AmericasNLP 2026 Shared Task: Cultural Image Captioning for Indigenous Languages
The AmericasNLP 2026 Shared Task challenges participants to develop systems that generate accurate, culturally grounded captions for images depicting Indigenous cultures of the Americas, written in the Indigenous languages themselves.
Motivation
Many Indigenous languages of the Americas are endangered and lack the resources needed to train NLP systems effectively. Language communities are actively pursuing revitalization, but creating culturally grounded teaching materials is expensive and time-consuming. Image captioning systems present an opportunity to generate such materials at scale, but doing so requires not only linguistic competence but also cultural knowledge — understanding the people, traditions, and contexts depicted in the images.
Task Description
Participants are given a dataset of culturally situated images, each paired with a caption in the associated Indigenous language. The goal is to generate captions for unseen images.
Example:
- Image:
- Target Caption (Wixárika): Ik+ kareta m+ya kaxetuni wixárika wapait+ yu +kú puti utá, uti xainék+ metá tsiere manapait+ rá ye hupú.
- English: The so-called carretón, built specifically to store food like corn, is also used as housing for people.
Rules
- Participants may use the provided training and development data, plus any additional resources (external data, pretrained models, etc.).
- Participants must not create test outputs manually.
Evaluation
We adopt a two-stage evaluation protocol:
- Stage 1: All systems are ranked using ChrF++.
- Stage 2: The top-5 systems are evaluated by human judges according to a fixed set of criteria.
Participants can enter for as many languages as they like; each language is evaluated separately. We provide an evaluation script and a baseline system to help get started.
Languages
- Bribri Costa Rica
- Guarani Paraguay
- Yucatec Maya Mexico
- Wixárika: Mexico
Data
Dataset and baseline: Github
Important Dates
- February 20, 2026: Release of pilot data and baseline system
- March 1, 2026: Release of development sets (50 examples)
- April 1, 2026: Release of surprise languages (if any)
- April 20, 2026: Release of test sets
- May 1, 2026: Submission of results (shared task deadline)
All deadlines are 11:59 pm UTC-12h (AoE).
Registration
If you are interested in participating, please register here: Google Form
