Dialects in NLP: A Resource Perspective (DialRes-LREC26)
Workshop at LREC 2026 — Palma de Mallorca, Spain, May 16, 2026
Hybrid event — in person and online
Website: https://dialres.github.io/dialres/
Contact: dialres-lrec26@googlegroups.com 
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
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.
Invited Speaker
Prof. Barbara Plank, LMU Munich (https://bplank.github.io/) 
Important Dates
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