January 2026 - Corpora

Edge Hill Corpus Research Group: Meeting #19
by Costas Gabrielatos 21 Jan '26

21 Jan '26

The next meeting of the Edge Hill Corpus Research Group will take place online (via MS Teams) on Friday 6 February 2026, 2:00-3:30 pm (GMT<https://time.is/United_Kingdom>). Topic: Discourse Oriented Corpus Studies Speaker: Dan Malone<https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Daniel-Malone> (Edge Hill University, UK) Title: From Global Uncertainty to Domestic Danger: The lone wolf terrorist as a topos of threat in (poly)crisis discourses The abstract and registration link are here: https://sites.edgehill.ac.uk/crg/next Attendance is free. Registration closes on Wednesday 4 February. If you have problems registering, or have any questions, please email the organiser, Costas Gabrielatos (gabrielc(a)edgehill.ac.uk<mailto:gabrielc@edgehill.ac.uk>). ________________________________ Edge Hill University<http://ehu.ac.uk/home/emailfooter> Modern University of the Year, The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2022<http://ehu.ac.uk/tef/emailfooter> University of the Year, Educate North 2021/21 ________________________________ This message is private and confidential. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender and remove it from your system. Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Edge Hill or associated companies. Edge Hill University may monitor email traffic data and also the content of email for the purposes of security and business communications during staff absence.<http://ehu.ac.uk/itspolicies/emailfooter>

1 0

Lancaster Open research group - starts today
by Brezina, Vaclav 21 Jan '26

21 Jan '26

Dear all, Just a reminder that The Open research group (online and in person) starts today at 12pm UK time. The Open Advanced Methods in Corpus Linguistics research group, offered by CASS - the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University, will resume this term. The group is open to anyone with an interest in corpus linguistics or quantitative approaches to language, and sessions will be held in a hybrid format (in person and online). This term, we will focus on one of the most fundamental concepts in corpus linguistics, frequency, a concept that underpins the field as a whole. When: Wednesdays, fortnightly, 12:00-12:50 pm (UK time) Starting: Wednesday 21 January Running topic: Measuring and reporting frequency in corpus linguistics Free registration: https://forms.office.com/e/YT5md2fjkac All are very welcome. Best wishes, Vaclav Readings: Brezina, V., & Gablasova, D. (2024). A frequency dictionary of British English: core vocabulary and exercises for learners. Routledge. Divjak, D. (2019). Frequency in language: Memory, attention and learning. Cambridge University Press. Gries, S.T. (2024). Frequency, Dispersion, Association, and Keyness: Revising and tupleizing corpus-linguistic measures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Platt, W. C. (2025). Review of Gries (2024): Frequency, Dispersion, Association, and Keyness: Revising and tupleizing corpus-linguistic measures. Tissari, H. (2023). Divjak, Dagmar: Frequency in language: memory, attention and learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.[Book review]. Linguist list, 34.

1 0

[CfP] IEEE FedCSIS 2026: "Digital Humanities, Computational Social Sciences and Economics Research (AI-HuSo)"
by Jens Dörpinghaus 21 Jan '26

21 Jan '26

Dear all, I would like to inform you about a call for papers for a thematic track at FedCSIS 2026 (IEEE #69809) called "AI in Digital Humanities, Computational Social Sciences and Economics Research (AI-HuSo)". FedCSIS 2026 will be held in Riga, Latvia, 23-26 August, 2026. Paper submission (no extensions): 15.04.2026 See https://2026.fedcsis.org/thematic/ai-huso for details. This thematic session is dedicated to the computational study of Social Sciences, Economics and Humanities, including all subjects like, for example, education, labour market, history, religious studies, theology, cultural heritage, and informative predictions for decision-making and behavioural-science perspectives. While digital methods, intelligence systems, and AI have been emerging topics in these fields for several decades, this thematic session is not only limited to discoveries in these domains, but also dedicated to the reflections of these methods and results within the field of computer science. Thus, we are in particular interested in interdisciplinary exchange and dissemination with a clear focus on computational and AI methods for intelligence systems. Since there is a clear methodological overlap between these three domains and often similar algorithms and AI approaches are considered, we see this thematic session as place for interdisciplinary learning, discussing a joint toolbox as a support for scholars from these field with human and context-aware agents. The aim of this thematic session is thus to bridge the gap between scientific domains, foster interdisciplinary exchange and discuss how research questions from other domains challenge current computer science. In particular, we are interested in communications between researchers from different fields of computer science, social sciences, economics, humanities, and practitioners from different fields. Topics ====== The list of topics includes, but is not limited to: - AI and computational approaches for the interdisciplinary work of the social sciences, economics, and humanities: report on theoretical, methodological, experimental, and applied research. - AI and computational approaches for linking data from different digital resources, including online social networks, web and data mining, Knowledge Graphs, Ontologies. - AI and computational methods for text mining and textual analysis, for example texts within social sciences, digital literary studies, computational stylistics and stylometry. - Text encoding, computational linguistics, annotation guidelines, OCR for humanities, economics, and social sciences. - Network analysis, including social and historical network analysis. - Ethical and philosophical considerations of AI in society, education and humanties research In general, the applications of interest are included in the list below, but are not limited to: - Labour market research and qualification, including behavioral-science perspectives. - Education: Digital methods and systems, e-learning, adult education, etc. - Contributions to the application of technology to culture, history, and societal issues: For example, computational text analysis, analytical and visualization, databases, etc. - In particular, we welcome submissions which focus on a critical reflection of digital methods in the humanities, economics and social sciences within computer science. - Linking of digital resources, a discussion of data sets, their quality and reliability, combining quantitative and qualitative data, anonymization and data protection. Contact: ai-huso(a)fedcsis.org Submission rules ================ - Authors should submit their papers as Postscript, PDF or MSWord files. - The total length of a paper should not exceed 12 pages IEEE style (including tables, figures and references). More pages can be added, for an additional fee. IEEE style templates are available here. - Papers will be refereed and accepted on the basis of their scientific merit and relevance to the Topical Area. - Preprints containing accepted papers will be published online. - Only papers presented at the conference will be published in Conference Proceedings and submitted for inclusion in the IEEE Xplore® database. - Conference proceedings will be published in a volume with ISBN, ISSN and DOI numbers and posted at the conference WWW site. - Conference proceedings will be submitted for indexation according to information here. - Organizers reserve right to move accepted papers between FedCSIS Sessions. Extended versions of selected papers presented at the conference may be published in a volume entitled "Advances in Computational Social Sciences: AI, Computational Methods and Applications for the Study of Society", to be published by Springer. In addition, selected papers may be submitted to a special issue of AI entitled "Integrating Data Sources for Smarter Interdisciplinary AI Solutions: Challenges and Opportunities".

1 0

Postdoc Perspectivist NLP at McMaster University
by cfwelch＠umich.edu 21 Jan '26

21 Jan '26

We are seeking a postdoctoral researcher to contribute to projects related to perspectivist NLP. We are looking to better understand what we need to know about an individual to better predict how they will label subjective data for a variety of tasks. We are researchers at McMaster University, located in Hamilton, Ontario. You will be primarily working with Prof. Charles Welch and will be expected to work on projects that involve other faculty members both at the university and within our broader network. Ideal candidate should have: - a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics/NLP, Machine Learning, Data Science, or related fields. - Excellent programming skills in Python. - Professional working proficiency in spoken and written English. - Knowledge of current neural network models and implementation tools for neural networks (e.g., PyTorch). - Experience with publications in top-tier venues in the field of NLP/Computational Linguistics. Expected start date: September 1, 2026 Duration: 2 years Deadline: February 6th, 2026 How to apply: Please send us a letter of motivation, your CV, your transcripts, a list of publications, and the names and contact information of at least two references, as a single PDF or a link to a PDF to cwelch(a)mcmaster.ca

1 0

Call for Papers: First Workshop on Computational Developmental Linguistics - ACL 2026, San Diego
by ACL Announcements 21 Jan '26

21 Jan '26

CALL FOR PAPERS: FIRST WORKSHOP ON COMPUTATIONAL DEVELOPMENTAL LINGUISTICS @ACL 2026, SAN DIEGO Friday, 3 July 2026 to Tuesday, 7 July 2026 Website: https://comp-dev-ling.github.io/ Submission Deadline: Friday, 20 March 2026 We are pleased to invite submissions to the First Workshop on Computational Developmental Linguistics (CDL, https://comp-dev-ling.github.io/), co-located with ACL 2026 in San Diego, CA, USA. The workshop will take place between July 3rd and July 7th (exact date to be confirmed). The workshop aims to bridge the conversation between modern machine learning and developmental linguistics. We hope to draw inspiration from both fields, identifying similarities and differences in the (im)plausibilities of comparing LMs and human language learning, to motivate better LM engineering and more rigorous computational modeling of human language acquisition. The scope and topics include, but are not limited to: * Computational models for developmental linguistics. * Learning dynamics in pretraining and post-training of LMs. * Comparisons of developmental linguistics in humans and machines. * Knowledge tracing and developmental diagnostics. * Applications of developmental insights in language education and clinical NLP. Important Dates * Submission Due: March 20th, 2026 * Review Due: April 22nd, 2026 * Notification of Acceptance: May 1st, 2026 * Camera-Ready Due (tentative): May 15th, 2026 Submission types include long papers (up to 8 pages, both archival and non-archival), short papers (up to 4 pages, both archival and non-archival), and ARR commitments (both archival and non-archival). Archival papers will receive an additional page in the camera-ready version to address reviewers' feedback and will be published in the ACL Anthology. Submission Portal: https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/ACL/2026/Workshop/CDL If you are interested in reviewing for CDL, please fill in the form here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdyPBKh2GZ6ETuUrQktqNYv6fLIsg7r... [1] Warm regards, CDL 2026 Organizers: Martin Ziqiao Ma, Emmy Liu, Jing Liu, Tyler A. Chang, Abdellah Fourtassi, Alex Warstadt, Michael Hahn, Weiwei Sun, and Freda Shi Contact Email: cdl.workshop.committee(a)gmail.com Links: ------ [1] https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdyPBKh2GZ6ETuUrQktqNYv6fLIsg7rUxZ…

1 0

HPSG 2026 -- First CfP
by Antonio Machicao y Priemer 20 Jan '26

20 Jan '26

FIRST CfP: The 33rd International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Norway) Short Title: HPSG 2026 Date: 03-Aug-2026 - 04-Aug-2026 Location: Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (Bergen, Norway) Contact: Petter Haugereid, Berthold Crysmann & Antonio Machicao y Priemer Email: hpsg2026(a)easychair.org Conference Website: https://petterha.github.io/hpsg2026/ Conference fee: 68€ (faculty) / 43€ (student) Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Linguistic Theories; Computational Linguistics; Syntax; Morphology; Semantics; Cognitive Science; Meeting Description: The 33rd International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar will be held on August 03 - August 04, 2026 at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (Bergen, Norway). The HPSG 2026 conference will be a two-day main conference (3rd - 4th of August). It will be co-located with the DELPH-IN meeting held over the preceding week (27th - 31st of July). Anonymous abstracts are invited that address linguistic, foundational, or computational issues relating to or in the spirit of the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Submissions should be 4 pages long, + 1 page for data, figures & references. They should be submitted in PDF format. The submissions should not include the authors’ names, and authors are asked to avoid self-references. Presentations are in-person by default, although exceptions can be negotiated. All abstracts should be submitted by April 10, 2026, via Easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=hpsg2026 Deadline for abstracts: 10th of April, 2026 Reviews due: 10th of May, 2026 Notification of acceptance: 15th of May, 2026 Conference: 3rd of August - 4th of August, 2026 Invited speakers: tba Conference proceedings submission: 15 of October, 2026 All abstracts will be reviewed anonymously by at least two reviewers. Each accepted abstract will be given 30 minutes for presentation. Additionally, 10 minutes will be reserved for discussion. A call for contributions to the proceedings will be issued after the conference. The proceedings will undergo a separate (final) round of reviews (accept/reject), to enable indexing of the proceedings. The proceedings of previous conferences are available at: https://proceedings.hpsg.xyz/ -- Dr. Antonio Machicao y Priemer Department of German Studies and Linguistics - Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Homepage: https://hu.berlin/aMyP Project: Building register into the architecture of language – an HPSG account (CRC 1412, Project A04) Series: Textbooks in Language Science (https://langsci-press.org/catalog/series/tbls)

1 0

Call for SemEval Task Proposals 2027
by Kai North 20 Jan '26

20 Jan '26

Introduction We invite proposals for tasks to be run as part of SemEval-2027. SemEval (the International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation) is an ongoing series of evaluations of computational semantics systems, organized under the umbrella of SIGLEX, the Special Interest Group on the Lexicon of the Association for Computational Linguistics. SemEval tasks investigate the nature of meaning in natural languages, exploring how to characterize and compute meaning. This is achieved in practical terms, using shared datasets and standardized evaluation metrics to quantify the strengths and weaknesses and possible solutions. SemEval tasks encompass a broad range of semantic topics from the lexical level to the discourse level, including word sense identification, semantic parsing, coreference resolution, and sentiment analysis, among others. For SemEval-2027, we welcome tasks that can test an automatic system for semantic analysis of text (e.g., intrinsic semantic evaluation, or an application-oriented evaluation). We especially encourage tasks for languages other than English, cross-lingual tasks, and tasks that develop novel applications of computational semantics. See the websites of previous editions of SemEval to get an idea about the range of tasks explored, e.g., SemEval-2020 (http://alt.qcri.org/semeval2020/) and SemEval-2021/2026 (https://semeval.github.io). We strongly encourage proposals based on pilot studies that have already generated initial data, evaluation measures, and baselines. In this way, we can avoid unforeseen challenges down the road that may delay the task. We suggest providing a reasonable baseline (e.g., providing a Transformer / LLM baseline for a classification task) apart from the majority vote / random guess. In case you are not sure whether a task is suitable for SemEval, please feel free to get in touch with the SemEval organizers at <semevalorganizers(a)gmail.com> to discuss your idea. Task Selection Task proposals will be reviewed by experts, and reviews will serve as the basis for acceptance decisions. Everything else being equal, more innovative new tasks will be given preference over task reruns. Task proposals will be evaluated on: Novelty: Is the task on a compelling new problem that has not been explored much in the community? Is the task a rerun, but covering substantially new ground (new subtasks, new types of data, new languages, etc. - one addition is not sufficient)? Interest: Is the proposed task likely to attract a sufficient number of participants? Data: Are the plans for collecting data convincing? Will the resulting data be of high quality? Will annotations have meaningfully high inter-annotator agreements? Have all appropriate licenses for use and re-use of the data after the evaluation been secured? Have all international privacy concerns been addressed? Will the data annotation be ready on time? Evaluation: Is the methodology for evaluation sound? Is the necessary infrastructure available, or can it be built in time for the shared task? Will research inspired by this task be able to evaluate in the same manner and on the same data after the initial task? Is the task significantly challenging (e.g., room for improvement over the baselines)? Impact: What is the expected impact of the data in this task on future research beyond the SemEval Workshop? Ethical – The data must be compliant with privacy policies. e.g. avoid personally identifiable information (PII). Tasks aimed at identifying specific people will not be accepted. Avoid medical decision making (compliance with HIPAA, do not try to replace medical professionals, especially if it has anything to do with mental health). These are representative and not exhaustive. Roles - Lead Organizer - main point of contact, expected to ensure deliverables are met on time and participate in contributing to task duties (see below). Co-Organizers - provide significant contributions to ensuring the task runs smoothly. Some examples include maintaining communication with task participants, preparing data, creating and running evaluation scripts, leading paper reviewing, and acceptance. Advisory Organizers - more of a supervisor role, may not contribute to detailed tasks, but will provide guidance and support. New Tasks vs. Task Reruns We welcome both new tasks and task reruns. For a new task, the proposal should address whether the task would be able to attract participants. Preference will be given to novel tasks that have not received much attention yet. For reruns of previous shared tasks (whether or not the previous task was part of SemEval), the proposal should address the need for another iteration of the task. Valid reasons include: a new form of evaluation (e.g., a new evaluation metric, a new application-oriented scenario), new genres or domains (e.g., social media, domain-specific corpora), or a significant expansion in scale. We further discourage carrying over a previous task and just adding new subtasks, as this can lead to the accumulation of too many subtasks. Evaluating on a different dataset with the same task formulation, or evaluating on the same dataset with a different evaluation metric, typically should not be considered a separate subtask. Task Organization We welcome people who have never organized a SemEval task before, as well as those who have. Apart from providing a dataset, task organizers are expected to: - Verify the data annotations have sufficient inter-annotator agreement. - Verify licenses for the data allow its use in the competition and afterwards. In particular, text that is publicly available online is not necessarily in the public domain; unless a license has been provided, the author retains all rights associated with their work, including copying, sharing and publishing. For more information, see: https://creativecommons.org/faq/#what-is-copyright-and-why-does-it-matter - Resolve any potential security, privacy, or ethical concerns about the data. - Commit to make the data available also after the task in a long-term repository under an appropriate license, preferably using Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/communities/semeval/ - Provide task participants with format checkers and standard scorers. - Provide task participants with baseline systems to use as a starting point (in order to lower the obstacles to participation). A baseline system typically contains code that reads the data, creates a baseline response (e.g., random guessing, majority class prediction), and outputs the evaluation results. Whenever possible, baseline systems should be written in widely used programming languages and/or should be implemented as a component for standard NLP pipelines. - Create a mailing list and website for the task and post all relevant information there. - Create a CodaLab or other similar competition for the task and upload the evaluation script. - Manage submissions on CodaLab or a similar competition site. - Write a task description paper to be included in SemEval proceedings, and present it at the workshop. - Manage participants’ submissions of system description papers, manage participants’ peer review of each other’s papers, and possibly shepherd papers that need additional help in improving the writing. - Review other task description papers. Desk Rejects - To ensure tasks have sufficient support, we require a minimum of two organizers at the time of proposal submission. A task proposal with only one organizer will be desk-rejected. Running a SemEval task is a significant time commitment; therefore, we highly recommend that a task have at least three-four organizers. - A person can be a lead organizer on only one task. The second mandatory organizer on the task must be committed to the task as a key co-organizer. Any other organizers (beyond the lead and co-organizer) can participate in other tasks. - All data should have a research-friendly license. The licensing must be provided in the proposal. - Task organizers must commit to keeping the data available after the task, either by keeping the task alive, by uploading it to Zenodo or some other public data storage location that will be permanent, and sharing the link with the organizers. === Important dates === - Task proposals due 13 April 2026 (Anywhere on Earth) - Task selection notification 25 May 2026 === Preliminary timetable === - Sample data ready 15 July 2026 - Training data ready 1 September 2026 - Evaluation data ready 1 December 2026 (internal deadline; not for public release) - Evaluation start 10 January 2027 - Evaluation end by 31 January 2027 (latest date; task organizers may choose an earlier date) - Paper submission due February 2027 - Notification to authors March 2027 - Camera ready due April 2027 - SemEval workshop Summer 2027 (co-located with a major NLP conference) Tasks that fail to keep up with crucial deadlines (such as the dates for having the task and CodaLab website up and dates for uploading sample, training, and evaluation data) may be cancelled at the discretion of SemEval organizers. While consideration will be given to extenuating circumstances, our goal is to provide sufficient time for the participants to develop strong and well-thought-out systems. Cancelled tasks will be encouraged to submit proposals for the subsequent year’s SemEval. To reduce the risk of tasks failing to meet the deadlines, we are unlikely to accept multiple tasks with overlap in the task organizers. Submission Details The task proposal should be a self-contained document of no longer than 3 pages (plus additional pages for references). All submissions must be in PDF format, following the ACL template: https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files Each proposal should contain the following: - Overview - Summary of the task - Why this task is needed and which communities would be interested in participating - Expected impact of the task - Data & Resources - How the training/testing data will be produced. Please discuss whether existing corpora will be reused. - Details of copyright and license, so that the data can be used by the research community both during the SemEval evaluation and afterwards - How much data will be produced - How data quality will be ensured and evaluated - An example of what the data would look like - Resources required to produce the data and prepare the task for participants (annotation cost, annotation time, computation time, etc.) - Assessment of any concerns with respect to ethics, privacy, or security (e.g., personally identifiable information of private individuals; potential for systems to cause harm) - Pilot Task (strongly recommended) - Details of the pilot task - What lessons were learned, and how these will impact the task design - Evaluation - The evaluation methodology to be used, including clear evaluation criteria - For Task Reruns - Justification for why a new iteration of the task is needed (see criteria above) - What will differ from the previous iteration - Expected impact of the rerun compared with the previous iteration - Task organizers - Names, affiliations, email addresses - (optional) brief description of relevant experience or expertise - (if applicable) years and task numbers of any SemEval tasks you have run in the past Proposals will be reviewed by an independent group of area experts who may not have familiarity with recent SemEval tasks, and therefore, all proposals should be written in a self-explanatory manner and contain sufficient examples. The submission webpage is: [TBC] === Chairs === Debanjan Ghosh, Analog Devices, USA Kai North, Cambium Assessment, USA Shervin Malmasi, Amazon Inc., USA Ekaterina Kochmar, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), UAE Mamoru Komachi, Hitotsubashi University, Japan Marcos Zampieri, George Mason University, USA Contact: semevalorganizers(a)gmail.com

1 0

1st CFP: 21st Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2026)
by Ekaterina Kochmar 20 Jan '26

20 Jan '26

First Call for Papers The 21st Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2026) San Diego, California, United States and online Thursday, July 2 and Friday, July 3, 2026 (co-located with ACL 2026) https://sig-edu.org/bea/current Submission Deadline: Thursday, March 5, 2026, 11:59pm UTC-12 WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION The BEA Workshop is a leading venue for NLP innovation in the context of educational applications. It is one of the largest one-day workshops in the ACL community with over 100 registered attendees in the past several years. The growing interest in educational applications and a diverse community of researchers involved resulted in the creation of the Special Interest Group in Educational Applications (SIGEDU)<https://sig-edu.org/members> in 2017, which currently has over 400 members. The 21st BEA will be a 2-day workshop, with one in-person workshop day and one virtual workshop day. The workshop will feature oral presentation sessions and large poster sessions to facilitate the presentation of a wide array of original research. Moreover, there will be a panel discussion on “Transitioning from Academia to the EdTech Industry”, a half-day tutorial on Theory of Mind and its Applications in Educational Contexts, and two shared tasks on Vocabulary Difficulty Prediction for English Learners<https://www.britishcouncil.org/data-science-and-insights/bea2026st> and on Rubric-based Short Answer Scoring for German<https://edutec.science/bea-2026-shared-task/> comprising an oral overview presentation by the shared task organizers and several poster presentations by the shared task participants. The workshop will accept submissions of both full papers and short papers, eligible for either oral or poster presentation. We solicit papers that incorporate NLP methods, including, but not limited to: * use of generative AI in education and its impact; * automated scoring of open-ended textual and spoken responses; * automated scoring/evaluation for written student responses (across multiple genres); * game-based instruction and assessment; * educational data mining; * intelligent tutoring; * collaborative learning environments; * peer review; * grammatical error detection and correction; * learner cognition; * spoken dialog; * multimodal applications; * annotation standards and schemas; * tools and applications for classroom teachers, learners and/or test developers; and * use of corpora in educational tools. SHARED TASKS Vocabulary Difficulty Prediction for English Learners Organizers: Mariano Felice (British Council) and Lucy Skidmore (British Council). Description: This shared task aims to advance research into vocabulary difficulty prediction for learners of English with diverse L1 backgrounds, an essential step towards custom content creation, computer-adaptive testing and personalised learning. In a context where traditional item calibration methods have become a bottleneck for the implementation of digital learning and assessment systems, we believe predictive NLP models can provide a more scalable, cost-effective solution. The goal of this shared task is to build regression models to predict the difficulty of English words given a learner’s L1. We believe this new shared task provides a novel approach to vocabulary modelling, offering a multidimensional perspective that has not been explored in previous work. To this aim, we will use the British Council’s Knowledge-based Vocabulary Lists (KVL), a multilingual dataset with psychometrically calibrated difficulty scores. We believe this unique dataset is not only an invaluable contribution to the NLP community but also a powerful resource that will enable in-depth investigations into how linguistic features, L1 background and contextual cues influence vocabulary difficulty. For more information on how to participate and latest updates, please refer to the shared task website: https://www.britishcouncil.org/data-science-and-insights/bea2026st Rubric-based Short Answer Scoring for German Organizers: Sebastian Gombert (DIPF), Zhifan Sun (DIPF), Fabian Zehner (DIPF), Jannik Lossjew (IPN), Tobias Wyrwich (IPN), Berrit Katharina Czinczel (IPN), David Bednorz (IPN), Sascha Bernholt (IPN), Knut Neumann (IPN), Ute Harms (IPN), Aiso Heinze (IPN), and Hendrik Drachsler (DIPF) Description: Short answer scoring is a well-established task in educational natural language processing. In this shared task, we introduce and focus on rubric-based short-answer scoring, a task formulation in which models are provided with a question, a student answer, and a textual scoring rubric that specifies criteria for each possible score level. Successfully solving this task requires models to interpret the semantics of scoring rubrics and apply their criteria to previously unseen answers, closely mirroring how human raters assign scores in educational assessment. Although rubrics have been used as auxiliary information in prior work on free-text scoring and LLM-based approaches, there has been little focused investigation of rubric-based short-answer scoring as a task in its own right. This setting poses distinct challenges, including ambiguous or underspecified rubric criteria and a wide range of valid student responses. With this shared task, we aim to stimulate systematic research on rubric-based scoring, assess how well current NLP methods can reason over rubrics, and identify promising modeling strategies. Additionally, by providing a German-language dataset, the shared task contributes a new non-English benchmark to the field. For more information on how to participate and latest updates, please refer to the shared task website: https://edutec.science/bea-2026-shared-task/ TUTORIAL Theory of Mind and Application in Educational Context Organizers: Effat Farhana (Auburn University), Maha Zainab (Auburn University), Qiaosi Wang (Carnegie Mellon University), Niloofar Mireshghallah (Carnegie Mellon University), Ramira van der Meulen (Leiden University), Max van Duijn (Leiden University). Description: This tutorial examines the integration of Theory of Mind (ToM) into AI-driven online tutoring systems, focusing on how advanced technologies, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), can model learners’ cognitive and emotional states to provide adaptive, personalized feedback. Participants will learn foundational principles of ToM from cognitive science and psychology and how these concepts can be operationalized in AI systems. We will discuss mutual ToM, where both AI tutors and learners maintain models of each other’s mental states, and address challenges such as detecting learner misconceptions, modeling meta-cognition, and maintaining privacy in data-driven tutoring. The tutorial also presents hands-on demonstrations of Machine ToM applied to programming education using datasets such as CS1QA and CodeQA, which contain Java and Python samples. By combining conceptual foundations, research insights, and practical exercises, this tutorial provides a comprehensive overview of designing human-centered, ethically aware, and cognitively informed AI tutoring systems. IMPORTANT DATES All deadlines are 11.59 pm UTC-12 (anywhere on earth). * Submission deadline: Thursday, March 5, 2026 * Notification of acceptance: Tuesday, April 28, 2026 * Camera-ready papers due: Tuesday, May 12, 2026 * Workshop: Thursday, July 2, and Friday, July 3, 2026 SUBMISSION INFORMATION We will be using the ACL Submission Guidelines for the BEA Workshop this year. Authors are invited to submit a long paper of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus unlimited references; final versions of long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account. We also invite short papers of up to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given five (5) content pages in the proceedings. Authors are encouraged to use this additional page to address reviewers’ comments in their final versions. We generally follow ACL submission guidelines and will require that all submitted papers should include a dedicated "Limitations" section, which does not count toward the page limit. Papers which describe systems are also invited to give a demo of their system. If you would like to present a demo in addition to presenting the paper, please make sure to select either “long paper + demo” or “short paper + demo” under “Submission Category” in the START submission page. Previously published papers cannot be accepted. The submissions will be reviewed by the program committee. As reviewing will be blind, please ensure that papers are anonymous. Self-references that reveal the author’s identity, e.g., “We previously showed (Smith, 1991) …”, should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as “Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) …”. We have also included conflict of interest in the submission form. You should mark all potential reviewers who have been authors on the paper, are from the same research group or institution, or who have seen versions of this paper or discussed it with you. We will be using the START conference system to manage submissions. The link will be provided soon. DOUBLE SUBMISSION POLICY We will follow the official ACL double-submission policy. Specifically, papers being submitted both to BEA and another conference or workshop must: * Note on the title page the other conference or workshop to which they are being submitted. * State on the title page that if the authors choose to present their paper at BEA (assuming it was accepted), then the paper will be withdrawn from other conferences and workshops. ORGANIZING COMMITTEE * Ekaterina Kochmar, MBZUAI * Andrea Horbach, Hildesheim University * Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Ruhr University Bochum * Marie Bexte, FernUniversität in Hagen * Anaïs Tack, KU Leuven, imec * Victoria Yaneva, National Board of Medical Examiners * Bashar Alhafni, MBZUAI * Zheng Yuan, University of Sheffield * Jill Burstein, Duolingo * Stefano Bannò, Cambridge University Workshop contact email address: bea.nlp.workshop(a)gmail.com<mailto:bea.nlp.workshop@gmail.com> PROGRAM COMMITTEE Tazin Afrin; David Alfter; Bashar Alhafni; Maaz Amjad; Nischal Ashok Kumar; Stefano Bannò; Michael Gringo Angelo Bayona; Lee Becker; Beata Beigman Klebanov; Luca Benedetto; Bhavya Bhavya; Serge Bibauw; Ted Briscoe; Dominique Brunato; Jie Cao; Dan Carpenter; Jeevan Chapagain; Guanliang Chen; Mei-Hua Chen; Christopher Davis; Orphee De Clercq; Kordula De Kuthy; Jasper Degraeuwe; Dushyanta Dhyani; Yuning Ding; Rahul Divekar; Kosuke Doi; Mohsen Dorodchi; Yo Ehara; Hamza El Alaoui; Sarra El Ayari; Andrew Emerson; Yao-Chung Fan; Mariano Felice; Nigel Fernandez; Michael Flor; Thomas François; Thomas Gaillat; Ananya Ganesh; Ritik Garg; Sebastian Gombert; Samuel González López; Cyril Goutte; Abigail Gurin Schleifer; Na-Rae Han; Ching Nam Hang; Jiangang Hao; Aki Härmä; Hasnain Heickal; Chieh-Yang Huang; Chung-Chi Huang; Radu Tudor Ionescu; Elsayed Issa; N J Karthika; Anisia Katinskaia; Elma Kerz; Fazel Keshtkar; Grandee Lee; Ji-Ung Lee; Arun Balajiee Lekshmi Narayanan; Jiazheng Li; Anastassia Loukina; Wanjing Anya Ma; Jakub Macina; Lieve Macken; Nitin Madnani; Arianna Masciolini; Detmar Meurers; Michael Mohler; Phoebe Mulcaire; Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez; Sungjin Nam; Diane Napolitano; Huy Nguyen; S Jaya Nirmala; Sergiu Nisioi; Michael Noah-Manuel; Adam Nohejl; Amin Omidvar; Daniel Oyeniran; Robert Östling; Ulrike Pado; Yannick Parmentier; Ted Pedersen; Mengyang Qiu; Martí Quixal; Chatrine Qwaider; Arjun Ramesh Rao; Vivi Peggie Rantung; Manikandan Ravikiran; Hanumant Redkar; Robert Reynolds; Saed Rezayi; Frankie Robertson; Aiala Rosá; Andreas Säuberli; Nicy Scaria; Ronald Seoh; Pritam Sil; Astha Singh; Lucy Skidmore; Maja Stahl; Katherine Stasaski; Helmer Strik; Hakyung Sung; Sowmya Vajjala; Elena Volodina; Nikhil Wani; Alistair Willis; Fabian Zehner.

1 0

Call for paper: BriGap-3, Bridges and Gaps between Formal and Computational Linguistics
by Timothée Bernard 20 Jan '26

20 Jan '26

*Call for paper: BriGap-3, Bridges and Gaps between Formal and Computational Linguistics* (with our apologies for cross-posting) Venue: Université Paris Cité, campus des Grands moulins, *Paris, France* Date: *July 11th, 2026* Event website: https://brigap-workshop.github.io/ *BriGap-3 is a venue for formal linguists, computational linguists and NLP scientists to meet: what fruitful interactions can we have? How do we build upon each other’s work?* * *Description* * Due to the groundbreaking achievements in the LLM era, the ongoing discourse in NLP has shifted more to what can be achieved through language than studying language for its own sake, and traditional conferences are increasingly dominated by engineering-oriented work. It could thus appear that computational and formal linguistics are more than ever separate domains. Yet, we are also witnessing a growing interest in linguistics in both explaining the successes of neural models and uncovering their limitations. Conversely, neural methods have proven their usefulness for linguistics time and again. To what extent are these traditions truly divorced, and what fruitful bridges can be (re)built? To answer these questions, the third iteration of the workshop on Bridges and Gaps between Formal and Computational Linguistics (BriGap-3) intends to provide a space for formal linguists, computational linguists, and NLP scientists to exchange their perspectives on how their different domains of research can build upon one another. * *Event topics* * - investigation of the linguistic properties of machine learning models, - linguistic representations, vector space semantics, and their relations with theoretical concepts such as compositionality, - use of computational and information-theoretical methods for linguistic inquiry, - formal distributional semantics and neural-symbolic integration for NLP, - formal grammars, symbolic structures and their applications for computational linguistics and NLP, - trends in the history of computational linguistics and NLP, - … * *Invited speakers* * - *Raquel FERNÁNDEZ*, Universiteit van Amsterdam - *Tal LINZEN*, New York University (to be confirmed) * *Submission details* * The event is designed with a widely inclusive submission policy so as to foster as vibrant a discussion as possible. In particular, we will accept: - Archival submissions, corresponding to novel and unpublished research, to be included in the event proceedings, - Non-archival submissions, corresponding to work in progress, early results, and articles presented in other venues that engage with the topics of the event. The event accepts both archival (original and unpublished research) submissions in either short (up to 4 pages) or long (up to 8 pages) format, and non-archival (work-in-progress, dissemination of research published or accepted elsewhere, etc.) submissions in short (up to 4 pages) format. Camera-ready versions of papers will be given one additional page of content so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account. Each submission should mention whether it targets archival or non-archival status. Archival papers accepted at BriGap-3 will be indexed in the ACL Anthology. Please use the ACL style templates available here: https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files Event website: https://brigap-workshop.github.io/ * *Important dates* * - *Submission deadline: Monday, April 27th, 2026*, (23:59 AoE) - Notification of acceptance: Monday, May 11th 2026 - Event: Saturday, July 11th, 2026 * *Contact* * For questions, please send an email to brigapworkshop(a)gmail.com or contact one of the event chairs: - Timothée Bernard, Université Paris Cité - Emmanuele Chersoni, Hong Kong Polytechnic University - Giulia Rambelli, Università di Bologna

1 0

IVACS 2026 - Malta - CfP Deadline Reminder
by Christopher.Fitzgerald 20 Jan '26

20 Jan '26

Call for Papers deadline this Friday January 23rd IVACS 2026 – Inter-Varietal Applied Corpus Studies Conference 1–3 July 2026 | University of Malta, Valletta, Malta The IVACS Association is pleased to announce that the 12th Biennial IVACS Conference will be hosted by the University of Malta, Valletta Campus, from 1–3 July 2026. The IVACS Conference series is a leading international forum for corpus-based research into linguistic varieties and applications of corpus linguistics in professional, pedagogical, and social contexts. Following the successful series of conferences, IVACS 2026 will continue to build on this tradition of collaboration and innovation. We welcome proposals related to (but not limited to): * Corpus Design & Methodology: compilation, annotation, and representativeness * Applied Contexts: workplace and professional discourse, minority and endangered languages, translation, interpreting, multilingual communication, stylistics * Innovations & Emerging Directions: GenAI tools and platforms, multimodal corpora * Teaching & Learning: corpus applications in pedagogy, data-driven learning, assessment, teacher education, learner corpora, genre-based approaches * Corpus-Informed Materials: pedagogic grammars, textbooks, syllabi design * Theoretical Perspectives: sociolinguistics, pragmatics, critical discourse studies, intercultural communication * Corpus Linguistics and Ethical Practice: Ethical, transparent, and inclusive methods in corpus-based research Submission Details * Individual Papers: 20 minutes presentation + 10 minutes discussion * Colloquia: 90 minutes, consisting of 3 thematically linked papers * Posters: especially suitable for work-in-progress or early-stage projects * Paper, colloquia and poster abstracts should be submitted to ivacs2026(a)um.edu.mt<mailto:ivacs2026@um.edu.mt>. The language of the conference is English. We encourage submission of abstracts from early-career researchers, including postgraduate research students and postdoctoral researchers. Abstract specifications for Individual Papers and Posters: * 250 – 350 words in length (including references, if any) * Written in Times New Roman font and saved as a docs file * Page 1 will include: Title; Presenter(s); Affiliation(s); Email address(es), plus abstract * Page 2 will be anonymised and will include: Title and abstract only Abstract specifications for Colloquia: * A maximum of 1,000 words in length (not including list of references) * A single abstract on behalf of all speakers on the panel, detailing the overall motivation for the panel, individual contributions, and the proposed panel structure * Written in Times New Roman font and saved as a docs file * Page 1 will include: Theme for the panel; Title of each contribution; Presenters; Affiliations; Email addresses, plus abstracts * Page 2 will be anonymised and will include: Titles and abstracts only Important Dates * Abstract submission deadline: 23 January 2026 (23:59 UTC) * Notification of acceptance: Early March 2026 * Early-bird registration deadline: April 2026 * Conference dates: 1–3 July 2026 Séanadh Ríomhphoist / Email Disclaimer https://www.mic.ul.ie/about-mic/college-services/ict-services?index=5

1 0