IROH: Insightful Ranking Of Humor using Multi-Stage Hybrid Retrieval with Rationale-Distilled LLM Judges for JOKER 2026 Track Task 1 English

Ana-Maria Luisa Mocanu, Sebastian Mocanu, Ciprian-Octavian Truică +1

Our team, VANGUARD, presents IROH (Insightful Ranking of Humor), a three-stage retrieval system for JOKER Task 1 English at CLEF 2026, achieving first place on the leaderboard with…