Overview of HOPE at IberLEF 2023: Multilingual Hope Speech Detection

Hope speech is the speech that is able to relax hostile environments and that helps, inspires and encourages people in times of illness, stress, loneliness or depression. Its automatic recognition can have a very significant effect fighting against sexual and racial discrimination or fostering less belligerent environments. In contrast to identifying and censoring negative or hate speech, hope speech detection is focused on recognizing and promoting positive speech online. In this paper we present an overview of the IberLEF 2023 shared task, HOPE: Multilingual Hope Speech Detection, consisting of identifying whether texts written in English or Spanish contain hope speech or not. The competition was organized through CodaLab and attracted 50 teams that registered. Finally, 12 submitted results and 8 presented working notes describing their systems.