Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to announce the Long-Form Analogy Evaluation Challenge, a shared task focused on automatically evaluating generated analogies for explaining Computer Science concepts. The shared task will be co-located with INLG 2026 (https://2026.inlgmeeting.org/), and participants will have the opportunity to write a paper describing their system and approach.
Submission Deadline: August 1, 2026
Prizes: The top 3 participants will receive $100, $50, and $25, respectively.
About the Challenge
Participants are asked to develop a system that predicts human quality ratings for long-form analogies. Given a concept, its description, a textual analogy, and an accompanying animation video, systems must predict scores across textual and video-based criteria. Submissions are evaluated using rank correlation with human judgments.
Links
* Competition: https://huggingface.co/spaces/analogy-evaluation/Analogy-Evaluation-Challen…
* Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/analogy-evaluation/challenge-dataset
* Baseline code: https://github.com/yurinoviello/analogy-eval-baseline-INLG
We warmly encourage members of this community to participate and share this announcement with colleagues and students who may be interested.
Best regards,
Bhavya
Research Scientist, IBM
Yuri Noviello
PhD Student, Delft University of Technology
*** NARNiHS 2027
*** North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics
*** Ninth Annual Meeting
*** 100% IN PERSON
*** Co-Located with the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Annual Meeting
*** San Francisco, California, USA
*** 6-9 January 2027
This event offers an opportunity for scholars from all over the world to gather and share leading research in historical sociolinguistic methods of linguistic inquiry; and we invite our fellow historical sociolinguists and scholars in related fields from our global scholarly community to join us in San Francisco for our 9th Annual Meeting.
Consult this Call for Abstracts on the web: https://narnihs.org/?page_id=3542 .
---------- Call for Abstracts ----------.
Abstract submission online:
https://easyabs.linguistlist.org/submit/NARNiHS_2027
Deadline: Monday, 24 August 2026, 11:59 PM US Eastern time.
Late abstracts will not be considered.
The North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics (NARNiHS) is accepting abstracts for its 9th Annual Meeting. As a Sister Society of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), NARNiHS will hold its Annual Meeting sessions at the LSA Annual Meeting in San Francisco, Wednesday-Saturday, 6-9 January 2027. The 9th edition of this inclusive NARNiHS event seeks to provide a collaborative environment where presenters bring fully developed work for presentation and enrichment. We see the NARNiHS Annual Meeting as a place for showcasing excellent projects in historical sociolinguistics, seeking feedback from peers, and engaging in productive development of the field's enduring questions.
NARNiHS welcomes papers in all areas of historical sociolinguistics, which is understood as the application and/or development of sociolinguistic theories, methods, and models for the study of historical language variation and change over time, or more broadly, the study of the interaction of language and society in historical periods and from historical perspectives. Thus, a wide range of linguistic areas, subdisciplines, methodologies, and adjacent disciplines easily find their place within historical sociolinguistics, and we encourage submission of abstracts that reflect this broad scope.
Abstracts will be accepted for both 20-minute papers and posters. Accepted papers will be organized into thematic sessions that will be scheduled throughout the 4 days of the LSA conference; accepted posters will be scheduled together in the LSA poster gallery. Please note that, at NARNiHS events, poster presentations are an integral and equal part of the intellectual exchange (not second-tier presentations). Abstracts will be assigned a paper or a poster presentation based on determinations in the review process about the most effective format for the submission. However, *if you prefer that your submission be considered primarily for poster presentation*, please specify this in your abstract.
Successful abstracts will demonstrate *thorough grounding* in historical sociolinguistics, *scientific rigor* in the formulation of research questions, and *promise for rich discussion* of ideas. Successful abstracts will be explicit about which *theoretical frameworks*, *methodological protocols*, and *analytical strategies* are being applied or critiqued. *Data sources and examples* should be sufficiently presented, so as to allow reviewers a full understanding of the scope and claims of the research. Please note that *the connection of your research to the field of historical sociolinguistics* should be explicitly outlined in your abstract. Failure to adhere to these criteria will likely result in rejection of the abstract.
*** Abstract Format Guidelines ***.
- Abstracts must be submitted in PDF format.
- Abstracts must fit on one 8.5x11-inch or A4 page, with margins no smaller than 1 inch (2.54 cm) and a font style and size no smaller than Times New Roman 12 point. You are encouraged to use the entire page to provide a full and robust description of the research. All additional supporting content (visualizations, trees, tables, figures, captions, examples, and references) must fit on a single (1) additional page. No exceptions to these requirements are allowed; abstracts longer than one page or with more than one additional page of supporting content will be rejected without review.
- Specify if you prefer your submission be considered primarily for a poster presentation.
- Anonymize your abstract. We realize that sometimes complete anonymity is not attainable, but there is a difference between the nature of the research creating an inability to anonymize and careless non-anonymizing (in citations, references, file names, etc.). Be sure to also anonymize your PDF file (you may do so in Adobe Acrobat Reader by clicking on "File", then "Properties", removing your name if it appears in the "Author" line of the "Description" tab, and re-saving the file before submission). Do not use your name as the file name when saving your PDF (e.g. Smith_Abstract.pdf); file names may not be automatically anonymized by the EasyAbs system. Rather, use non-identifying information in your file name (e.g. HistSoc4Lyfe.pdf). Your name should only appear in the online form accompanying your abstract submission. Abstracts that are not sufficiently anonymized wherever possible will be rejected without review.
*** General Requirements ***.
- Abstracts must be submitted electronically using the following link: https://easyabs.linguistlist.org/submit/NARNiHS_2027
- Authors may submit a maximum of two abstracts: One single-author abstract and one co-authored abstract.
- Authors may not submit identical abstracts for presentation in NARNiHS Sessions and at the LSA Annual Meeting or another LSA Sister Society meeting (ADS, ANS, NAHoLS, SCiL, SPCL, or SSILA).
- Specify if you prefer your submission be considered primarily for a poster presentation.
- After submission, no changes of author, title, or wording of the abstract may occur. If your abstract is accepted, adjustment of typographical errors is permitted before a final version of the abstract is printed in the conference booklet.
- Papers and posters must be delivered as projected in the abstract or represent bona fide developments of the same research.
- Authors are expected to attend the conference in-person and present their own papers and posters. This will not be a hybrid event.
Contact us at NARNiHistSoc(a)gmail.com with any questions.
Dear Colleagues,
We're delighted to announce that the call for paper for the 24th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association - ALTA 2026
Details are available on our website at https://alta2026.alta.asn.au/calls/papers and a summary follows.
---
Important Dates
- Submission open: 16 July 2026
- Submission deadline (long and short papers): 11 September 2026
- Submission deadline for presentation abstracts and non-archival papers: 9 October 2026.
- Author notification: 23 October 2026
- ALTA 2026: 30 November - 2 December 2026
Overview
The 24th Annual Workshop of the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA 2026) will be held in person at Deakin University Downtown Campus, Melbourne, from 30 November to 2 December 2026.
ALTA is the key local forum for presenting and discussing research results in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Linguistics (CL). The workshop will feature presentations, posters, and demonstrations from students, industry, and academic researchers. As in previous years, we strongly encourage submissions and participation from industry and government researchers. Accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings, published online in the ACL Anthology and on the ALTA website. Papers will be presented either as oral or poster presentations at the workshop. Note that ALTA is listed in the CORE 2026 Conference Rankings as Australasian C.
Topics
- Commonsense Reasoning.
- Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics.
- Dialogue and Interactive Systems.
- Discourse and Pragmatics.
- Efficient Methods for NLP.
- Ethics in NLP.
- Information Extraction.
- Information Retrieval and Text Mining.
- Interpretability, Interactivity and Analysis of Models for NLP.
- Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond.
- Language Modeling and Analysis of Language Models.
- Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics.
- Machine Learning for NLP.
- Machine Translation.
- Multilinguality and Linguistic Diversity.
- Natural Language Generation.
- NLP Applications.
- Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation.
- Question Answering.
- Resources and Evaluation.
- Semantics: Lexical, Sentence level, Document Level, Textual Inference, etc.
- Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining.
- Speech and Multimodality.
- Summarisation.
- Syntax, Parsing and their Applications.
We particularly encourage submissions that broaden the scope of our community by considering practical applications of language technology and multidisciplinary research. We also specifically encourage submissions from the industry.
Format and instructions for authors
We welcome long (8 pages) and short (4 pages) Archival Submissions, and Non-Archival Submissions.
Please refer to our CfP webpage<https://alta2026.alta.asn.au/calls/papers> for specifics.
---
You can follow ALTA on social media at the following links:
LinkedIn (page): https://www.linkedin.com/company/australasian-language-technology-associati…
LinkedIn (group): https://www.linkedin.com/groups/1849979/
X: https://x.com/altanlp
Mastodon: https://sigmoid.social/@ALTAnlp
With kind regards, on behalf of the ALTA 2026 Team:
Dr Bahadorreza Ofoghi, General Chair
Prof Massimo Piccardi, Program Chair
Dr Ming Liu, Program Chair
Dr Mohamed Reda Bouadjenek, Program Chair
Dr Zhuang Li, Publication Chair
Mong Yuan Sim, PhD candidate, Publication Chair
Aymen Rayane Khouas, PhD candidate, Technology Chair
Dr Fatima Ansarizadeh, Sponsorship Chair
Sara Mirabi, PhD candidate, Local Chair
Saeedeh Javadi, PhD candidate, Local Chair
A/Prof Wei (Emma) Zhang, Publicity Chair
[apologies for cross-posting]
Terminology Translation Task @WMT2026 �C Call for Participation
We are excited to announce the 4th Terminology Translation Shared Task, which will be held as part of the 11th Conference on Machine Translation (WMT 2026), co-located with EMNLP 2026 in Budapest, Hungary.
TL;DR
* Two tracks on terminology-aware document-level machine translation.
* Language pairs: Spanish��Basque, English��Polish, and Traditional Chinese��English across engineering, medicine, and finance domains.
* Evaluation metrics: both general MT quality and terminology-oriented metrics.
* Task started: 30 June 2026
* System submission deadline: 31 July 2026 (AoE)
* Shared task website: https://www2.statmt.org/wmt26/terminology.html
* Pre-registration: https://forms.gle/nCHmek9UkdJaraqu9
OVERVIEW
Despite remarkable progress in machine translation, accurately translating specialized terminology while maintaining overall translation quality remains a challenging problem. Previous editions of the Terminology Translation Shared Task demonstrated that document-level terminology translation is still substantially more difficult than sentence-level translation, particularly when consistent terminology usage is required throughout a document.
This year's edition introduces two major developments. First, we expand the shared task to lower-resource, morphologically rich languages: Basque and Polish. Second, alongside our established terminology-dictionary setting, we introduce a new track in which systems must infer terminology from seed bitexts, providing a more realistic and challenging evaluation scenario.
We welcome submissions from both academia and industry and impose no restrictions on models or training resources.
IMPORTANT DATES (AoE)
* 1 Jul 2026: Test data and submission form released; shared task begins
* 31 Jul 2026: System submission deadline
* 7 Aug 2026: paper description submission (according to the WMT 2026 schedule)
* 28-29 October 2026: WMT 2026 conference
SUBMISSION TRACKS
Track 1: Document-Level Translation with Explicit Dictionary
Participants receive document-level source texts together with terminology dictionaries and evaluate their systems under different terminology conditions.
Track 2: Document-Level Translation with Seed Bitexts
Instead of explicit terminology dictionaries, participants receive terminology-rich parallel examples ("seed bitexts") and must leverage them to translate related documents.
LANGUAGES AND DOMAINS
* Spanish �� Basque (Engineering & Technology),
* English �� Polish (Engineering & Technology, Medicine),
* Traditional Chinese �� English (Finance)
EVALUATION
Following the previous editions of the shared task, systems will be evaluated under multiple terminology modes to assess the causal effect of the explicit terminology contents:
* No terminology
* Proper terminology
* Random terminology
Submissions will be assessed using two complementary groups of metrics:
* Overall translation quality, including automatic MT metrics (e.g., BLEU) together with evaluation of grammatical term usage.
* Terminology-oriented metrics, including terminology success rate and terminology consistency.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Before submitting, we kindly ask participants to:
1. (Recommended) Pre-register using our Google Form to receive reminders and help us estimate participation.
2. Validate system outputs using the official validation script.
3. Submit translations through the official submission form together with a brief system description. Participants are also encouraged to submit a WMT system description paper following the main conference guidelines.
* The participants are allowed to submit systems for one track and/or only subset of the language pairs (however, we encourage you to test your strengths across all language pairs)
* Detailed task descriptions, data formats, input/output specifications, and submission instructions are available on the shared task website.
ORGANIZERS
Nathaniel Berger, Adrian Charkiewicz, Pinzhen Chen, Thierry Etchegoyhen, Harritxu Gete Ugarte, Kamil Guttmann, Xu Huang, David Ponce, Artur Nowakowski, Fr��d��ric Odermatt, Arturo Oncevay, Kirill Semenov, Dawei Zhu, and Vil��m Zouhar.
Contact: Kirill Semenov �� firstname.lastname [at] uzh [dot] ch
WEBSITE
https://www2.statmt.org/wmt26/terminology.html
We look forward to your participation!
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 almost here! The challenge submission deadline is this Sunday, July 5, 2026 (only 2 days away!), followed shortly by the direct paper submission deadline on July 12, 2026 (9 days away!).
📝 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
* Challenge submission deadline: July 5, 2026 (only 2 days away!)
* Direct paper submission deadline: July 12, 2026 (9 days 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 all,
Please see the information on job opportunities below.
I’d be grateful if you could share with potential candidates.
Where:
The Text & Language Lab in the Department of Digital Humanities and Social Studies (DHSS) at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) is recruiting up to five outstanding postdoctoral and doctoral researchers. Join a highly collaborative team pursuing an ambitious research agenda on various aspects of language in today’s digital world. Led by Alexander von Humboldt-Professor Michaela Mahlberg, the lab offers an inspiring environment where curious researchers work across disciplines and produce results with clear, real-world relevance.
What:
Depending on your qualifications and experience there are different options of appointment, which include opportunities to make a contribution to the teaching of the Department.
• PhD positions are for up to 4 years (75% or 100%), initial contract 1 year with extension after successful completion of first year
• Postdoctoral positions for up to 4.5 years (100 %), initial contract 2 years, after successful completion of that period there is the opportunity to extend the positions until 31.03.2031
The positions:
1) Postdoctoral researcher with focus on web application development and CLiC (clic-fiction.com)
Specific responsibilities will include:
• Corpus compilation
• Modular software development
• Leading on the organisation of training workshops and dissemination activities
• Developing training materials for workshops
• Producing documentation
• Collaboration with external software developers
• Working as part of a team, with the responsibility to manage specific work packages and lead clear sub-projects (including publications and grant application development)
• Managing project tasks such as supervising student assistants and providing progress reports
2) Postdoctoral researcher with focus on experimental methods
Specific responsibilities will include:
• Designing and running experiments that focus on the engagement with texts and tools (reader response, surveys, interviews, eye-tracking, Human-AI interaction)
• Analysing research data
• Leading on the organisation of training workshops and dissemination activities
• Working as part of a team, with the responsibility to manage specific work packages and lead clear sub-projects (including publications and grant application development)
• Managing project tasks such as supervising student assistants and providing progress reports
3) Doctoral researcher - PhD Project: Fictional people and the climate crisis
The project will be situated within a research context that deals with textual patterns of characterization with a focus on the relationship between fictional people and their environment. This environment will cover both the natural and the built environment. The textual patterns will be studied on the basis of data from a variety of texts (including climate and science fiction). Methods of analysis will draw on computational textual analysis. The specific research questions of the project will be developed together with the successful candidate.
Specific responsibilities will include:
• Text and data analysis
• Corpus design and compilation
• Working as part of a team, with the responsibility to manage specific work packages and lead clear sub-projects (including publications and grant application development)
• Managing project tasks such as supervising student assistants and providing progress reports
More detail on required qualifications and how to apply:
https://www.fau-jobs.de/jobposting/621d437fb9ed15d519420c8046d50aa9431c66ec0
Deadline: 24 July 2026
If you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact me
Michaela
--
Professor Michaela Mahlberg
https://michaelamahlberg.com/<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fmichaelamahlberg.com%2f…>
Alexander-von-Humboldt Professor & Professor of Digital Humanities<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgkKhcwvWgI>
Head of Department of Digital Humanities and Social Studies (DHSS)<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.dhss.phil.fau.de%2f…>
FAU - Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.fau.de%2f&c=E,1,fU0…>
Honorary Professor of Corpus Linguistics University of Birmingham, UK<https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/>
Editor of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fbenjamins.com%2fcatalog…>
President of the Dickens Society<https://dickenssociety.org/>
Host of the Life and Language Podcast <https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michaela-mahlberg/>
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaela-mahlberg/
=========================================================
2nd Call for Papers - Deadline EXTENDED: HeMAI 2026
Multimodal Interaction with Generative AI Health Applications
Workshop at ICMI 2026, Naples, Italy, 9 October 2026 (in person)
https://qulab.github.io/HeMAI2026/
Submission via PCS until July 13, 2026
=========================================================
Generative AI is changing how people interact with health technology. Large language models, multimodal foundation models, and conversational agents make it possible to combine text, speech, vision, and physiological signals in ways that weren't practical a few years ago, and they raise difficult questions about usability, safety, explainability, trust, and evaluation when the stakes involve someone's health.
HeMAI 2026 brings HCI, AI, and health researchers together to work through those questions. We welcome contributions on multimodal interaction techniques for health systems, conversational and embodied agents in healthcare, integration of text/speech/vision/biosignals, explainability and transparency, human-AI collaboration, safety and trust, ethical and regulatory issues, evaluation methodologies, and real-world deployments.
Submission types:
- Full research papers (up to 8 pages, excluding references)
- Short / work-in-progress / position / demo papers (up to 4 pages, excluding references)
Submissions follow ICMI 2026 author guidelines: https://icmi.acm.org/2026/guidelines/
Papers rejected from the main ICMI track are welcome if they fit the scope.
Important dates (AoE):
- Paper submission: 6 July 2026 (via PCS)
- Notification: 29 July 2026
- Camera-ready: 1 August 2026
- Workshop: 9 October 2026
Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings associated with ICMI 2026.
Organizers:
- Stefan Hillmann (TU Berlin)
- Sebastian Möller (TU Berlin & DFKI Berlin)
- Catherine Pelachaud (CNRS--ISIR, Sorbonne University)
- Lisa Raithel (TU Berlin & BIFOLD & DFKI Berlin & Charité--IKIM)
- Roland Roller (DFKI Berlin)
Workshop website: https://qulab.github.io/HeMAI2026/
We are looking forward to your submissions!
We are recruiting a Doctoral Researcher and a Postdoctoral Researcher! Both roles focused on training health foundation models and medical reasoning using Finland's nationwide health databases.
💻 Access to world-class computing resources, including local clusters (Roihu and Triton) and the LUMI Supercomputer (one of the world's fastest and greenest).
🤝 Direct integration into the ELLIS Institute Finland and the University of Turku research ecosystems.
🌲 Excellent work-life balance and competitive salary in Finland.
📅 Application Deadline: August 17, 2026 at 16:00 (Helsinki time)
Find full job details and apply here:
https://www.olaresearch.org/news/job-openings-foundation-health-models.html
Dear Colleagues,
We are pleased to invite submissions to the Special Issue "Big Data
Analytics and Mining for Information Retrieval" in the "Big Data and
Cognitive Computing" Journal (IF 5.3, CiteScore 11.4).
This Special Issue seeks advanced analytics and mining methods that
integrate big-data technologies with intelligent retrieval models. We
welcome original research articles and review papers on research areas
including, but not limited to:
- web search
- social media analytics
- recommendation systems
- enterprise search
- digital libraries
- biomedical informatics
For details and submission instructions, visit the Special Issue
webpage:
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/BDCC/special_issues/4643ZF82B5
If you are interested in submitting a manuscript, kindly register a
tentative title and abstract via the "Submit Abstract to Special Issue"
form on the Special Issue webpage at your earliest convenience.
Please feel free to share this invitation with colleagues and
collaborators.
We look forward to receiving your contributions.
Kind regards,
Guest Editor
Dr. Ida Mele
IASI-CNR, Rome, Italy