Dear all,
We are organising the 5th Cardiff NLP Summer Workshop, which will take place on 22–23 June 2026 in the Abacws Building in Cardiff (Wales, UK).
The workshop is especially aimed for PhD students and early-career researchers (and anyone interested in NLP). Registration is free for all participants. Please fill in the expression of interest form<https://forms.gle/ypUBEpVhfoUhSgY16> by 11 April if you are interested in joining the workshop.
Workshop activities include:
* Invited speakers from academia and industry.
* Tutorials.
* Poster session and networking.
* Panel discussion.
Important dates:
* Application period: 28 January – 11 April 2026.
* Notification of acceptance: Late April 2026.
* Workshop: 22–23 June 2026, Cardiff.
For more details, please visit the workshop website: https://www.cardiffnlpworkshop.org/.
Best regards,
The Cardiff NLP Organising Team.
1st Call for Papers
2nd International Workshop on Language and Language Models (WoLaLa)
Dubrovnik, Croatia | October 12-13
The ELTE Research Centre for Linguistics, the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Croatian Language Technologies Society invite submissions to the 2nd International Workshop on Language and Language Models. This workshop is designed as a dedicated forum for scholars and practitioners in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) to discuss and evaluate large language models from an SSH perspective, and to share best practices that can advance research and applications within these fields.
Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, the following areas:
General language models: Critical and comparative analyses of state-of-the-art language models, including their linguistic competence, performance, and limitations.
Cultural and linguistic perspectives: Investigations into the cultural, cognitive, and scientific aspects of language processing, including the unexplored territories of model behavior and linguistic capability.
Applications and best practices: Case studies and best practices in applying AI to language research, highlighting the potential for cross-disciplinary innovation within SSH.
Bridging disciplines: Contributions that examine the role of language models in reshaping traditional SSH methodologies, and proposals on integrating AI insights into linguistic inquiry.
IMPORTANT DATES
20 May 2026: Submission deadline
08 August 2026: Notification of acceptance
12 October – 13 October 2026: Workshop in Dubrovnik
15 December 2026: Full paper submission deadline
Submissions
We expect submissions in the form of extended abstracts (length: 3 to 4 pages including references) in PDF format, in accordance with the template (https://www.overleaf.com/read/sbmczvkpxpzz#4a94e3). Please ensure your submission clearly outlines your research question, methodology, and preliminary findings.
Extended abstracts must be submitted through the EasyChair submission system <https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wolala2026> and will be reviewed by the Programme Committee. All proposals will be reviewed on the basis of the following criteria:
Appropriateness: The contribution must pertain to the topics listed above
Soundness and correctness: The content must be technically and factually correct; methods must be scientifically sound, according to best practice, and preferably evaluated.
Meaningful comparison: The abstract must indicate that the author is aware of alternative approaches, if any, and highlight relevant differences.
Substance: Concrete work and experiences will be given preference over ideas and plans.
Impact: Contributions with a higher impact on the research community and society more broadly will be given preference over papers with lower impact.
Clarity: The abstract should be clearly written and well structured.
Timeliness and novelty: The work must convey relevant new knowledge to the audience at this event.
Programme Committee
The Programme Committee for the conference consists of the following members:
Marko Tadić, University of Zagreb, Croatia (chair)
António Branco, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Eva Hajičová, Charles University Prague, Czech Republic
Erhard Hinrichs, University of Tubingen, Germany
András Kornai, HUN-REN Institute for Computer Science and Control, Hungary
Alessandro Lenci, University of Pisa
Csaba Pléh, Central European University, Austria
Gábor Prószéky, ELTE Research Centre for Linguistics & Pázmány Péter Catholic University
Paul Rayson, Lancaster University, United Kingdom
Frédérique Segond, National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology, France
Dan Tufiș, Romanian Academy, Romania
Hans Uszkoreit, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Germany
Tamás Váradi, HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Hungary
Martin Wynne, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
LINKS
2nd International Workshop on Language and Language Models website: https://wolala.nytud.hu <https://wolala.nytud.hu/>
EasyChair submission: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wolala2026
Template for submissions:
ZIP-archive: https://wolala.nytud.hu/templates/WoLaLa2026.zip <https://wolala.nytud.hu/templates/WoLaLa2025.zip>
Overleaf template: <https://www.overleaf.com/read/xsvjrhvjyfmj#f3362f>https://www.overleaf.com/read/prvhqbxdgmxq#374f7b
Contact for any questions regarding the conference: info(a)wolala.nytud.hu
There is a vacancy for a permanent position as Associate Professor at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, at the University of Bergen, Norway.
The position focuses on intelligent information systems, including areas such as natural language processing, neuro‑symbolic methods, semantic technologies, multimedia processing, and ethical and trustworthy AI.
Bergen is a beautiful city surrounded by fjords and mountains, and the position offers generous conditions. Do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.
More information is available in the full announcement here: https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/297764/associate-professor-i…
Kind regards,
Samia
---
Samia Touileb
Associate Professor in Natural Language Processing
Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen
MediaFutures: Research Center for Responsible Media Technology & Innovation
Fagspråksenteret: Centre for Norwegian Professional Language
<Apologies for cross-postings>
--------------------------------------
SECOND CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
--------------------------------------
MIRROR@IberLEF20206: Motivational Interviewing Response & Rating via
Synthetic cOnversational tuRns
https://mirror-iberlef.vercel.app/
Challenge platform now online: https://www.mirror-iberlef.lat/dashboard
Just register, log in, and start making submissions.
-------------------------------
***Task description***
-------------------------------
We invite the community to develop Generative AI (GenAI) methods for
creating synthetic conversation turns that can substantially improve the
performance of models trained to recognize behavior codes (BCs) in the
context of motivational interviews. A BC is a discrete, observable
clinician action (e.g., asking a question, giving information) that is
counted during coding of a motivational interviewing session to quantify
specific techniques used. These codes allow raters to tally how often
particular clinician behaviours occur, which helps assess adherence to
MI-consistent versus MI-inconsistent practice. Our ultimate goal is to
generate valuable data for training models for the automatic assessment
of clinicians’ motivational-interviewing skills. These skills — crucial
for promoting behavior change among patients — can be evaluated by using
the “Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity (MITI)” rubric
(https://tinyurl.com/38byjrwy).
This is a data-centric competition: participants are expected to produce
high-quality datasets representing a wide range of clinical
conversations (rather than training a model) to enhance the performance
of a frozen baseline model used for BC classification. We encourage
participants to include samples featuring clients from diverse
backgrounds, varied conversation topics, and conversing with different
types of health professionals.
Participants in this competition should provide three datasets (one per
pair of considered BCs) of at most 100 labeled conversation turns that
will be used to fine-tune pretrained models; the fine-tuned models will
then be used to make predictions for a hold-out dataset. The performance
of the fine-tuned model will be used as the leading evaluation metric to
rank participants. The considered pairs of BCs are:
(1) Simple reflection vs. Complex reflection;
(2) Open question vs. Closed question;
(3) Persuasion vs. Giving Information.
Sample submissions, and detailed instructions on the formatting,
evaluation criteria and competition platform will be available at the
MIRROR website.
-------------------------------
***Important dates***
-------------------------------
* Mar 9th: Start of the development phase (platform starts receiving
submissions for the validation set)
* May 1st: Start of the final phase (platform starts receiving
submissions for the test set)
* May 11th: End of evaluation campaign (deadline for submission of runs)
* May 22nd; Publication of official results
* Jun 8th: Deadline for paper submission
* Jun 23th: Acceptance notification
* Jun 30th: Camera-ready submission deadline
* Sep, TBD: Publication of proceedings
* Sep, TBD: Workshop with SEPLN 2026
-------------------------------
***Organizing team***
-------------------------------
* Luis J. Arellano INAOE, Mexico
* Carlos Olachea INAOE, Mexico
* John Piette, University of Michigan, USA
* Hugo Jair Escalante, INAOE, Mexico
* Delia Irazú Hernández, INAOE, Mexico
* Luis Villaseñor, INAOE, Mexico
* Manuel Montes, INAOE, Mexico
Contact: Hugo Jair Escalante (hugo.jair(a)gmail.com)
The Paradigm Shift: From Rules to Models in Natural Language Processing
International Summer School
Alicante, Spain, 15, 16 and 17 June 2026
https://summer-school.gplsi.es
Second Call for Participation
Natural Language Processing (NLP) has witnessed a clear paradigm shift:
the transition from rule-based approaches to data-driven language
models. While rule-based approaches dominated NLP for many years, during
the 1990s and early 2000s they gradually gave way to statistical and
machine-learning methods. It would be fair to say that data-driven
models--and, most prominently, Deep Learning (DL), including more
recently Large Language Models (LLMs)--have taken the world by storm.
Deep Learning models are now used almost everywhere, across nearly every
discipline, and Natural Language Processing is no exception. DL has
proved highly promising so far, delivering improvements for almost every
NLP task and application. However, as observed on numerous occasions,
the outputs of DL models are not always ideal, with some studies
reporting cases in which machine-learning approaches do not necessarily
outperform the 'old-fashioned' rule-based ones.
The overarching theme of the summer school will be this paradigm shift,
with lectures and practical sessions reflecting the latest trends at
both theoretical and practical levels. More specifically, the programme
will combine lectures focusing on theoretical foundations with hands-on
practical sessions.
Specific topics will include an Introduction to Large Language Models
(LLMs), Explainable AI in LLMs, Datasets and bias in LLMs, Building
foundational LLMs for low-resource languages, Machine Translation for
Low-Resource Languages, LLMs and sentiment analysis, Model and
hyperparameter optimisation and Eye-tracking and gaze data for NLP and
language models, among others.
The summer school will be ideal for both newcomers and experienced
professionals in NLP, computer science, data science, cybersecurity,
corpus linguistics, language technologies, and related disciplines,
offering a unique opportunity to deepen expertise and engage with the
rapidly evolving world of LLMs.
Panel discussion
A panel discussion on the future of NLP methods and LLMs is scheduled as
part of the summer school. The panel composition is available here:
https://summer-school.gplsi.es/panel/
Venue and dates
The summer school will take place at the research institute of
Informatics of the University of Alicante and will take place on 15, 16
and 17 June 2026.
Keynote speaker
Roberto Navigli (Sapienza University of Rome)
Lecturers
The list of summer school lecturers includes:
Tharindu Ranasinghe (Lancaster University)
Salima Lamsiyah (University of Luxembourg)
Cengiz Acartürk (Jagiellonian University)
Hansi Hettiarachchi (Lancaster University)
Juan Pablo Consuegra Ayala (University of Alicante)
Robiert Sepulveda Torres (University of Alicante)
Alicia Picazo Izquierdo (University of Alicante)
Isuri Anuradha (Lancaster University)
Damith Premasiri (Lancaster University)
Ernesto Luis Estevanell (University of Alicante)
Maram Alharbi (Lancaster University)
Summer school Directors
Tharindu Ranasinghe (University of Lancaster)
Salima Lamsiyah (University of Luxembourg)
Summer School Chair
Ruslan Mitkov (University of Alicante)
Advisory Committee
Manuel Palomar Sanz (University of Alicante)
Rafael Muñoz Guillena (University of Alicante)
Andrés Montoyo Guijarro (University of Alicante)
Organising Committee
Raúl García Cerdá (University of Alicante)
Alicia Picazo Izquierdo (University of Alicante)
Ernesto Luis Estevanell (University of Alicante)
Maram Alharbi (Lancaster University)
Registration
Registration will open in early April 2026. In the meantime, please see
the registration fees here: https://summer-school.gplsi.es/registration/
Related events
The summer school will follow the second international conference
_Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence_ (NLPAICS'2026)
which will take place in Alicante on 11 and 12 June 2026
(https://nlpaics2026.gplsi.es). Those who register for both events will
benefit from a discounted registration fee.
Further information
Further information will be provided in subsequent calls. Alternatively,
interested parties can email summer-school(a)dlsi.ua.es for more
information.
--
Amal Haddad Haddad (She/her)
Facultad de Traducción e Interpretación
Universidad de Granada |https://www.ugr.es/personal/amal-haddad-haddad
Lexicon Research Group |http://lexicon.ugr.es/haddad
Co-Convenor, BAAL SIG 'Humans, Machines,
Language'|https://r.jyu.fi/humala
Event Coordinator, BAAL SIG 'Language, Learning and Teaching'
===============
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[Apologies for cross-posting]
A 2-year research fellowship in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is available in the Language Technology Group (LTG) at the University of Oslo (UiO), Norway.
The position is affiliated with the research project MORALCHANGE<https://www.samfunnsforskning.no/english/projects/aktive/moralchange-eng.ht…>, a cross-disciplinary collaboration between social scientists and NLP researchers exploring how changes in moral values shape political discourse and cultural divides over time.
For more information about the position and the research environment, please see the full announcement here: https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/298838/researcher-in-natural…
Closing date: 5th May 2026
Best regards,
-e
--
Erik Velldal
Language Technology Group
Section for Machine Learning
Department of Informatics, University of Oslo
Final call for papers: CORE Project Workshop @ESSLLI 2026
Referring expression choice in grounded contexts: Linguistic, cognitive,
and computational aspects
ESSLLI 2026 Workshop
3-7 August 2026, Prague, Czech Republic
Extended abstract submission deadline: April 15, 2026
Workshop URL: https://www.upf.edu/web/glif/esslli2026-workshop
ESSLLI 2026 URL: https://2026.esslli.eu
Workshop description:
When we refer to entities and events in our environment, particularly (but
not only) when visual information is present, we have choices. Depending on
what has been said before, who or what else is in a scene, and the
characteristics of what we want to refer to, we might say (among many other
options) "the person running", "the runner", "the woman in the red shirt",
"the one with the glasses", or "them over there". The extent of this
variation in referring expression (RE) choice has become evident in recent
large-scale datasets (Monroe et al. 2017, Silberer et al. 2020, He et al.
2023).
Some of the factors influencing some kinds of choices in RE use have been
amply studied – for example, between full noun phrases and shorter
expressions involving demonstratives or pronouns (Ariel 1990, Gundel et al.
1993 and much later work), or between noun phrases with and without
modification (e.g., Degen et al. 2020, Rubio-Fernandez and Jara-Ettinger
2020, and literature cited there). Others have received less attention –
these include choices among noun phrases that reflect different levels of
taxonomic granularity ("dog" vs. "husky", Graf et al. 2016, Kobrock et al.
2024, Liang and Liao 2024), choices arising from the cross-classifiability
of referents (woman vs. runner, Mädebach et al. 2022, Gualdoni et al.
2023), choices based on salience or contrast (Clarke et al. 2013,
Rubio-Fernández 2024, Bolea et al. to appear) or options for referring to
individuals based on what they are doing or the scenes they appear in
("person running" vs. "runner", Tagliaferri et al. 2023), sometimes with
the goal of producing particular sorts of causal inferences (Sasaki et al.
2025).
The goals of this workshop are 1) to further document and gain insight into
the range of this variation; 2) to highlight its relevance for
semantic/pragmatic theory, for theories of language and cognition, and for
the use of language in computation; and 3) to promote communication and
synergies between researchers at the interfaces of linguistics, cognitive
science, and computation who have studied different aspects of referring
expression choice in grounded contexts.
We welcome contributions on the following and other related questions:
- Cognitive biases that influence tendencies in RE choice in grounded
contexts.
- The role of contrast in RE choice.
- The role of the specific available linguistic alternatives and
alternative-based reasoning in influencing RE choice.
- The information load a referring expression has to bear given
extralinguistic sources of information in the context, especially visual
information.
- Lexical/constructional effects and association strength between RE
options and the referent in question.
- RE variability and language change
Invited speakers:
Raffaella Bernardi (Bolzano)
Laia Mayol (UPF)
Denis Paperno (Utrecht)
Submission guidelines:
Abstracts should be at most two pages in 12pt font (plus up to one extra
page for data and references). Since we want to promote participation and
discussion and no proceedings will be published, workshop submissions are
not limited to unpublished work. We welcome proposals for both long (30
min. + discussion) and short (15 min. + discussion) presentations. We also
plan to devote one day to a poster session accompanied by lightening talks.
Please indicate on your abstract which type(s) of participation you are
interested in.
Submission deadline: March 31, 2026. Submission is through Open Review at:
https://openreview.net/group?id=ESSLLI.eu/2026/Workshop/CORE
Contact email: louise.mcnally(a)upf.edu
Important dates:
Deadline for abstract submission: March 31, 2026
Notification of acceptance: April 30, 2026
Workshop dates: August 3-7, 2026
There is a vacancy for a position as Associate Professor at the Department
of Information Science and Media Studies, at the University of Bergen.
The position focuses on intelligent information systems, including areas
such as natural language processing, neuro‑symbolic methods, semantic
technologies, multimedia processing, and ethical and trustworthy AI.
Bergen is a beautiful city surrounded by fjords and mountains, and the
position offers generous conditions. Do not hesitate to contact me if you
have any questions.
More information is available in the full announcement here:
https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/297764/associate-professor-i…
Kind regards,
Samia
Dear all,
We are pleased to invite you to participate in the MultiLexNorm 2026 shared task, which will be hosted at EMNLP 2026.
Our shared task operates at the word level and focuses on lexical normalization, that is, transforming an utterance into its standard form (e.g., ppl → people) on the word level. It also includes one-to-many (1-to-n) and many-to-one (n-to-1) replacements. Participants will develop systems for lexical normalization across 17 languages.
Building on the previous task, which focused on Indo-European languages written in the Latin script, we now focus on languages written in other scripts, and have new benchmarks for Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese.
The data and more information about the task can be found on: https://noisy-text.github.io/2026/multi-lexnorm.html
Dates:
21-Jul Test data
01-Aug Final Evaluation
20-Aug Paper deadline
05-Sep Paper reviewed
15-Sep Camera ready
TBA Workshop
Best,
The organizers:
Rob van der Goot
Weerayut Buaphet