CFP: LT4HALA 2026 - The Fourth Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages
Website: https://circse.github.io/LT4HALA/2026/
Date: Monday, May 11 2026
Place: co-located with LREC 2026, May 11-16, Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Submission page: TBA
DESCRIPTION
LT4HALA 2026 is a one-day workshop that seeks to bring together scholars who are developing and/or are using Language Technologies (LTs) for historically attested languages, so to foster cross-fertilization between the Computational Linguistics community and the areas in the Humanities dealing with historical linguistic data, e.g. historians, philologists, linguists, archaeologists and literary scholars. LT4HALA 2026 follows LT4HALA 2020, 2022, 2024 that were organized in the context of LREC 2020, LREC 2022 and LREC-COLING 2024, respectively. Despite the current availability of large collections of digitized texts written in historical languages, such interdisciplinary collaboration is still hampered by the limited availability of annotated linguistic resources for most of the historical languages. Creating such resources is a challenge and an obligation for LTs, both to support historical linguistic research with the most updated technologies and to preserve those precious linguistic data that survived from past times.
Relevant topics for the workshop include, but are not limited to:
* creation and annotation of linguistic resources (both lexical and textual);
* role of digital infrastructures, such as CLARIN, in supporting research based on language resources for historical and ancient languages;
* handling spelling variation;
* detection and correction of OCR errors;
* deciphering;
* morphological/syntactic/semantic analysis of textual data;
* adaptation of tools to address diachronic/diatopic/diastratic variation in texts;
* teaching ancient languages with LTs;
* NLP-driven theoretical studies in historical linguistics;
* NLP-driven analysis of literary ancient texts;
* evaluation of LTs designed for historical and ancient languages;
* LLMs for the automatic analysis of ancient texts.
SHARED TASKS
LT4HALA 2026 will also host:
* the 4th edition of EvaLatin<https://circse.github.io/LT4HALA/2026/EvaLatin>, a campaign entirely devoted to the evaluation of NLP tools for Latin. This new edition will focus on two tasks: dependency parsing and Named Entity Recognition. Dependency parsing will be based on the Universal Dependencies framework.
* the 5th edition of EvaHan<https://circse.github.io/LT4HALA/2026/EvaHan>, the campaign for the evaluation of NLP tools for Ancient Chinese. EvaHan 2026 will focus on Ancient Chinese OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Evaluation.
* the 2nd edition of EvaCun<https://circse.github.io/LT4HALA/2026/EvaCun>, the campaign for the evaluation of Ancient Cuneiform Languages, with shared tasks on transliteration normalization, morphological analysis and lemmatization, Named Entity Recognition of Akkadian and/or Sumerian.
SUBMISSIONS
Submissions should be 4 to 8 pages in length and follow the LREC 2026 stylesheet (see below). The maximum number of pages excludes potential Ethics Statements and discussion on Limitations, acknowledgements and references, as well as data and code availability statements. Appendices or supplementary material are not permitted during the initial submission phase, as papers should be self-contained and reviewable on their own.
Papers must be of original, previously unpublished work. Papers must be anonymized to support double-blind reviewing. Submissions thus must not include authors’ names and affiliations. The submissions should also avoid links to non-anonymized repositories: the code should be either submitted as supplementary material in the final version of the paper, or as a link to an anonymized repository (e.g., Anonymous GitHub or Anonym Share). Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.
Submissions should follow the LREC stylesheet, which is available on the LREC 2026 website on the Author’s kit page<https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/>.
Each paper will be reviewed by three independent reviewers.
Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings, which include both oral and poster papers in the same format. Determination of the presentation format (oral vs. poster) is based solely on an assessment of the optimal method of communication (more or less interactive), given the paper content.
As for the shared tasks, participants will be required to submit a technical report for each task (with all the related sub-tasks) they took part in. Technical reports will be included in the proceedings as short papers: the maximum length is 4 pages (excluding references) and they should follow the LREC 2026 official format. Reports will receive a light review (we will check for the correctness of the format, the exactness of results and ranking, and overall exposition). All participants will have the possibility to present their results at the workshop. Reports of the shared tasks are not anonymous.
WORKSHOP IMPORTANT DATES
17 February 2026: submissions due
13 March 2026: reviews due
16 March 2026: notifications to authors
27 March 2026: camera-ready due
Shared tasks deadlines are available in the specific web pages: EvaLatin<https://circse.github.io/LT4HALA/2026/EvaLatin>, EvaHan<https://circse.github.io/LT4HALA/2026/EvaHan>, EvaCun<https://circse.github.io/LT4HALA/2026/EvaCun>.
Identify, Describe and Share your LRs!
When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC authors to share the described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.) to enable their reuse and replicability of experiments (including evaluation ones).
[http://static.unicatt.it/ext-portale/5xmille_firma_mail_2023.jpg] <https://www.unicatt.it/uc/5xmille>
Dear colleagues,
We are writing to invite your collaboration in a community-driven initiative
to develop annotation schemas for scientific process descriptions in
research articles. The effort is inspired by the spirit of schema.org
<https://schema.org/> , but focuses specifically on capturing experimental
and simulation workflows across scientific domains. The resulting schemas
will be openly published as templates in the Open Research Knowledge Graph
(ORKG, <https://orkg.org/> https://orkg.org/) and will form the basis of a
paper planned for Nature Scientific Data <https://www.nature.com/sdata/> .
Motivation
Scientific papers describe complex processes-e.g., ALD and CVD in materials
science, PCR and CRISPR in molecular biology, tensile and fatigue testing in
engineering, leaching experiments in environmental science, RCTs and
cognitive tasks in psychology-using highly variable narrative text. This
variability makes it difficult to:
* design consistent, interoperable annotation guidelines,
* build cross-domain corpora of scientific methods,
* compare and align experimental setups across papers, and
* create FAIR, reusable metadata about how studies are actually
carried out.
Our goal is to define annotation schemas for these processes (inputs,
conditions, outputs, roles, and relations) and to populate them from
full-text articles. These schemas and resulting corpora are intended as
shared resources for corpus linguistics, NLP, scientific text mining, and
downstream applications.
Why Collaborate
We are seeking contributors who can:
* provide collections of full-text articles (~50+) describing a
specific experimental or simulation process in their field,
* offer expert feedback on automatically mined process schemas, or
* run the schema-miner workflow themselves (with our support) and help
refine the resulting schema.
Individual or small-team participation is welcome, and co-authorship
opportunities are available depending on involvement.
A wide variety of processes can be included-thin-film deposition, synthetic
chemistry reactions, gene editing workflows, fatigue testing, soil leaching
experiments, drug dissolution assays, fMRI tasks, cognitive experiments, and
many more.
A broader (non-exhaustive) list is here:
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iyL1l9vCXhnQ0To7j79vlr-pW4JvPlQC95svygq
RDfg/edit>
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iyL1l9vCXhnQ0To7j79vlr-pW4JvPlQC95svygqR
Dfg/edit
How to Participate
Please register your interest using this short form:
<https://forms.gle/9WEdouw4yMyNHcn19> https://forms.gle/9WEdouw4yMyNHcn19
We will notify selected contributors by January 31, 2026. Data collection
and schema mining will conclude by April 30, 2026, followed by manuscript
preparation.
We hope members of this community will consider contributing to this effort
to develop shared annotation schemas and corpora of scientific process
descriptions-a step toward more comparable, analyzable, and reusable
scientific text resources. Also please help us spread the word!
Best regards,
Jennifer D'Souza
TIB - Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology
(on behalf of the schema-miner coordination team)
[apologies for cross posting]
DeTermIt! Workshop @ LREC 2026
Second Workshop on Evaluating Text Difficulty in a Multilingual Context
Location: Palau de Congressos de Palma, Palma de Mallorca (Spain)
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First Call for Papers
Schedule
- Paper submissions: 23 February 2026
- Notification of acceptance: 13 March 2026
- Camera-ready due: 30 March 2026
- Workshop: one of 11, 12, or 16 May 2026 (half-day)
All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 AoE (“Anywhere on Earth”)
For more information, please visit:
Website: https://determit2026.dei.unipd.it/
#####################
In today’s interconnected world, where information dissemination knows no linguistic bounds, it is crucial to ensure that knowledge is accessible to diverse audiences, regardless of language proficiency and domain expertise. Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) and text difficulty assessment are central to this goal, especially in the age of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI (GenAI), which increasingly mediate access to information.
The second edition of the DeTermIt! workshop focuses on the evaluation and modeling of text difficulty in multilingual, terminology-rich contexts, with a particular emphasis on the interaction between:
- text simplification,
- terminology and conceptual complexity, and
- LLM/GenAI-based generation and rewriting.
The 2026 edition builds on the first DeTermIt! workshop held at LREC-COLING 2024 (https://determit2024.dei.unipd.it/), as well as related initiatives such as the CLEF SimpleText track (https://simpletext-project.com/), which provides reusable data and benchmarks for scientific text summarization and simplification. DeTermIt! 2026 aims to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in terminology-aware simplification, lexical and conceptual difficulty, and evaluation protocols for GenAI systems.
We welcome contributions that address theoretical, methodological, and applied aspects of text difficulty, including resource creation and evaluation (e.g., corpora, datasets, and benchmarks), with a focus on how linguistic complexity, specialized terminology, and domain knowledge interact with human understanding. In particular, we encourage work that explores how LLMs and GenAI can be evaluated, constrained, or guided to produce readable, faithful, and accessible texts.
#####################
Topics of Interest
#####################
We invite submissions on (but not limited to) the following themes:
1. Theoretical and Modeling Perspectives
- Cognitive and linguistic models of text and lexical complexity.
- Multilingual readability and text difficulty prediction.
- Modeling conceptual difficulty and domain-specific terminology.
- Theoretical connections between lexicography, terminology, and text simplification.
2. Terminology and Conceptual Complexity
- Identification and classification of specialized terms and concepts.
- Estimation of term difficulty for lay readers and second language learners.
- Use of terminological databases, ontologies, and knowledge graphs in simplification pipelines.
- Methods for adapting domain-specific terminology for accessible communication (e.g., in medicine, law, technology).
3. Generative and Explainable AI for Text Simplification
- LLM- and GenAI-based approaches to text simplification and paraphrasing.
- Terminology-Augmented Generation (TAG) and term-preserving simplification.
- Evaluation of GenAI outputs: readability, factuality, terminology fidelity, and hallucination analysis.
- Readability-controlled or difficulty-controlled generation; controllable simplification.
- Human-centered and explainable approaches to text accessibility in GenAI systems.
4. Resources, Benchmarks, and Evaluation Frameworks
- Corpora, annotation schemes, and benchmarks for text difficulty and simplification.
- Datasets and methods for evaluating terminology-aware simplification and explanation.
- FAIR and reusable resources for multilingual text accessibility.
- Evaluation protocols and metrics for cross-lingual and cross-domain simplification and GenAI-based rewriting.
5. Applications and Case Studies
- Domain-specific simplification (e.g., healthcare, legal, scientific communication).
- Tools and systems for educational settings, language learning, or accessible communication.
- User studies, human evaluation setups, and mixed-method approaches to assessing text difficulty and GenAI-assisted simplification.
- Industrial and real-world experiences with integrating ATS and terminology into LLM-driven workflows.
#####################
Submission Guidelines
#####################
We invite original contributions, including research papers, case studies, negative results, and system demonstrations.
When submitting a paper through the START system of LREC 2026, authors will be asked to provide essential information about language resources (in a broad sense: data, tools, services, standards, evaluation packages, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of the research. ELRA strongly encourages all authors to share the resources described in their papers to support reproducibility and reusability.
Papers must be compliant with the stylesheet adopted for the LREC 2026 Proceedings (see https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/).
The workshop proceedings will be published in the LREC 2026 workshop proceedings.
PAPER TYPES
We accept three types of submissions:
- Regular long papers – up to eight (8) pages of content, presenting substantial, original, completed, and unpublished work.
- Short papers – up to four (4) pages of content, describing smaller focused contributions, work in progress, negative results, or system demonstrations.
- Position papers – up to eight (8) pages of content, discussing key open challenges, methodological issues, and cross-disciplinary perspectives on text difficulty, terminology, and GenAI.
References do not count toward the page limits.
#####################
Organizers
#####################
Chairs
Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio, University of Padua, Italy
Federica Vezzani, University of Padua, Italy
Liana Ermakova, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, France
Hosein Azarbonyad, Elsevier, The Netherlands
Jaap Kamps, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Scientific Committee
Florian Boudin - Nantes University, France
Lynne Bowker - University of Ottawa, Canada
Sara Carvalho - Universidade NOVA de Lisboa / Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal
Rute Costa - Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal
Eric Gaussier - University Grenoble Alpes, France
Natalia Grabar - CNRS, France
Ana Ostroški Anić - Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics, Croatia
Tatiana Passali - Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Grigorios Tsoumakas - Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Sara Vecchiato - University of Udine, Italy
Cornelia Wermuth - KU Leuven, Belgium
#####################
Contact
#####################
For inquiries, please contact:
giorgiomaria.dinunzio(a)unipd.it <mailto:giorgiomaria.dinunzio@unipd.it>
Uppsala University is hiring a Substitute Senior Lecturer in Computational Linguistics, half-time for one year starting in January 2026:
https://www.uu.se/om-uu/jobba-hos-oss/lediga-jobb/jobbannons?query=883187
Duties include supervision of master’s theses and teaching within the international master’s program in Language Technology, as well as research. Application deadline: December 23, 2025.
Joakim Nivre
Professor of Computational Linguistics
Uppsala University
När du har kontakt med oss på Uppsala universitet med e-post så innebär det att vi behandlar dina personuppgifter. För att läsa mer om hur vi gör det kan du läsa här: http://www.uu.se/om-uu/dataskydd-personuppgifter/
E-mailing Uppsala University means that we will process your personal data. For more information on how this is performed, please read here: http://www.uu.se/en/about-uu/data-protection-policy
New Book Series: Corpus Linguistics and Technology-Mediated Language Education in the AI Era, Applied Linguistics Press
Corpus linguistics and technology-mediated language education in the AI era invites proposals for authored or edited volumes that advance
trustworthy, reproducible work at the intersection of corpora, digital learning environments and AI-supported language pedagogy. The series
encourages submissions that combine corpus design, annotation, analytics and AI-based learning ecosystems to improve educational
decision-making with traceable, verifiable data.
Topics of interest include corpus pedagogy and AI interfaces in education, multilingual and multimodal learning, accessibility, Datadriven
learning (DDL), corpora and technology-mediated language education, Corpus-Based Language Pedagogy (CBLP), corpus-literacy,
AI literacy, language data and AI, low-resource languages and corpus education, open datasets in corpus-based pedagogy, shareable code,
AI risk evaluation, learner metacognition in corpus education and teacher/learner agency in CBLP and DDL.
Corpus linguistics and technology-mediated language education in the AI era is open access and encourages global authorship. Proposals
submitted to the series will undergo initial evaluation by the ALP General Editor and the series Co-Editors and will then be sent out for external peer review.
Please send your proposals outlining aim(s), topics addressed, and how the volume fulfils the ALP mission to contribute to open science.
To submit a proposal for this book series, download the proposal template HERE<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KK57vC0-hwqHfd7ilaJC7zngLigXTFGO/edit?r…> <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KK57vC0-hwqHfd7ilaJC7zngLigXTFGO/edit?r…> and return when completed to the series Editors via email (pascualf(a)um.es. and maqing(a)eduhk.hk)
We welcome proposals for monographs and edited volumes.
Series Editors: Pascual Pérez-Paredes (Universidad de Murcia) & Qing (Angel) Ma (The Education University of Hong Kong)
Applied Linguistics Press<https://www.appliedlinguisticspress.org/home> is a scholar-led digital publisher promoting open science, fair practice, and wider access, offering monographs and collections with multimedia features, founded in 2023 by Prof Luke Plonsky and run by volunteers.
Feel free to contact us if you’d like to discuss your idea.
Pascual Pérez-Paredes
https://webs.um.es/pascualf
Ninth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2026)
May 2026, Palma de Mallorca, Spain (co-located with LREC 2026)
https://universaldependencies.org/udw26/
Universal Dependencies (UD, https://universaldependencies.org) is a
framework for cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation that
has so far been applied to over 180 languages. The framework aims to
capture similarities as well as idiosyncrasies among typologically
different languages (e.g., morphologically rich languages, pro-drop
languages, and languages featuring clitic doubling). The goal in
developing UD was not only to support comparative evaluation and
cross-lingual learning but also to facilitate multilingual natural
language processing, enable comparative linguistic studies, and
provide resources for language model understanding and evaluation.
The Universal Dependencies Workshop series was started to create a
forum for discussion of the theory and practice of UD, its use in
research and development, and its future goals and challenges. Some of
the previous workshops have been co-located with COLING, EMNLP, and
SyntaxFest. We invite papers on all topics relevant to UD, including
but not limited to:
- Theoretical foundations and universal guidelines
- Linguistic analysis of specific languages and/or constructions
- Language typology and linguistic universals
- Treebank annotation, conversion, and validation
- Word segmentation, morphological tagging and syntactic parsing
- Use of UD data for evaluating or understanding language models
- Linguistic studies based on the UD data
Priority will be given to papers that adopt a cross-lingual perspective.
## Important Dates
- Paper submission deadline: February 16, 2026
- Notification of acceptance: March 16, 2026
- Camera-ready version due: March 30, 2026
- Conference dates: May 11-16, 2026
We invite submissions in two formats:
- Regular (long) papers up to 8 pages of content
(excluding references and appendices). Regular papers should present
substantial, original, and unpublished research, including empirical
evaluation results where appropriate.
- Short papers up to 4 pages of content (excluding references and
appendices). Short papers may offer smaller, focused contributions,
such as work in progress, negative results, surveys, or opinion
pieces.
We also welcome non-archival papers, defined as work that has already
been published or accepted for publication at another computational
linguistics venue. These papers may be presented at the workshop but
will not appear in the LREC 2026 Workshop Proceedings.
Accepted papers will be given one additional page to address reviewer
comments.
## Paper Submission, Review Process and Selection Criteria
Submissions will be handled via the START Conference Manager. The
submission link will be provided on the workshop website as soon as it
becomes available. Papers should describe original work; they should
emphasise completed work rather than intended work, and should
indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results.
Submissions will be judged on correctness, originality, technical
strength, significance and relevance to the conference, and interest
to the attendees.
All submissions should follow the two-column LREC style guidelines. We
strongly recommend the use of the LaTeX style files, OpenDocument, or
Microsoft Word templates created for LREC:
<https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/>. Unlike LREC main conference
submissions, UDW submissions are allowed to include appendices, and
the UDW makes a distinction between short (up to four pages) and long
papers (up to eight pages). All papers must be anonymous, i.e., not
reveal author(s) on the title page or through self-references. So,
e.g., “We previously showed (Smith, 2020) …”, should be avoided.
Instead, use citations such as “Smith (2020) previously showed …”.
All papers will undergo a double-blind peer review process, with final
acceptance decisions made by the workshop chairs. Submissions
that violate the requirements above will be rejected without review.
## LRE-Map and Sharing Language Resources
When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to
provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e.
also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been
used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your
research. Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC authors to share the
described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.) to enable their reuse and
replicability of experiments (including evaluation ones).
## Presentation Format
Accepted papers will be presented as oral or poster presentations. The
mode of presentation will be determined by the workshop chairs and
does not reflect the quality of the submission.
Accepted papers will be published in the LREC 2026 Workshop Proceedings.
## Organizing committee
Çağrı Çöltekin, Tübingen University
Kaja Dobrovoljc, University of Ljubljana & Jozef Stefan Institute
Joakim Nivre, Uppsala University
Event: 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages (sign-lang@LREC 2026)
Submission deadline: 14 February 2026
Workshop date: 16 May 2026
Website: https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec2026/
Submission page: tbd
CALL FOR PAPERS
Submissions are invited for a full day workshop on sign language resources and technologies, to take place on 16 May 2026 as a satellite event of LREC 2026 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
During the past years, a number of large-scale sign language corpus projects have started. Some have already been completed, but many more projects are about to start. At the same time, sign language technologies are maturing and are promising to support the time-consuming basic annotation. The workshop aims at bringing together those researchers who already work with multimodal sign language corpora (and those who see the need for empirical underpinnings of their current research) with those who develop sign language technologies. It provides the platform to compare competing approaches.
As sign language resource technologies build to a large extent on methodologies and tools used in the language resource community in general, but add very specific perspectives (e.g. no writing system established, use of video as data source) and works with a different modality of human language, sign language research is able to feed back to the language resource community at large. At the same time, as the raw data are in the visual domain, the field naturally bridges into Computer Vision. Thus, researchers use Machine Learning methods on both visual and linguistic data.
We invite submissions of papers to be presented either on stage (20 minutes plus 10 minutes discussion) or as posters (with or without demonstrations) on the following topics:
2026 SPECIAL TOPIC: LANGUAGE IN MOTION
Motion is at the core of sign languages, both literally, through their existence in the visual-gestural modality, and figuratively, in how their communities drive language change. Equally, sign language research must stay in motion, adapting to new insights and technological possibilities, advancing how we create and use resources, evolving the capabilities of tools, and pushing the boundaries of what can be expected from the field, both technologically and ethically. We especially invite contributions relating to the representation and processing of sign languages that address these various facets of language in motion, but also welcome papers on other general issues relating to sign language resources and technologies.
GENERAL ISSUES ON SIGN LANGUAGE CORPORA AND TOOLS
• Evaluation of sign language resources
• Experiences in building sign language corpora
• Elicitation methodology appropriate for corpus collection
• Proposals for standards for linguistic annotation or for metadata descriptions
• Experiences from linguistic research using corpora
• Use of (parallel) corpora and lexicons in translation studies and machine translation
• Avatar technology as a tool in sign language corpora and corpus data feeding into advances in avatar technology
• Language documentation and long-term accessibility for sign language data
• Annotation and visualization tools
• Linking corpora and lexicons and integrated presentation of corpus and dictionary contents
• “Internet as a corpus” for sign languages
• Sign language corpus mining
• Crowd and community sourcing for corpus work
• Multi-lingual sign language resources and connecting sign language resources to language resources for spoken languages
• Language change and how it relates to resource creation, corpus-driven linguistic research, and language technologies
In the tradition of LREC, oral/signed presentations and poster presentations (with or without demonstrations) have equal status, and authors are encouraged to suggest the presentation format best suited to communicate their ideas. Papers (4–8 pages) of all accepted submissions to this workshop will be published as workshop proceedings published on the conference website – independent of whether you have a poster or an oral/signed presentation. The workshop does not differentiate between long, short, or position papers.
Please submit your paper through the LREC START system (link tbd) not later than 14 February 2026, indicating whether you prefer an oral/signed presentation, a poster presentation or a poster presentation with demo. Unlike the main conference, the workshop will be reviewed single-blind, so submissions SHOULD NOT BE ANONYMOUS. In all other respects, submissions should follow the LREC 2026 style guide (https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/).
ATTENTION Please note that you are expected to submit the full paper, not an extended abstract as in previous years!
IMPORTANT DATES
• Deadline for submissions: 14 February 2026 (11:59PM UTC-12:00 “anywhere on Earth”)
• Notification of acceptance: 16 March, 2026
• Early bird registration ends: tbd
• Camera ready version of the paper (for both oral/signed presentations and posters): 27 March 2026
• Submission of slides for interpreters' preparation (oral/signed presentations only): 6 May 2026
• This workshop: 16 May 2026
• LREC main conference: 13–15 May 2026
• LREC workshops 11, 12 & 16 May 2026
Workshop on Learning Non-Literal Expressions with Small Data
To be held in conjunction with LREC 2026, Palma de Mallorca, Spain on 11
May 2026.
Overview
Non-Literal Expressions (NLEs) in natural language are a reflection of
fundamental cognitive processes such as analogical reasoning and
categorisation, and are deeply rooted in everyday communication. NLEs
understanding is therefore an essential task for language modeling. This
task is especially challenging because it cannot be tackled by falling
back on individual word meanings, but requires taking into account
larger chunks of surrounding text or even contextual information. At the
same time, it is important because the reliable processing of NLEs is
relevant for optimizing downstream tasks like translation and
summarization.
This workshop focuses on understanding of Non-Literal Expressions. While
most of the earlier work on NLEs had been devoted to metaphor and
metonymy, recent activities target other forms of NLEs as well, e.g.,
hyperbole (deliberate exaggeration), litotes (understatement),
rhetorical questions, and irony. Humanly annotated corpora for NLEs have
very recently started becoming available to the research community and
may serve as the basis for data-driven approaches to NLEs processing,
with the interrelated goals of first identifying and then interpreting
such expressions. Such data is mostly of high linguistic quality, but
still very limited in size. Thus, the workshop’s focus is on adaptation
of Language Models (LMs) and Deep Learning (DL) for processing of
Non-Literal Expressions with limited high-quality data, since such
constructs still pose big identification and processing challenges in
natural language analysis tasks.
Topics of Interest
We are interested in contributions which focus on the use of techniques
like self-training for leveraging unlabelled data, as well as in work
that focuses on the incorporation of external linguistic resources and
knowledge injection to enrich features, and also in research that
describes work on utilisation of multitask learning with the aim to
benefit from related tasks.
The workshop also wants to discuss alternative approaches which may
elaborate on the use of pre-trained Language Models (LMs) as a
foundation and the application of techniques like contrastive learning
and clustering to identify challenging examples within the data, the
ultimate aim of the workshop being to highlight the necessity of
high-quality data, as well as cross-lingual datasets.
Invited Speakers
- Prof. Barbara Plank, LMU Munich (https://bplank.github.io/)
- Dr. Debanjan Ghosh, Princeton, USA
Details will be announced on the workshop website (tba).
Submission Guidelines
Papers must be submitted electronically through Softconf: [link to
come]. Submissions should:
• Be 4–8 pages, excluding references and optional Ethics Statements
• Follow the LREC 2026 style guidelines, available on the conference
website: https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/
• Use templates provided here:
https://lrec2026.info/calls/second-call-for-papers/
Authors will be asked to supply information on any language resources
(broadly defined — data, tools, standards, evaluation sets, etc.) used
in or resulting from their work. ELRA strongly encourages sharing such
resources to support reproducibility and reuse.
Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings. Presentation
format (oral/poster) will be based solely on how best to communicate the
work.
Important Dates
• 20 February 2026 — Submission Deadline
• 11 March 2026 — Notification of Acceptance
• 28 March 2026 — Camera-ready Papers Due
Endorsements
The workshop is endorsed by: Collaborative Research Centre 1412
"REGISTER" funded by the DFG Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German
Research Foundation)
Organizers
• Markus Egg — Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
• Valia Kordoni - Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Contact: kordonie at rz.hu-berlin.de
First Call for Papers: Joint Workshop on Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Language Technologies (LEGAL2026) and Computational Approaches to Language Data Pseudonymization, Anonymization, De-identification, and Data Privacy (CALD-pseudo 2026)
Website: https://legal2026.mobileds.de/
We invite submissions to the Joint Workshop on Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Language Technologies (LEGAL2026) and Computational Approaches to Language Data Pseudonymization, Anonymization, De-identification, and Data Privacy (CALD-pseudo 2026), to be held at LREC 2026 on the 12th of May 2026.
Important Dates
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20th of February 2026: paper submission deadline
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30th March 2026: camera ready deadline (strict)
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12th May 2026: workshop date
Introduction
Access to text and speech data is essential for research, yet personal and sensitive information often prevents open sharing. Techniques such as pseudonymization and anonymization offer potential solutions, but their effectiveness, limitations, and impact on data utility require deeper investigation. Balancing privacy protection with meaningful scientific use remains a key challenge.
At the same time, legal and ethical requirements increasingly shape how language resources can be created, processed, and distributed. Regulatory frameworks, such as the GDPR, the Data Act, and the Artificial Intelligence Act, affect access, reuse, and documentation duties for both text and speech data, creating a complex environment that demands interdisciplinary insight.
The workshop brings these two perspectives together by addressing both the technical and practical aspects of de-identification as well as the legal and ethical obligations governing data handling. Topics include anonymization and pseudonymization methods, compliance in practical workflows, provenance and rights tracking, and emerging approaches to legal metadata. The goal is to foster responsible, legally sound, and technically robust innovation in human language technologies.
Topics of Interest
We invite contributions from all disciplines involved in the creation, processing, governance, and de-identification of text and speech data. Submissions may address theoretical, empirical, methodological, legal, or technical questions, including cross-disciplinary work. We particularly encourage research on less-represented languages and on data from under-represented communities.
1. Legal Aspects of Language Data (LEGAL2026)
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Regulatory frameworks and global governance
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Intellectual property, data protection, and LLM governance
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Ethics, fairness, trust, and transparency
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Compliance in practice
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Ethics, fairness, and trust
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Operationalizing compliance
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Emerging and grey areas
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Interdisciplinary and cross-border coordination
2. Pseudonymization, Anonymization, and De-identification: Theoretical, Methodological, and Technical Aspects (CALD-pseudo 2026)
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Detection and classification of personal information (PI)
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Replacement and transformation of PI
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Utility and bias after de-identification
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Approaches to evaluation and adversarial testing
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Dataset creation for de-identification research
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Low-resource scenarios
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Speech-specific challenges
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Cross-disciplinary applications and challenges
We invite submissions from fields where de-identification of data plays an important role, including but not limited to Computational Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Digital Humanities, Social Sciences, Political Sciences, Medical Science etc., from the perspectives of researchers, public organizations, and industry.
Submission Guidelines
Authors are invited to submit original and unpublished research papers in the following categories:
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Long papers (up to 8 pages) for substantial contributions
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Short papers (up to 4 pages) for:
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Small, focused contributions or ongoing or preliminary work
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Extended abstracts for non-technical submissions only, such as conceptual, theoretical, legal, ethical, policy-oriented, or position papers. Extended abstract submissions are expected to be developed into regular papers by the camera-ready submission deadline.
The full papers will be published as workshop proceedings along with the LREC main conference. They should follow the LREC stylesheet, which is available on the conference website on the Author’s kit<https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/> page.
Submission deadline: 20th of February 2026
The submission link will be provided in due time on the workshop website.
When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research.
Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC authors to share the described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.) to enable their reuse and replicability of experiments (including evaluation ones).
Keynote Talks
We are delighted to announce the workshop will host keynote talks from two speakers:
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Paweł Kamocki, Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Germany
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Ivan Habernal, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
Workshop Organizers
LEGAL 2026:
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Ingo Siegert, Otto-von-Guericke Universität Magdeburg, Germany
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Paweł Kamocki, Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Germany
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Kossay Talmoudi, ELDA, France
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Khalid Choukri, ELDA, France
CALD-pseudo 2026
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Maria Irena Szawerna, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
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Simon Dobnik, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
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Therese Lindström Tiedemann, University of Helsinki, Finland
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Pierre Lison, Norwegian Computing Center & University of Oslo, Norway
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Ildikó Pilán, Norwegian Computing Center, Norway
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Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
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Lisa Södergård, University of Helsinki, Finland
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Elena Volodina, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
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Xuan-Son Vu, Lund University & DeepTensor AB, Sweden
Program Committee
A list of program committee members is available on the workshop webpage.
Contact
For general inquiries, please contact mail(a)legal2026.mobiles.de
Best regards,
Maria Irena Szawerna
____________________
PhD student
Språkbanken Text<https://spraakbanken.gu.se/>
Institutionen för svenska, flerspråkighet och språkteknologi<https://www.gu.se/svenska-spraket>
UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG<https://www.gu.se/>
https://spraakbanken.gu.se/om/personal/maria-szawerna