Participant peer review process is ready

[Santiago Castro]

We finished the desk rejection phase of the papers. A handful of papers had issues and are now being processed. In any case, at least 28 submitted papers are fine to continue with the review process. We're so happy to receive so much participation!

We assigned one author from each paper to review another paper from the submission pool. Please do so by April 1st. You should be able to see it at https://softconf.com/acl2026/semeval2026/

Consider this a great opportunity to give and receive feedback from your participant peers. Peer feedback is a valuable way to grow and learn. And it shouldn't take you long. Even if you only have 1 hour, you can still give meaningful feedback. Though I'd encourage spending more time on a more detailed review.

Please follow SemEval's recommendations on how to review (which, in turn, point to ACL's).

Here are some suggestions on useful feedback to give to the paper authors:

* What improvements can they make to their systems? Especially non-trivial aspects (not simply going from Gemini 2.5 to 3).
* How can the reproducibility of the paper be improved? E.g., if they say they used GPT, do they say which version? E.g., if they say they add keywords to the input of a model, do you understand how they do it so that you could reproduce it on your end by writing code yourself?
* How can they make their paper easier to understand?
* Point out interesting experiments to give a shot at.
* Highlight one thing you liked about the paper. Let them know if you learned something new.

Here are some requests from our end:

* Ensure any mention of results and team/user names is consistent with the final results.

* Check for any big issues in the document format.
* Check that the paper cites our overview paper:

@inproceedings{semeval2026mwahaha,

  title={{SemEval-2026 Task 1: MWAHAHA, Models Write Automatic Humor And Humans Annotate}},

  author={Castro, Santiago and Chiruzzo, Luis and G{\'o}ngora, Santiago and Rahili, Salar and Deng, Naihao and Sastre, Ignacio and Amoroso, Victoria and Rey, Guillermo and Ros{\'a}, Aiala and Moncecchi, Guillermo and Meaney, J. A. and Prada, Juan Jos{\'e} and Mihalcea, Rada},

  booktitle={Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2026)},

  year={2026}

}

[Sarah Barzel]

Hi,

I’m unable to find where the paper assigned for review appears in the system. I’ve attached a screenshot—would appreciate your guidance.

בתאריך יום ג׳, 17 במרץ 2026, 08:09, מאת Santiago Castro ‏<bryan...@gmail.com>:

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "semeval-2026-task-1-humor-gen" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to semeval-2026-task-1-...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/semeval-2026-task-1-humor-gen/8ec2bce6-36b5-4346-b7f6-c37cf35777dcn%40googlegroups.com.

[Santiago Castro]

Hey, can you try with this link: https://softconf.com/acl2026/semeval2026/track/SemEval_2026_Task_1___Humor_Generation/scmd.cgi?scmd=get-assigned

[Sarah Barzel]

  when I click the link, it either gives me the option to open the attached below, or to download a file that, when extracted, contains an HTM file leading me to the STAR system but I’m not able to find the paper assigned for review. . I’d appreciate some guidance.  

[Santiago Castro]

Hey, Sarah, I just identified the issue. Following SemEval organizers suggestions, we have assigned two reviewers per paper. And we decided to do it by assigning one organizer and and one participant author. Because each paper has many authors, We took the first author we could find in Softconf as a reviewer, and that's why you didn't have a paper assigned (the first author of your paper did instead).

However, I just assigned you one paper. Feel free to review it provided you have time. If you do so, please have it ready before the start of Monday, April 6th.

Sorry about the confusion and the time I took to answer.

[Sarah Barzel]

Thanks for your response, I'll rely on the review already conducted by the partners

בתאריך יום ה׳, 2 באפר׳ 2026, 09:16, מאת Santiago Castro ‏<bryan...@gmail.com>: