EvaHan 2026

EvaHan 2026 is the Fifth International Evaluation of Ancient Chinese Information Processing, focusing on OCR tasks for multimodal large language models in ancient Chinese.
Co-organized with LREC 2026, which will be held from May 11 to 16, 2026, in Mallorca, Spain.
EvaHan 2026 is organized by Dongbo Wang, Bin Li, Minuxan Feng, Chao Xu, Weiguang Qu, Liu Liu, Si Shen.

Previous Tasks

EvaHan 2022

The First Bake-off of ancient Chinese automatic processing was successfully held in Marseille, France, in 2022, with a focus on automatic word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging of ancient Chinese.

EvaHan 2023

The Second Bake-off of ancient Chinese automatic processing was successfully held in Macau, China, in 2023, with a focus on machine translation of ancient Chinese.

EvaHan 2024

The Third Bake-off of ancient Chinese automatic processing was held in Turin, Italy, in 2024, with a focus on automatic sentence segmentation and punctuation of ancient Chinese.

EvaHan 2025

The Fourth Bake-off of ancient Chinese automatic processing was held in New Mexico, USA, in 2025, with a focus on named entity recognition in ancient Chinese.

Important Dates for EvaHan 2026

Registration deadline: January 30, 2026
Training data release: January 1, 2026
Test data release: February 1, 2026
Running results submission: February 6, 2026
Technical report submission deadline: February 28, 2026
Notification of acceptance: March 1, 2026
Camera-ready papers due: March 10, 2026

Participation

To participate in EvaHan 2026, you must complete the following steps:

Registration:
Fill in the registration form to officially register your team for the task. Registration is open from December 1, 2025, to January 30, 2026. Only registered participants will gain access to the training dataset.
Accessing the Training Data:
After completing the registration process, participants will receive instructions for downloading the training dataset, which includes image–text pairs from ancient Chinese texts for OCR.
Submitting Results and Reports:
Participants must use the provided test data to generate results and submit their system outputs and a technical report as per the shared task schedule.

For inquiries or to request the registration form, please contact us at evahan2026@gmail.com.

Data

The Evahan 2026 dataset comprises three datasets, covering image-text pairs: plain text images, mixed image-text images, and handwritten images-text. The data underwent initial automatic annotation, followed by meticulous correction and refinement by experts in classical Chinese language and history to ensure the highest quality of the training materials and gold-standard texts.

● Dataset A (Printed Texts) consists of data selected from the Siku Quanshu (Complete Library of the Four Treasuries), including classics, history, philosophy, and literature, as well as various other ancient books.

● Dataset B (Mixed Layouts) contains mixed image-text data selected from the Siku Quanshu and other ancient books.

● Dataset C (Handwritten Texts) includes handwritten ancient books, primarily the Chinese Buddhist canon, including the Chinese Buddhist canon (TKH) dataset, and the Chinese Buddhist canon (MTH) dataset.

Organizers

Dongbo Wang, College of Information Management, Nanjing Agricultural University, China
Bin Li, School of Chinese Language and Literature, Nanjing Normal University, China
Minxuan Feng, School of Chinese Language and Literature, Nanjing Normal University, China
Chao Xu, School of Chinese Language and Literature, Nanjing Normal University, China
Weiguang Qu, School of Computer and Electronic Information /School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing Normal University, China
Liu Liu, College of Information Management, Nanjing Agricultural University, China
Si Shen, School of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China

Student Members

Dongmei Zhu, College of Information Management, Nanjing Agricultural University, China
Jieqiong Li, College of Information Management, Nanjing Agricultural University, China
Ruifeng Wu,College of Information Management, Nanjing Agricultural University, China
Junyi Yang，College of Information Management, Nanjing Agricultural University, China
Junjie Li, School of Chinese Language and Literature, Nanjing Normal University, China
Zhixing Xu, School of Chinese Language and Literature, Nanjing Normal University, China

For more information, please refer to our home page: EvaHan 2026

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