ICMI 2026 CALL FOR MULTIMODAL GRAND CHALLENGES
!!! DEADLINE EXTENSION !!!
============================================
5-9 October 2026, Napoli - Italy
https://icmi.acm.org/2026/
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-> THE DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION IS EXTENDED TO JANUARY 16, 2026
We are calling for teams to propose one or more ICMI Multimodal Grand Challenges.
The International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI) is the premier international forum for multidisciplinary research on multimodal human-human and human-computer interaction, interfaces, and system development.
The conference's goals are to implement believable, autonomous, adaptive, context-aware Human Computer Interaction (HCI) systems able to infer how organizational, cultural and physical contexts shape individual perception, choices and actions. Such systems, e.g. synthetic agents, robots, avatars or analysis systems act in real-time, sustain dyadic/group interactions and actively cooperate in discussion, decision-making, problem solving, learning/knowledge building. These systems gather information and meanings in the course of everyday activity and build knowledge and practical ability to render the world interpretable while interacting with users attuned to behavioural sequences that underpin collaboration.
ICMI Multimodal Grand Challenges aim to inspire new ideas in the ICMI community and create momentum for future collaborative work. Analysis, synthesis, and interactive tasks are all possible.
Challenge papers will be indexed in the main proceedings of ICMI.
We invite the ICMI community from various fields related to multimodal interaction to collectively define and tackle these scientific Grand Challenges in this domain including but not limited to the following categories:
1. DATA CHALLENGES: gathering new experimental data and theories across a spectrum of disciplines;
2. ALGORITHM CHALLENGES: developing algorithms, models and computational paradigms that may equip machines with human level automaton intelligence;
3. APPLICATION CHALLENGES: implementing HCI systems that enhance quality of life in society and simplify the user access to future telecommunication services;
4. MULTIDISCIPLINARY CHALLENGES: promoting multidisciplinary exchanges, educational initiatives, and new socio-psychological and computational approaches towards socially-emotionally-context-aware Information Communication Technologies (ICT).
Prospective organizers should submit a five-page maximum proposal containing the following information:
1. Title
2. Abstract appropriate for possible Web promotion of the Challenge
3. Distinctive topics to be addressed and specific goals
4. Detailed description of the Challenge and its relevance to multimodal interaction
5. Length (full day or half day)
6. Plan for soliciting participation
7. Description of how submissions (challenge's submissions and papers) will be evaluated, and a list of proposed reviewers
8. Proposed schedule for releasing datasets (if applicable) and/or systems (if applicable) and receiving submissions
9. Short biography of the organizers (preferably from multiple institutions)
10. Funding source (if any) that supports or could support the challenge organization
11. Draft call for papers; affiliations and email address of the organisers; summary of the Grand Challenge; list of potential Technical Program Committee members and their affiliations; important dates
Proposals will be evaluated based on originality, ambition, feasibility, and implementation plan.
A Challenge with dataset(s) or system(s) that has had pilot results to ensure its representativity and suitability to the proposed task will be given preference for acceptance; an additional 1 page description must be attached in such case.
Continuation of or variants on the 2025 challenges are welcome, even if we require submissions of this form to highlight the number of participants that attended during the previous year and describe what changes (if any) will be made from the previous year.
The ICMI organizers will offer support with basic logistics, which includes rooms and equipment to run the Workshop, coffee breaks can be offered if synchronised with the main conference.
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Important Dates and Contact Details
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-> Proposals due: January 16, 2026 EXTENDED
Proposal notification: February 7, 2026 POSTPONED
Grand challenge date: October 5, 2026
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Proposals should be emailed to the ICMI 2025 Multimodal Grand Challenge Chairs, Sebastian Zepf (sebastian.zepf(a)mercedes-benz.com) and Alessandro Vinciarelli (Alessandro.Vinciarelli(a)glasgow.ac.uk).
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CALL FOR WORKSHOPS
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Please note that the call for workshops remains open until January 16,
2026.
We are seeking workshop proposals on emerging research areas related to the main conference topics and those that focus on multi-disciplinary research. We would also strongly encourage workshops that will include a diverse set of keynote speakers (factors to consider include: gender, ethnic background, institutions, years of experience, geography, etc.).
The content of accepted workshops is under the control of the workshop organizers. Workshops may be of half-day or one-day duration. Workshop organizers will be expected to manage the workshop content, solicit submissions, be present to moderate the discussion and panels, invite experts in the domain, conduct the reviewing process, and maintain a website for the workshop.
Workshop papers will be indexed by ACM Digital Library in an adjunct proceedings, and a short workshop summary by the organizers will be published in the main conference proceedings.
*CogSci 2026 - Call for Submissions to the 48th Annual Meeting of the
Cognitive Science Society Conference*
Theme: Cognitive (In)Efficiency
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
July 20 - 25, 2026
The Cognitive Science Society invites submissions to the 2026 edition of
its annual conference, *CogSci*. Submissions should address cognition from
any area related to Cognitive Science, including Artificial Intelligence,
Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and
Education. Submission guidelines, including submission categories,
templates and important dates are available at
https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/submissions/. Submission will be open
from November 26th 2025 to February 2nd 2026.
*Special Theme: Cognitive (In)Efficiency*
A core objective of cognitive science is to identify the mental processes
that guide thought and behavior. Much research has focused on understanding
these processes through the lens of utility and cognitive efficiency. Human
and non-human species are often seen as striving toward learning,
problem-solving, communication, and other goals by making optimal use of
cognitive resources. However, many behaviors and mental processes are not a
product of this ideal of efficiency and often deviate from it. CogSci 2026
focuses on the theme of Cognitive (In)Efficiency, and aims at exploring
through three thematic symposia: *(In)efficiency in Language and
Communication*, *(In)efficiency in Social Cognition and Cooperation*,
and *(In)efficiency
in Cognitive Science Research*.
The first two emphasize the critical need to address both cognitive
efficiency and inefficiency as natural and influential aspects of
processing and behavior. By exploring instances where cognitive processes
and behavioral outputs appear suboptimal—particularly in the contexts of
communication and social coordination—we invite a deeper examination of
what constitutes “optimality” across different domains and settings. In
doing so, we aim to broaden the understanding of cognitive processes by
considering both efficient and inefficient pathways that shape thought and
behavior. The third symposium addresses (in)efficiencies arising from
disparities in research conditions across cognitive science laboratories
and departments worldwide. This symposium will spotlight how unequal access
to funding creates systemic barriers to global representation while
showcasing cognitive scientists who produce impactful research despite
facing disadvantaged material conditions. Our aim is to advocate for a more
equitable approach that values contributions from researchers across
diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, ultimately enriching the field as a
whole.
Each symposium topic will feature one keynote and three invited speakers.
Our keynote speakers include:
- Balthasar Bickel, Universität Zürich
- Hyowon (Hyo) Gweon, Stanford University
- Julia Hermida, National Scientific and Technical Research Council of
Argentina and National University of Hurlingham
*Conference Format*
CogSci 2026 will be fully hybrid with streaming of the entire program,
except for workshops (which will all be in-person). Presenters can choose
to present in-person in Rio de Janeiro or virtually, and virtual attendees
will be able to view the entire program synchronously. Virtual talks will
be presented synchronously throughout the program, and virtual posters will
be available for asynchronous interaction via the conference app, as well
as synchronous online interaction via video conferencing.
*Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives*
CogSci is committed to providing opportunities for people with different
backgrounds to attend the conference. Therefore, and since this is the
first time the Cognitive Science Society Conference comes to South America,
on top of the already existing initiatives promoted by the society, CogSci
2026 will feature reduced registration rates for participants from South
America.
---
Gemma Boleda
Universitat Pompeu Fabra / ICREA
https://gboleda.github.io/
The Language, Computation, and Cognition Lab (LaCoCo)
<https://lacoco-lab.github.io/home/> at Saarland Informatics Campus
(Saarbrücken, Germany), directed by Michael Hahn <https://mhahn.info/>,
invites applications for fully funded PhD and postdoc positions, with a
flexible start date.
*
RESEARCH AREAS
*
We’re especially excited about projects on:
* Architectural limitations of large language models (LLMs),
especially from theoretical perspectives
* New architectures and efficient reasoning for LLMs
* Mechanistic interpretability
* Theoretical foundations for AI safety
You’ll have substantial freedom to shape your topic within the lab’s scope.
*ABOUT THE LAB*
The lab is generously supported by an Emmy Noether grant (DFG) and has
substantial GPU resources. We regularly publish at top venues (e.g.,
six NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR papers in 2024–2025; ACL Best Paper 2024) and are
embedded in a world-class environment: Saarland University (Departments
of Computer Science and Language Science & Technology)
<https://saarland-informatics-campus.de/en/>, MPI for Informatics
<https://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/home>, MPI-SWS <https://www.mpi-sws.org/>,
CISPA <https://cispa.de/en>, and DFKI <https://www.dfki.de/en/web>.
Learn more about the lab at https://lacoco-lab.github.io/
<https://lacoco-lab.github.io/><https://lacoco-lab.github.io/>
*HOW TO APPLY
*
Please follow the procedure here: https://lacoco-lab.github.io/joining/
<https://lacoco-lab.github.io/joining/><https://lacoco-lab.github.io/joining/>
Deadline: December 20, 2025.
For questions, please contact Michael Hahn, mhahn(a)lst.uni-saarland.de
Applicants are expected to have a Master's degree by the start date.
Applicants who only have an undergraduate degree should instead apply to
the Saarbrücken Graduate School of Computer Science
<https://www.graduateschool-computerscience.de/>.
--
Michael Hahn
Assistant Professor
Saarland Informatics Campus
Saarland University
Group: https://lacoco-lab.github.io/
Personal: https://www.mhahn.info/
Deadline Extension and Final Call for Papers: 7th AfricaNLP Workshop @ EACL
2026 (Rabat, Morocco)
Theme: Multilingual Multimodal LLMs
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/africanlp2026/home
Submission URL:
https://openreview.net/group?id=eacl.org/EACL/2026/Workshop/AfricaNLP
The AfricaNLP workshop at EACL 2026 invites papers related to any aspect of
NLP for African languages.
In the current landscape, large language models (LLMs) have seen widespread
use and significant innovation, yet African languages remain
underrepresented. To address this disparity, the theme for the 2026
workshop is Multilingual Multimodal LLMs. We believe this is an especially
timely theme as LLMs are becoming more multilingually capable, but their
performance across other modalities such as images and speech continues to
lag behind. This workshop invites research and discussion on how
multilingual and multimodal systems can better reflect the diversity of
African languages and communities.
Key Dates (all deadlines Anywhere on Earth time zone)
-
Direct Submission: December 22nd, 2025 (extended)
-
ARR Submission: January 9th, 2026
-
Acceptance Notification: January 23, 2026
-
Workshop: day-long event during EACL 2026 (March 24-29, 2026)
Submission Formats
-
Full Papers: 4–8 pages (archival or non-archival)
-
Extended Abstracts: up to 2 pages (non-archival)
-
ARR Submissions: Papers from the October 2025 ARR cycle (or earlier)
with completed reviews and metareview
AfricaNLP aspires to bring together a diverse group of researchers to
explore solutions, collaborations, and innovation around enhancing LLMs’
capabilities in African languages and ensuring cultural awareness in their
applications. We particularly welcome first-time authors, collaborative
efforts, and work connecting multiple modalities — text, speech, or vision
— for the benefit of African communities.
*Contact: *africanlp-eacl2026(a)googlegroups.com
Constantine Lignos
Assistant Professor of Computational Linguistics
Pronouns: he/him/his
--------------------------------------------
HealTAC 2026
June 8-10th, 2026, Brighton (UK)
https://healtac2026.github.io/
--------------------------------------------
The 9th Healthcare Text Analytics Conference (HealTAC 2026) invites contributions that address any aspect of healthcare text analytics. This year’s theme is Human-Centered AI & NLP: Bridging Research and Real-World Practice
----------------------------
Call for Contribution
----------------------------
We invite submissions in the form of extended abstracts (up to 2 pages) describing methodological or application-focused work that has not been previously presented at a conference. Submissions should be prepared based on a template that is available at the conference web site. This year, we will focus on Human-Centered AI & NLP: Bridging Research and Real-World Practice, so we encourage submissions in that space in particular.
We also invite submissions describing ongoing PhD research (at any stage) or planned fellowship applications. The conference will provide an opportunity to receive constructive feedback from a panel of experts.
In addition, we invite submissions for software demonstrations, and new for 2026, we are also welcoming proposals for panel discussions.
See the website (Call for Contribution<https://healtac2026.github.io/cfp/>) for full details.
---------------------------
Key dates
----------------------------
Submissions open: January 9, 2026
Deadline for all contributions: February 27, 2026
Notification of acceptance: April 17, 2026
Early-bird registration deadline: May 4, 2026
Pre-conference workshop: June 8, 2026
Conference: June 9-10, 2026
As in previous years, there will be a post-conference call to submit a journal length paper for further peer review and publication in Frontiers in Digital Health.
----------------------------
Registration fees
----------------------------
Due to generous support from our sponsors, we will keep the registration fee low as before: An early registration fee for students is expected to be £100 and for others £200. All registrations include the full 3-day programme and lunches. Conference dinner (optional) will be separate. Students with accepted papers will be able to register for free.
More details on registration can be found here<https://healtac2026.github.io/registration/>. Travel and accommodation details are also available here<https://healtac2026.github.io/accommodation/>.
Follow the conference announcements on social media at #HEALTAC2026
We are looking forward to welcoming you to HealTAC 2026 in Brighton!
Jaya Chaturvedi BDS MSc PhD
Research Associate in Health Related Natural Language Processing
Department of Biostatistics and Health Informatics
C3.15, Social Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre
Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience
King’s College London
PO Box 80, De Crespigny Park
London SE5 8AF
Pronunciation: Jah-yah
Pronouns: she/her
GitHub: https://github.com/jayachaturvedi
Bluesky: @Jayachatur.bsky.social
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayachaturvedi/
[cid:image001.png@01DAF499.ADF8D370]
If you receive an email from me outside of normal working hours, please do not feel the need to respond outside of your own working hours.
Call for Participation: AraSentEval 2026 Shared Task
Subject: Call for Participation: AraSentEval 2026 Shared Task on Sentiment Analysis and Swapping in Arabic (Hosted with OSACT7 at LREC 2026)
We are delighted to invite you to participate in the AraSentEval 2026 Shared Task, hosted in conjunction with the 7th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (OSACT7) at LREC 2026.
Overview
Sentiment analysis remains a critical application in NLP, yet Arabic presents unique challenges due to its rich morphology and dialectal variations. AraSentEval 2026 aims to push the boundaries of Arabic sentiment analysis by evaluating both understanding (classification) and generation (style transfer) in diverse contexts.
Task Description
AraSentEval features two complementary subtasks designed to foster innovation in Arabic NLP:
Subtask 1: Arabic Dialect Sentiment Analysis
A multi-class classification task to identify the sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral) of texts written in various Arabic dialects (Moroccan, Egyptian, Jordanian, and Saudi). This subtask focuses on robustness across lexical and syntactic diversity.
Subtask 2: Arabic Sentiment Swap
A challenging generative task where systems must rewrite an Arabic sentence to invert its sentiment polarity (e.g., positive to negative) while preserving its core meaning. This task requires deep semantic understanding and high-quality generation capabilities.
Datasets
* Subtask 1: Multi-Dialect-Sent (MDS-3), a balanced dataset of 3,000 sentences across five major dialects.
* Subtask 2: MAAKS, a manually-curated parallel dataset of 5,000 Modern Standard Arabic sentence pairs.
Important Dates (Tentative)
* January 01, 2026: Release of training/dev data and evaluation scripts.
* February 10, 2026: Registration deadline and release of test data.
* February 17, 2026: End of evaluation cycle (Test set submission closes).
* February 24, 2026: Announcement of results.
* March 10, 2026: System description paper submissions due.
* March 20, 2026: Notification of acceptance.
* March 30, 2026: Camera-ready versions due.
* May 2026 (TBC): Workshop at LREC 2026.
Participation
Participants are welcome to submit to one or both subtasks. The shared task will be managed via CodaLab.
For more details, participation guidelines, and data access, please visit our task website: https://ezzini.github.io/AraSentEval/
Organizers
* Saad Ezzini, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, KSA
* Paul Rayson, Lancaster University, UK
* Shadi Abudalfa, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, KSA
* Maram Alharbi, Lancaster University, UK
* Mo El-Haj, VinUniversity, Vietnam / Lancaster University, UK
* Samaher Alghamdi, Lancaster University, UK
* Reem Alotaibi, King Abdulaziz University, KSA
* Salmane Chafik, UM6P, Morocco
We look forward to your participation!
Best regards,
The AraSentEval 2026 Organizers
**********************************************************************
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إن المعلومات الواردة في هذا البريد الإلكتروني ومرفقاته إن وجدت، قد تكون خاصة أو سرية؛ فإذا لم تكن المقصود بهذه الرسالة؛ فيُرجى منك حذفها ومرفقاتها من نظامك وإخطار المرسل بخطأ وصولها إليك فورا. كما لا يجوز نسخ أي جزء منها أو مرفقاتها ، أو الإفصاح عن محتوياتها لأي شخص أو استعمالها لأي غرض آخر. إن جامعة الملك فهد للبترول والمعادن لا تتحمل مسؤولية التغييرات التي يتم إجراؤها على هذه الرسالة بعد إرسالها. وإن البيانات أو الآراء المعبر عنها في هذا البريد، هي بيانات تخص مُرسلها، ولا تعكس بالضرورة رأي وبيانات الجامعة. كما لا تتحمل الجامعة مسؤولية أي تأثير ينتج عن هذه الرسالة أوعن أي فيروس قد تحمله.
Call for Papers
**************************************************************
19th WORKSHOP ON BUILDING AND USING COMPARABLE CORPORA
Co-located with LREC 2026, Palma de Mallorca (in-person & online)
May 11, 2026
Paper submission deadline: February 28, 2026
Workshop website: https://comparable.lisn.upsaclay.fr/bucc2026/
Main conference website: https://lrec2026.info/
**************************************************************
MOTIVATION
In the language engineering and linguistics communities, research
in comparable corpora has been motivated by two main reasons. In
language engineering, on the one hand, it is chiefly motivated by
the need to use comparable corpora as training data for data-driven
NLP applications such as statistical and neural machine translation, or
cross-lingual retrieval. In linguistics, on the other hand, comparable
corpora are of interest because they enable cross-language discoveries
and comparisons. It is generally accepted in both communities that
comparable corpora consist of documents that are comparable in content
and form in various degrees and dimensions across several languages.
Parallel corpora are on the one end of this spectrum, and unrelated
corpora are on the other. Increasingly, these resources are not only
collected, but also augmented or even created synthetically, which
raises new questions about how to define and measure comparability.
In recent years, the use of comparable corpora for pre-training Large
Language Models (LLMs) has led to their impressive multilingual and
cross-lingual abilities, which are relevant to a range of applications,
including information retrieval, machine translation, cross-lingual text
classification, etc. The linguistic definitions and observations related
to comparable corpora are crucial to improve methods to mine such corpora,
to assess and document synthetic data, and to improve cross-lingual transfer
of LLMs. Therefore, it is of great interest to bring together builders and
users of such corpora.
PANEL DISCUSSION
The panel discusses the impact of synthetic data on comparable corpora
research. Fundamental questions about how LLMs transform our understanding
and use of multilingual data are addressed.
TOPICS
We solicit contributions on all topics related to comparable (and parallel)
corpora, including but not limited to the following:
Building Comparable Corpora
- Automatic and semi-automatic methods, including generating
comparable corpora using LLMs
- Methods to mine parallel and non-parallel corpora from the web
- Tools and criteria to evaluate the comparability of corpora
- Parallel vs non-parallel corpora, monolingual corpora
- Rare and minority languages, within and across language families
- Multi-media/multi-modal comparable corpora
Synthetic Data for Comparable Corpora
- LLM generation of comparable/parallel data
- Improving comparability of synthetic data
- Incidental bilingualism & pre-training use of comparable data
- Comparability & cross-lingual consistency
- Detection & attribution of synthetic vs. human text
- English-centric effects & fairness across languages/scripts
- Evaluation & reproducibility for downstream tasks
Applications of Comparable Corpora
- Human translation
- Language learning
- Cross-language information retrieval & document categorization
- Bilingual and multilingual projections
- (Unsupervised) machine translation
- Writing assistance
- Machine learning techniques using comparable corpora
Mining from Comparable Corpora
- Cross-language distributional semantics, word embeddings and
pre-trained multilingual transformer models
- Extraction of parallel segments or paraphrases from comparable corpora
- Methods to derive parallel from non-parallel corpora (e.g. to provide
for low-resource languages in neural machine translation)
- Extraction of bilingual and multilingual translations of single words,
multi-word expressions, proper names, named entities, sentences,
paraphrases etc. from comparable corpora.
- Induction of morphological, grammatical, and translation rules from
comparable corpora
- Induction of multilingual word classes from comparable corpora
Comparable Corpora in the Humanities
- Comparing linguistic phenomena across languages in contrastive linguistics
- Analyzing properties of translated language in translation studies
- Studying language change over time in diachronic linguistics
- Assigning texts to authors via authors' corpora in forensic linguistics
- Comparing rhetorical features in discourse analysis
- Studying cultural differences in sociolinguistics
- Analyzing language universals in typological research
IMPORTANT DATES
28 Feb 2026: Paper Submission deadline
22 Mar 2026: Notification of acceptance
29 Mar 2026: Camera-ready final papers
14 Apr 2026: Workshop Programme final version
11 May 2026: Workshop date
All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 (“anywhere on earth”).
For updates of the schedule, please see the workshop website.
PRACTICAL INFORMATION
The workshop is a hybrid event, both in-person and online. Workshop
registration is via the main conference registration site, see
https://lrec2026.info/
The workshop proceedings will be published in the ACL Anthology
(https://aclanthology.org/).
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Please follow the style sheet and templates (for LaTeX, Overleaf and
MS-Word) provided for the main conference at
https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/
Papers should be submitted as a PDF file using the START conference
manager at https://softconf.com/lrec2026/BUCC2026/
Submissions must describe original and unpublished work and range from 4
to 8 pages plus unlimited references. Reviewing will be double blind, so
the papers should not reveal the authors' identity. Accepted papers will
be published in the workshop proceedings.
Double submission policy: Parallel submission to other meetings or
publications is possible but must be notified to the workshop organizers
by e-mail immediately upon submission to another venue.
For further information and updates, please see the BUCC 2026 web page
at https://comparable.lisn.upsaclay.fr/bucc2026/.
WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS
- Reinhard Rapp (University of Mainz, Germany)
- Ayla Rigouts Terryn (Université de Montréal, Mila, Canada)
- Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, United Kingdom)
- Pierre Zweigenbaum (Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, France)
Contact: reinhardrapp (at) gmx (dot) de
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
- Ebrahim Ansari (Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences, Iran)
- Eleftherios Avramidis (DFKI, Germany)
- Gabriel Bernier-Colborne (National Research Council, Canada)
- Kenneth Church (VecML.com, USA)
- Patrick Drouin (Université de Montréal, Canada)
- Alex Fraser (Technical University of Munich, Germany)
- Natalia Grabar (CNRS, University of Lille, France)
- Amal Haddad Haddad (Universidad de Granada, Spain)
- Kyo Kageura (University of Tokyo, Japan)
- Natalie Kübler (Université Paris Cité, France)
- Philippe Langlais (Université de Montréal, Canada)
- Yves Lepage (Waseda University, Japan)
- Shervin Malmasi (Amazon, USA)
- Michael Mohler (Language Computer Corporation, USA)
- Emmanuel Morin (Nantes Université, France)
- Dragos Stefan Munteanu (RWS, USA)
- Preslav Nakov (Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI, United Arab Emirates)
- Ted Pedersen (University of Minnesota, Duluth, USA)
- Reinhard Rapp (University of Mainz, Germany)
- Ayla Rigouts Terryn (Université de Montréal & Mila, Canada)
- Nasredine Semmar (CEA LIST, Paris, France)
- Serge Sharoff (University of Leeds, UK)
- Richard Sproat (Sakana.ai, Tokyo, Japan)
- Marko Tadić (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
- François Yvon (CNRS & Sorbonne Université, France)
- Pierre Zweigenbaum (Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, France)
INFORMATION ABOUT THE LRE 2026 MAP AND THE "SHARE YOUR LRs!" INITIATIVE
When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to
provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e.
also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used
for the work described in the paper or are a new result of the research.
Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC authors to share the described LRs
(data, tools, services, etc.) to enable their reuse and replicability of
experiments (including evaluation ones).
Call for Participation: NakbaVirality Shared Task
Multimodal and Textual Virality Prediction in High-Stakes Discourse
Organized within the second Nakba-NLP Workshop at LREC 2026
https://lrec2026.info/
11-16 May 2026
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
We invite you to participate in the NakbaVirality Shared Task, a new challenge focusing on predicting the reach and engagement of content surrounding the Nakba and the post-October 7th war on Gaza. This task operates at the intersection of NLP, Computer Vision, and Computational Social Science, aiming to understand information diffusion in highly polarized and emotionally charged contexts.
Website: https://ezzini.github.io/NakbaVirality/
Registration: https://forms.gle/ufj2gqRyMrrdDs5f9
Motivation
Understanding what makes a post "go viral" in conflict zones is critical for analyzing propaganda spread, public sentiment, and information maneuvering. This shared task challenges participants to model "virality" not just as a number, but as a function of nuanced text, graphic imagery, and deep historical context.
Tasks
We propose two distinct tasks:
Task 1: Multimodal Virality Classification
* Goal: Classify posts into Low, Medium, or High virality buckets.
* Input: Text + Image.
* Challenge: Aligning mismatched modalities (e.g., peaceful image vs. violent interaction) and handling "dog whistles."
* Metric: Macro-F1 Score.
Task 2: Textual Virality and Interaction Prediction (Regression)
* Goal: Predict distinct Likability (agreement) and Interactivity (controversy/engagement) scores.
* Input: Text only.
* Challenge: Distinguishing between content that is "liked" versus content that provokes "debate."
* Metrics: Pearson Correlation (r) and MSE.
Data
* Sources: X (Twitter) and Reddit.
* Size: ~5,000 anonymized samples (post-Oct 2023).
* Content: Posts related to "Gaza," "Nakba," "Palestine," "Israel," etc.
Important Dates
* Jan 1: Release of Training Data (3,500 samples)
* Feb 1: Release of Development Data (500 samples)
* Feb 15: Evaluation Period Begins
* Feb 20: Evaluation Period Ends
* Mar 1: Paper Submission Deadline
Participation & Submission
* Participation is free.
* Teams must verify their results by submitting a system description paper (max 4 pages).
* Papers will be published in the proceedings (ACLAnthology).
* Detailed guidelines: https://ezzini.github.io/NakbaVirality/guidelines
Organizers
* Saad Ezzini, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals
* Salima Lamsiyah, University of Luxembourg
* Shadi Abudalfa, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals
* Samir El-Amrany, University of Luxembourg
* Walid Alsafadi, University College of Applied Sciences Gaza
For more information, please visit our website https://ezzini.github.io/NakbaVirality/ or contact us at saad.ezzini(a)kfupm.edu.sa<mailto:saad.ezzini@kfupm.edu.sa>
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إن المعلومات الواردة في هذا البريد الإلكتروني ومرفقاته إن وجدت، قد تكون خاصة أو سرية؛ فإذا لم تكن المقصود بهذه الرسالة؛ فيُرجى منك حذفها ومرفقاتها من نظامك وإخطار المرسل بخطأ وصولها إليك فورا. كما لا يجوز نسخ أي جزء منها أو مرفقاتها ، أو الإفصاح عن محتوياتها لأي شخص أو استعمالها لأي غرض آخر. إن جامعة الملك فهد للبترول والمعادن لا تتحمل مسؤولية التغييرات التي يتم إجراؤها على هذه الرسالة بعد إرسالها. وإن البيانات أو الآراء المعبر عنها في هذا البريد، هي بيانات تخص مُرسلها، ولا تعكس بالضرورة رأي وبيانات الجامعة. كما لا تتحمل الجامعة مسؤولية أي تأثير ينتج عن هذه الرسالة أوعن أي فيروس قد تحمله.
Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models (KG–LLM 2026) @ LREC 2026
We are pleased to announce the Workshop on Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models (KG–LLM 2026), to be held in conjunction with LREC 2026 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, May 16th 2026.
We invite submissions of original research that leverages both Knowledge Graphs (KGs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) in any domain of Natural Language Processing or language resource development.
More information at https://kg-llm.github.io/
Workshop Overview
Large Language Models have become foundational in NLP, yet they continue to face challenges related to bias, hallucination, explainability, environmental impact, and the cost of training. Knowledge Graphs, in contrast, provide high-quality, interpretable, and reusable ontological and linguistic structures that support reasoning, fact checking, and knowledge preservation.
The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers working at the intersection of these two paradigms, exploring how explicit knowledge and implicit statistical learning can enhance each other. We welcome contributions that investigate, demonstrate, or evaluate systems, methods, or resources integrating both KGs and LLMs.
Topics of Interest
We encourage submissions on (but not limited to):
1. LLMs for Knowledge Graph Engineering
KG modelling, resource creation, and interlinking
Relation extraction
Corpus annotation
Ontology localization
Creation or expansion of linguistic or knowledge graphs
KG querying and question answering
2. Knowledge Graphs for Large Language Models
Using linguistic or knowledge graphs as training data
Fine-tuning LLMs using linked linguistic (meta)data
Knowledge/linguistic graph embeddings
KGs for model explainability, provenance, and source attribution
Neural models for under-resourced languages
KG-augmented RAG (KG-RAG)
3. Joint Use of KGs and LLMs in Applications
Combined KG–LLM use cases with structured linguistic data
Digital humanities applications
Question answering over graph data
Fake news and misinformation detection
Educational applications and assisted learning
Visualizing academic writing with KGs and LLMs
KG-enhanced chatbots for health and medical contexts
Application Domains
All application domains are welcome (Digital Humanities, FinTech, Linguistics, Education, Cybersecurity, etc.) as long as the work uses both Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models.
Submission Guidelines
Submission Format: Papers up to 8 pages excluding references.
Style: All submissions must follow the LREC 2026 format and use the official LREC author kit. (available at https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/ )
Review Process: Double-blind peer review. Submissions must be fully anonymized.
Submission System: Papers must be submitted via the START conference system at https://softconf.com/lrec2026/KGLLM/
Language Resources: In line with LREC policies, authors are encouraged to describe, document, and share language resources, datasets, models, evaluation tools, or annotation guidelines used or created in their work.
Accepted Papers: All accepted papers will be included in the LREC 2026 workshop proceedings.
Presentation: Accepted papers will be presented as oral or poster sessions during the workshop.
Important Dates
*All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 (“anywhere on Earth”)*
Paper submission deadline: 26 February 2026
Notification to authors: 24 March 2026
Camera-ready due: 30 March 2026
Workshop date: 16 May 2026
Contact
For questions, please contact the workshop organizers at: kg-llm-26(a)googlegroups.com
Organizing Committee
Gilles Sérasset, Université Grenoble Alpes, France
Katerina Gkirtzou, Athena Research Center, Greece
Michael Cochez, Ellis Institute Finland & Åbo Akademi, Finland
Jan-Christoph Kalo, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Dear colleagues,
Please find below information about the upcoming GEM workshop!
Event Type: Call for Papers
Conference: GEM at ACL 2026
Date: July 2nd or July 3rd, 2026
Location: San Diego, California, USA
Website: https://gem-workshop.com/
Contact: gem-workshop-chairs(a)googlegroups.com
------------------------------
Overview
The fifth edition of the Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and
Metrics (GEM) Workshop will be at ACL 2026 in San Diego!
Evaluation of language models has grown to be a central theme in NLP
research, while remaining far from solved. As LMs have become more
powerful, errors have become tougher to spot and systems harder to
distinguish. Evaluation practices are evolving rapidly—from living
benchmarks like Chatbot Arena to LMs being used as evaluators themselves
(e.g., LM as judge, autoraters). Further research is needed to understand
the interplay between metrics, benchmarks, and human-in-the-loop
evaluation, and their impact in real-world settings
Topics of Interest
We welcome submissions related to, but not limited to, the following topics:
-
Automatic evaluation of generation systems, including the use of LMs as
evaluators
-
Creating evaluation corpora, challenge sets, and living benchmarks
-
Critiques of benchmarking efforts, including contamination,
memorization, and validity
-
Evaluation of cutting-edge topics in LM development, including
long-context understanding, agentic capabilities, reasoning, and more
-
Evaluation as measurement beyond raw capability, including ideas such as
robustness, reliability, and more
-
Multimodal evaluation across text, vision, and other modalities
-
Cost-aware and efficient evaluation methods applicable across languages
and scenarios
-
Human evaluation and its role in the era of powerful LMs
-
Evaluation of sociotechnical systems employing large language models
-
Surveys and meta-assessments of evaluation methods, metrics, and
benchmarks
-
Best practices for dataset and benchmark documentation
-
Industry applications of the above-mentioned topics, especially internal
benchmarking or navigating the gap between academic metrics and real-world
impact.
Special TracksOpinion and Statement Papers Track (New!)
We are introducing a special track for opinion and statement papers. These
submissions will be presented in curated panel discussions, encouraging
open dialogue on emerging topics in evaluation research.
We welcome bold, thought-provoking position papers that challenge
conventional wisdom, propose new directions for the field, or offer
critical perspectives on current evaluation practices. This track is an
opportunity to spark discussion and debate—submissions need not present new
empirical results but should offer well-argued viewpoints supported by
scientific evidence (e.g. prior studies) that advance our collective
thinking about evaluation.
ReproNLP
The ReproNLP Shared Task on Reproducibility of Evaluations in NLP has been
run for six consecutive years (2021–2026). ReproNLP 2026 will be part of
the GEM Workshop at ACL 2026 in San Diego. It aims to (i) shed light on
the extent to which past NLP evaluations have been reproducible, and (ii)
draw conclusions regarding how NLP evaluations can be designed and reported
in order to increase reproducibility. Participants submit reports for their
reproductions of human evaluations from previous NLP literature where they
quantitatively assess the degree of reproducibility using methods described
in Belz. (2025). More details can be found in the first call for
participation for ReproNLP 2026 at https://repronlp.github.io.
Workshop Format
We aim to organize the workshop in an inclusive, highly interactive, and
discussion-driven format. Paper presentations will focus on themed poster
sessions that allow presenters to interact with researchers from varied
backgrounds and similar interests. The workshop will feature panels on
emerging topics and multiple short keynotes by leading experts.
🎭 GEM Comic-Con Edition!
In the spirit of San Diego's famous Comic-Con (July 23-26), this year's GEM
will be a special Comic-Con edition! We encourage participants to embrace
creativity! Whether that’s through themed poster designs, comic-style
slides, or dressing up as your favorite evaluation metric personified, we
want this year's workshop to be memorable and fun!
Submission Types
Submissions can take any of the following forms:
-
Archival Papers: Original and unpublished work, for all the following
tracks—Main, ReproNLP, and Opinion/Statement.
-
Non-Archival Extended Abstracts: Work already presented or under review
at a peer-reviewed venue. This is an excellent opportunity to share recent
or ongoing work with the GEM community without precluding future
publication.
-
Findings Papers: We additionally welcome presentation of relevant papers
accepted to Findings, and will share more information at a later date.
All accepted papers will be given up to an additional page to address
reviewers comments.
Submission Guidelines
-
Papers to be reviewed should be submitted directly through OpenReview,
selecting the appropriate track, and conform to ACL 2026 style guidelines
-
Review requirement: For each submitted paper, authors may be asked to
provide 2 reviews (either one author doing 2 reviews, or two authors each
doing one review)
-
Length.
-
Archival papers should be within 4–8 pages, and opinion/statement
papers should be within 2–4 pages. We make no “Short” or “Long” paper
distinctions; we advise authors to tailor their submission length
proportional to their contribution.
-
Extended abstracts should be within 1–2 pages.
-
Opinion/Statement Papers: These should be titled with the “Position:”
prefix.
-
Dual submission: Dual submission of archival papers is not allowed.
Authors interested in presenting work submitted to a different venue should
instead use the non-archival extended abstract track.
Important Dates
-
March 19, 2026: Direct paper submission deadline
-
April 9, 2026: Pre-reviewed ARR commitment deadline
-
April 28, 2026: Notification of acceptance
-
May 14, 2026: Camera-ready paper due
-
June 4, 2026: Pre-recorded video due (hard deadline)
-
July 2–3, 2026: Workshop at ACL in San Diego
Contact
For any questions, please check the workshop page or email the organisers:
gem-workshop-chairs(a)googlegroups.com
*Dublin City University*
*Simon Mille *| Postdoctoral Research Fellow
ADAPT Centre
School of Computing
Dublin City University
Dublin 9
Ireland
www.adaptcentre.ie
*ADAPT Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland Centre for Digital Content
Technology*
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