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

TL;DR

This paper introduces a shared task on detecting political question evasion and response clarity, using U.S. presidential interviews, highlighting the challenge of modeling strategic ambiguity in political discourse.

Contribution

It presents a new benchmark dataset and task for classifying political evasive responses, with insights into effective modeling strategies like language prompting and hierarchical analysis.

Findings

High accuracy in clarity classification (0.89 macro-F1)

Moderate success in evasion strategy classification (0.68 macro-F1)

Hierarchical and prompting methods outperform independent subtask approaches

Abstract

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.