on identifying and promoting positive supportive discourse in online communities.
• Our shared task aims to address this gap and encourage researchers to focus on such positive expressions.

The task is to identify expressions of candy speech (Flausch) in online posts (YouTube comments). We define candy speech as expression of positive attitudes on social media toward individuals or their output (videos, comments, etc.).

Data

• We will provide the participants with annotated training (and development) and unlabeled test datasets containing complete written, German language comment threads under YouTube videos posted by different content creators.
• The content creators and communities vary in topic, style, age group, etc.
• The training and test datasets do not overlap in terms of YouTube.

Task Details

• Candy speech detection is the task of identifying the presence of candy speech (at the span level) in a given YouTube comment and classifying each expression in one of the predefined categories.
• This shared task focuses on German speaking YouTube communities.
• Participants will be provided with a dataset of YouTube comments manually annotated for different types of candy speech expressions.

Important Dates

• Trial data available: February 15, 2025
• Training data available: March 3, 2025
• Test data available: May 17, 2025
• Evaluation start: June 16, 2025
• Evaluation end: June 27, 2025
• Paper submission due: July 15, 2025
• Camera ready due: August 15, 2025
• GermEval workshop: September 8 or 12, 2025 (co-located with KONVENS)

Website

https://yuliacl.github.io/GermEval2025-Flausch-Erkennung/

Contact

Please send any enquiry to the following email address: germeval-2025-candy-speech at ruhr-uni-bochum.de

Tags: GermEval, Candy Speech Detection, Natural Language Processing, German Language, Shared Task, KONVENS