April 2026 - Corpora

Lectures on CL: Bolzano (Italy) 15-17 June 2026: Registration open
by Bernardi Raffaella 13 Apr '26

13 Apr '26

Dear all, The registration to the 2026 edition of the Lectures on Computational Linguistics is open. It will close on May 27, or earlier — as soon as the maximum number of participants (150) is reached. https://www.ai-lc.it/en/lcl-registration-procedure/ The 2026 edition is organized by the Italian Association of Computational Linguistics (AILC) together with the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Faculty of Engineering and Faculty of Education) and EURAC Research Center. It focuses on Natural Language Processing for the Society, covering topics from Low Resources Languages, Speech and Text, Embodied AI, Interpretability and Small Language Models for education in schools. Featuring frontal classes, evening lectures and hands-on labs, it provides both a high-level overview of the field as well as an introduction to specific topics, and practical experiences. SPEAKERS Tutorials: Barbara Plank (LMU Munich) Elia Bruni (University of Osnabrück) Barbara Schuppler (TU Graz) Evening Lectures: Julia Hockenmaier (University of Illinois) Aurelie Herbelot (Denotation UG) Labs: Loredana Schettino and Alessandro Vietti (Faculty of Education, UNIBZ) Leonardo Bertolazzi (University of Trento) Egon Stemle and Luca Ducceschi (EURAC Research Center) The detailed programme is available at: https://www.ai-lc.it/en/lectures-2/lectures-2026/program/ Student Presentations Students wishing to present aspects of their work in the "Student Presentations" sessions are asked to send a 500-word abstract to ailc.lectures(a)gmail.com<mailto:ailc.lectures@gmail.com> by May 16, 2026. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by May 23, 2026. Scientific Committee Pierpaolo Basile, University of Studi di Bari Aldo Moro Raffaella Bernardi, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Tommaso Caselli, University of Groningen Elisabetta Fersini, University of Milano-Bicocca Elisabetta Jezek, University of Pavia Local Organizing Committee Raffaella Bernardi, Faculty of Engineering, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Alessandro Vietti, Faculty of Education, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Luca Ducceschi, EURAC Research Center Contacts: ailc.lectures(a)gmail.com<mailto:ailc.lectures@gmail.com> ======================================================================= Room B1.5.01 Faculty of Engineering Free University of Bozen Bolzano NOI Techpark - B. Buozzi 1, 39100 Bozen Bolzano, Italy

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Final Call for Papers - StyGenAI Workshop@EAMT 2026
by Sami Ul Haq 13 Apr '26

13 Apr '26

Final Call for Papers - StyGenAI Workshop @EAMT 2026 The StyGenAI workshop will take place in conjunction with EAMT 2026 (European Association for Machine Translation) from 15–18 June 2026 at the Schaumburg Concertzaal in Tilburg, the Netherlands. The workshop will be part of a vibrant international conference bringing together researchers and practitioners at the forefront of machine translation and language technologies. More information about the main conference is available at https://eamt2026.org/ → Important Dates - Workshop paper submission deadline: 27 April 2026 (there will be no extension to this deadline) - Notification of acceptance: 12 May 2026 - Camera-ready papers due: 20 May 2026 → Submission Information The workshop invites research papers reporting original work. Papers should be 4–10 pages in length, excluding references. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings and made available online via the ACL Anthology. Submissions must follow the EAMT 2026 formatting guidelines and templates <https://eamt2026.org/calls-for-papers> and be submitted via the EasyChair <https://easychair.org/conferences/submission_new?a=35628372> system. Workshop website: https://sites.google.com/view/workshopstygenai?usp=sharing About the workshop: The advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence has profoundly reshaped the landscape of translation. Moving beyond traditional machine translation paradigms, large language models (LLMs) now operate as translation agents capable of producing linguistically fluent and stylistically complex texts. As a result, translation is no longer only a matter of accuracy or adequacy, but increasingly one of style. As LLMs are adopted for translation tasks, their outputs reveal distinctive linguistic and stylistic patterns. These patterns differ in subtle but consequential ways from those found in both human translation and conventional MT systems. While such differences are often perceived intuitively by readers and practitioners, they remain underexplored from a systematic, research-driven perspective. This evolving scenario raises a set of pressing questions: -What are the stylistic features of GenAI-produced translations? -How do they differ from those generated by traditional MT systems? -And how do they compare to human translations across genres, languages, and contexts? StyGenAI is the first workshop dedicated specifically to the study of style in GenAI-translated content. The workshop aims to bring together researchers interested in AI translation stylistics, including recurrent stylistic patterns, departures from human translation style, and the linguistic, technical, and contextual factors that modulate AI-generated output. Particular attention is given to the role of text genre, language pair, and prompt design or prompting strategies in shaping the stylistic profile of GenAI translations. The workshop provides a forum for interdisciplinary dialogue at the intersection of translation studies, computational linguistics, stylistics, and AI evaluation. Contributions are welcomed from both empirical and conceptual perspectives, as well as from research that bridges academic inquiry and professional practice. The workshop welcomes empirical, methodological, and conceptual contributions from translation studies, computational linguistics, stylistics, and related fields. We invite submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following topics: - Stylistic fingerprints of LLM-based translation in comparison with conventional MT systems and professional human translation - The influence of prompting strategies (for example, role prompting, constraints, zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot approaches) on stylistic outcomes - Cross-genre analyses of AI translation style in literary, academic, journalistic, technical, and social media texts - Authorial voice and style preservation across languages in GenAI-mediated translation - Language-specific manifestations of machine-like or synthetic stylistic patterns - Methodologies for evaluating stylistic adequacy and stylistic variation in AI-generated translations - Cognitive effort and decision-making in post-editing LLM output for stylistic quality as opposed to content accuracy - Cultural, pragmatic, or discourse-level mismatches introduced by AI translation choices - The handling of irony, humour, voice, and other stylistically marked devices in GenAI translation - Human–AI hybrid workflows for style-sensitive translation tasks - Pedagogical approaches to training translators to identify, assess, and correct AI-generated stylistic patterns - Diachronic or longitudinal analyses of stylistic change as LLMs and prompting practices evolve -- *Sami Ul Haq (He/Him)* Doctoral Researcher | ADAPT Centre | McNulty Building (L115) | Dublin City University | Glasnevin Campus | Dublin, Ireland Website: https://sami-haq99.github.io/ Email: sami.haq2(a)mail.dcu.ie <https://sami-haq99.github.io/> -- __ Séanadh Ríomhphoist/_ Email Disclaimer__ ** Tá an ríomhphost seo agus aon chomhad a sheoltar leis faoi rún agus is lena úsáid ag an seolaí agus sin amháin é. Is féidir tuilleadh a léamh anseo. <https://www.dcu.ie/iss/seanadh-riomhphoist.shtml> <https://www4.dcu.ie/iss/seanadh-riomhphoist.shtml>* _ This e-mail and any files transmitted with it are confidential and are intended solely for use by the addressee. Read more here. <https://www.dcu.ie/iss/email-disclaimer.shtml> _ *_

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[CFP] Call for papers for EvalMG 2026
by ACL Announcements 13 Apr '26

13 Apr '26

The Second Workshop on Evaluation for Multimodal Generation Multimodal generation and retrieval systems are increasingly central to modern information retrieval, powering retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), multimodal search, recommendation, and knowledge-intensive applications. Despite rapid progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), robust and principled evaluation of multimodal generation and retrieval remains a major open challenge for the IR community. This workshop aims to foster discussions and research efforts by bringing together researchers and practitioners in information retrieval, natural language processing, computer vision, and multimodal AI. Our goal is to establish evaluation methods for multimodal research and advance research efforts in this direction. CALL FOR PAPERS Both long papers and short papers (up to 9 pages and 4 pages respectively, with unlimited references and appendices) are welcome for submission. A list of topics relevant to this workshop (but not limited to): * Multimodal retrieval for RAG, Agentic AI, recommendation systems * Evaluation of retrieved cross-modal samples, without relying on augmented generation * Multi-aspect evaluation methods capturing inter- and intra-modal coherence, relevance, grounding, and contextual consistency * Benchmark retrieval datasets, evaluation protocols and annotations for text-image-audio-video-3D generation * Automatic and human-centric metrics for informativeness, factuality, fluency, faithfulness, calibration, and usability for multimodal generation * Methodology for detecting, analysing, and mitigating multimodal bias, stereotypes, toxicity, and hallucinations * Evaluation in multimodal low-resource and multilingual settings, including culturally aware and cross-lingual metrics * Agent-based evaluation of multimodal generation in multi-turn, tool-use, or iterative editing scenarios * Game-theoretic or optimization-based formulations of evaluation objectives and protocols * Evaluation of the generation quality of synthetic multimodal data, provenance/attribution, and downstream impact on training and deployment * Ethical considerations in the evaluation of multimodal text generation, including bias detection and mitigation strategies * Evaluation of Security and Privacy Dimensions in Multimodal Applications * SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS For direct paper submission, you are invited to submit your papers in our OpenReview portal [1]. Papers are required to strictly follow the SIGIR submission guidelines [2]. We invite both long papers [2] (9 pages) and short papers [3] (4 pages) submissions. All the submitted papers have to be anonymous for double-blind review. All accepted papers must be presented at the workshop. IMPORTANT DATES * Mar 25, 2026: Submission Open * May 2, 2026: Workshop Paper Direct Submission Deadline * May 27, 2026: ARR Commitment Date * June 2, 2026: Workshop Paper Notification * July 24, 2026: Workshop Day Note: All deadlines are 11:59 PM UTC-12:00 ("Anywhere on Earth") More Information: https://evalmg.github.io/#submission [4] Links: ------ [1] https://openreview.net/group?id=ACM.org/SIGIR/2026/Workshop/EvalMG [2] https://sigir2026.org/en-AU/pages/submissions/full-papers-track [3] https://sigir2026.org/en-AU/pages/submissions/short-papers-track [4] https://evalmg.github.io/#submission

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CMC2026: Extended deadline
by Steven Coats 13 Apr '26

13 Apr '26

Dear colleagues, We announce an extension of the submission deadline for CMC2026: Extended deadline: 22 April 13th International Conference on CMC and Social Media Corpora for the Humanities (CMC-Corpora 2026) 📍 University of Oulu, Finland 📅 27–28 August 2026 🌐 https://cmc2026.org<https://cmc2026.org/> We invite submissions for CMC-Corpora 2026, the 13th edition of the conference series focusing on corpora and computational approaches to computer-mediated communication and social media. The conference welcomes research on the development, analysis, and computational processing of CMC and social media corpora, including multimodal and large-scale datasets from contemporary platforms such as messaging apps, social networks, and video-sharing environments. Submission types • Short papers (3–5 pages) – oral presentations • Poster abstracts (max. 300 words) – work-in-progress and demos Topics include (but are not limited to) • Development and annotation of CMC and social media corpora • Sociolinguistic and discourse analysis of online communication • Multimodal communication and social media data • Multilingualism and code-switching in digital contexts • NLP and AI methods for CMC analysis • Large language models and computational approaches to social media data Important dates Submission deadline: 22 April 2026 Notification: 1 June 2026 Conference: 27–28 August 2026 Submission portal https://www.conftool.net/cmc2026 Full call for papers, templates, and guidelines https://cmc2026.org<https://cmc2026.org/> We look forward to your submissions and to welcoming you to Oulu. The organizing committee Steven Coats Maarit Siromaa Jarkko Toikkanen Hanne Juntunen University Lecturer, Docent English, Faculty of Humanities University of Oulu P.O. Box 8000, FI-90014 University of Oulu Finland https://cc.oulu.fi/~scoats

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NLPAICS'2026 - extended submissions deadline 27 April 2026
by Amal Haddad 12 Apr '26

12 Apr '26

Second International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence for Cyber Security (NLPAICS'2026) University of Alicante, Alicante, Spain 11 and 12 June 2026 https://nlpaics2026.gplsi.es/ *** Due to multiple requests, the submission deadline is extended to 27 April 2026 *** Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Deep Learning and Large Language Models (LLMs) have resulted in improved performance of applications. In particular, there has been a growing interest in employing AI methods in different Cyber Security applications. In today's digital world, Cyber Security has emerged as a heightened priority for both individual users and organisations. As the volume of online information grows exponentially, traditional security approaches often struggle to identify and prevent evolving security threats. The inadequacy of conventional security frameworks highlights the need for innovative solutions that can effectively navigate the complex digital landscape to ensure robust security. NLP and AI in Cyber Security have vast potential to significantly enhance threat detection and mitigation by fostering the development of advanced security systems for autonomous identification, assessment, and response to security threats in real time. Recognising this challenge and the capabilities of NLP and AI approaches to fortify Cyber Security systems, the Second International Conference on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Cyber Security (NLPAICS'2026) continues the tradition from NLPAICS'2024 to be a gathering place for researchers in NLP and AI methods for Cyber Security. We invite contributions that present the latest NLP and AI solutions for mitigating risks in processing digital information. Conference topics The conference invites submissions on a broad range of topics related to the employment of NLP and AI (and in general, language studies and models) for Cyber Security, including but not limited to: Societal and Human Security and Safety ● Content Legitimacy and Quality ● Detection and mitigation of hate speech and offensive language ● Fake news, deepfakes, misinformation and disinformation ● Detection of machine-generated language in multimodal context (text, speech and gesture) ● Trust and credibility of online information ● User Security and Safety ● Cyberbullying and identification of internet offenders ● Monitoring extremist fora ● Suicide prevention ● Clickbait and scam detection ● Fake profile detection in online social networks ● Technical Measures and Solutions ● Social engineering identification, phishing detection ● NLP for risk assessment ● Controlled languages for safe messages ● Prevention of malicious use of ai models ● Forensic linguistics ● Human Factors in Cyber Security Speech Technology and Multimodal Investigations for Cyber Security ● Voice-based security: Analysis of voice recordings or transcripts for security threats ● Detection of machine-generated language in multimodal context (text, speech and gesture) ● NLP and biometrics in multimodal context Data and Software Security ● Cryptography ● Digital forensics ● Malware detection, obfuscation ● Models for documentation ● NLP for data privacy and leakage prevention (DLP) ● Addressing dataset "poisoning" attacks Human-Centric Security and Support ● Natural language understanding for chatbots: NLP-powered chatbots for user support and security incident reporting ● User behaviour analysis: analysing user-generated text data (e.g., chat logs and emails) to detect insider threats or unusual behaviour ● Human supervision of technology for Cyber Security Anomaly Detection and Threat Intelligence ● Text-Based Anomaly Detection ● Identification of unusual or suspicious patterns in logs, incident reports or other textual data ● Detecting deviations from normal behaviour in system logs or network traffic ● Threat Intelligence Analysis ● Processing and analysing threat intelligence reports, news, articles and blogs on latest Cyber Security threats ● Extracting key information and indicators of compromise (IoCs) from unstructured text Systems and Infrastructure Security ● Systems Security ● Anti-reverse engineering for protecting privacy and anonymity ● Identification and mitigation of side-channel attacks ● Authentication and access control ● Enterprise-level mitigation ● NLP for software vulnerability detection ● Malware Detection through Code Analysis ● Analysing code and scripts for malware ● Detection using NLP to identify patterns indicative of malicious code Financial Cyber Security ● Financial fraud detection ● Financial risk detection ● Algorithmic trading security ● Secure online banking ● Risk management in finance ● Financial text analytics Ethics, Bias, and Legislation in Cyber Security ● Ethical and Legal Issues ● Digital privacy and identity management ● The ethics of NLP and speech technology ● Explainability of NLP and speech technology tools ● Legislation against malicious use of AI ● Regulatory issues ● Bias and Security ● Bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) ● Bias in security related datasets and annotations Datasets and resources for Cyber Security Applications Specialised Security Applications and Open Topics ● Intelligence applications ● Emerging and innovative applications in Cyber Security Special Theme Track - Future of Cyber Security in the Era of LLMs and Generative AI NLPAICS 2026 will feature a special theme track with the goal of stimulating discussion around Large Language Models (LLMs), Generative AI and ensuring their safety. The latest generation of LLMs, such as CHATGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, LLAMA and open-source alternatives, has showcased remarkable advancements in text and image understanding and generation. However, as we navigate through uncharted territory, it becomes imperative to address the challenges associated with employing these models in everyday tasks, focusing on aspects such as fairness, ethics, and responsibility. The theme track invites studies on how to ensure the safety of LLMs in various tasks and applications and what this means for the future of the field. The possible topics of discussion include (but are not limited to) the following: ● Detection of LLM-generated language in multimodal context (text, speech and gesture) ● LLMs for forensic linguistics ● Bias in LLMs ● Safety benchmarks for LLMs ● Legislation against malicious use of LLMs ● Tools to evaluate safety in LLMs ● Methods to enhance the robustness of language models Keynote Speaker We are delighted to announce that Preslav Nakov from Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (Abu Dhabi) (https://mbzuai.ac.ae/study/faculty/preslav-nakov/) will be keynote speaker at NLPAICS 2026. Submissions and Publication NLPAICS welcomes high-quality submissions in English, which can take two forms: ● Regular long papers: These can be up to eight (8) pages long, presenting substantial, original, completed, and unpublished work. ● Short (poster) papers: These c in an be up to four (4) pages long and are suitable for describing small, focused contributions, ongoing research, negative results, system demonstrations, etc. Short papers will be presented as part of a poster session. The conference will not consider and evaluate abstracts only. Accepted papers, including both long and short papers, will be published as e-proceedings with ISBN will available online on the conference website at the time of the conference and are expected to be uploaded into the ACL Anthology. To prepare your submission, please make sure to use the NLPAICS 2026 style files available here: LaTeX in Overleaf: https://www.overleaf.com/read/sgwmrzbmjfhc#aeea77 Word: https://nlpaics2026.gplsi.es/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/NLPAICS2026_Proceed… Papers should be submitted through Softconf/START using the following link: https://softconf.com/p/nlpaics2026/user/ The conference will feature a student workshop. Submissions to the student workshop can be in the form of both regular and short papers but will be evaluated separately and will be presented as a separate session at the conference. Awards will be offered to the authors of best papers. Important dates • Submission deadline (extended due to multiple requests): 27April 2026 • Reviewing process: 28April 2026 – 17 May 2026 • Notification of acceptance: 18 May 2026 • Camera-ready due: 28 May 2026 • Conference camera-ready proceedings ready 5 June 2026 • Conference: 11-12 June 2026 Organisation Conference Chairs Ruslan Mitkov (University of Alicante) Rafael Muñoz (University of Alicante) Programme Committee Chairs Elena Lloret (University of Alicante) Tharindu Ranasinghe (Lancaster University) Publication Chair Ernesto Estevanell (University of Alicante) Sponsorship Chair Andres Montoyo (University of Alicante) Student Workshop Chair Salima Lamsiyah (University of Luxembourg) Best Paper Award Chair Saad Ezzini (King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals) Publicity Chair Beatriz Botella (University of Alicante) Social Programme Chair Alba Bonet (University of Alicante) Programme Committee • Vivek Kumar, University of Bundeswehr München, Germany. • Hansi Hettiarachchi, Lancaster University, UK. • Rui Sousa Silva, University of Porto, Portugal. • Cengiz Acartürk, Jagiellonian University, Poland • Lena Podoletz, Lancaster University, UK • Nasredine Semmar, CEA/University of Paris-Saclay, France • Sevil Sen, Hacettepe University, Turkey • Wajdi Zaghouani, Northwest University, Qatar • Marcos Zampieri, George Mason University, USA • Jacques Klein, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg • Ignatius Ezeani, Lancaster University, UK • Cengiz Acarturk, Jagiellonian University, Poland • Matthew Bradbury, Lancaster University, UK • Paul Rayson, Lancaster University, UK • Daniel Prince, Lancaster University, UK • Basil Germond, Lancaster University, UK • Hongmei He, University of Salford, UK • Rafael Valencia García, University of Murcia, Spain, • Angela Almela Sanchez-Lafuente, University of Murcia, Spain • Eugenio Martínez Cámara, University of Jaén, Spain • Alfonso Ureña López, University of Jaén, Spain • Dan Fretwell, Lancaster University, UK • Sedat Akleylek, University of Tartu, Estonia • Ozkan Kilic, Cisco Systems Inc., USA • Ilker Ozcelik, Eskisehir Osmangazi University, Turkey • Ozgur Ural, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, USA Venue The Second International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence for Cyber Security (NLPAICS'2026) will take place at the University of Alicante and is organised by the University of Alicante GPLSI research group. Related events The conference school will precede the summer school The Paradigm Shift: From Rules to Models in Natural Language 15, 16 and 17 June 2026 (https://summer-school.gplsi.es). Further information and contact details The conference website is https://nlpaics2026.gplsi.es/ and will be updated on a regular basis. For further information, please email nlpaics2026(a)dlsi.ua.es -- Amal Haddad Haddad (She/her) Facultad de Traducción e Interpretación Universidad de Granada |https://www.ugr.es/personal/amal-haddad-haddad Lexicon Research Group |http://lexicon.ugr.es/haddad Co-Convenor, BAAL SIG 'Humans, Machines, Language'|https://r.jyu.fi/humala Event Coordinator, BAAL SIG 'Language, Learning and Teaching' =============== Cláusula de Confidencialidad: "Este mensaje se dirige exclusivamente a su destinatario y puede contener información privilegiada o confidencial. Si no es Ud. el destinatario indicado, queda notificado de que la utilización, divulgación o copia sin autorización está prohibida en virtud de la legislación vigente. Si ha recibido este mensaje por error, se ruega lo comunique inmediatamente por esta misma vía y proceda a su destrucción. This message is intended exclusively for its addressee and may contain information that is CONFIDENTIAL and protected by professional privilege. If you are not the intended recipient you are hereby notified that any dissemination, copy or disclosure of this communication is strictly prohibited by law. If this message has been received in error, please immediately notify us via e-mail and delete it" ===============

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LCR 2026 Prague (registration is open)
by tomas.graf＠ff.cuni.cz 12 Apr '26

12 Apr '26

Learner Corpus Research Conference (LCR 2026) – Prague, September 16–19 2026 Registration now open for LCR 2026 We are pleased to announce that registration for the Learner Corpus Research (LCR) 2026 conference is now open. You can find all details and register here: https://lcr2026.ff.cuni.cz/registration/ Please feel free to share this information with colleagues who might be interested. We look forward to seeing you there! Tomáš Gráf

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Call for Track proposals - Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation 2026 - fire.irsi.org.in
by Thomas Mandl 10 Apr '26

10 Apr '26

Dear Colleagues, Call for Evaluation and Benchmarking Track 2026 is out now. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We invite proposals for the Evaluation and Benchmarking Track at FIRE 2026. FIRE 2026 is the 18th edition of the annual meeting of Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (fire.irsi.org.in <https://fire.irsi.org.in>). Since its inception in 2008, FIRE had a strong focus on shared tasks similar to those offered at Evaluation forums like TREC, CLEF, and NTCIR. The shared tasks should focus on solving specific problems in the area of information access and, more importantly, on generating high quality evaluation datasets for the research community. In line with this objective, this year the FIRE tracks emphasize selecting tasks that either introduce a new paradigm in the field or generate a substantial amount of valuable benchmark data that can support future research and experimentation. It is not required for the tasks to focus on a specific language, and they can broadly cover any problem in the fields related (but not limited) to IR, NLP, multi-modal information access, and ML. However, the organizers especially encourage proposals for tracks related to South Asian, African, and Middle Eastern languages. In the past, FIRE has hosted tracks from Arabic, Persian, German, Russian, and Urdu languages besides several Indian languages. We aim to continue these efforts and include more language groups from these regions. For knowing more about tracks in past FIRE meetings, you can visit fire.irsi.org.in <https://fire.irsi.org.in> Informal inquiries can also be sent to the track chairs. Please include the following details in your proposal: 1. Track name 2. Track description 3. Use case/s 4. Target Audience and number of expected submissions 5. Data(*) (Fair Details) 6. Evaluation plan 7. Timeline: Please try to align with the FIRE conference dates as given below 8. Organizer/s Details 9. Prior experience in organizing shared task/workshop at relevant venues *Tentative Timeline* *5th April, 2026* Track proposals due *24th April, 2026* Track acceptance notification *15th May, 2026* Open track websites and release of training data *15th June, 2026* Test data release *30th June, 2026* Run submission deadline *15th July, 2026* Track results declaration *30th August, 2026* Working notes due *30th September, 2026* Camera-ready copies of working notes and overview paper due *December, 2026 - Dates TBD* FIRE 2026 Conference Please send these details in a pdf format to clia(a)isical.ac.in with a copy to majumdar.srijoni(a)gmail.com <mailto:majumbdar.srijoni@gmail.com>, kripa.ghosh(a)gmail.com and mandl(a)uni-hildesheim.de (*) We require that after FIRE, the data should be made publicly available through Information Retrieval Society of India. In case, data can not be distributed publicly (e.g., Twitter data), a unique identifier that can be used to recreate the original corpus can be provided (e.g., tweet ids in case of Twitter data). This disbursal will be governed by a copyright form, which the users have to sign before getting the data. A sample form is available at ( fire.irsi.org.in/fire/static/data <https://fire.irsi.org.in/fire/static/data> ). In case, it is not preferable/possible for the track organizers to share the data, please mention this in the proposal with specific concerns. Exceptions can be made for tracks where data from industry is used or in case of other serious legal or ethical concerns. The aim of organizing these tracks at FIRE is to have debates and discussions on focused topics and give feedback to participants. As a result, at least one of the track organizers from each track is expected to attend FIRE and present the overview of track in person. In case of non-attendance of any of the organizers, the team will not be allowed to offer a track next year. We will try to provide student volunteers for support in the proposed tracks. They will basically be undergraduate students interested in IR and related fields and can help with corpus creation, evaluation, correspondence with participants, etc. If you require any such support, kindly mention that in the track proposals along with the number of students required. Hoping to have an enthusiastic response from your end. *Overall Track Coordinators, FIRE 2026* Thomas Mandl (Universitat Hildesheim, Germany) Kripabandhu Ghosh (IISER Kolkata, India) Srijoni Majumdar (University of Leeds, UK)

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PROFE 2026 @ IberLEF 2026 - Call for Participation and release of development data
by ALVARO RODRIGO YUSTE 10 Apr '26

10 Apr '26

<Apologies for cross-postings> ------------------------------------------------ Call for Participation PROFE 2026: Language Proficiency Evaluation IberLEF 2026 Shared Task https://sites.google.com/view/profe2026 PROFE 2026 reuses the exams for Spanish proficiency evaluation developed by Instituto Cervantes along many years to evaluate human students. Therefore, automatic systems will be evaluated under the same conditions as humans were. Systems will receive a set of exercises with their corresponding instructions without specific training material. In this way we expect Transfer Learning approaches or the use of Generative Large Language Models. The previous edition proposed exams based only on text. In this new edition, we will include exams with images, which sometimes require interpretation to answer the exercise correctly. We propose evaluating systems on their ability to perform multimodal reasoning, moving beyond text-only comprehension. We will provide a limited set of new image-based exercises while retaining the dataset from the previous edition. This setup encourages participants to develop strategies for handling the scarcity of specific training data. Subtasks PROFE 2026 has three subtasks, one per exercise type. Teams can participate in any combination of them. Each subtask contains several exercises of the same type. The subtasks are: 1. Multiple choice subtask: each exercise includes a text and a set of multiple-choice questions about the text where only one answer is correct. Given a multiple-choice question, systems must select the correct answer among the candidates. 2. Matching subtask: each exercise contains two sets of texts. Systems must find the text in the second set that best matches the first set. There is only one possible matching per text, but the first set can contain extra unnecessary texts. 3. Filling the gap subtask: each exercise contains a text with several gaps corresponding to textual fragments that have been removed and presented disorderly as options. Systems must determine the correct position for each fragment. There is only one correct text per gap, but there could be more candidates than gaps. The different exercises open research on how to approach them, adapting different prompts when using generative models. As the main novelty in this edition, some exercises will contain images. While some of these images will be the candidate answers (rather than text excerpts), others might provide visual information needed to answer the exercise correctly. Conversely, some images will not provide essential information. Consequently, systems participating in this edition must adopt a multimodal approach, capable of discerning when to integrate visual cues and when to disregard them. This necessity to filter visual relevance introduces significant new challenges compared to the previous edition. Dataset We will use the IC-UNED-RC-ES dataset created from real examinations at Instituto Cervantes. These exams were created by human experts to assess language proficiency in Spanish. We have already collected the exams and converted them to a digital format, which is ready to be used in the task. The dataset contains exams at different levels (from A1 to C2). The description of the full dataset was published in the following paper: * Anselmo Peñas, Álvaro Rodrigo, Javier Fruns-Jiménez, Inés Soria-Pastor, Sergio Moreno-Álvarez, Alberto Pérez García-Plaza, and Julio Reyes-Montesinos. A Spanish Language Proficiency Dataset for AI Evaluation<https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/17/2/159>. Information 17, no. 2: 159. DOI: 10.3390/info17020159<https://doi.org/10.3390/info17020159>. 2026. The complete dataset contains 282 exams with 855 exercises. The total number of evaluation points are 6146 (among 16570 options) distributed by exercise type as: multiple-choice: 3544 responses matching: 2309 responses fill-the-gap: 293 responses In PROFE 2026, we plan to use around 50% of the exams; the other 50% was already used for the PROFE 2025 edition. We intend not to distribute the gold standard to prevent overfitting in post-campaign experiments and data contamination in LLMs. Evaluation measures and baseline We will use traditional accuracy (proportion of correct answers) as the main evaluation measure. Systems will receive evaluation scores from two different perspectives: * At the question level, where correct answers are counted individually without grouping them. * At the exam level, where scores for each exam are considered. Each exam contains several exercises of different types. An exam is considered to be passed if an accuracy score (accounted as the proportion of correct answers) above 0.5 is reached. Then, the proportion of passed exams is given as a global score. This perspective will only apply to those teams participating in the three subtasks. More in detail, the exact evaluation per subtask is as follows: * Multiple choice subtask: we will measure accuracy as the proportion of questions correctly answered * Matching subtask: we will measure accuracy as the proportion of correct texts matched. * Fill in the gap subtask: We will measure accuracy as the proportion of correctly filled gaps. We will use accuracy as the evaluation measure because there is only one correct option among candidates and because it is the measure applied to humans doing the same exams. Thus, we can compare the performance of automatic systems and humans under the same conditions A preliminary baseline using ChatGPT obtains the following results for each exercise type (provided that different prompting can produce slightly different results): * Multiple choice accuracy: 0.64 * Filling the gap accuracy: 0.43 * Matching accuracy: 0.51 Schedule April April 10, 2026 Development data released April 27, 2026 Test set release May May 11, 2026 Deadline for submitting runs May 18, 2026 Release of evaluation results June June 3, 2026 Paper submission deadline Organizers Alvaro Rodrigo<https://www.uned.es/universidad/docentes/informatica/alvaro-rodrigo-yuste.h…>, UNED NLP & IR Group (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia) Anselmo Peñas<https://www.uned.es/universidad/docentes/informatica/anselmo-penas-padilla.…>, UNED NLP & IR Group (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia) Alberto Pérez<https://www.uned.es/universidad/docentes/informatica/alberto-perez-garcia-p…>, UNED NLP & IR Group (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia) Sergio Moreno<https://www.uned.es/universidad/docentes/en/informatica/sergio-moreno-alvar…>, UNED NLP & IR Group (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia) Javier Fruns, Instituto Cervantes Inés Soria, Instituto Cervantes Rodrigo Agerri<https://ragerri.github.io/>, HiTz (Universidad del País Vasco, UPV/EHU) AVISO LEGAL. Este mensaje puede contener información reservada y confidencial. Si usted no es el destinatario no está autorizado a copiar, reproducir o distribuir este mensaje ni su contenido. Si ha recibido este mensaje por error, le rogamos que lo notifique al remitente. Le informamos de que sus datos personales, que puedan constar en este mensaje, serán tratados en calidad de responsable de tratamiento por la UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE EDUCACIÓN A DISTANCIA (UNED) c/ Bravo Murillo, 38, 28015-MADRID-, con la finalidad de mantener el contacto con usted. La base jurídica que legitima este tratamiento, será su consentimiento, el interés legítimo o la necesidad para gestionar una relación contractual o similar. En cualquier momento podrá ejercer sus derechos de acceso, rectificación, supresión, oposición, limitación al tratamiento o portabilidad de los datos, ante la UNED, Oficina de Protección de datos<https://www.uned.es/dpj>, o a través de la Sede electrónica<https://uned.sede.gob.es/> de la Universidad. Para más información visite nuestra Política de Privacidad<https://descargas.uned.es/publico/pdf/Politica_privacidad_UNED.pdf>.

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Call for Participation in iKAT 2026 as Part of SCAI@SIGIR 2026
by Marcel Ewald Gohsen 10 Apr '26

10 Apr '26

We invite participation to the 4th shared task on interactive (personalized) knowledge assistance (iKAT 2026), which will be hosted as part of the 10th Workshop on Search-Oriented Conversational AI (SCAI)<https://scai.info/scai-2026/> , colocated with SIGIR 2026 in Melbourne, Australia. * Name: Interactive Knowledge Assistance Track (iKAT) * Organizers: Marcel Gohsen<https://www.uni-weimar.de/en/media/chairs/computer-science-department/webis…>, Mohammad Aliannejadi<https://aliannejadi.com/>, Simon Lupart<https://simonlupart.github.io/>, Zahra Abbasiantaeb<https://zahraabbasiantaeb.github.io/>, Nailia Mirzakhmedova<https://www.uni-weimar.de/en/media/chairs/computer-science-department/webis…>, Johannes Kiesel<https://kiesels.de/johannes>, Jeff Dalton<https://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~jeff/> * Preliminary timeline (exact dates might still be subject of change): * Registration deadline: May 27, 2026 * System submission opens: May 27, 2026 * System submission deadline: June 10, 2026 * Report submission deadline: July 17, 2026 * SCAI Workshop: July 24, 2026 * Website: https://www.trecikat.com/ * Registration: https://form.jotform.com/260753949743066 Motivation While the conversational interaction paradigm becomes more and more prevalent for search, the challenge of adapting system responses to individual users (i.e., personalization) still remains a challenge for conversational retrieval systems. Since answer relevance is highly subjective, personalization is necessary to build effective user-centric retrieval systems. From the beginning, personalization of conversational search is the central goal of the Interactive Knowledge Assistance Track (iKAT). The iKAT shared task can look back on four years under former name, Conversational Assistance Track (CAsT), and three years under the current name, iKAT, hosted at TREC. In 2026, iKAT will be organized in collaboration with the SCAI workshop that will take place at SIGIR 2026 in Melbourne, Australia. Task Overview Participants of iKAT will receive the following resources to provide their run submissions. 1. Test dataset that contains the following information: a) Topics b) Example conversations c) Personal Text Knowledge Bases (PTKB) of the users 2. Passage collection (iKAT subset of ClueWeb22-B) 3. Access to the user simulation API (Sim.API<https://github.com/marcel-gohsen/user-simulation-api>) and documentation. Participants submit conversational search systems that, for each real-time simulated user turn, retrieves and ranks relevant passages from the passage collection. Then, the system use the ranked passages to generate a personalized response based on the user’s PTKB, utterance, and context. This response will be passed back to the simulated user, which again produces an utterance. This process will be repeated until the user terminates the conversation. The systems have to provide the generated text response, the ranked list of passages (citations), and the PTKB statements that were deemed relevant for each produced turn. Submission Participants submit their runs via an API and submit a report to describe their approaches. Every participating team will be invited to present their approaches during the SCAI workshop and the reports will be released as part of our proceedings. Further Details For more information and updates on the task please keep an eye on our guidelines and on our iKAT website<https://www.trecikat.com/>.

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[Jobs@ELDA] Offre de missions de traduction en anglais, français, allemand et russe (H/F) / English, French, German and Russian Translators (F/M)
by info＠elda.org 10 Apr '26

10 Apr '26

[Apologies for multiple postings] English, French, German and Russian translators (F/M) (English version below) Context: In order to create high-quality linguistic resources, ELDA (Evaluations and Language resources Distribution Agency) is hiring translators to work in the following language pairs: • French to English • German to French • English to German • Russian to English Mission details: • Document type: political newspaper articles (defense-oriented); • Volume: 15.000 words ; • Modality: full translation (target text to be created from scratch); • Technical terminology: journalistic discourse - may contain political, judicial or military jargon; • Start date: as soon as possible; • End date: May 22nd, 2026; • Location: ELDA main office (Paris, 13th district). Remote work allowed; • Contract type: freelance (possible fixed-term contract upon request); • Send estimate to: <menel(a)elda.org> Additional job specificities: • Knowledge of annotation softwares (Label Studio) is a great-to-have. • You are able to quickly understand and apply complex annotation guidelines. How to apply : • Send your resume to <menel(a)elda.org>. ------------------------------------------------------- Offre de missions de traduction - anglais, français, allemand et russe (H/F) Contexte : Dans le cadre de ses activités de production de ressources linguistiques, ELDA (Evaluations and Language resources Distribution Agency) recherche des traducteurs (F/H) amenés à travailler dans les paires de langues suivantes : • Français vers anglais • Allemand vers français • Anglais vers allemand • Russe vers anglais Détails de la mission : • Documents : articles politiques contemporains (axés défense) ; • Volume : 15 000 mots ; • Modalité : traduction complète (production du texte cible) ; • Langage technique : discours journalistique, avec jargons politique, juridique et/ou militaire occasionnels ; • Date d’embauche prévue : Dès que possible ; • Date de fin de mission : 22 mai 2026 ; • Lieu : Locaux d’ELDA (Paris 13ème arrondissement), télétravail possible ; • Type de contrat : freelance (CDD envisageable sur demande) ; • Envoi de devis : <menel(a)elda.org> Autres spécificités du poste : • La connaissance du logiciel d’annotation Label Studio est très appréciée. • Capacité à intégrer et appliquer rapidement des règles d’annotation complexes. Candidature : • Envoyer un CV à <menel(a)elda.org>

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Corpora April 2026