The Natural Language Learning & Generation (NLLG) group https://nl2g.github.io/ at University of Technology Nuremberg (UTN) is looking for two postdocs positions (E13 100%), to be filled as soon as possible:
* one open position in our fields of expertise (see below)
* one position for LLM-based authorship verification/attribution in German data (speaking German is beneficial)
The duration of the positions is 12 to 15 months.
The tasks include:
* scientific research in at least one of our focus areas, see below
* Writing and publishing research results in relevant conferences and journals, as well as scientific networking and outreach through their presentation at conferences
* Participation in third-party funding applications
* Supervision of doctoral students and student assistants
* Design and teaching of courses on a small scale
Application materials include:
* tabular CV
* letter of motivation (restricted to 1 page)
* 1-page description of your desired contribution to the group as a postdoc
* links to at least 3 top-quality conference or journal publications (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, EACL, COLING, TACL, ICLR, ICCV, NeurIPS, AAAI, CVPR, or an equivalent) and a description of your role in each publication.
Application deadline:
* February 20, 2026
For questions please contact steffen.eger(a)utn.de<mailto:steffen.eger@utn.de>
Please apply online via https://www.utn.de/en/career/job-openings/
Focus areas: The NLLG group is among the leading NLP groups in Europe. It has a broad focus on NLP related topics, including: evaluation of text generation (e.g. machine translation, multimodal tasks, etc.), NLP and digital humanities (e.g. automatic poetry generation, literary translation, language change, argumentation, authorship analysis), NLP and social sciences (e.g. LLM-based analysis of social solidarity over time, biases, fairness) and AI4Science topics (e.g. automatic generation of scientific figures).
---------------------------------------------
Prof. Dr. Steffen Eger
Heisenberg Professor
Natural Language Learning & Generation (NLLG)
University of Technology Nuremberg (UTN)
https://nl2g.github.io/
<https://nl2g.github.io/>https://www.utn.de/en/person/prof-dr-steffen-eger/<https://www.utn.de/person/prof-dr-steffen-eger/>
https://www.utn.de/en/departments/department-engineering/nllg-lab/
<https://nl2g.github.io/>
Ulmenstraße 52i
90443 Nürnberg
The Survey of English Usage at University College London will be running its 13th Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics online from 24-26 June 2026.
This Summer School is an accessible and inspiring introductory course in English Corpus Linguistics for students of linguistics and students of the English language.
The course will be taught online over three days in the morning (UK time). The course consists of theoretical and practical sessions.
Over the course of the three days, participants learn about the following:
-the scope of Corpus Linguistics, and how we can use corpora to study the English Language;
-key issues in Corpus Linguistics methodology;
-how to use corpora to analyse issues in syntax, semantics, discourse and World Englishes;
-basic elements of statistics;
-how to navigate large and small corpora, particularly ICE-GB and DCPSE.
At the end of the course, participants will have:
-acquired a basic but solid knowledge of the terminology, concepts and methodologies used in English Corpus Linguistics;
-had practical experience working with two corpora and a corpus exploration tool (ICECUP);
-have gained an understanding of the breadth of Corpus Linguistics and the potential application for projects;
-have learned about the fundamental concepts of inferential statistics and their practical application to Corpus Linguistics.
Students are expected to have a basic knowledge of concepts in linguistics, especially grammar.
Places are limited. Be sure to book early to get the early bird rate.
For students in full-time education the course fee includes a free copy of either the ICE-GB Corpus (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/arts-humanities/research-projects/1998/sep/ice-gb) or the DCPSE Corpus (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/arts-humanities/research-projects/2006/sep/dcpse), with the associated exploration software ICECUP.
For more information about the course, provisional timetable and how to apply, see:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/english/summer-school-english-corpus-linguistics
Prof. Bas Aarts
Department of English Language and Literature UCL
Substack: https://basaarts.substack.com/
Continuous Professional Development and INSET courses for teachers: https://bit.ly/39qnKIH
X: @UCLEnglishUsage and @EngliciousUCL
Note: I respect your work/life balance. If I send you an email outside of your normal working hours there is no expectation that you will read or respond to the message at that time.
Here, history happens.
[image.png]
Dear all,
We invite participation in our Shared Task on Vocabulary Difficulty Prediction for English Learners, which will be hosted at The<https://sig-edu.org/bea/2026> <https://sig-edu.org/bea/2026> 21st Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications<https://sig-edu.org/bea/2026> (co-located with ACL 2026) both online and in person in San Diego, CA, United States.
This shared task focuses on predicting the difficulty of English vocabulary for learners with different L1 backgrounds. Evaluation will use the British Council’s Knowledge-based Vocabulary Lists (KVL), which provide psychometrically calibrated difficulty scores for English learners with Spanish, German, and Mandarin L1s. The task includes a Closed Track, limited to the provided data and standard NLP resources, and an Open Track, which allows external data and use of LLMs, to explore the full potential of current AI approaches.
Important Dates
26 January: Release of training data and baseline models<https://github.com/britishcouncil/bea2026st>
20 March: Test data release
27 March: System submissions from teams due
3 April: Announcement of evaluation results by the organisers
24 April: System papers due
1 May: Paper reviews returned
12 May: Final camera-ready submissions
2-3 July: BEA 2026 workshop at ACL
Further details can be found at our shared task website<https://www.britishcouncil.org/data-science-and-insights/bea2026st>. Please send any questions to vocabularychallenge(a)britishcouncil.org<mailto:vocabularychallenge@britishcouncil.org> or post a new topic in our forum<https://groups.google.com/g/bea-2026-shared-task/>. We look forward to your participation!
Organisers: Mariano Felice (British Council) and Lucy Skidmore (British Council).
The British Council is the United Kingdom's international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities. A registered charity: 209131 (England and Wales) SC037733 (Scotland). This message is for the use of the intended recipient(s) only and may contain confidential information. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender and delete it. The British Council accepts no liability for loss or damage caused by viruses and other malware and you are advised to carry out a virus and malware check on any attachments contained in this message.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Joint Call for Papers
Social Context (SoCon) and Integrating NLP and Psychology to Study
Social Interactions (NLPSI)
Co-located with LREC 2026, Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Workshop day: May 12, 2026
Deadline for paper submission: February 16, 2026 February 23, 2026
Website: https://socon-nlpsi.github.io
Contact: socon-nlpsi-workshop-organizers.nlproc(a)uni-bamberg.de
OVERVIEW
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Natural Language Processing has evolved significantly, enabling the
modeling of high-level aspects of human communication. Relevant topics
include pragmatics, social dynamics, and the integration of social
context to better understand communicative intent. The SoCon and NLPSI
workshops share a focus on the social dimensions of communication, while
addressing distinct challenges.
The Social Context Workshop explores how context shapes language use,
seeking interdisciplinary collaboration across NLP, Pragmatics,
Sociolinguistics, and Sociology. It aims to develop shared terminology
and promote community-centered approaches as alternatives to traditional
crowdsourcing.
The NLPSI Workshop focuses on psychological processes shaping human
communication, including how individuals perceive, process, and produce
language. It welcomes interdisciplinary work from NLP, Social
Psychology, and Affective Computing, with an emphasis on large-scale
studies.
TOPICS
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This joint Call for Papers contains two tracks, SoCon and NLPSI. Authors
should choose the track that best matches their contribution.
SoCon Track
"Towards Responsibly Infusing NLP with Social Context, Community
Meanings, and Pragmatics Through Interdisciplinary NLP Efforts."
Topics include, but are not limited to:
* Interdisciplinary methods for modeling context, integrating NLP with
pragmatics and social sciences
* Studying social communities and how to engage with communities of
practice and speech communities
* Ethical challenges in resource creation, including participatory
design involving relevant communities
* Explaining behaviors in social interactions through models of social
attitudes shaped by backgrounds, contexts, and triggering events
NLPSI Track
"Bridging the gap between NLP and psychological insights to foster a
deeper understanding of social interactions."
Topics include, but are not limited to:
*Psychological constructs (beliefs, motives, feelings, affect, personality)
*Psychological studies, especially those focused on interaction
*Communication patterns such as empathy, persuasion, and conflict resolution
*The role of emotions in interpersonal communication, such as emotion
contagion and interpersonal emotion regulation
SUBMISSION TYPES
-------------------------------------------------------------------
* Long papers (up to 8 pages) presenting original research, from
preliminary to established contributions
* Short papers (up to 4 pages) presenting emerging ideas or early-stage
research
* Extended abstracts(non-archival, up to 2 pages): a new format designed
to be inclusive of researchers from fields where conference papers are
not standard (e.g., Social Sciences). Extended abstracts are not
included in conference proceedings.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Submissions will be double-blind reviewed.
Papers must follow the LREC templates (LaTeX, Word, Open Office, Overleaf).
Page limits apply only to the main content; limitations, ethics,
acknowledgements, references, and appendices do not count.
Submission via Softconf: https://softconf.com/lrec2026/SoConNLPSI/
Authors must indicate resources used or created (data, tools,
technologies, evaluation kits). ELRA encourages sharing of language
resources to support reuse and replicability. Authors must follow
ethical AI research policies and include an ethics statement.
WORKSHOP FORMAT
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The workshop follows LREC’s attendance policy.
It will be a full-day hybrid event with keynotes and paper presentations
(oral and lightning talks).
IMPORTANT DATES
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Paper submission deadline: February 16, 2026 February 23, 2026
Notification of acceptance: March 23, 2026
Camera-ready deadline: March 30, 2026
Workshop day: May 12, 2026
ORGANIZERS
-------------------------------------------------------------------
SoCon
Marco Antonio Stranisci, University of Turin
Soda Marem Lo, University of Turin
Sabine Weber, Bamberg University
Rossana Damiano, University of Turin
Simona Frenda, Heriot-Watt University
Roman Klinger, University of Bamberg
Viviana Patti, University of Turin
Marteen Sap, Carnegie Mellon University
Seid Muhie Yimam, University of Hamburg
NLPSI
Aswathy Velutharambath, University of Bamberg
Sofie Labat, Ghent University
Neele Falk, University of Stuttgart
Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco, Bocconi University
Roman Klinger, University of Bamberg
Véronique Hoste, Ghent University
Bennett Kleinberg, Tilburg University
Marco
https://marcostranisci.github.io/
- How happy were you with the shot selection the PhD even though they came
back?
- Happy?
- Reasonable
- Happy is not a word that we think about in the game the PhD. Think of
something different. Happy, I don't know how to judge 'happy'. (Pop
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl_I9s1cN3Q>)
Dear all,
due to numerous requests we are extending the submission period for sign-lang@LREC 2026 to Friday, 20 February. See below for the updated Call for Papers:
Event: 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages (sign-lang@LREC 2026)
**NEW** Submission deadline: 20 February 2026
Workshop date: 16 May 2026
Website: https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec2026/
Submission page: https://softconf.com/lrec2026/signlang2026/
CALL FOR PAPERS
Submissions are invited for a full day workshop on sign language resources and technologies, to take place on 16 May 2026 as a satellite event of LREC 2026 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. As in the previous four years, the workshop will be a hybrid event. The extended submission deadline is Friday, 20 February 2026.
During the past years, a number of large-scale sign language corpus projects have started. Some have already been completed, but many more projects are about to start. At the same time, sign language technologies are maturing and are promising to support the time-consuming basic annotation. The workshop aims at bringing together those researchers who already work with multimodal sign language corpora (and those who see the need for empirical underpinnings of their current research) with those who develop sign language technologies. It provides the platform to compare competing approaches.
As sign language resource technologies build to a large extent on methodologies and tools used in the language resource community in general, but add very specific perspectives (e.g. no writing system established, use of video as data source) and works with a different modality of human language, sign language research is able to feed back to the language resource community at large. At the same time, as the raw data are in the visual domain, the field naturally bridges into Computer Vision. Thus, researchers use Machine Learning methods on both visual and linguistic data.
We invite submissions of papers to be presented either on stage (20 minutes plus 10 minutes discussion), as posters (with or without demonstrations) or remotely (poster PDF plus text chat) on the following topics:
2026 SPECIAL TOPIC: LANGUAGE IN MOTION
Motion is at the core of sign languages, both literally, through their existence in the visual-gestural modality, and figuratively, in how their communities drive language change. Equally, sign language research must stay in motion, adapting to new insights and technological possibilities, advancing how we create and use resources, evolving the capabilities of tools, and pushing the boundaries of what can be expected from the field, both technologically and ethically. We especially invite contributions relating to the representation and processing of sign languages that address these various facets of language in motion, but also welcome papers on other general issues relating to sign language resources and technologies.
GENERAL ISSUES ON SIGN LANGUAGE CORPORA AND TOOLS
• Evaluation of sign language resources
• Experiences in building sign language corpora
• Elicitation methodology appropriate for corpus collection
• Proposals for standards for linguistic annotation or for metadata descriptions
• Experiences from linguistic research using corpora
• Use of (parallel) corpora and lexicons in translation studies and machine translation
• Avatar technology as a tool in sign language corpora and corpus data feeding into advances in avatar technology
• Language documentation and long-term accessibility for sign language data
• Annotation and visualization tools
• Linking corpora and lexicons and integrated presentation of corpus and dictionary contents
• “Internet as a corpus” for sign languages
• Sign language corpus mining
• Crowd and community sourcing for corpus work
• Multi-lingual sign language resources and connecting sign language resources to language resources for spoken languages
• Language change and how it relates to resource creation, corpus-driven linguistic research, and language technologies
We are pleased to confirm that the workshop will be a hybrid event. Similar to the 2022 and 2024 workshops, all participants will be given access to an online text chat before and during the event to allow remote participants to present their work as well as for discussion of all workshop contributions. On-stage presentations will be live streamed (including International Sign/English interpretation) with opportunity for questions from remote and on-site participants. The live poster sessions will be held on-site only, but posters will be made available online for discussion via text chat.
In the tradition of LREC, oral/signed presentations, poster presentations (with or without demonstrations) and remote presentations have equal status, and authors are encouraged to suggest the presentation format best suited to communicate their ideas. Papers (4–8 pages) of all accepted submissions to this workshop will be published as workshop proceedings published on the conference website – independent of whether you have a poster, remote or oral/signed presentation. The workshop does not differentiate between long, short, or position papers.
Please submit your paper through the LREC START system (https://softconf.com/lrec2026/signlang2026/) not later than 14 February 2026 (any time zone), indicating whether you prefer an oral/signed presentation, a poster presentation, a poster presentation with demo, or a remote poster. Unlike the main conference, the workshop will be reviewed single-blind, so submissions SHOULD NOT BE ANONYMOUS. In all other respects, submissions should follow the LREC 2026 style guide (https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/).
ATTENTION Please note that you are expected to submit the full paper, not an extended abstract as in previous years!
IMPORTANT DATES
• **NEW** deadline for submissions: 20 February 2026 (11:59PM UTC-12:00 “anywhere on Earth”)
• Notification of acceptance: 16 March, 2026
• Early bird registration ends: tbd
• Camera ready version of the paper (for both oral/signed presentations and posters): 27 March 2026
• Submission of slides for interpreters' preparation (oral/signed presentations only): 6 May 2026
• Submission of all slides/posters for the conference platform: 6 May 2026
• Submission of additional material, including demo videos, to be made available alongside with the posters/slides on the conference platform: 6 May 2026
• This workshop: 16 May 2026
• LREC main conference: 13–15 May 2026
• LREC workshops 11, 12 & 16 May 2026
**Apologies for cross-posting**
Third Call for Papers: Joint Workshop on Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Language Technologies (LEGAL2026) and Computational Approaches to Language Data Pseudonymization, Anonymization, De-identification, and Data Privacy (CALD-pseudo 2026)
Website: https://legal2026.mobileds.de/
Submission: https://softconf.com/lrec2026/LEGAL2026/
We invite submissions to the Joint Workshop on Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Language Technologies (LEGAL2026) and Computational Approaches to Language Data Pseudonymization, Anonymization, De-identification, and Data Privacy (CALD-pseudo 2026), to be held at LREC 2026 on the 12th of May 2026.
Important Dates
*
20th of February 2026: paper submission deadline
*
30th March 2026: camera ready deadline (strict)
*
12th May 2026: workshop date
Introduction
Access to text and speech data is essential for research, yet personal and sensitive information often prevents open sharing. Techniques such as pseudonymization and anonymization offer potential solutions, but their effectiveness, limitations, and impact on data utility require deeper investigation. Balancing privacy protection with meaningful scientific use remains a key challenge.
At the same time, legal and ethical requirements increasingly shape how language resources can be created, processed, and distributed. Regulatory frameworks, such as the GDPR, the Data Act, and the Artificial Intelligence Act, affect access, reuse, and documentation duties for both text and speech data, creating a complex environment that demands interdisciplinary insight.
The workshop brings these two perspectives together by addressing both the technical and practical aspects of de-identification as well as the legal and ethical obligations governing data handling. Topics include anonymization and pseudonymization methods, compliance in practical workflows, provenance and rights tracking, and emerging approaches to legal metadata. The goal is to foster responsible, legally sound, and technically robust innovation in human language technologies.
Topics of Interest
We invite contributions from all disciplines involved in the creation, processing, governance, and de-identification of text and speech data. Submissions may address theoretical, empirical, methodological, legal, or technical questions, including cross-disciplinary work. We particularly encourage research on less-represented languages and on data from under-represented communities.
1. Legal Aspects of Language Data (LEGAL2026)
*
Regulatory frameworks and global governance
*
Intellectual property, data protection, and LLM governance
*
Ethics, fairness, trust, and transparency
*
Compliance in practice
*
Ethics, fairness, and trust
*
Operationalizing compliance
*
Emerging and grey areas
*
Interdisciplinary and cross-border coordination
2. Pseudonymization, Anonymization, and De-identification: Theoretical, Methodological, and Technical Aspects (CALD-pseudo 2026)
*
Detection and classification of personal information (PI)
*
Replacement and transformation of PI
*
Utility and bias after de-identification
*
Approaches to evaluation and adversarial testing
*
Dataset creation for de-identification research
*
Low-resource scenarios
*
Speech-specific challenges
*
Cross-disciplinary applications and challenges
We invite submissions from fields where de-identification of data plays an important role, including but not limited to Computational Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Digital Humanities, Social Sciences, Political Sciences, Medical Science etc., from the perspectives of researchers, public organizations, and industry.
Submission Guidelines
Authors are invited to submit original and unpublished research papers in the following categories:
*
Long papers (up to 8 pages) for substantial contributions
*
Short papers (up to 4 pages) for:
*
Small, focused contributions or ongoing or preliminary work
*
Extended abstracts for non-technical submissions only, such as conceptual, theoretical, legal, ethical, policy-oriented, or position papers. Extended abstract submissions are expected to be developed into regular papers by the camera-ready submission deadline.
The full papers will be published as workshop proceedings along with the LREC main conference. They should follow the LREC stylesheet, which is available on the conference website on the Author’s kit<https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/> page. Unlike the main conference, we allow appendices of up to 10 pages already in the review phase. However, the reviewers will not be required to look in the appendices and must be able to review the paper based on everything contained within the main body of the paper (as if there were no appendices).
Submission deadline: 20th of February 2026
Submission link: https://softconf.com/lrec2026/LEGAL2026/
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).
Keynote Talks
We are delighted to announce the workshop will host keynote talks from two speakers:
*
Paweł Kamocki, Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Germany
*
Ivan Habernal, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
Workshop Organizers
LEGAL 2026:
*
Ingo Siegert, Otto-von-Guericke Universität Magdeburg, Germany
*
Paweł Kamocki, Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Germany
*
Kossay Talmoudi, ELDA, France
*
Khalid Choukri, ELDA, France
CALD-pseudo 2026
*
Maria Irena Szawerna, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
*
Simon Dobnik, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
*
Therese Lindström Tiedemann, University of Helsinki, Finland
*
Pierre Lison, Norwegian Computing Center & University of Oslo, Norway
*
Ildikó Pilán, Norwegian Computing Center, Norway
*
Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
*
Lisa Södergård, University of Helsinki, Finland
*
Elena Volodina, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
*
Xuan-Son Vu, Lund University & DeepTensor AB, Sweden
Program Committee
A list of program committee members is available on the workshop webpage.
Contact
For inquiries, please contact ingo.siegert(a)ovgu.de for questions about LEGAL2026 or mormor.karl(a)svenska.gu.se for questions about CALD-pseudo 2026.
Best regards,
Maria Irena Szawerna
____________________
PhD student
Språkbanken Text<https://spraakbanken.gu.se/>
Institutionen för svenska, flerspråkighet och språkteknologi<https://www.gu.se/svenska-spraket>
UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG<https://www.gu.se/>
https://spraakbanken.gu.se/om/personal/maria-szawerna
[apologies for cross posting]
DeTermIt! Workshop @ LREC 2026
11 May 2026 (afternoon)
hybrid event (in-person + online)!
Second Workshop on Evaluating Text Difficulty in a Multilingual Context
Location: Palau de Congressos de Palma, Palma de Mallorca (Spain)
- Paper submissions: 23 February 2026
Submission link: https://softconf.com/lrec2026/DeTermIt2026/
***** Exciting NEWS *****
Best Student Paper Award: the best student paper (i.e., a paper whose first author is a PhD student or equivalent) will receive a free workshop registration for the corresponding (student) author.
Keynote: We’re delighted to announce Horacio Saggion (Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra) as our keynote speaker!
#####################
Final Call for Papers
Schedule
- Paper submissions: 23 February 2026
- Notification of acceptance: 13 March 2026
- Camera-ready due: 30 March 2026
- Workshop: one of 11, 12, or 16 May 2026 (half-day)
All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 AoE (“Anywhere on Earth”)
For more information, please visit:
Website: https://determit2026.dei.unipd.it/
#####################
In today’s interconnected world, where information dissemination knows no linguistic bounds, it is crucial to ensure that knowledge is accessible to diverse audiences, regardless of language proficiency and domain expertise. Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) and text difficulty assessment are central to this goal, especially in the age of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI (GenAI), which increasingly mediate access to information.
The second edition of the DeTermIt! workshop focuses on the evaluation and modeling of text difficulty in multilingual, terminology-rich contexts, with a particular emphasis on the interaction between:
- text simplification,
- terminology and conceptual complexity, and
- LLM/GenAI-based generation and rewriting.
The 2026 edition builds on the first DeTermIt! workshop held at LREC-COLING 2024 (https://determit2024.dei.unipd.it/), as well as related initiatives such as the CLEF SimpleText track (https://simpletext-project.com/), which provides reusable data and benchmarks for scientific text summarization and simplification. DeTermIt! 2026 aims to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in terminology-aware simplification, lexical and conceptual difficulty, and evaluation protocols for GenAI systems.
We welcome contributions that address theoretical, methodological, and applied aspects of text difficulty, including resource creation and evaluation (e.g., corpora, datasets, and benchmarks), with a focus on how linguistic complexity, specialized terminology, and domain knowledge interact with human understanding. In particular, we encourage work that explores how LLMs and GenAI can be evaluated, constrained, or guided to produce readable, faithful, and accessible texts.
#####################
Topics of Interest
#####################
We invite submissions on (but not limited to) the following themes:
1. Theoretical and Modeling Perspectives
- Cognitive and linguistic models of text and lexical complexity.
- Multilingual readability and text difficulty prediction.
- Modeling conceptual difficulty and domain-specific terminology.
- Theoretical connections between lexicography, terminology, and text simplification.
2. Terminology and Conceptual Complexity
- Identification and classification of specialized terms and concepts.
- Estimation of term difficulty for lay readers and second language learners.
- Use of terminological databases, ontologies, and knowledge graphs in simplification pipelines.
- Methods for adapting domain-specific terminology for accessible communication (e.g., in medicine, law, technology).
3. Generative and Explainable AI for Text Simplification
- LLM- and GenAI-based approaches to text simplification and paraphrasing.
- Terminology-Augmented Generation (TAG) and term-preserving simplification.
- Evaluation of GenAI outputs: readability, factuality, terminology fidelity, and hallucination analysis.
- Readability-controlled or difficulty-controlled generation; controllable simplification.
- Human-centered and explainable approaches to text accessibility in GenAI systems.
4. Resources, Benchmarks, and Evaluation Frameworks
- Corpora, annotation schemes, and benchmarks for text difficulty and simplification.
- Datasets and methods for evaluating terminology-aware simplification and explanation.
- FAIR and reusable resources for multilingual text accessibility.
- Evaluation protocols and metrics for cross-lingual and cross-domain simplification and GenAI-based rewriting.
5. Applications and Case Studies
- Domain-specific simplification (e.g., healthcare, legal, scientific communication).
- Tools and systems for educational settings, language learning, or accessible communication.
- User studies, human evaluation setups, and mixed-method approaches to assessing text difficulty and GenAI-assisted simplification.
- Industrial and real-world experiences with integrating ATS and terminology into LLM-driven workflows.
#####################
Submission Guidelines
#####################
We invite original contributions, including research papers, case studies, negative results, and system demonstrations.
When submitting a paper through the START system of LREC 2026, authors will be asked to provide essential information about language resources (in a broad sense: data, tools, services, standards, evaluation packages, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of the research. ELRA strongly encourages all authors to share the resources described in their papers to support reproducibility and reusability.
Papers must be compliant with the stylesheet adopted for the LREC 2026 Proceedings (see https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/).
The workshop proceedings will be published in the LREC 2026 workshop proceedings.
PAPER TYPES
We accept three types of submissions:
- Regular long papers – up to eight (8) pages of content, presenting substantial, original, completed, and unpublished work.
- Short papers – up to four (4) pages of content, describing smaller focused contributions, work in progress, negative results, or system demonstrations.
- Position papers – up to eight (8) pages of content, discussing key open challenges, methodological issues, and cross-disciplinary perspectives on text difficulty, terminology, and GenAI.
References do not count toward the page limits.
#####################
Organizers
#####################
Chairs
Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio, University of Padua, Italy
Federica Vezzani, University of Padua, Italy
Liana Ermakova, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, France
Hosein Azarbonyad, Elsevier, The Netherlands
Jaap Kamps, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Scientific Committee
Florian Boudin - Nantes University, France
Lynne Bowker - University of Ottawa, Canada
Sara Carvalho - Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal
Rute Costa - Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal
Eric Gaussier - University Grenoble Alpes, France
Natalia Grabar - CNRS, France
Ana Ostroški Anić - Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics, Croatia
Tatiana Passali - Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Grigorios Tsoumakas - Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Sara Vecchiato - University of Udine, Italy
Cornelia Wermuth - KU Leuven, Belgium
#####################
Contact
#####################
For inquiries, please contact:
giorgiomaria.dinunzio(a)unipd.it <mailto:giorgiomaria.dinunzio@unipd.it>
Dialects in NLP: A Resource Perspective (DialRes-LREC26)
Workshop at LREC 2026 — Palma de Mallorca, Spain, May 16, 2026
Hybrid event — in person and online
Website: https://dialres.github.io/dialres/
Contact: dialres-lrec26(a)googlegroups.com<mailto:dialres-lrec26@googlegroups.com>
Dialectal and non-standard varieties pose persistent challenges for linguistic resource development. While in-depth study and large-scale resource creation for dominant or standard varieties have driven major advances in language technology, linguistic resources that adequately represent dialectal variation remain scarce. It therefore remains an open question whether standard-centric practices address dialectal variation or instead create new problems for dialects.
DialRes-LREC26 invites submissions on the creation, analysis, and evaluation of dialectal resources, including—but not limited to—work that critically examines how standard-centric methodologies impact dialects in the development of linguistic resources and models. We especially encourage contributions addressing the consequences of such practices for speech and morphosyntactic modelling, OCR of dialectal and historical texts, orthographic normalisation and homogenisation, annotation practices and lemmatisation strategies that abstract away or suppress dialectal forms, as well as analyses of how these choices affect dialects and their communities methodologically, economically, and socially.
The workshop focuses on problems, limitations, and trade-offs in developing dialectal resources from a linguistic perspective, while encouraging the creation and evaluation of resources in formats that enable reuse by the NLP community.
Workshop Topics
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Development and evaluation of dialectal oral and textual resources
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Orthographic normalisation and homogenisation, including their impact on dialectal variation
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Dialects vs. standard language varieties in annotation frameworks
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Cross-lingual and cross-dialectal transfer and model adaptation
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Resource scalability issues and techniques
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Use and limitations of large language models (LLMs) in dialectal resource development
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OCR for dialectal, non-standard, and historical texts: challenges, errors, and downstream effects
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Resources for, and applications supporting, dialect revitalisation and preservation
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Dialectal studies and teaching from a resource-oriented perspective
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Working on dialectal resources: academic, financial, legal, and societal issues
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Enabling and empowering dialect communities to develop their own resources
Submission Information
Instructions for Authors Submissions are electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system via the link: https://softconf.com/lrec2026/DialRes. They must be 4 to 8 pages long (excluding references and potential Ethics Statements) and follow the LREC stylesheet, available on the conference website on the Author’s kit page Author’s Kit<https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/>. All templates are also available from this<https://lrec2026.info/calls/second-call-for-papers/> page.
Invited Speaker
Prof. Barbara Plank, LMU Munich (https://bplank.github.io/)
Important Dates
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20 February 2026 — Submission Deadline
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11 March 2026 — Notification of Acceptance
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28 March 2026 — Camera-ready Papers Due
Resubmissions from the LREC Main Conference
It will also be possible to submit papers that were rejected from the LREC 2026 main conference to DialRes 2026. Such submissions must be revised to fit the scope and format of the workshop and must comply with the same anonymization requirements.
Endorsements The workshop is endorsed by UniDive COST Action CA21167 and Archimedes Athena R.C.
Organizing Committee
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Antonios Anastasopoulos — George Mason University / Archimedes–Athena RC
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Stella Markantonatou — ILSP / Archimedes–Athena RC
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Angela Ralli — University of Patras / Archimedes–Athena RC
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Marcos Zampieri — George Mason University
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Stavros Bompolas — Archimedes–Athena RC
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Vivian Stamou — Archimedes–Athena RC
The newly founded Chair of Intelligent Language Systems at FAU
Erlangen–Nürnberg is seeking applications for fully funded PhD and
postdoctoral positions. The key research areas include reasoning,
interpretability, neuro-symbolic methods, memory and multilinguality. The
position offers a degree of research freedom, however the overall goal is
to advance LLM/VLMs for the long-tail of the distribution, i.e., unseen
languages, tasks or domains by developing novel ML/NLP/RL methods.
About the Lab
The lab is led by Gözde Gül Sahin <https://gglab-ku.github.io/>. We
regularly publish at top-tier *CL venues, and are also looking to extend to
top-tier ML venues. Our lab has been partially funded by
<https://www.tubitak.gov.tr/>Wikimedia Foundation
<https://wikimediafoundation.org/> via Wikimedia Research Fund
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Research_%26_Tech…>
, Google (Gemini) Academic Program
<https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/gemini-for-research> and Scientific
and Technological Research Council of Türkiye <https://www.tubitak.gov.tr/>
via International Fellowship for Outstanding Researchers program.
About FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg
FAU offers broad opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration across
Informatik and beyond. There is strong potential for joint research with
other computer science chairs, for example in areas intersecting with speech
processing <https://lme.tf.fau.de/>, as well as, security, and reliable
systems <https://www.cs1.tf.fau.de/lab/>. Natural connections also exist
with the Humanities <https://www.phil.fau.eu/>, particularly linguistics
and digitally supported humanities research, as well as with
application-oriented fields such as medicine <https://www.med.fau.eu/>. The
chair is embedded in the vibrant Erlangen–Nuremberg research ecosystem,
with close proximity to major industrial and applied research actors such
as Siemens, adidas, and Fraunhofer IIS, providing an excellent environment
for collaborative, impact-oriented PhD and postdoctoral research.
Computational Resources
FAU Erlangen–Nürnberg HPC Center offers access to powerful, well-maintained
GPU clusters (https://doc.nhr.fau.de/clusters/overview/).
Your Profile
- For the postdoctoral position: PhD in computer science, computational
linguistics or a related field. For PhD position: Master of Science in
computer science, computational linguistics or a related field before the
PhD starting date
- Strong background in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning
- Excellent programming skills
- Proficiency in English (German not required)
- Ability to work independently and as part of an interdisciplinary team
- Positive attitude, enjoyment of research, and finding new solutions
Application
Please email the following as a single pdf file to goezde.sahin [at] fau.de
- Cover letter, including your motivation for application (max. one page)
- A research statement outlining your research interests within the scope
of the advertised position. It should propose a concrete research agenda
you plan to develop during your PhD or PostDoc (up to two pages including
references).
- Curriculum vitae (including your publication list (if available))
- Bachelors and Masters diplomas
- Transcripts
- Name and contact details of 2 referees
Applications until *01.03.2026* will be given full consideration, however
the position will remain open until filled. Hence, feel free to inquire
even if the deadline has passed. The preferred starting date is 01.05.2026
(or soon after)
Salary
This is a fully funded E13 position (100%). An approximate salary can be
calculated using the following tool:
https://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/c/t/rechner/tv-l/west?id=tv-l-2025.