CFP: LT4HALA 2026 - The Fourth Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages
* Website: https://circse.github.io/LT4HALA/2026/
* Date: 11 May 2026
* Place: co-located with LREC 2026, 11-16 May 2026, Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
* Submission page: https://softconf.com/lrec2026/LT4HALA2026/
* Submission deadline: 17 February 2026
DESCRIPTION
LT4HALA 2026 is a one-day workshop that seeks to bring together scholars who are developing and/or are using Language Technologies (LTs) for historically attested languages, so to foster cross-fertilization between the Computational Linguistics community and the areas in the Humanities dealing with historical linguistic data, e.g. historians, philologists, linguists, archaeologists and literary scholars. LT4HALA 2026 follows LT4HALA 2020, 2022, 2024 that were organized in the context of LREC 2020, LREC 2022 and LREC-COLING 2024, respectively. Despite the current availability of large collections of digitized texts written in historical languages, such interdisciplinary collaboration is still hampered by the limited availability of annotated linguistic resources for most of the historical languages. Creating such resources is a challenge and an obligation for LTs, both to support historical linguistic research with the most updated technologies and to preserve those precious linguistic data that survived from past times.
Relevant topics for the workshop include, but are not limited to:
* creation and annotation of linguistic resources (both lexical and textual);
* the role of digital infrastructures, such as CLARIN<https://www.clarin.eu/>, in supporting research based on language resources for historical and ancient languages;
* handling spelling variation;
* detection and correction of OCR errors;
* deciphering;
* morphological/syntactic/semantic analysis of textual data;
* adaptation of tools to address diachronic/diatopic/diastratic variation in texts;
* teaching ancient languages with LTs;
* NLP-driven theoretical studies in historical linguistics;
* NLP-driven analysis of literary ancient texts;
* evaluation of LTs designed for historical and ancient languages;
* LLMs for the automatic analysis of ancient texts.
SHARED TASKS
LT4HALA 2026 will host:
* the 4th edition of EvaLatin<https://circse.github.io/LT4HALA/2026/EvaLatin>, a campaign entirely devoted to the evaluation of NLP tools for Latin. This new edition will focus on two tasks: dependency parsing and Named Entity Recognition. Dependency parsing will be based on the Universal Dependencies framework.
* the 5th edition of EvaHan<https://circse.github.io/LT4HALA/2026/EvaHan>, the campaign for the evaluation of NLP tools for Ancient Chinese. EvaHan 2026 will focus on Ancient Chinese OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Evaluation.
* the 2nd edition of EvaCun<https://circse.github.io/LT4HALA/2026/EvaCun>, the campaign for the evaluation of Ancient Cuneiform Languages, with shared tasks on transliteration normalization, morphological analysis and lemmatization, Named Entity Recognition of Akkadian and/or Sumerian.
SUBMISSIONS
Submissions should be 4 to 8 pages in length and follow the LREC stylesheet (see below). The maximum number of pages excludes potential Ethics Statements and discussion on Limitations, acknowledgements and references, as well as data and code availability statements. Appendices or supplementary material are not permitted during the initial submission phase, as papers should be self-contained and reviewable on their own.
Papers must be of original, previously unpublished work. Papers must be anonymized to support double-blind reviewing. Submissions thus must not include authors’ names and affiliations. The submissions should also avoid links to non-anonymized repositories: the code should be either submitted as supplementary material in the final version of the paper, or as a link to an anonymized repository (e.g., Anonymous GitHub or Anonym Share). Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.
Submissions should follow the LREC stylesheet, which is available on the LREC 2026 website on the Author’s kit page<https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/>.
Each paper will be reviewed by three independent reviewers.
Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings, which include both oral and poster papers in the same format. Determination of the presentation format (oral vs. poster) is based solely on an assessment of the optimal method of communication (more or less interactive), given the paper content.
As for the shared tasks, participants will be required to submit a technical report for each task (with all the related sub-tasks) they took part in. Technical reports will be included in the proceedings as short papers: the maximum length is 4 pages (excluding references) and they should follow the LREC 2026 official format. Reports will receive a light review (we will check for the correctness of the format, the exactness of results and ranking, and overall exposition). All participants will have the possibility to present their results at the workshop. Reports of the shared tasks are not anonymous.
WORKSHOP IMPORTANT DATES
* 17 February 2026: submissions due
* 13 March 2026: reviews due
* 16 March 2026: notifications to authors
* 27 March 2026: camera-ready due
Shared tasks deadlines are available in the specific web pages: EvaLatin, EvaHan, EvaCun.
Identify, Describe and Share your LRs!
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 your 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).
[http://static.unicatt.it/ext-portale/5xmille_firma_mail_2023.jpg] <https://www.unicatt.it/uc/5xmille>
*Homophobia and Transphobia Meme Classification | LT-EDI @ ACL 2026*
We are pleased to invite the research community to participate in the
LT-EDI @ ACL 2026 shared task on Homophobia and Transphobia Meme
Classification, which addresses harmful multimodal content targeting LGBTQ+
individuals and communities.
Memes function as compact multimodal communication units that combine
visual and textual cues. They spread rapidly across cultures and languages.
This combination enables both subtle and explicit forms of discrimination.
The shared task focuses on the automatic identification of homophobic and
transphobic content in memes.
* 📝 Task Description*The shared task focuses on multiclass meme
classification for detecting anti-LGBT content. Participants are provided
with multimodal memes and are required to classify each meme into one of
the predefined categories based on the presence of discriminatory content.
*Labels:*Homophobia
Transphobia
Non-anti-LGBT
*Languages:*English, Hindi, and Chinese
*Description:*Separate datasets are released for each language, enabling
analysis across culturally distinct meme collections. The task requires
participants to identify discriminatory stereotypes, harmful visual
elements, and derogatory textual cues embedded in memes. All training and
test datasets are developed following culturally sensitive and ethical
annotation practices. The task emphasizes robust multimodal understanding
across diverse cultural contexts.
* 📚 Resources*
🔗 Competition link (Codabench):
https://www.codabench.org/competitions/11335/
🔗 Task website: https://sites.google.com/view/lt-edi-2026/shared-tasks
*🗓️ Important Dates*Task announcement: November 16, 2025
Training data release: November 25, 2025
Test data release: January 20, 2026
Run submission deadline: February 10, 2026
Results announcement: February 16, 2026
Paper submission deadline: March 5, 2026
Peer review notification: April 28, 2026
Camera-ready submission: May 12, 2026
Workshop dates: July 2–3, 2026
with regards,
Dr. Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi,
Assistant Professor / Lecturer-above-the-bar
Programme Director (MSc Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence)
<https://www.universityofgalway.ie/courses/taught-postgraduate-courses/compu…>
School of Computer Science, University of Galway, Ireland
Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics, Data Science Institute,
University of Galway, Ireland
E-mail: bharathiraja.akr(a)gmail.com , bharathi.raja(a)universityofgalway.ie
<bharathiraja.asokachakravarthi(a)universityofgalway.ie>
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=irCl028AAAAJ&hl=en
Website:
https://research.universityofgalway.ie/en/persons/bharathi-raja-asoka-chakr…