SIGUL April 2026

sigul@list.elra.info

3 participants
3 discussions

3rd Workshop on Language Models for Underserved Communities (LM4UC)
by Fred PHILIPPY 27 Apr '26

27 Apr '26

We are excited to announce the 3rd Language Models for Underserved Communities (LM4UC) workshop, co-located with IJCAI 2026. The workshop will take place in person and virtually between August 15-17, 2026, in Bremen. LM4UC invites researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to address challenges and propose innovative solutions for building and deploying language models (LMs) for underserved languages and communities. Underserved communities often lack adequate access to advanced NLP technologies due to limited linguistic data, insufficient computational resources, or inadequate AI governance frameworks. This gap hinders equitable access to NLP advancements, exacerbating the digital divide. Our workshop aims to address this by fostering a multidisciplinary dialogue around the development of LMs that prioritize cultural sensitivity, resource efficiency, and sustainable AI practices. Topics of Interest We invite submissions of full papers, ongoing work, position papers, and survey papers on topics including, but not limited to: 1. Evaluation Design: Evaluations are no longer passive datasets. They are mechanisms that shape model development. We invite research that focuses on principled, technically grounded benchmark design. 2. Cultural Alignment & Safety: Most alignment research assumes Western norms. We invite papers that focus on technically grounded alignment methods that generalize across cultures and languages. 3. Agentic Systems in Global Environments: As LLMs become agents, we need formal evaluation and control in multilingual, multi-cultural environments. Submission Guidelines We welcome long papers (8 pages) and short papers (4 pages), excluding references. Submissions must follow the IJCAI 2026 style guidelines. Important Dates * Submission deadline: May 24, 2026 * Notification of acceptance: June 7, 2026 * Camera-ready paper due: August 1, 2026 * Workshop dates: August 15/16/17, 2026 Submit your paper via OpenReview: https://openreview.net/group?id=ijcai.org/IJCAI/2026/Workshop/LM4UC Contact Us: For inquiries, please contact the workshop organizer: lm4uc.organizers(a)gmail.com<mailto:lm4uc.organizers@gmail.com>

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Call for Participation for the 7th RAIL WORKSHOP
by Menno Van Zaanen 14 Apr '26

14 Apr '26

Call for Participation for the 7th RAIL WORKSHOP RAIL workshop https://sadilar.org/en/seventh-workshop-on-resources-for-african-indigenous… Co-located with LREC 2026 https://www.elra.info/lrec2026 RAIL workshop date: 12 May 2026 Conference venue: Palau de Congressos de Palma, Palma de Mallorca (Spain) Theme: Creating resources for less-resourced African languages The seventh Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) workshop will be co-located with the LREC 2026 conference in Palma, Mallorca (Spain), on 12 May 2026. The RAIL workshop is an interdisciplinary platform for researchers working on African indigenous language resources such as natural language processing (NLP) tools, Human Language Technologies (HLT), data collections, and annotations. This workshop aims to foster a scientific community of practice that focuses on computational linguistic tools and data that are designed for or applied to the indigenous languages of Africa. Many African languages are under-resourced, while only a few are considered to be somewhat better resourced. These languages often share interesting properties such as writing systems, making them different from most high-resourced languages. From a computational perspective, these languages lack enough corpora to undertake high-level development of NLP and HLT tools, which in turn impedes the development of African languages in these areas. During previous workshops, it was noted that the problems and solutions presented were not only applicable to African languages but were also relevant to many other low-resource languages across the world. Because these languages share similar challenges, this workshop provides researchers with opportunities to work collaboratively on issues of language resource development and learn from each other. The RAIL workshop has several aims. First, the workshop brings together researchers who work on African indigenous languages, forming a community of practice for people working on indigenous languages. Second, the workshop aims to reveal currently unknown or unpublished existing resources (corpora, NLP tools, and applications), resulting in a better overview of the current state-of-the-art, and also allows for discussions on novel, desired resources for future research in this area. Third, it enhances the sharing of knowledge regarding the development of low-resource languages. Finally, it enables discussions on how to improve the quality as well as the availability of the resources. Organising Committee Muzi Matfunjwa, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources Mmasibidi Setaka, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources Rooweither Mabuya, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources Menno van Zaanen, South African Centre for Digital Language Resources -- Prof Menno van Zaanen menno.vanzaanen(a)nwu.ac.za Professor in Digital Humanities South African Centre for Digital Language Resources https://www.sadilar.org ________________________________ NWU PRIVACY STATEMENT: http://www.nwu.ac.za/it/gov-man/disclaimer.html DISCLAIMER: This e-mail message and attachments thereto are intended solely for the recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorised review, use, disclosure, or distribution is prohibited. If you have received the e-mail by mistake, please contact the sender or reply e-mail and delete the e-mail and its attachments (where appropriate) from your system. ________________________________

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7th Call for Papers – LaTeLL 2026 (Low-Resource Languages)
by ernesto.estevanell＠ua.es 08 Apr '26

08 Apr '26

International Conference 'LAnguage TEchnologies for Low-resource Languages' (LaTeLL '2026) Fes, Morocco 30 September, 1 and 2 October 2026 www.latell.org/2026/ [1] 7th Call for Papers The conference Natural Language Processing (NLP) has witnessed remarkable progress in recent years, largely driven by the emergence of deep learning architectures and, more recently, large language models (LLMs). Nevertheless, these advances have disproportionately benefited high-resource languages that possess abundant data for model training. By contrast, low-resource languages which account for at least 85% of the world's linguistic diversity and are often spoken by smaller or marginalised communities, have not yet reaped the full benefits of contemporary NLP technologies. This imbalance can be attributed to several interrelated factors, including the scarcity of high-quality training data, limited computational and financial resources, and insufficient community engagement in data collection and model development. Developing NLP applications for low-resource languages poses major challenges, particularly the need for large, well-annotated datasets, standardised tools, and robust linguistic resources. Although several workshops have previously addressed NLP for low-resource languages, _LaTeLL_ represents the first international conference dedicated specifically to the automatic processing of such languages. The event aims to provide a forum for researchers to present and discuss their latest work in NLP in general, and in the development and evaluation of language models for low-resource languages in particular. Conference topics We invite submissions on a broad range of themes concerning linguistic and computational studies focusing on low-resource languages, including but not limited to the following topics: Language resources for low-resource languages * Dataset creation and annotation * Evaluation methodologies and benchmarks for low-resource settings * Lexical resources, corpora, and linguistic databases * Crowdsourcing and community-driven data collection * Tools and frameworks for low-resource language processing Core language technologies for low-resource languages * Language modelling and pre-training for low-resource languages * Speech recognition, text-to-speech, and spoken language understanding * Phonology, morphology, word segmentation, and tokenisation * Syntax: tagging, chunking, and parsing * Semantics: lexical and sentence-level representation NLP Applications for low-resource languages * Information extraction and named entity recognition * Question answering systems * Dialogue and interactive systems * Summarisation * Machine translation * Sentiment analysis, stylistic analysis, and argument mining * Content moderation * Information retrieval and text mining Multimodality and Grounding for low-resource languages * Vision and language for low-resource contexts * Speech and text multimodal systems * Low-resource sign language processing Ethics, Equity, and Social Impact for low-resource languages * Bias and fairness in low-resource language technologies * Sociolinguistic considerations in technology development * Cultural appropriateness and sensitivity Human-Centred Approaches in low-resource languages * Usability and accessibility of low-resource language technologies * Educational applications and language learning * Community needs assessment and technology adoption * User experience research in low-resource contexts Multilinguality and Cross-Lingual Methods for low-resource languages * Multilingual language models and their adaptation * Code-switching and code-mixing * Cross-lingual transfer learning in low-resource languages. Special Theme Track 1 -- Building Applications Based on Large Language Models for Low-Resource Languages _LaTeLL'2026_ will feature a Special Theme Track dedicated to the development of applications based on Large Language Models (LLMs) for low-resource languages. This track aims to explore innovative methodologies, architectures, and tools that leverage the power of LLMs to enhance linguistic processing, accessibility, and inclusivity for underrepresented languages. Contributions are encouraged on topics such as model adaptation and fine-tuning, multilingual and cross-lingual transfer, ethical and fairness considerations, and the creation of datasets and benchmarks that facilitate the integration of LLM-based solutions in low-resource settings. Special Theme Track 2 -- Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Arabic Dialects This special track addresses the unique challenges and opportunities in processing Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and the rich landscape of Arabic dialects. The diglossic nature of Arabic, where the formal MSA coexists with numerous, widely used spoken dialects, presents a significant hurdle for NLP. While MSA is relatively well-resourced, Arabic dialects are quintessential examples of low-resource languages, often lacking standardised orthographies, annotated corpora, and dedicated processing tools. This track invites submissions on novel research and resources aimed at bridging this gap and advancing the state of the art in Arabic language technology. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: * Dialect identification and classification * Creation of corpora and lexical resources for Arabic dialects * Machine translation between MSA and dialects, and across different dialects * Speech recognition and synthesis for dialectal Arabic * Computational modelling of morphology, syntax, and semantics for dialects * NLP applications (e.g., sentiment analysis, NER) for dialectal user-generated content * Code-switching between Arabic dialects, MSA, and other languages Submissions and Publication _LaTeLL'2026_ welcomes high-quality submissions in English, which may take one of the following two forms: * Regular (long) papers: Up to eight (8) pages in length, presenting substantial, original, completed, and unpublished research. * Short (poster) papers: Up to four (4) pages in length, suitable for concise or focused contributions, ongoing research, negative results, system demonstrations, and similar work. Short papers will be presented during a dedicated poster session. The conference will not consider submissions consisting of abstracts only. All accepted papers (both long and short) will be published as electronic proceedings (with ISBN) and made available on the conference website at the time of the event. The organisers intend to submit the proceedings for inclusion in the ACL Anthology. To prepare your submission, please make sure to use the LaTeLL'2026 style files available here: LaTeX: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RceWyUqjFLEbv_oNto-x2Quop7qT4-wf/view?usp=… [2] Word: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m6VeC9jtMpe-Ku2QREgrPlE2-NTDvJvZ/edit?u… [3] Overleaf: https://www.overleaf.com/read/ttzzfcnjrgvw#e82bef [4] Papers should be submitted through Softconf/START using the following link: https://softconf.com/p/latell2026 Authors of papers receiving exceptionally positive reviews will be invited to prepare extended and substantially revised versions for submission to a leading journal in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). The conference will also feature a Student Workshop, and awards will be presented to the authors of outstanding papers. Important dates * Submissions due: 1 June 2026 * Notification of acceptance: 21 July 2026 * Camera-ready due: 31 July 2026 * Conference: 30 September, 1 October and 2 October 2026 Keynote speaker Nizar Habash (New York University Abu Dhabi) Organisation Conference Chair Ruslan Mitkov (Lancaster University and University of Alicante) Programme Committee Chairs Saad Ezzini (King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals) Salima Lamsiyah (University of Luxembourg) Tharindu Ranasinghe (Lancaster University) Organising Committee Maram Alharbi (Lancaster University) Salmane Chafik (Mohammed VI Polytechnic University) Ernesto Estevanell (University of Alicante) Milica Ikonić Nešić (University of Belgrade) Further information and contact details The follow-up calls will provide more details on the conference venue and registration. The conference website is www.latell.org/2026/ [1] and will be updated on a regular basis. For further information, please email 2026(a)latell.org Registration will open before the end of April 2026. Links: ------ [1] http://www.latell.org/2026/ [2] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RceWyUqjFLEbv_oNto-x2Quop7qT4-wf/view?usp=… [3] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m6VeC9jtMpe-Ku2QREgrPlE2-NTDvJvZ/edit?u… [4] https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/latell-26-template/kfcvbgxmccvb

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SIGUL April 2026