---
title: "SemEval 2021 Task 7 — paper by Meaney et al. (2021)"
description: "HaHackathon is the SemEval 2021 shared task that, for the first time, brought humor detection and… 0.580 accuracy. 50 references, cited by 66 papers here."
authors: ["J. A. Meaney", "Steven Wilson", "Luis Chiruzzo", "Adam Lopez", "Walid Magdy"]
year: 2021
venue: "Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2021.semeval-1.9/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/2021.semeval-1.9"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/meaney-2021-semeval-2021-task-7-hahackathon/"
---
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# SemEval 2021 Task 7: HaHackathon, Detecting and Rating Humor and Offense

**Authors:** J. A. Meaney, [Steven Wilson](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/steven-wilson/), [Luis Chiruzzo](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/luis-chiruzzo/), [Adam Lopez](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/adam-lopez/) and [Walid Magdy](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/walid-magdy/) · **Year:** 2021 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/semeval/) ([SemEval 2021](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/semeval/2021/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2021.semeval-1.9/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2021.semeval-1.9.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/2021.semeval-1.9](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.semeval-1.9) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W3183822815)

**Citations:** 75 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [66](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/meaney-2021-semeval-2021-task-7-hahackathon/cited-by/) in our library, of the 141,840 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
HaHackathon is the SemEval 2021 shared task that, for the first time, brought humor detection and offense detection together in one benchmark. The organizers assembled 10,000 English texts. Most came from US Twitter accounts and the rest from the Kaggle Short Jokes collection. Each text was labeled by 20 US-based native speakers, with five annotators from each of four age brackets. There were four subtasks: deciding whether a text is humorous, regressing its mean humor score, regressing its mean offense score, and a new controversy subtask that asks whether annotators disagreed strongly on how funny a joke is. Between 36 and 58 teams entered each subtask. Most relied on pre-trained transformers, often combined with extra techniques such as task-adaptive training, adversarial training or multi-task learning. Binary humor detection turned out to be largely tractable. Controversy prediction stayed hard, and a simple rule-based system placed in the top three. The dataset matters because it records funniness and offensiveness as subjective, demographically varied judgments rather than single fixed labels.

## Key points
- **Data sources:** 80% of the corpus is tweets and 20% comes from the Kaggle Short Jokes dataset (/r/jokes, /r/cleanjokes). The 8,000 tweets were filtered down from 76,542 crawled texts.
- **Annotation:** Annotators were recruited on Prolific and split across four age groups (18–25, 26–40, 41–55, 56–70), giving 20 ratings per text. After 301 sessions were rejected, 2,062 annotation sessions remained.
- **Controversy label:** A humorous text counts as controversial when the variance of its humor ratings is above the median variance in the training set.
- **Rule-based ceiling for controversy:** If humor scores were known perfectly, labeling every text with a score above 2 as controversial would reach 0.580 accuracy. A cut-off of 1.45 would reach an F1 of 0.635. Both results would top the leaderboard.
- **Offense errors by source:** Kaggle texts account for 44.8% of the hardest-to-predict offense items, although they are only 20% of the data. Many of these are ironic jokes that systems wrongly rated as highly offensive.

## Interesting ideas
- **Keyword decoupling:** The organizers took 1,000 jokes in which a hate-speech keyword is the butt of the joke and 1,000 in which the keyword only appears in passing. This stops models from learning a shortcut based on keywords alone. The same contrastive sampling could help any toxicity or sentiment dataset where trigger words are confounded with labels.
- **Disagreement as a target:** The task turns rater variance into its own prediction label instead of averaging it away. This approach could be reused for any subjective annotation, such as politeness or sarcasm, where how much people disagree is informative in itself.
- **Hard non-humorous negatives:** Non-humorous texts were drawn from sources that resemble jokes in form, such as trivia Q&A accounts, movie-quote accounts and advocacy groups that mention the same target words. News was avoided because its style is too easy to tell apart. Choosing negatives this way makes classifiers learn content rather than genre style.
- **Upper bound for simple heuristics:** The organizers measured how well a threshold rule would do if it had perfect knowledge of the humor scores. This shows how much of a subtask a trivial baseline could solve, which is a useful sanity check when designing new subtasks.
- **Matched annotators and texts:** Texts and raters were both taken from the US to reduce misunderstandings caused by cultural gaps. This is relevant to any culturally loaded annotation, for example Ukrainian humor or slang, where raters should share the background of the texts.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: J. A. Meaney, Steven Wilson, Luis Chiruzzo, Adam Lopez and Walid Magdy. 2021. SemEval 2021 Task 7: HaHackathon, Detecting and Rating Humor and Offense. Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{meaney2021semeval,
  title = {{SemEval 2021 Task 7: HaHackathon, Detecting and Rating Humor and Offense}},
  author = {J. A. Meaney, Steven Wilson, Luis Chiruzzo, Adam Lopez and Walid Magdy},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021)},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2021.semeval-1.9},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.semeval-1.9}
}
```

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*Updated 24 October 2026*