2nd Call for Papers and Mentorship Provision
Dialects in NLP: A Resource Perspective (DialRes-LREC26)
Workshop at LREC 2026 — Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Dialectal and non-standard varieties pose persistent challenges for linguistic resource development. While in-depth study and large-scale resource creation for dominant or standard varieties have driven major advances in language technology, linguistic resources that adequately represent dialectal variation remain scarce. It therefore remains an open question whether standard-centric practices address dialectal variation or instead create new problems for dialects.
DialRes-LREC26 invites submissions on the creation, analysis, and evaluation of dialectal resources, including—but not limited to—work that critically examines how standard-centric methodologies impact dialects in the development of linguistic resources and models. We especially encourage contributions addressing the consequences of such practices for speech and morphosyntactic modelling, OCR of dialectal and historical texts, orthographic normalisation and homogenisation, annotation practices and lemmatisation strategies that abstract away or suppress dialectal forms, as well as analyses of how these choices affect dialects and their communities methodologically, economically, and socially.
The workshop focuses on problems, limitations, and trade-offs in developing dialectal resources from a linguistic perspective, while encouraging the creation and evaluation of resources in formats that enable reuse by the NLP community.
Workshop Topics
• Development and evaluation of dialectal oral and textual resources
• Orthographic normalisation and homogenisation, including their impact on dialectal variation
• Dialects vs. standard language varieties in annotation frameworks
• Cross-lingual and cross-dialectal transfer and model adaptation
• Resource scalability issues and techniques
• Use and limitations of large language models (LLMs) in dialectal resource development
• OCR for dialectal, non-standard, and historical texts: challenges, errors, and downstream effects
• Resources for, and applications supporting, dialect revitalisation and preservation
• Dialectal studies and teaching from a resource-oriented perspective
• Working on dialectal resources: academic, financial, legal, and societal issues
• Enabling and empowering dialect communities to develop their own resources
Author Support
The workshop will offer individual tutoring and mentoring upon request. Interested authors should contact the organizers at least 10 days before the paper submission deadline at:
dialres-lrec26(a)googlegroups.com
This support is addressed especially to early-career researchers and contributors working with dialectal data who have limited or no prior experience in developing NLP-oriented resources.
Submission Information
Instructions for Authors Submissions are electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system via the link: https://softconf.com/lrec2026/DialRes. They must be 4 to 8 pages long (excluding references and potential Ethics Statements) and follow the LREC stylesheet, available on the conference website on the Author’s kit page Author’s Kit. All templates are also available from this page.
Important Dates
• 20 February 2026 — Submission Deadline
• 11 March 2026 — Notification of Acceptance
• 28 March 2026 — Camera-ready Papers Due
Resubmissions from the LREC Main Conference
It will also be possible to submit papers that were rejected from the LREC 2026 main conference to DialRes 2026. Such submissions must be revised to fit the scope and format of the workshop and must comply with the same anonymization requirements.
Endorsements The workshop is endorsed by UniDive COST Action CA21167 and Archimedes Athena R.C.
Organizing Committee
• Antonios Anastasopoulos — George Mason University / Archimedes–Athena RC
• Stella Markantonatou — ILSP / Archimedes–Athena RC
• Angela Ralli — University of Patras / Archimedes–Athena RC
• Marcos Zampieri — George Mason University
• Stavros Bompolas — Archimedes–Athena RC
• Vivian Stamou — Archimedes–Athena RC
Apologies for cross-posting.
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*SIGUL 2026 Joint Workshop with ELE, EURALI, and DCLRL*
*Towards Inclusivity and Equality: Language Resources and Technologies for
Under-Resourced and Endangered Languages*
*https://sites.google.com/view/sigul2026/home-page
<https://sites.google.com/view/sigul2026/home-page>*
------------------------------------
We are pleased to announce the upcoming SIGUL 2026 Joint Workshop with ELE,
EURALI, and DCLRL on Towards Inclusivity and Equality: Language Resources
and Technologies for Under-Resourced and Endangered Languages
<https://sites.google.com/view/sigul2026/home-page>, co-located with *LREC
2026 *in Palma, Mallorca, Spain. This workshop brings together researchers
working on less-resourced, endangered, minority, low-density, and
underrepresented languages to share novel techniques, resources,
strategies, and evaluation methods. We emphasize the entire pipeline: data
creation, modeling, adaptation/transfer, system development, evaluation,
deployment, and ethical/community engagement.
We invite contributions on, but not limited to, the following topics:
-
Data collection, annotation, and curation for under-resourced languages
(crowdsourcing, participatory methods, gamification, unsupervised or weakly
supervised methods)
-
Learning with limited supervision (zero- or few-shot, PEFT, RAG with
linguistic resources)
-
Multilingual alignment, representation learning, and language
embeddings, including rare languages
-
Speech, multimodal, and cross-modal technologies for under-resourced
languages (speech recognition, synthesis, speech-to-text, speech
translation, multimodal resources)
-
Basic text processing (normalization, orthography, transliteration,
tokenization/segmentation, morphological and syntactic processing) in and
for low-resource settings.
-
Low-resource machine translation (pivoting, alignment, synthetic data)
-
Evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and metrics designed or adapted for
underrepresented languages
-
Adaptation, domain adaptation, and robustness to domain shift in
low-resource contexts
-
Responsible approaches, ethical issues, community engagement, data
sovereignty, and language revitalization
-
Deployment, tools, and practical systems for underserved languages
(e.g., mobile apps, dictionary or translation apps, linguistic tools)
-
Case studies of success and negative results (with lessons learned)
-
Interoperability, standardization, and metadata practices for datasets
in low-resource scenarios
Special Themes
Language modeling for intra-language variation, dialects, accents, and
regional variants of less-resourced languages
Many less-resourced languages display rich internal diversity, including
dialects, accents, and regional or social varieties. This special theme
focuses on developing language models and speech technologies that capture
and respect intra-language variation rather than reduce it to a single
“standard.” We welcome work on dialect identification and adaptation,
accent-robust speech systems, normalization vs. diversity-preserving
modeling, and cross-dialect transfer in low-data scenarios. Approaches
combining linguistic insights, community participation, and ethical
awareness are especially encouraged. The aim is to build technologies that
reflect and sustain the true linguistic richness of under-resourced
languages.
Ultra-Low-Resource Language Adaptation
This special theme focuses on methods that enable effective language and
speech technology development under extreme data scarcity. We invite
research on transfer learning, cross-lingual adaptation, multilingual
pretraining, and self-supervised or few-shot approaches tailored to
ultra-low-resource settings. Work on evaluation, data augmentation
(including synthetic data), and leveraging typological or linguistic
knowledge is also welcome. The goal is to advance techniques that extend
modern language technologies to the most underrepresented languages,
ensuring inclusivity in the digital age.
Community-Led Project Showcase
To help ground research in community needs, we invite brief (5–10 min)
presentations by language community members, NGOs, or practitioners
describing real-world challenges or resource needs. Position papers or
research posters are appropriate formats for this category.
Important Dates
Paper Submission Deadline: February 20 (Friday), 2026
Notification of Acceptance: March 22 (Sunday), 2026
Submission of Camera-Ready: March 30 (Monday), 2026
Workshop Date: 11-12 May 2026
All deadlines are anywhere-on-earth (AoE).
Call for Papers
We welcome original research papers and ongoing work relevant to the topics
of the workshop. Each submission can be one of the following categories:
-
research papers;
-
position papers for reflective considerations of methodological, best
practice, and institutional issues (e.g., ethics, data ownership, speakers’
community involvement, de-colonizing approaches);
-
posters, for work-in-progress projects in the early stage of development
or description of new resources;
-
demo papers and early-career/student papers (to be submitted as extended
abstracts and presented as posters).
The research and position papers should range from four (4) to eight (8)
pages, while demo papers are limited to four (4) pages. References don't
count towards page limits. 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.
Submissions must be anonymous and follow LREC formatting guidelines
<https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/>.
For inquiries, send an email to claudia.soria(a)cnr.it.
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).
Thanks,
Atul
𝗧𝗵𝗶𝗿𝗱 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗙𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗖𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗣𝗮𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀 - 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗽 𝗼𝗻 𝗟𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗟𝗼𝘄-𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲 𝗟𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲𝘀
[Workshop website - https://loreslm.github.io/home]
[CFP - https://loreslm.github.io/cfp]
[Submissions - https://openreview.net/group?id=eacl.org/EACL/2026/Workshop/LoResLM]
Neural language models have revolutionised natural language processing (NLP) and have provided state-of-the-art results for many tasks. However, their effectiveness is largely dependent on the pre-training resources. Therefore, language models (LMs) often struggle with low-resource languages in both training and evaluation. Recently, there has been a growing trend in developing and adopting LMs for low-resource languages. Supporting this important shift, LoResLM aims to provide a forum for researchers to share and discuss their ongoing work on LMs for low-resource languages.
𝗧𝗼𝗽𝗶𝗰𝘀
LoResLM 2026 invites submissions on a broad range of topics related to the development and evaluation of neural language models for low-resource languages. We welcome research that explores modalities beyond text and encourage work on low-resource dialects in addition to major language varieties. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Building language models for low-resource languages.
• Adapting/extending existing language models/large language models for low-resource languages.
• Corpora creation and curation technologies for training language models/large language models for low-resource languages.
• Benchmarks to evaluate language models/large language models in low-resource languages.
• Prompting/in-context learning strategies for low-resource languages with large language models.
• Review of available corpora to train/fine-tune language models/large language models for low-resource languages.
• Multilingual/cross-lingual language models/large language models for low-resource languages.
• Multimodal language models/large language models for low-resource languages
• Applications of language models/large language models for low-resource languages (i.e. machine translation, chatbots, content moderation, etc.)
𝗦𝘂𝗯𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗚𝘂𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀
We follow the EACL 2026 standards for submission format and guidelines. LoResLM 2026 invites submissions of long papers up to 8 pages and short papers up to 4 pages. These page limits only apply to the main body of the paper. At the end of the paper (after the conclusions but before the references), papers need to include a mandatory section discussing the limitations of the work and, optionally, a section discussing ethical considerations. Papers can include unlimited pages of references and an appendix.
To prepare your submission, please make sure to use the EACL 2026 style files available here:
• LaTeX - https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files
• Overleaf - https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/association-for-computational-ling…
Papers should be submitted through OpenReview using the following link: https://openreview.net/group?id=eacl.org/EACL/2026/Workshop/LoResLM
𝗜𝗺𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀
• Paper submission: 6th January 2026
• Notification of acceptance: 28th January 2026
• Camera-ready submission: 3rd February 2026
• Workshop: 29th March 2026 @ EACL
𝗩𝗲𝗻𝘂𝗲
LoResLM 2026 will be held in conjunction with EACL 2026 in Rabat, Morocco.
𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀
Proceedings of the workshop will appear in the ACL Anthology. For the past proceedings, please refer https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=rvm3HOgAAAAJ&hl=en
𝗞𝗲𝘆𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗲 𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗿
Prof Barbara Plank - Full professor and chair for AI and Computational Linguistics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Head of the Munich AI and NLP (MaiNLP) lab, and co-director of the Centre for Information and Language Processing (CIS)
𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗲
David Ifeoluwa Adelani - McGill School of Computer Science, Canada
Idris Abdulmumin - University of Pretoria, South Africa
Godfred Agyapong - University of Florida, USA
Isuri Anuradha - Lancaster University, UK
Laura Bernardy - University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Ana-Maria Bucur - University of Lugano, Switzerland
Eleftheria Briakou - Google
Tommaso Caselli - University of Groningen, Netherlands
Çağrı Çöltekin - University of Tübingen, Germany
Charibeth Ko Cheng - De La Salle University, Philippines
Claudiu Creanga - University of Bucharest
Sourabh Deoghare - Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India
Bosheng Ding - Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Alphaeus Dmonte - George Mason University, USA
Daan van Esch - Google
Ignatius Ezeani - Lancaster University, UK
Anna Furtado - University of Galway, Ireland
Ona de Gibert - University of Helsinki, Finland
Amal Htait - Aston University, UK
Diptesh Kanojia - University of Surrey, UK
Jaroslav Kopčan - Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies, Slovakia
Constantine Lignos - Brandeis University, USA
Cedric Lothritz - Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, Luxembourg
Anne-Marie Lutgen - University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Sheng Li - Institute of Science Tokyo, Japan
Veronika Lipp - Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, Hungary
Vukosi Marivate - University of Pretoria, South Africa
Muhidin Mohamed - Aston University, UK
Simon Münker - Trier University, Germany
Abiodun Modupe - University of Pretoria, South Africa
Fred Philippy - University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Md Nishat Raihan - George Mason University, USA
Mariana Romanyshyn - Grammarly
Guokan Shang - Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, France
Ravi Shekhar - University of Essex, UK
Archchana Sindhujan - University of Surrey, UK
Hristo Tanev - Joint Research Centre, European Commission
Uthayasanker Thayasivam - University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka
Raúl Vázquez - University of Helsinki, Finland
Taro Watanabe - Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan-
Zheng Xin Yong - Brown University, USA
Alexandra Zbaganu - University of Bucharest, Romania
𝗢𝗿𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗲
Hansi Hettiarachchi – Lancaster University, UK
Tharindu Ranasinghe – Lancaster University, UK
Alistair Plum – University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Damith Premasiri – Lancaster University, UK
Fiona Anting Tan – National University of Singapore, Singapore
Lasitha Uyangodage – University of Münster, Germany
𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗿𝘀
Paul Rayson – Lancaster University, UK
Ruslan Mitkov – Lancaster University, UK
Mohamed Gaber – Queensland University of Technology, Australia
𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘆
The workshop is supported in part by the Artificial Intelligence Journal, which promotes and disseminates AI research.
𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝘂𝘀
Contact us through loreslm.contact(a)gmail.com.
Follow us on social media
• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/loreslm/
• X - https://x.com/LoResLM2026
• BlueSky - https://bsky.app/profile/loreslm.bsky.social
Best Regards
Tharindu Ranasinghe, on behalf of the organising committee, LoResLM 2026
Dr Tharindu Ranasinghe | Lecturer in Security and Protection Science
School of Computing and Communications | Lancaster University
www.lancaster.ac.uk<https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/>