- Corpora - ELRA lists

Edge Hill Corpus Research Group: Meeting #19
by Costas Gabrielatos 07 Jan '26

07 Jan '26

The next meeting of the Edge Hill Corpus Research Group will take place online (via MS Teams) on Friday 6 February 2026, 2:00-3:30 pm (GMT<https://time.is/United_Kingdom>). Topic: Discourse Oriented Corpus Studies Speaker: Dan Malone<https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Daniel-Malone> (Edge Hill University, UK) Title: From Global Uncertainty to Domestic Danger: The lone wolf terrorist as a topos of threat in (poly)crisis discourses The abstract and registration link are here: https://sites.edgehill.ac.uk/crg/next Attendance is free. Registration closes on Wednesday 4 February. If you have problems registering, or have any questions, please email the organiser, Costas Gabrielatos (gabrielc(a)edgehill.ac.uk<mailto:gabrielc@edgehill.ac.uk>). ________________________________ Edge Hill University<http://ehu.ac.uk/home/emailfooter> Modern University of the Year, The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2022<http://ehu.ac.uk/tef/emailfooter> University of the Year, Educate North 2021/21 ________________________________ This message is private and confidential. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender and remove it from your system. Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Edge Hill or associated companies. Edge Hill University may monitor email traffic data and also the content of email for the purposes of security and business communications during staff absence.<http://ehu.ac.uk/itspolicies/emailfooter>

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Final Call: WebSci'26 Workshops & Tutorials (Jan 9) + Additional Upcoming Deadlines
by Kaiser, Sierra Ann 07 Jan '26

07 Jan '26

Dear colleagues, This is a final reminder that the submission deadline for Workshops and Tutorials at the 18th ACM Web Science Conference 2026<https://websci26.org/> (WebSci’26) is January 9, 2026. WebSci’26 will take place May 26–29, 2026, in Braunschweig, Germany, celebrating the theme “20 Years of Web Science.” Workshops and tutorials will be held on May 26, 2026, the first day of the conference. We invite interdisciplinary workshop and tutorial proposals addressing any topic relevant to the Web Science community, including (but not limited to) the Web and AI, society, methods, ethics, sustainability, misinformation, and emerging research areas. Workshops & Tutorials – Details<https://websci26.org/?page_id=79> * Proposal submission deadline: January 9, 2026 * Notification of acceptance: January 15, 2026 * Workshops & Tutorials Day: May 26, 2026 For questions regarding workshops and tutorials, please contact the chairs: * Eelco Herder (e.herder(a)uu.nl<mailto:e.herder@uu.nl>) * Lydia Manikonda (manikl(a)rpi.edu<mailto:manikl@rpi.edu>) In addition, the following submission options remain open: WebSci Posters - Details<https://websci26.org/?page_id=513> * Submission deadline: February 18, 2026 * Notification: March 11, 2026 * Final version due: April 1, 2026 WebSci PhD Symposium - Details<https://websci26.org/?page_id=81> * Submission deadline: February 18, 2026 * Notification: March 11, 2026 * Final version due: April 1, 2026 * PhD Symposium date: May 26, 2026 We encourage you—and your students and colleagues—to contribute and help shape the discussions at WebSci’26. Best regards, The WebSci’26 Organizing Committee Mastodon<https://bawü.social/@Stuttgart_IRIS> | LinkedIn<https://www.linkedin.com/company/interchange-forum-for-reflecting-on-intell…> | BlueSky<https://bsky.app/profile/unistuttgartiris.bsky.social> |X<https://x.com/WebSciConf>

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IVACS 2026 - Malta - CfP deadline extension
by Christopher.Fitzgerald 07 Jan '26

07 Jan '26

Call for Papers extended to January 23rd IVACS 2026 – Inter-Varietal Applied Corpus Studies Conference 1–3 July 2026 | University of Malta, Valletta, Malta The IVACS Association is pleased to announce that the 12th Biennial IVACS Conference will be hosted by the University of Malta, Valletta Campus, from 1–3 July 2026. The IVACS Conference series is a leading international forum for corpus-based research into linguistic varieties and applications of corpus linguistics in professional, pedagogical, and social contexts. Following the successful series of conferences, IVACS 2026 will continue to build on this tradition of collaboration and innovation. We welcome proposals related to (but not limited to): * Corpus Design & Methodology: compilation, annotation, and representativeness * Applied Contexts: workplace and professional discourse, minority and endangered languages, translation, interpreting, multilingual communication, stylistics * Innovations & Emerging Directions: GenAI tools and platforms, multimodal corpora * Teaching & Learning: corpus applications in pedagogy, data-driven learning, assessment, teacher education, learner corpora, genre-based approaches * Corpus-Informed Materials: pedagogic grammars, textbooks, syllabi design * Theoretical Perspectives: sociolinguistics, pragmatics, critical discourse studies, intercultural communication * Corpus Linguistics and Ethical Practice: Ethical, transparent, and inclusive methods in corpus-based research Submission Details * Individual Papers: 20 minutes presentation + 10 minutes discussion * Colloquia: 90 minutes, consisting of 3 thematically linked papers * Posters: especially suitable for work-in-progress or early-stage projects * Paper, colloquia and poster abstracts should be submitted to ivacs2026(a)um.edu.mt<mailto:ivacs2026@um.edu.mt>. The language of the conference is English. We encourage submission of abstracts from early-career researchers, including postgraduate research students and postdoctoral researchers. Abstract specifications for Individual Papers and Posters: * 250 – 350 words in length (including references, if any) * Written in Times New Roman font and saved as a docs file * Page 1 will include: Title; Presenter(s); Affiliation(s); Email address(es), plus abstract * Page 2 will be anonymised and will include: Title and abstract only Abstract specifications for Colloquia: * A maximum of 1,000 words in length (not including list of references) * A single abstract on behalf of all speakers on the panel, detailing the overall motivation for the panel, individual contributions, and the proposed panel structure * Written in Times New Roman font and saved as a docs file * Page 1 will include: Theme for the panel; Title of each contribution; Presenters; Affiliations; Email addresses, plus abstracts * Page 2 will be anonymised and will include: Titles and abstracts only Important Dates * Abstract submission opens: 1 October 2025 * Abstract submission deadline: 23 January 2026 (23:59 UTC) * Notification of acceptance: Early March 2026 * Early-bird registration deadline: April 2026 * Conference dates: 1–3 July 2026 Séanadh Ríomhphoist / Email Disclaimer https://www.mic.ul.ie/about-mic/college-services/ict-services?index=5

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Call for Papers: Ethical and Technical Challenges for Identity-Aware NLP
by Neele Falk 07 Jan '26

07 Jan '26

Dear all, We are organizing a workshop co-located with LREC 2026 on Identity Aware NLP. The details are as follows: ===================================================================== FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS Ethical and Technical Challenges for Identity-Aware NLP Workshop at LREC 2026, Palma de Mallorca, Spain, May 11-16, 2026 https://identity-aware-ai.github.io/ ===================================================================== *Workshop Theme:* What makes each of us unique, and which ethical and technical challenges does this imply? *OVERVIEW* What makes us unique? Language (and thus the automatic processing of it) is about people and what they mean. However, current practice relies on the assumptions that the involved humans are all the same, and that if enough data (and compute power) is present, the resulting generalizations will be robust enough and represent the majority. This approach often harms marginalized communities and ignores the notion of identity in models and systems. Our interdisciplinary workshop aims to raise the question of "what makes each of us unique?" to the NLP community. *WORKSHOP GOALS* - The development of a shared and interdisciplinary understanding of identities and how identity is treated in AI - The development of new methods that push the effective, fair, and inclusive treatment of individuals in AI to the next level *TOPICS OF INTEREST* We invite submissions on the following topics: *Modeling subjective phenomena and disagreement: *Personalization and perspectivist methods that challenge one-size-fits-all approaches by leveraging disaggregated data and annotator metadata. Methods that learn from disagreements rather than forcing consensus that erases unique perspectives. *Auditing and evaluating identity representation:* Techniques to measure how well models represent diverse identities, diagnose failures in capturing marginalized perspectives, and assess whether systems treat all identities equitably. Frameworks for identity-aware performance evaluation beyond aggregate metrics. *Bias detection and fairness interventions: *Methods to identify when models fail marginalized groups due to over-generalization, and techniques to mitigate such harms while preserving model utility. *Identity representation in LLMs: *How language models encode (or erase) diverse identities, embody particular perspectives, and either reproduce or challenge stereotypes. Measuring LLMs' capacity for reasoning about identities beyond majority groups. *Socio-political applications: *Modeling polarization, opinion formation, and deliberation in ways that account for identity rather than assuming homogeneous populations. How identity-aware approaches improve accuracy for politically sensitive tasks. *Methodological foundations from social sciences:* Best practices from psychology and survey science for measuring identity constructs (values, morals, narratives). Addressing challenges of using LLMs to model diverse populations while avoiding erasure through aggregation. *Accountability and responsible development: *Ethical responsibilities when building systems that represent (or exclude) identities. Making AI development processes accountable to marginalized communities most affected by over-generalization. *SUBMISSION TYPES* We welcome the following types of submissions: * Long papers: 4-8 pages of content (excluding references) * Short papers: 4-8 pages of content (excluding references) * Non-archival submissions, student project presentations, mixed-media submissions For non-archival submissions, we welcome creative formats including: - Art, poetry, music - Blog posts - Jupyter notebooks - Teaching materials - Videos - Findings papers - Late-breaking papers - Extended abstracts For creative format submissions, please submit a PDF containing: - A summary or abstract of your work - A link to your work (if hosted externally) - Any additional context or documentation *SUBMISSION GUIDELINES * * All submissions will be double-blind reviewed * Submissions should follow LREC 2026 formatting guidelines available at: https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/ * Papers must be 4-8 pages in length (excluding references) * Papers must include ethics and limitations sections * NO appendices are allowed * Submission link will be provided in the Second Call for Papers * Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings *WORKSHOP FORMAT* The workshop will be a half-day event featuring: - Keynote speeches from leading experts in the field - Paper presentations (oral and lightning talks) - Participatory design activity to develop a shared interdisciplinary vocabulary, identify current gaps in datasets for studying identity, and design a vision for collecting new datasets We are committed to ensuring that our workshop is accessible to all. The workshop will be held in a hybrid format, allowing both in-person and virtual participation. *IMPORTANT DATES* All deadlines are 11:59 PM AoE (Anywhere on Earth) * Submission Deadline: February 20, 2026 * Notification of Acceptance: March 20, 2026 * Camera-Ready Deadline: March 30, 2026 * Workshop Date: 16 May 2026 (exact date TBA) *DIVERSITY & INCLUSION * We actively encourage submissions from underrepresented communities and countries. The workshop organizers will provide mentorship and thorough feedback, especially to first-time authors and reviewers. * ORGANIZERS* Pranav A (University of Hamburg) Valerio Basile (University of Turin) Neele Falk (University of Stuttgart) David Jurgens (University of Michigan) Gabriella Lapesa (GESIS, Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences & Heinrich-Heine University of Düsseldorf) Anne Lauscher (University of Hamburg) Soda Marem Lo (University of Turin) *CONTACT* For queries, please contact: identity-aware-ai(a)googlegroups.com

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[CFP] Sci-ImageMiner Competition 2026: Scientific Figure Understanding -- 1st call
by D'Souza, Jennifer 06 Jan '26

06 Jan '26

The 1st Sci-ImageMiner Competition: Information Extraction from Scientific Figures in Materials Science Focus: Quantitative plots from Atomic Layer Deposition and Etching (ALD/E) research Organized as part of the ICDAR 2026 Competition track <https://icdar2026.org/index.php/call-for-competitions/> <https://icdar2026.org/index.php/competitions/> https://icdar2026.org/index.php/competitions/ <https://icdar2026.org/index.php/call-for-competitions/> ICDAR 2026 - The 20th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition 30 Aug - 04 Sep 2026 | Vienna, Austria Sci-ImageMiner Competition Website: <https://sites.google.com/view/sci-imageminer/> https://sites.google.com/view/sci-imageminer/ Overview Scientific figures often contain critical results that never appear explicitly in the text. Despite recent advances in multimodal large language models, most existing benchmarks rely on generic or synthetic visuals. Sci-ImageMiner addresses this gap by introducing a curated benchmark grounded in authentic scientific figures from a specialized scientific domain. Tasks The competition hosts four tasks: 1. Figure Classification - identify the chart or figure type 2. Data Table Extraction - reconstruct the underlying tabular data from quantitative plots 3. Figure Summarization - generate concise, factual summaries of key trends 4. Visual Question Answering (VQA) - answer scientific questions requiring reasoning over figure content Teams may participate in any subset of tasks (including all four). Data & Evaluation * A trial dataset is available now to familiarize participants with the data and annotations. * The full dataset will be released in stages (training, development, blind test). * All evaluations will be conducted on Codabench, with per-task leaderboards. Important Dates (selected) * Trial data release: 8 December 2025 * Evaluation start: 3 March 2026 * Evaluation end: 3 April 2026 * Paper submission deadline: 17 April 2026 * Camera-ready deadline: 4 May 2026

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3rd Int. Workshop on Natural Scientific Language Processing (NSLP) 2026: 2nd CFP
by Georg Rehm 06 Jan '26

06 Jan '26

3rd International Workshop on Natural Scientific Language Processing (NSLP 2026) 12 May 2026 – Co-located with LREC 2026 Palma, Mallorca (Spain) NSLP 2026 features two shared tasks: * ClimateCheck 2026: Scientific Fact-Checking of Social Media Claims * SOMD 2026: Software Mention Detection & Coreference Resolution NSLP 2026 – important dates: * Submission deadline: 20 February 2026 * Notifications: 13 March 2026 * Camera-ready: 30 March 2026 NSLP 2026 website (including the shared tasks): * https://nfdi4ds.github.io/nslp2026 Scientific research has witnessed a steep growth rate over the last decades. The number of scholarly publications is growing exponentially, and doubles every 15-17 years. Consequently, both general and specialised repositories, databases, knowledge graphs, and digital libraries have been developed to publish and manage scientific artifacts. Examples include the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph (S2AG), PubMed Central and also the ACL Anthology. These resources enable the collection, reuse, tracking, and expansion of scientific findings, and facilitate downstream applications such as scientific search engines. However, in order to develop robust systems that deal with scholarly text, various challenges need to be addressed. The current status quo of scientific communication mostly includes scholarly articles as unstructured PDF documents, which are not machine-readable in the sense that relevant scientific information can be extracted easily, thus making extracting and utilising this information as part of the scientific process a laborious and time-consuming task. Developing methods for converting unstructured information into structured formats is one of the major challenges in the field of Natural Scientific Language Processing (NSLP). This goal encompasses related challenges such as detecting, disambiguating, and linking mentions of scientific artifacts (e.g., software tools or specific datasets or language resources), and tracking state-of-the-art models and their evaluation scores (including new versions of existing models). Extracting and managing heterogeneous scientific knowledge effectively remains a challenging ongoing research area. Existing efforts are often fragmented, addressing separate issues with distinct datasets and conceptual approaches. NSLP 2026 addresses current topics and issues in Natural Scientific Language Processing. It is proposed and organised with the support of NFDI for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (NFDI4DS), a long-term project with approx. 20 partners who work towards building a German national research data infrastructure for DS and AI. The workshop aims to further bring together the international community of researchers who work on NSLP and related topics (including research knowledge graphs), to discuss current issues and possible solutions. NSLP 2026 includes two keynote speakers and presentations of accepted papers (oral and poster presentations), as well as three shared tasks. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to * Scientific LLMs – LLMs for NSLP * Language resources (LRs) and Language technologies (LTs) for NSLP beyond LLMs * Research Knowledge Graphs (RKGs), Scientific Knowledge Graphs (SKGs) and other forms of structured representation of research-related knowledge * Information extraction from scholarly articles * Extraction of research information from texts * Detection and disambiguation of mentions of datasets, tasks, software or other methods * Classification of scholarly articles (collections, single documents, parts of documents) * Information extraction for RKGs * Summarisation of scholarly articles * Scholarly IR and scientific search engines * Question answering over scientific knowledge * Metadata and cataloging * Cross-lingual and multilingual natural scientific language processing * Adaptation of NLP methods for NSLP purposes Important Dates * Paper submission deadline: 20 February 2026 (not to be extended) * Notification of acceptance: 13 March 2026 * Camera-ready submission: 30 March 2026 * Workshop: 12 May 2026 Submission Guidelines The NSLP 2026 workshop invites submissions of: regular long papers; short papers; position papers. We especially encourage submissions from junior researchers and students from diverse backgrounds. * Note that we will not accept work that is under review or has already been published in or accepted for publication in a journal, another conference, or another workshop. * The workshop invites anonymous submissions of regular long papers (up to 8 pages without references and appendix); short papers as well as position papers (up to 4 pages without references and appendix) presenting, for example, negative results, in-progress projects, or demos. * Authors are permitted to include an optional appendix of up to 2 pages. However, reviewers will not be mandated to review the appendix and all papers must be self-contained. * Reviewing will be performed double-blind, i.e., submissions must be anonymous. Reviewers will not actively try to identify the authors. * Submissions must be in PDF, formatted in the LREC 2026 style. * The proceedings of this workshop will be published in the ACL Anthology (full Open Access) as part of the LREC 2026 proceedings. * At least one author per contribution must register for the workshop for presentation. * All submissions are done via START: https://softconf.com/lrec2026/NSLP2026/ When submitting a paper through START, the 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 Speakers * Iryna Gurevych, TU Darmstadt, Germany * Yufang Hou, ITU Austria, Austria Shared Tasks 1. ClimateCheck 2026: Scientific Fact-Checking of Social Media Claims The rise of climate discourse on social media offers new channels for public engagement but also amplifies mis- and disinformation. As online platforms increasingly shape public understanding of science, tools that ground claims in trustworthy, peer-reviewed evidence are necessary. The new iteration of ClimateCheck builds on the results and insights from the 2025 iteration (run at SDP 2025/ACL 2025), offering the following subtasks: Subtask 1: Abstract retrieval and claim verification: given a claim and corpus of publications, retrieve the top 10 most relevant abstracts and classify each claim-abstract pair as supports, refutes, or not enough information. Subtask 2: Disinformation narrative classification: given a claim, predict which climate disinformation narrative exists according to a predefined taxonomy. New training data will be released for both tasks, with task 1 having triple the amount of the last iteration. The new iteration will focus on sustainability, emphasising the need to build climate-friendly NLP systems with minimal environmental impact. Shared task co-organisers: Raia Abu Ahmad, Aida Usmanova, Max Upravitelev, Georg Rehm 2. SOMD 2026: Software Mention Detection & Coreference Resolution Understanding software mentions is crucial for reproducibility and to interpret experimental results. Citations of software are often informal, lacking the use of persistent identifiers, making it hard to infer and disambiguate knowledge about software efficiently. This task will build on SOMD 2025 (run at SDP 2025, co-located with ACL 2025) and focus on entity disambiguation as an under-investigated problem in this context. More precisely, we address the task of coreference resolution of software mentions across multiple documents, i.e. given a set of software mentions extracted from multiple scientific publications, cluster these mentions so that all software mentions in a particular cluster refer to the same real world software. We define three subtasks with varying challenges: Subtask 1: Software coreference resolution over gold standard mentions. Addresses the task based on high-quality (gold standard) mentions of software that are expert-annotated in multiple publications. Subtask 2: Software coreference resolution over predicted mentions. Addresses the task on software mentions that are automatically extracted using a baseline model, i.e. reflecting a typical information extraction scenario, where upstream pipelines (such as entity and metadata extraction) are imperfect. Subtask 3: Software coreference resolution at scale. Addresses the task using predicted mentions of software and metadata at a larger scale. This challenges models to scale effectively, maintain accuracy, and distinguish among an increasingly dense field of similar or overlapping software mentions. Shared task co-organisers: Sharmila Upadhyaya, Stefan Dietze, Frank Krüger, Wolfgang Otto Organisers * Georg Rehm (Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz & Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany) – main contact: <georg.rehm(a)dfki.de> * Stefan Dietze (GESIS Leibniz Institut für Sozialwissenschaften, Cologne & Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany) * Danilo Dessí (University of Sharjah, UAE) * Diana Maynard (University of Sheffield, UK) * Sonja Schimmler (Technical University of Berlin & Fraunhofer FOKUS, Germany) Programme Committee * Marcel Ackermann, Lernzentrum Informatik (LZI), DBLP, Germany * Raia Abu Ahmad, Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI), Germany * Tilahun Abedissa Taffa, University of Hamburg, Germany * Ekaterina Borisova, Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI), Germany * Davide Buscaldi, LIPN, CNRS, University Paris 13, France * Leyla Jael Castro, ZB MED Information Centre for Life Sciences, Germany * Mathieu d’Aquin, Université de Lorraine, France * Jennifer D’Souza, TIB Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, Germany * Catherine Faron, Université Côte d’Azur, France * Dayne Freitag, SRI International, USA * Paul Groth, University of Amsterdam, TheNetherlands * Leonhard Hennig, Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI), Germany * Inma Hernandez, University of Seville, Spain * Robert Jäschke, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany * Petr Knoth, Open University, UK * Frank Krüger, Wismar University of Applied Sciences, Germany * Julia Lane, NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, USA * Andrea Mannocci, CNR-ISTI, Italy * Natalia Manola, OpenAIRE, Greece * Mirko Marras, University of Cagliari, Italy * Philipp Mayr-Schlegel, GESIS Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany * Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Common Crawl Foundation, USA * Wolfgang Otto, GESIS Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany * Haris Papageorgiou, R.C. Athena, Greece * Silvio Peroni, University of Bologna, Italy * Simone Ponzetto, Univ. of Mannheim, Germany * Diego Reforgiato Recupero, University of Cagliari, Italy * Harald Sack, FIZ Karlsruhe, Germany * Angelo Salatino, The Open University, UK * Philipp Schaer, TH Köln (University of Applied Sciences), Germany * Atsuhiro Takasu, University of Tokyo, Japan * Stefani Tsaneva, WU Wien, Austria * Ricardo Usbeck, Leuphana University, Germany * Thanasis Vergoulis, R.C. Athena, Greece

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CfP: FLAIRS-39 Track on Normative Reasoning for Agentic AI (NORA)
by Davide LIGA 06 Jan '26

06 Jan '26

Dear Colleagues, We invite submissions for the Normative Reasoning for Agentic AI (NORA) special track at the 39th International FLAIRS Conference, to be held 17-20 May 2026 in Marco Island, Florida. The goal of the NORA special track is to advance research on how norms can shape, guide, and explain agentic behavior in AI systems. It aims to bring together scholars exploring formal models of norms and deontic reasoning with those developing applied approaches to norm-aware, agent-based, collaborative, and responsible AI. By fostering dialogue between logic-based, data-driven, and human-centered perspectives, the track seeks to bridge theoretical foundations and practical implementations of normative reasoning across diverse domains such as multi-agent systems, reinforcement learning, robotics, security, law, and AI ethics. The track welcomes both established scholars and early-career researchers from diverse AI domains who wish to explore how normative approaches can enrich and support contemporary AI research. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): * Formal and computational models of normative reasoning * Norm-aware and norm-adaptive agents (including agents for coordination, negotiation, and institution design) * Normative alignment and behavioral conformity in agentic and adaptive AI systems * Normative reasoning in multi-agent interaction, collaboration, and collective decision-making * Dialogue and interaction protocols for proposing, contesting, and revising norms * Learning, planning, and control under normative constraints (reinforcement learning, safe exploration, and compliance by design) * Automated normative reasoning for verification, monitoring, and compliance checking * Normative reasoning in robotics, embodied and hybrid agents, and practical decision making * Causal reasoning and norms (responsibility, accountability, blame/credit assignment, and trust) * Normative explainability and interpretability (e.g., argumentation- or deontic-based explanations) * Translation of natural-language norms into formal or executable specifications * Applications of normative reasoning in law, security, machine ethics, and AI governance For full details on the track and how to submit see the track website: https://sites.google.com/view/flairs-nora/ Important Dates * Abstract submission deadline: January 19, 2026 (Abstract is required to submit full paper.) * Paper submission deadline: January 26, 2026 * Paper acceptance notifications: March 9, 2026 * Camera ready version due: April 6, 2026 Types of submissions The track is accepting three types of paper submissions: * Full papers (up to 6 pages excluding references) * Short papers (up to 4 pages excluding references) * Posters (up to 2 pages excluding references) Proceedings The proceedings of FLAIRS-39 will be published by Florida Online Journals (https://journals.flvc.org/) which is indexed in DBLP and Scopus. Paper submission Papers must use the <https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MZDlUkHPxAUVe4nenFm0_FoOtJPLNqsh/view> FLAIRS-39 template<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MZDlUkHPxAUVe4nenFm0_FoOtJPLNqsh/view> and must be submitted as a PDF. We look forward to your contributions! The NORA Track Chairs Réka Markovich, University of Luxembourg, reka.markovich(a)uni.lu<mailto:reka.markovich@uni.lu> Leon van der Torre, University of Luxembourg, leon.vandertorre(a)uni.lu Davide Liga, University of Luxembourg, davide.liga(a)uni.lu Luca Pasetto, University of Luxembourg, luca.pasetto(a)uni.lu Liuwen Yu, Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, liuwen.yu(a)list.lu

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PsyDefDetect shared task (co-located with BioNLP @ ACL 2026) - call for participation
by Paul Thompson 06 Jan '26

06 Jan '26

PsyDefDetect invites researchers to tackle a novel challenge at the intersection of Clinical Psychology and Natural Language Processing: detecting and classifying psychological defense mechanisms in emotional support dialogues. Grounded in the clinically validated Defense Mechanism Rating Scales (DMRS) framework, this shared task aims to advance the understanding of unconscious defensive functioning in text. Shared task website: https://psydefdetect-shared-task.github.io/ Discord server: https://discord.com/invite/AhuspeXNkM Google group: https://groups.google.com/g/psydefdetect RedNote: https://xhslink.com/m/34ddMoz7E4L Evaluation Platform (Codabench): https://www.codabench.org/competitions/12124/ Task Overview Psychological defenses are the “immune system” of the mind, shaping what speakers disclose and how they accept or resist help. Despite their critical role in mental health and counseling, defensive functioning remains largely unmodeled in current emotional support conversation systems. This shared task invites participants to bridge the gap between clinical theory and NLP by analyzing the PSYDEFCONV dataset. Participants will work with multi-turn dialogues to identify the specific defense level of a target utterance given its context. The goal is to develop models that can recognize subtle, context-dependent defensive maneuvers—ranging from adaptive coping to immature distortion. Data and Labels PSYDEFCONV is the first conversational dataset annotated with defense levels based on the DMRS. The dataset is constructed from a stratified subset of the ESConv corpus to ensure diverse coverage of problem types and emotions. The corpus contains 200 dialogues and 4,709 total utterances, including 2,336 help-seeker turns annotated for defense levels. Participants must classify utterances into 9 categories, comprising seven hierarchical levels of defensive maturity and two auxiliary labels. Key Challenge Capturing subtle linguistic cues of deep-seated psychological mechanisms within highly informal and context-dependent emotional dialogues. Timeline This preliminary timeline is subject to change. Follow our website and channels for updates. Dec 15 2025: Task announced. Dec 20 2025: Task Launch on CodaBench. Mar 15 2026: Start of evaluation period. Apr 05 2026: End of evaluation period. TBA: Paper submission. TBA: Author notifications. TBA: Camera ready due. Baseline and Evaluation Metrics Baseline runs and official metrics are published on our CodaBench Page (https://www.codabench.org/competitions/12124/) Organizers Hongbin Na, University of Technology Sydney Zimu Wang, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University Zhaoming Chen, University of Utah Yining Hua, Harvard University Rena Gao, The University of Melbourne Kailai Yang, The University of Manchester Ling Chen, University of Technology Sydney Wei Wang, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University Shaoxiong Ji, ELLIS Institute Finland & University of Turku John Torous, Harvard University Sophia Ananiadou, The University of Manchester & ELLIS Manchester -- Paul Thompson Research Fellow Department of Computer Science National Centre for Text Mining Manchester Institute of Biotechnology University of Manchester 131 Princess Street Manchester M1 7DN UK http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/Paul.Thompson/

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International Conference on Software and Systems Reuse, Product Lines, and Configuration (VARIABILITY 2026): First Call for Research Papers (2nd Round)
by Announce 06 Jan '26

06 Jan '26

*** First Call for Research Papers (2nd Round) *** International Conference on Software and Systems Reuse, Product Lines, and Configuration (VARIABILITY 2026) 29 September - 2 October 2026, 5* St. Raphael Resort and Marina Limassol, Cyprus https://conf.researchr.org/home/variability-2026 The International Conference on Software and Systems Reuse, Product Lines, and Configuration (VARIABILITY 2026) invites high-quality contributions from researchers and practitioners in software engineering, systems engineering, and related disciplines focussing on a broad spectrum of methods, concepts, and tools for variability. VARIABILITY aims to be the premier forum for the exchange of ideas, experiences, and results in all aspects of software and systems variability management, reuse, software configuration, and customization. As software and systems become increasingly configurable, reusable, and adaptable, managing their variability across all lifecycle phases is more critical—and more challenging —than ever. VARIABILITY 2026 seeks to bring together the diverse communities that address these challenges from theoretical, technical, and practical perspectives. VARIABILITY results from a merge of three prominent conferences focussing on software and systems variability, configuration and reuse: SPLC (the International Systems and Software Product Line Conference, 29 successful editions), VaMoS (the International Working Conference on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems, 19 successful editions), and ICSR (the International Conference on Systems and Software Reuse, 22 successful editions). VARIABILITY is by design open as a conference. It welcomes new fields of variability- intensive research, such as artificial intelligence, hybrid software-hardware systems, etc. For this first edition of VARIABILITY, we strive to continue the success of the predecessor conferences ICSR, SPLC, and VaMoS by welcoming high-quality submissions for the research track in numerous closely related areas, such as systems and software product lines, systems and software reuse, configurable systems and software, product configuration, and systems and software variability. We will award the best research paper and the best artifact paper. Topics of Interest We invite contributions on variability management, reuse, and configuration across all phases of the software and systems lifecycle. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Requirements & Domain Engineering • Domain analysis and variability modeling • Decision modeling and support • Customization and personalization specification • Requirements variability and traceability Architecture & Design • Variability-aware software architectures • Architecture-centric product line engineering • Model-driven engineering (MDE) • Multi-product lines, program families, product lines of product lines, software ecosystems Implementation & Code Generation • Generative programming and code synthesis • Modularization techniques for reusable code • Programming languages and frameworks for variability • Open-source strategies for software reuse Testing, Verification & Quality Assurance • Testing and analysis of configurable systems • Safety and security in variable systems • Formal Methods for Software Product Lines • Non-functional properties: quality-aware analysis, quality-driven configuration • Reuse in testing, verification, and quality assurance Evolution, Maintenance & Operation • Refactoring and restructuring of configurable systems • Reverse engineering, variability mining, and refactoring • Runtime variability and dynamic (software) product lines • Maintenance strategies for large-scale reused systems • Variability in DevOps and CI/CD pipelines AI and Data-Driven Methods • Machine learning for variability management • AI-assisted product configuration • Data and repository mining from product lines and configuration histories • Recommendation systems for reuse and customization Publication of Proceedings Accepted papers will be published in the VARIABILITY 2026 proceedings by Springer in the LNCS series. Submission Guidelines Paper Types We invite the following types of submissions: • Full Papers (up to 18 pages excluding references): Research papers must present original, unpublished work with validated results through empirical evaluation, formal analysis, or implementation-based experiments. Submissions must clearly articulate the problem, its relevance, the proposed contribution, and validation results. • Short Papers (6 - 8 pages excluding references): Short papers present early-stage research, novel ideas, or conceptual proposals that are not yet fully developed or validated but offer promising directions. These papers should articulate the vision, motivation, and potential impact. Formatting Papers must use the Springer LNCS template according to: https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-gu… Springer provides author guidelines that should be consulted for further details: https://resource-preview-cms.springernature.com/springer-cms/rest/v1/conten… Submission Link Submissions should be made via Easy Chair, selecting the research track: https://easychair.org/conferences?conf=variability2026 Paper Originality, Double-Anonymous Policy, Reviewing All papers must be original and not under review elsewhere. Submissions will be double- anonymous and reviewed by at least three experts. Submissions will be evaluated based on their novelty, relevance, rigor, transparency, and presentation. Authors of submissions to the first deadline might be invited to submit a revision of their papers to the second deadline, which will be reviewed as a revision. Revisions Research-track papers can be submitted to the first or second cycle. In the first cycle, papers can receive the following decisions: accept, revision, or reject. Revision means that the reviewers believe that the paper has potential, but that its quality or contribution is not yet ready for publication. Such papers are offered lightweight shepherding by a community member, who is not necessarily a PC member or reviewer. Revised papers should be submitted to the second cycle together with a response letter, explaining how the reviewer comments were addressed. They are then reviewed by the same PC members. Papers rejected in the first cycle can be resubmitted in the second cycle, but need to contain an appendix “Changes to First-Cycle Submission” at the end of the PDF (after references, regardless of the page limit) that lists the major changes in bullet-point format. Best Paper Awards Springer will sponsor the awards for bet papers with an overall amount of €1000. Journal Special Issue Selected accepted papers will be invited to submit extended versions with at least 30% additional and original material, to be published in a special issue in a reputable Software Engineering journal (currently under negotiation). Important Dates (AoE) • Paper Submission Deadline (2nd Round): 2 April 2026 • Notification of Acceptance (2nd Round): 1 June 2026 • Camera-Ready Deadline: 15 July 2025 • Author Registration: 15 July 2025 Organisation General Chairs • George A. Papadopoulos, University of Cyprus, Cyprus • Gilles Perrouin, FNRS & University of Namur, Belgium Research Track Chairs • Thorsten Berger, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany • Ina Schaefer, KIT, Germany Industry Track Chairs • Shaukat Ali, Simula Research Lab and Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway • Martin Becker, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany Journal First Track Chairs • Mathieu Acher, University Rennes, Inria, CNRS, IRISA, France • Xhevahire Tërnava, LTCI, Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France Doctoral Symposium Track Chairs • Rick Rabiser, LIT CPS, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria • Iris Reinhartz-Berger, University of Haifa, Israel Demos and Tools Track Chairs • Sandra Greiner, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark • Leopoldo Teixeira, Federal University of Pernambuco Projects Showcase Chairs • Daniel Struber, Chalmers, University of Gothenburg, Radbound University, Sweden • Dalila Tamzalit, Nantes Université, France Hall of Fame Chairs • Martin Becker, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany • Goetz Botterweck, Lero - The Irish Software Research Centre and University of Limerick, Ireland • Natsuko Noda, Shibaura Institute of Technology, Japan Workshops Chairs • Lidia Fuentes, Universidad de Malaga, Spain • Malte Lochau, University of Siegen, Germany Tutorials Chairs • Loek Cleophas, Eindhoven University of Technology and Stellenbosch University, The Netherlands • Mahsa Varshosaz, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark Proceedings Chair • Sophie Fortz, King's College London, UK Publicity Chairs • Wesley Assunção, North Carolina State University, USA • Kentaro Yoshimura, Hitachi Ltd, Japan Local Organiser and Finance Chair • George A. Papadopoulos, University of Cyprus, Cyprus

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CFP: Sixth Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (LT-EDI-2026) at ACL 2026
by Bharathi Raja Asoka Chakravarthi 05 Jan '26

05 Jan '26

*Sixth Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (LT-EDI-2026)* at The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2026 Place: San Diego, California, United States Link: https://sites.google.com/view/lt-edi-2026/home Tagline: Towards Fair and Inclusive Language Technologies for All. Call for Papers: Following the success of the first five editions of the LTEDI 2026 workshop (LDK 2025, EACL 2024, RANLP 2023, ACL 2022. EACL 2021), the workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners working on NLP, LLMs and other AI fields with social scientists and interdisciplinary researchers. LT-EDI-2026 invites theoretical, empirical, and applied papers from the Natural Language Processing (NLP), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and interdisciplinary communities particularly those focusing on bias in language technologies. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: - Datasets, and Benchmarks for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion - - - - Construction and annotation of datasets for EDI, including benchmarks for bias detection and mitigation. - Compilation of resources curated for fairness, inclusivity, and accessibility. - Methodologies for annotating intersectional identities (gender, race, disability, religion, sexual orientation, etc.). - Bias Detection and Mitigation in LLMs - - - - Techniques for identifying, measuring, and mediating gender, racial, disability, and other societal biases in NLP and LLMs. - The impact of bias in deployed NLP/LLM systems - Gender-neutral modeling and representational fairness in LLMs - Detection and mitigation of intersectional biases including gender, racial, gender identity, disability, and other societal biases. - Advances in bias mitigation in large language models: in-context learning, prompt engineering, conditional text generation, and adversarial training. - Inclusive Language and Counter-Narratives for LLMs - - - - Algorithms and resources for inclusive language generation with LLMs. - Counter-narrative modeling for combating toxicity, hate speech, and misinformation targeting marginalized communities. - Dialogue systems and multi-agent approaches that align with inclusivity goals. - Human-in-the-loop and participatory strategies for enhancing inclusiveness. - Multilingual and Multicultural Approaches for LLMs - - - - Multicultural and multilingual LLMs and approaches - Speech and language recognition for minority and under-resourced groups - Code-mixed and cross-lingual approaches for inclusive technologies - Responsible, Explainable, and Trustworthy LLMs for EDI - - - - Detecting and mitigating hallucinations, misinformation, and toxicity in LLM systems - Explainable and trustworthy LLMs - Evaluation frameworks incorporating ethics, accountability, and transparency - Direct paper submission deadline: March 5, 2026 - Pre-reviewed ARR commitment deadline: March 24, 2026 - Notification of acceptance: April 28, 2026 - Camera-ready paper due: May 12, 2026 - Pre-recorded video due (hard deadline): June 4, 2026 - Workshop dates: July 2-3, 2026

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