Call for Participation: LM Playschool (LMP 2026)
Improving Language Models through Learning from Dialogue Interaction
Co-located with EMNLP 2026 — 28 October 2026, Budapest
Website: https://lm-playschool.github.io/
Starter Kit: https://github.com/lm-playpen/playpen
The submission deadlines for the LM Playschool Workshop are fast approaching! Please note that some dates have been updated since our previous announcements — see below.
📝 SUBMISSION TRACKS
We welcome either long or short submissions for the following tracks:
1. Challenge track: Technical reports for the LM-Playschool challenge (archival).
2. Paper-only track: Work-in-progress (archival or non-archival) or recently published papers (non-archival).
🏆 CHALLENGE TRACK (SHARED TASK)
The shared task focuses on post-training LLMs to master communicative skills in unseen dialogue games while retaining original language capabilities. Participants are free to choose any base model; evaluation is based on improvement relative to that base model on an unseen test set.
Not signed up yet? Register here: https://forms.gle/fhpXPH5kZk4psPXp9
🛠️ STARTER KIT
Our sandbox environment Playpen is available on GitHub and ready to use. Key features:
* Comprehensive Evaluation: A single command to get your "clemscore" (interactive competence) and "statscore" (classic benchmarks).
* Training Recipes: Example scripts for SFT and GRPO to help models learn from game-state success.
* Resource Friendly: We encourage using the Qwen3.5 family (0.8B to 27B) to ensure participation is possible with modest compute.
🎯 PAPER-ONLY TRACK: TOPICS OF INTEREST
We welcome original research and work-in-progress on:
* Architectures and training regimes for interactive agents.
* Intrinsic rewards and learning signals (RL from game-state success).
* Benchmarking via dialogue games.
* Data efficiency and social interaction.
* Social cognition and Theory of Mind in interactive systems.
* Human-agent collaboration and coordination.
* Embodied interactive agents.
* Communicative and perceptual grounding.
📅 IMPORTANT DATES (updated)
* ARR paper submission deadline: May 25, 2026
* Challenge submission deadline: July 5, 2026 (3 weeks away!)
* Direct paper submission deadline: July 12, 2026 (1 month away!)
* Pre-reviewed ARR commitment deadline: August 2, 2026
* Notification of acceptance: August 8, 2026
* Camera ready due: August 23, 2026
* Challenge winners announced: Early October 2026
* Workshop at EMNLP 2026: October 28, 2026 — Budapest
For more information, visit our website: https://lm-playschool.github.io/
We look forward to your submissions!
The LMP 2026 Organizing Committee:
Raffaella Bernardi, Raquel Fernández, Mario Giulianelli, Sherzod Hakimov, Alexander Koller, Dieu-Thu Le, Oliver Lemon, Davide Mazzaccara, Sabrina McCallum, David Schlangen, Alessandro Suglia
Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to announce FinNLP @ EMNLP 2026, the 11th Workshop on Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing, co-located with EMNLP 2026 in Budapest, Hungary, October 24–29, 2026.
As the annual workshop of ACL SIG-FinTech, FinNLP brings together researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Large Language Models, finance, economics, and law.
FinNLP now invites both paper submissions and FinEval shared task proposals.
For the Call for Papers, we welcome submissions on financial NLP, financial LLMs, financial question answering, financial search, multimodal and tabular financial data, graph learning, ESG analysis, compliance monitoring, financial legal AI, auditing and regulatory reporting, hallucination evaluation and mitigation, privacy, interpretability, Responsible AI, benchmarks, datasets, and evaluation methods.
For the Call for Challenges / FinEval, we invite proposals for shared tasks that address important open problems in financial AI. Strong proposals should include a clear task definition, high-quality datasets or a concrete data construction plan, evaluation metrics, baselines, starter kits, evaluation scripts, and leaderboards.
Call for Papers
Submission system opens: July 1, 2026
Direct paper submission deadline: August 11, 2026 AoE
Pre-reviewed ARR commitment deadline: August 27, 2026 AoE
Author notification: September 1, 2026
Camera-ready deadline: September 10, 2026
Workshop day: October 28, 2026
Location: Budapest, Hungary
Call for Challenges / FinEval
Call for task proposals: June 6, 2026
Proposal submission deadline: June 20, 2026 AoE
Final task list announced: July 1, 2026
Training data and starter kits release: July 1, 2026
Test phase / final predictions: August 4, 2026 AoE
System paper submission: August 11, 2026 AoE
Workshop and awards: October 28, 2026
All deadlines are 11:59 PM Anywhere on Earth.
Accepted papers will be published in the ACL Anthology.
👥 Organizing Committee (General Chairs):
Chung-Chi Chen · Yongjae Lee · Jimin Huang · Sophia Ananiadou · Hsin-Hsi Chen · Hiroya Takamura
For more information, please visit: https://sigfintech.github.io/finnlp2026/
For questions, please contact: aclsig...(a)gmail.com
We look forward to receiving your submissions and task proposals.
Best regards,
FinNLP Organizing Committee
*** First Call for Doctoral Consortium Papers ***
37th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering
(ISSRE 2026)
October 20-23, 2026, 5* St. Raphael Resort and Marina
Limassol, Cyprus
https://cyprusconferences.org/issre2026/
The ISSRE 2026 Doctoral Symposium is intended to bring together PhD students working
on innovative research for improving, monitoring, and assessing the reliability,
dependability, and security of software systems, and give them the opportunity to present
and discuss their research in a constructive, friendly, and international atmosphere. The
goals of the Doctoral Symposium are:
• Providing a setting for constructive feedback on participants' current research and
guidance on future research directions;
• Developing a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research;
• Providing an opportunity for PhD students to interact with established researchers and
practitioners in the software reliability engineering community.
The authors of the selected papers will present their work and receive feedback both from
a panel of experts from academia and industry and from other Doctoral Symposium
students. The students will also have the opportunity to seek advice on various aspects of
completing a PhD, such as how to perform research, how to design and execute empirical
research, etc.
The papers accepted and presented at the Doctoral Symposium will be published in the
supplementary conference proceedings of ISSRE 2026 and participants in the Doctoral
Symposium will be given the opportunity to present a poster about their dissertation
research at the conference.
Who should participate
Students at all stages (at the beginning, at the middle, or near the end of their PhD) who
are working on a thesis topic relevant to ISSRE are encouraged to participate in the
Doctoral Symposium.
Submissions
Each submission consists of two elements:
• Research proposal: a 4-page paper describing your dissertation research to be authored
by the student only. Your advisor should be included in the acknowledgments.
• Letter of recommendation: ask your advisor to submit a letter of recommendation in
support of your application. This letter should include your name and a candid assessment
of the current status of your dissertation research. The letter should be emailed to both
Doctoral Symposium Co-Chairs (issre2026-ds AT stefan-winter.net) with the subject
"ISSRE 2026 Doctoral Symposium Recommendation".
Your research proposal should contain at least the following items: 1) a title for your work;
2) an abstract (maximum 200 words); 3) a description of the technical problem to be
solved and the research questions to be answered; 4) the proposed approach; 5) a brief
description of the work accomplished to date; 6) the tentative date of your thesis defense.
All submissions must be original work, and must not have been previously published, nor
be under consideration for publication elsewhere.
Formatting guidelines
Papers must be written in English, and be formatted according to the IEEE Computer
Society Format Guidelines (https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates).
Submissions must comply with IEEE’s author guidelines for AI-generated texts
(https://open.ieee.org/author-guidelines-for-artificial-intelligence-ai-gene…).
Process
All papers must be submitted electronically at the following link:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=issre2026 .
Please make sure to select the track on Doctoral Symposium at the beginning of the
submission process.
Submissions will be reviewed by the Doctoral Symposium co-chairs. Authors of
submissions selected for acceptance will present their work during the Doctoral
Symposium and have the camera-ready version of their paper published in the ISSRE 2026
Supplementary Proceedings and the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. In addition, authors of
accepted submissions will be given the opportunity to present a poster about their
dissertation research at the conference.
Important Dates (AoE)
• Submission deadline: July 22, 2026
• Notification of acceptance: July 29, 2026
• Camera-ready copy submission: July 29, 2026
• Author registration deadline: August 19, 2026
Organisation
General Chairs
• Leonardo Mariani, University of Milano - Bicocca, Italy
• George A. Papadopoulos, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
Program Coordinator
• Roberto Natella, GSSI, Italy
Research Program Committee Chairs
• Domenico Cotroneo, UNC Charlotte, USA
• Jie M. Zhang, King's College London, UK
Industry Program Chairs
• Jinyang Liu, Bytedance, USA
• Sigrid Eldh, Ericsson AB, Sweden
Workshop Chairs
• Georgia Kapitsaki, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
• August Shi, The University of Texas at Austin, USA
Doctoral Symposium Chairs
• Stefan Winter, LMU Munich, Germany
• Lili Wei, McGill University, Canada
Fast Abstract Chairs
• Luigi Lavazza, University of Insubria, Italy
• Yintong Huo, SMU, Singapore
JIC2 Chair
• Helene Waeselynck, LAAS-CNRS, France
Publicity Chairs
• Allison K. Sulivan, The University of Texas at Arlington, USA
• Jose D'Abruzzo Pereira, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Publication Chairs
• Sherlock Licorish, Otago Business School, New Zealand
• Maria Teresa Rossi, GSSI, Italy
Artifact Evaluation Chairs
• Naghmeh Ivaki, University of Coimbra, Portugal
• Fumio Machida, University of Tsukuba, Japan
Diversity and Inclusion Chair
• Eleni Constantinou, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
Financial Chair
• Costas Pattichis, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
Web Chairs
• Michalis Ioannides, Easy Conferences LTD
• Elena Masserini, University of Milano - Bicocca, Italy
Registration Chair
• Easy Conferences LTD
Second Call For Papers: CLEAR-TEXT Workshop at the conference CLIB 2026 (7 September 2026, Sofia, Bulgaria)
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/clear-text/home
Free participation
IMPORTANT DATES: Due to requests, we are giving an EXTENSION OF THE SUBMISSION DEADLINE
30 June 2026 (23:59 anywhere on Earth) all articles submission deadline
28 July 2026 (23:59 anywhere on Earth) review decisions sent to authors
18 August 2026 (23:59 anywhere on Earth) camera-ready submissions due
7 September, 2026 - Workshop date
This is an interdisciplinary workshop which addresses all topics ranging from Legibility to Text Simplification, including issues, resources, and manual and automatic methods related to measuring and improving text comprehensibility.
The event brings together researchers, IT professionals, publishers, public institutions (e.g., Ministries of Education, schools), and practitioners (authors, teachers, translators) to discuss current challenges and innovative solutions.
Specifically, we invite submissions from scientific researchers, representatives of IT companies, publishers, public institutions (such as the Ministries of Education and public schools), and practitioners (such as authors of children's books, school materials, and teachers). The scientific articles can present completed or ongoing work with methods coming from all related fields, such as Linguistics, Translation and Translation Technologies, Psycholinguistics, Education, Computational Social Science, and Natural Language Processing. Accepted papers will be published in the ACL Anthology.
The workshop will feature one renowned invited speaker and two panels of representatives from different fields, who will present cutting-edge insights and discuss the existing international and Bulgarian issues and possible solutions to them.
More information: https://sites.google.com/view/clear-text/home
Irina Temnikova, PhD
Big Data for Smart Society Institute (GATE)
Hi team, I have tried sending emails (to corpora-leave(a)list.elra.info) multiple
times to remove my subscription to the corpora emails, but I still keep
receiving emails. Can you help me remove my email from the list?
Dear colleagues,
With apologies for cross-posting.
We are very pleased to announce Vocab@Hiroshima 2027, an international
conference on vocabulary research, to be held in Hiroshima, Japan.
Summer School: 13 to 14 September 2027
Main conference: 15 to 17 September 2027
The conference brings together researchers, teachers, and postgraduate
students with an interest in vocabulary, from acquisition and assessment
through to teaching and use. Given the strong overlap between vocabulary
and language testing, we hope it will be of real interest to colleagues on
this list, and we would love for you to join us.
Key dates:
30 November 2026: call for papers posted and submission portal opens
15 February 2027: abstract submission deadline
We would be grateful if you could pass this on to colleagues and students
who might be interested. Please do save the date, and we very much hope to
see you in Hiroshima.
You can follow our updates here:
Website: vocab-at-hiroshima.org
Full registration and travel details will follow in due course.
With warm wishes,
The Vocab@Hiroshima 2027 organising committee
info(a)vocab-at-hiroshima.org
Dear all,
Lancaster University warmly invites you to join us for the launch of the EMI Corpus, a unique new resource for researchers and practitioners interested in English as a Medium of Instruction.
The event will take place on Wednesday 17 June, starting at 10.30am (UK time).
For registration and further details, please see below.
We look forward to welcoming you.
Best wishes,
Vaclav
EMI Corpus Launch
Date/time: Wednesday, 17 June, 10.30-13.00 (UK time)
Cost: Free
Online registration: https://tinyurl.com/3bntvhya
We are excited to announce that the EMI Corpus of Student Academic Writing will be launched on 17 June 2026. Join us for the launch to hear more about how the corpus was constructed, what data it contains, and how to access it.
EMI (English Medium Instruction) is a global pedagogical trend, with thousands of students studying for their degrees through the medium of English. The EMI Corpus captures disciplinary writing in this educational context from a number of countries and institutions. Currently, the EMI Corpus contains more than 6 million words from over 2,000 pieces of student academic writing in English from eight universities in Austria, China, Italy, Thailand and the UK (including data from Lancaster University student writing). The corpus represents writing from three major disciplinary areas: Arts, Humanities and Social Science, Business and Management, and Science and Technology.
The project was funded by the British Council's Future of English project, and supported by the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) and Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. You can read more about the corpus and the project here: https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/emi-corpus-project/emi-corpus/
Event Programme (UK time)
10.30-11.00 Welcome and Introduction to the Future of English project
11.00-11.45 Building a Corpus of Student Academic Writing: Lessons from the EMI Corpus
11.45-12.00 Break
12.00-12.50 EMI Corpus: Description, Applications and Access
12.50-13.00 Closing remarks
*Daleel 2026 - Arabic Argumentative Discourse Mining Shared Task*
*ArabicNLP Conference, co-located with EMNLP 2026*
Dear All,
Registration is now open for *Daleel 2026: Arabic Argumentative Discourse
Mining Shared Task*, which will be held as part of the ArabicNLP 2026
Conference, co-located with EMNLP 2026 in Budapest, Hungary.
The shared task focuses on *the detection and classification of
argumentative discourse units in Arabic* across two text genres: Editorials
and Debates.
*Tasks*
- Task 1: Argumentative Discourse Unit Classification
- Task 2: Argumentative Discourse Unit Detection
*Awards*
Monetary prizes will be awarded to the authors of the top three system
description papers:
- 1st Place: $400
- 2nd Place: $200
- 3rd Place: $150
*Important Dates*
- June 5, 2026: Release of data, baselines, and evaluation scripts
- July 25, 2026: Registration deadline and release of final evaluation
input data
- July 30, 2026: System submission deadline and final evaluation
- August 6, 2026: System description paper submission deadline
- August 13, 2026: Notification of acceptance
- August 22, 2026: Camera-ready submission of system papers
*For detailed information about the shared task and registration, please
visit:*
https://qatardebate.org/programs/academic-programs/daleel2026-shared-task/
*For questions, please contact:* daleel26(a)argsbase.net
We look forward to your participation and to advancing research in Arabic
argument mining together.
*Organizers*
- Sara Nabhani, University of Groningen
- Nahla Bassyouni, QatarDebate
- Ali Al-Zawqari, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
- Mohammad Khader, QatarDebate
- Khalid Al-Khatib, University of Groningen
The University of Louvain (UCLouvain) has an opening for a PhD fellowship at the intersection of second language acquisition, learner corpus research and computer-assisted language learning, within the interdisciplinary research project “How Generative AI is shaping human language: insights from post-AI language use, learning and critical literacy”.
• Full-time (100%) PhD fellowship for one year, renewable (max. 4 years)
• Start date: 1 October 2026
• Supervisors: Prof. Serge Bibauw & Prof. Magali Paquot
The project
The PhD project will investigate the longitudinal effects of interacting with Generative AI (GenAI) chatbots on the second language (L2) development of French learners, with a focus on vocabulary and pragmatics. While conversational AI is increasingly used as a language-learning partner, its actual longitudinal effects on L2 development—and the extent to which learners may also acquire AI-specific linguistic fingerprints—remain largely unexplored.
The project plans on following cohorts of L2 French learners, possibly in Hanoi, Vietnam, over one academic year. It will combine quasi-experimental studies on pragmatics and vocabulary learning and longitudinal corpus analysis of conversation logs.
The doctoral researcher will be part of an interdisciplinary consortium, including two other PhD students, a post-doctoral researcher and five academic supervisors, investigating the impact of GenAI on language, communication, and critical literacy across educational and professional contexts. The broader project aims to address two critical gaps in current research: first, the need to understand how GenAI-produced language may reshape human writing, language learning, and communicative practices; and second, the importance of fostering critical competencies to help users engage thoughtfully with AI-generated content.
The initiative brings together expertise from linguistics, second language acquisition, natural language processing, translation studies, and communication sciences to analyze how AI-generated language influences human language use and first and foreign language learning. By addressing both the linguistic and educational dimensions of generative AI, the project seeks to promote critical AI literacy, mitigate the risks associated with uncritical reliance on GenAI tools, and foster a more informed, ethical, and reflective integration of these technologies into academic and public life.
Qualifications and expected profile
Required:
• Master degree in (Applied) Linguistics, Language Sciences, Romance Studies, Educational Sciences, NLP, or a closely related field
• Excellent record of BA and MA level study
• Excellent command of French (B2 minimum, C1 ideal) — the language of the empirical data
• Excellent command of English (B2 minimum, C1 desired) — the language of publication and supervision
• Strong analytical skills, scientific rigor, and intellectual curiosity
• Autonomy, sense of teamwork, ability to listen and engage with colleagues across disciplines
Assets:
• Background or strong interest in second language acquisition and/or computer-assisted language learning
• Familiarity with learner corpus research, quantitative methods, or experimental designs
• Knowledge of R or Python for data analysis, or willingness to learn it quickly.
• Interest in generative AI and its educational applications.
• Willingness to travel (to academic conferences and possibly to Hanoi for data collection).
Conditions of engagement
• The contract will initially be for two years and may be renewed once, for a total duration of up to four years.
• The candidate receives a doctoral fellowship grant (starting at approx. EUR 2,515 net per month).
• The position requires residence in Belgium for the duration of the mandate.
• Applicants from outside the EU are responsible for obtaining the necessary visa or permits, with the assistance of UCLouvain’s HR department.
Application
Application deadline: 7 August 2026
The application file (a single PDF) should include:
• A one-page cover letter in English explaining your interest in this position and how you meet the requirements;
• A curriculum vitae;
• A one-page academic statement in French outlining your research interests, expectations and career goals;
• Names and full contact details of two academic referees;
• Copies of BA and MA diplomas and transcripts;
• A copy of (or working links to) your master’s thesis and any academic publications (if applicable).
Shortlisted candidates will be invited to an interview (in person in Louvain-la-Neuve or via videoconference) between 17 and 21 August 2026.
Applications and inquiries should be sent by email to Prof. Serge Bibauw (serge.bibauw(a)uclouvain.be) and Prof. Magali Paquot (magali.paquot(a)uclouvain.be), with the subject line “SP3 PhD application — [Your name]”.
We are hiring 3 doctoral students and one postdoctoral researcher. For more details, https://postai-language.netlify.app/recruitment
Prof. Magali Paquot
FNRS Senior research associate
Professor of Linguistics,
Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres (FIAL)
Institut Langage et Communication (ILC)
UCLouvain
*** First Call for Journal First, Conference Second Papers ***
37th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering
(ISSRE 2026)
October 20-23, 2026, 5* St. Raphael Resort and Marina
Limassol, Cyprus
https://cyprusconferences.org/issre2026/
ISSRE 2026 will continue running the “Journal First Conference Second” track that seeks to
include journal papers in the ISSRE 2026 program. The authors of papers published
recently in prestigious software reliability engineering journals are invited to send a
proposal to present their work at ISSRE 2026. Note that the submitted J1C2 paper shall
not be a former workshop or conference paper. Via this scheme authors have the
possibility to present their work to a wider audience in person, discuss, network with
peers, and drive renewed interest to their work.
The journal-first manuscripts are published through the journals and will not be part of
the ISSRE proceedings. The journal-first papers will be listed in the conference program.
At least one author of each presentation accepted for the journal-first program must
register and attend the conference to present the paper at the time identified in the
program.
Scope
A journal-first presentation submitted to ISSRE 2026 must adhere to the following criteria:
• The paper was accepted for publication not earlier than January 1st 2025.
• The paper is in the scope of the conference, as defined in the call for ISSRE 2026
research papers.
• The paper reports completely new research results or presents novel contributions that
significantly extend and were not reported in prior work.
• The paper has not been presented at, and is not under consideration for, journal-first
programs of other conferences.
Submission of Proposals
Authors of manuscripts that respect these criteria are invited to send a one-page
presentation proposal (in IEEE 2-column format) via this submission link on EasyChair:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=issre2026, consisting of the paper's title, the
paper's authors, the paper's abstract, a description of how the paper fits into the
conference theme, and a pointer to the original journal paper at the journal's Web site. If
the paper is not online yet, then specify so. Authors will also have to upload a copy of the
paper. Please make sure to select the J1C2 track at the beginning of the submission
process.
Authors will be invited to present their paper at ISSRE 2026 after a check that the paper is
in scope for the conference and it adheres to the criteria above. The papers will not be
reviewed again for technical content. In case an exceptionally high number of proposals is
received, presentation proposals will be prioritized according to their fit to the conference
theme and structure of sessions. The J1C2 Track Chairs will notify the authors about their decision.
Important Dates (AoE)
• J1C2 proposal submission deadline: July 20, 2026
• J1C2 notification deadline: August 10, 2026
• Author registration deadline: August 19, 2026
Organisation
General Chairs
• Leonardo Mariani, University of Milano - Bicocca, Italy
• George A. Papadopoulos, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
Program Coordinator
• Roberto Natella, GSSI, Italy
Research Program Committee Chairs
• Domenico Cotroneo, UNC Charlotte, USA
• Jie M. Zhang, King's College London, UK
Industry Program Chairs
• Jinyang Liu, Bytedance, USA
• Sigrid Eldh, Ericsson AB, Sweden
Workshop Chairs
• Georgia Kapitsaki, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
• August Shi, The University of Texas at Austin, USA
Doctoral Symposium Chairs
• Stefan Winter, LMU Munich, Germany
• Lili Wei, McGill University, Canada
Fast Abstract Chairs
• Luigi Lavazza, University of Insubria, Italy
• Yintong Huo, SMU, Singapore
JIC2 Chair
• Helene Waeselynck, LAAS-CNRS, France
Publicity Chairs
• Allison K. Sulivan, The University of Texas at Arlington, USA
• Jose D'Abruzzo Pereira, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Publication Chairs
• Sherlock Licorish, Otago Business School, New Zealand
• Maria Teresa Rossi, GSSI, Italy
Artifact Evaluation Chairs
• Naghmeh Ivaki, University of Coimbra, Portugal
• Fumio Machida, University of Tsukuba, Japan
Diversity and Inclusion Chair
• Eleni Constantinou, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
Financial Chair
• Costas Pattichis, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
Web Chairs
• Michalis Ioannides, Easy Conferences LTD
• Elena Masserini, University of Milano - Bicocca, Italy
Registration Chair
• Easy Conferences LTD