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: https://softconf.com/lrec2026/signlang2026/
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. As in the previous four years, the workshop will be a hybrid event.
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), as posters (with or without demonstrations) or remotely (poster PDF plus text chat) 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
We are pleased to confirm that the workshop will be a hybrid event. Similar to the 2022 and 2024 workshops, all participants will be given access to an online text chat before and during the event to allow remote participants to present their work as well as for discussion of all workshop contributions. On-stage presentations will be live streamed (including International Sign/English interpretation) with opportunity for questions from remote and on-site participants. The live poster sessions will be held on-site only, but posters will be made available online for discussion via text chat.
In the tradition of LREC, oral/signed presentations, poster presentations (with or without demonstrations) and remote presentations 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, remote or oral/signed presentation. The workshop does not differentiate between long, short, or position papers.
Please submit your paper through the LREC START system (https://softconf.com/lrec2026/signlang2026/) not later than 14 February 2026 (any time zone), indicating whether you prefer an oral/signed presentation, a poster presentation, a poster presentation with demo, or a remote poster. 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 • Submission of all slides/posters for the conference platform: 6 May 2026 • Submission of additional material, including demo videos, to be made available alongside with the posters/slides on the conference platform: 6 May 2026 • This workshop: 16 May 2026 • LREC main conference: 13–15 May 2026 • LREC workshops 11, 12 & 16 May 2026