February 2026 - Corpora

CLEF-2026 CheckThat! Lab -- 2nd Call for Participation
by Julia Maria Struß 23 Feb '26

23 Feb '26

(apologies for cross-posting) Dear colleague, We invite you to participate in the 2026 edition of the CheckThat! Lab at CLEF 2026. This year, we feature three tasks ---two follow-up and one new--- that correspond to important components within and around the full fact-checking pipeline in multiple languages: Task 1 Source Retrieval for Scientific Web Claims: Given a social media post that contains a scientific claim and an implicit reference to a scientific paper (mentions it without a URL), retrieve the mentioned paper from a pool of candidate papers. Available in English, German, and French. Task 2 Fact-Checking Numerical Claims:Given claims, potential evidence, and possible reasoning paths, rank the reasoning paths and provide an output of verdict. Available in Arabic, English, and Spanish. Task 3 Generating Full Fact-Checking Articles:Given a claim, its veracity, and a set of evidence documents consulted for fact-checking the claim, generate a full fact-checking article. Register and participate:https://clef-labs-registration.dipintra.it/ <https://clef-labs-registration.dipintra.it/> Further information:https://checkthat.gitlab.io/ <https://checkthat.gitlab.io/> Datasets:https://gitlab.com/checkthat_lab/clef2026-checkthat-lab <https://gitlab.com/checkthat_lab/clef2026-checkthat-lab>(training materials released) Discord Server: https://discord.gg/PEMh4a2YHV <https://discord.gg/PEMh4a2YHV> Important Dates --------------------- - November 2025: Lab registration opened - December 2025: sample materials released - December - February 2026: training materials released - 23 April 2026: Lab registration closes - 24 April 2026: Beginning of the evaluation cycle (test sets release) - 7 May 2026 (23:59 AOE): End of the evaluation cycle (run submission) - 28 May 2026: Deadline for the submission of working notes [CEUR-WS] - 29 May – 27 June 2026: Review process of participant papers - 30 June 2026: Notification of Acceptance for working notes [CEUR-WS] - 6 July 2026: Camera Ready Copy of working note papers [CEUR-WS] - 10 July 2026: Regular Conference Registration Ends - 31 August 2026: Late Conference Registration Ends - 21-24 September 2026: CLEF 2026 Conference in Jena, Germany Best regards, The CLEF-2026 CheckThat! Lab Shared Task Organizers -- ___________________________ Prof. Dr. Julia Maria Struß Fachhochschule Potsdam University of Applied Sciences Fachbereich Informationswissenschaften Kiepenheuerallee 5 14469 Potsdam Telefon: +49 331 580 4532 Zoom:https://fh-potsdam.zoom-x.de/my/juliamstruss

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AILC Lectures on Computational Linguistics, 15-17 June 2026
by Bernardi Raffaella 23 Feb '26

23 Feb '26

Dear all, We are pleased to announce that the 2026 edition of the Lectures on Computational Linguistics, a series of lectures dedicated to central topics in the field of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, will be held in Bolzano from 15 to 17 June. The 2026 edition is organized by the Italian Association of Computational Linguistics/Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Computazionale (AILC) together with The Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Faculty of Engineering and Faculty of Education) and EURAC Research Center. It focuses on Natural Language Processing for the Society, covering topics from Low Resources Languages, Speech and Text, Embodied AI, Interpretability and Small Language Models for education in schools. Featuring frontal classes, evening lectures and hands-on labs, it provides both a high-level overview of the field as well as an introduction to specific topics, and practical experiences. SPEAKERS Tutorials: Barbara Plank (LMU Munich) Oliver Lemon (Edinburgh Center for Robotic) Barbara Schuppler (TU Graz) Evening Lectures: Julia Hockenmaier (University of Illinois) Aurelie Herbelot (Denotation UG) Labs: Loredana Schettino and Alessandro Vietti (Faculty of Education, UNIBZ) Leonardo Bertolazzi (University of Trento) Egon Stemle and Luca Ducceschi (EURAC Research Center) The detailed programme is available on the Lectures website<https://www.ai-lc.it/lectures/lectures-2026/> Student Presentations Students wishing to present aspects of their work in the "Student Presentations" sessions are asked to send a 500-word abstract to ailc.lectures(a)gmail.com<mailto:ailc.lectures@gmail.com> by May 16, 2026. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by May 23, 2026. Registration The school is mainly aimed at Doctoral and Master's degree students, although a minimum qualification is not required for access. Participation is free but subject to registration and association with AILC, and places are limited to 150. The registration link will be open soon and will close on May 27, or when the maximum number of participants is reached. Accommodation: Information and suggestions will be published on the website soon. We recommend booking your accommodation well in advance to avoid higher prices. Scientific Committee Pierpaolo Basile, University of Studi di Bari Aldo Moro Raffaella Bernardi, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Tommaso Caselli, University of Groningen Elisabetta Fersini, University of Milano-Bicocca Elisabetta Jezek, University of Pavia Local Organizing Committee Raffaella Bernardi, Faculty of Engineering, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Alessandro Vietti, Faculty of Education, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Luca Ducceschi, EURAC Research Center Contacts: ailc.lectures(a)gmail.com<mailto:ailc.lectures@gmail.com> ======================================================================= Room B1.5.01 Faculty of Engineering Free University of Bozen Bolzano NOI Techpark - B. Buozzi 1, 39100 Bozen Bolzano, Italy

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Call for Papers: The 1st Workshop on Computational Affective Science at LREC 2026
by ACL Announcements 23 Feb '26

23 Feb '26

CALL FOR PAPERS: THE 1ST WORKSHOP ON COMPUTATIONAL AFFECTIVE SCIENCE AT LREC 2026 December 15, 2025 | BY vk22priya Event Notification Type: Call for Papers Abbreviated Title: First CfP: CAS Workshop@LREC 2026 Location: Palma de Mallorca, Spain State: Mallorca Country: Spain Contact Email: Christopher.Bagdon(a)uni-bamberg.de vkpriya(a)cs.toronto.edu City: Palma de Mallorca Contact: Christopher Bagdon Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla Website: https://casworkshop.github.io/ Submission Deadline: Monday, 16 February 2026 First Call for Papers: The 1st Workshop on Computational Affective Science (CAS 2026), co-located with the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) 2026 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, May 11-16. Website: https://casworkshop.github.io/ Contact: <workshop.cas1(a)gmail.com> We invite submissions to the first Workshop on Computational Affective Science (CAS 2026), co-located with LREC 2026, on research related to the understanding of affect and emotions through language and computation. CAS will accept archival long and short paper submissions, featuring substantial, original, and unpublished research. We also encourage submissions of extended abstracts from researchers in the broader Affective Science community, with up to two pages of content featuring the research background/hypotheses and a description of methods/results. Extended abstracts are non-archival, offering the option for publication and presentation at other conference venues. **Motivation** Affect refers to the fundamental neural processes that generate and regulate emotions, moods, and feeling states. Affect and emotions are central to how we organize meaning, to our behavior, to our health and well-being, and to our very survival. Despite this, and even though most of us are intimately familiar with emotions in everyday life, there is much we do not know about how emotions work and how they impact our lives. Affective Science is a broad interdisciplinary field that explores these and related questions about affect and emotions. Since language is a powerful mechanism of emotion expression, there is a growing use of language data and advanced natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to shed light on fundamental questions about emotions. The Workshop on Computational Affective Science (CAS) aims to be a dedicated venue for work focused specifically on the link between NLP and affective science. **Interdisciplinary Scope** The workshop takes an interdisciplinary approach to affective science and aims at bringing together NLP researchers, scientists, and theorists from many research areas, including psychology, sociology, neuroscience, and philosophy. Although work in sentiment analysis is decades old, this work often proceeds separately and in different fields from research and theory in affective science. Meanwhile, affective scientists in psychology, sociology, neuroscience and philosophy increasingly seek to use linguistic tools to shed light on the nature of emotions, moods, and feeling states. CAS is therefore co-organized by an interdisciplinary group of researchers (spanning NLP and Affective Science) to foment collaboration at this exciting frontier of research. **Submissions** We invite long and short archival paper submissions, as well as non-archival extended abstracts on a broad range of topics at the intersection of affective science and natural language processing, including but not limited to: 1. The Nature of Affect and Computational Modeling of Emotions Computational experiments that add to our understanding of affect and emotions, including findings relevant to: * theories and nature of emotion * the biology or neuroscience of emotions * appraisal models * dimensional models (valence / arousal / dominance) * models of constructed emotion * cognitive-affective architectures * emotion dynamics (emergence, intensification, decay, transitions) * emotion granularity * emotion regulation * affective embodiment * evolutionary and developmental affect * emotion-cognition interactions These areas are relevant not just to human affect, but may also apply to data animals and artificial agents. 2. Affective Data and Resources Work on compiling and annotating affect-related information in text, speech, facial and bodily expression, and physiological signals (ECG, EEG, GSR, multimodal biosensing), with a focus on text data (monolingual or multilingual) and multimodal data suitable for an NLP venue. Data from underserved languages is especially encouraged. 3. Emotion Recognition, Prediction, and Inference At the instance level: * emotion classification (discrete emotions, dimensional ratings) * emotion intensity estimation * emotion cause detection * context-aware affect inference (culture, situation, social setting) * structured emotion analysis At the aggregate level: * creating emotion arcs * determining broad trends in emotions over time or across locations * tracking emotional responses toward entities of interest (e.g., climate change) * document-level and cross-document emotion analysis * labeling social networks 4. Applications Including but not limited to: * Affect and health, psychopathology, and mental disorders * Affect and behavior/social science (e.g., interpersonal affect, empathy, group-level affect, affect contagion, computational emotion regulation) * Affect and education * Affect and literature/narratives/digital humanities * Affect and commerce 5. Explainability and Interpretability in Computational Affective Models Work aimed at improving the transparency and interpretability of affective systems. This includes understanding how models represent and infer emotions and identifying key cues driving predictions. 6. Ethics, Fairness, Theory Integration, Philosophical Implications * Bias and generalizability of affective systems across demographics * Privacy and ethics in affective data collection * Examining whether automatic NLP systems rely on current and valid theories of affect and emotion * The implications of machines modeling or simulating affect * Societal considerations surrounding affective artificial agents **Important Dates (tentative):** · Submission deadline:16 Feb 2026 · Notification of acceptance: 16 March 2026 · Camera Ready Paper due: 23 March 2026 · Workshop date: TBA (11-16 May 2026) **Submission Details:** We invite submissions for archival long and short papers, as well as non-archival extended abstracts. Archival long and short papers should feature novel and unpublished work relating to the topics detailed above. We also invite submissions of extended abstracts from researchers in the broader Affective Science community, with up to two pages of content featuring the research background/hypotheses and a description of methods/results. Extended abstracts are non-archival, offering the option for publication and presentation at other conference venues. Archival Track: · Long Paper: Consists of up to 8 pages of content, with additional pages for references, limitations, ethical considerations, and appendices. · Short Paper: Consists of up to 4 pages of content, with additional pages for references, limitations, ethical considerations, and appendices. (When preparing camera ready papers, you will be allowed one extra page to address comments by the reviewers.) Non-Archival Track: · Extended Abstract: Up to 2 pages. **Submission Format:** All submissions must use the LREC 2026 template and follow the guidelines found at: https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/ (Note: extended abstracts can be limited to being 1-2 pages in length). **Mandatory Ethics Section:** We ask all authors to include a section on Ethical Considerations in their submission, touching on the ethical concerns and broader societal impacts of the work. This discussion section will not count towards the page limit. **Submission Site:** All submissions must be made through the SoftConf portal. The link to the system will be shared shortly. **Additional Details:** Website: https://casworkshop.github.io/ Attendance: The workshop will follow the attendance policy of the main conference (https://lrec2026.info/registration-policy/ ). **Organizers:** * Christopher Bagdon, University of Bamberg, Germany * Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla, National Research Council Canada * Kristen A. Lindquist, The Ohio State University, USA * Lyle Ungar, University of Pennsylvania, USA * Roman Klinger, University of Bamberg, Germany * Saif M. Mohammad, National Research Council Canada Contact us at <workshop.cas1(a)gmail.com> with any questions.

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Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2026) @ EACL 2026: Call for Participation
by Ivelina Stoyanova Department of Computational Linguistics 22 Feb '26

22 Feb '26

22nd Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2026) [ https://multiword.org/mwe2026/ | https://multiword.org/mwe2026/ ] Organized, sponsored, and endorsed by SIGLEX, the Special Interest Group on the Lexicon of the ACL, and by [ https://unidive.lisn.upsaclay.fr/ | UniDive ] COST Action CA21167 Half-day workshop collocated with the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026, [ https://2026.eacl.org/ | https://2026.eacl.org/ ] ), Rabat, Morocco. * Workshop date: March 28 , 2026 (9:00 – 12:30) * Early bird registration deadline: February 24 , 2026 (AOE) * Information on registration: [ https://2026.eacl.org/registration/ | https://2026.eacl.org/registration/ ] Multiword expressions (MWEs), i.e., word combinations that exhibit lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and/or statistical idiosyncrasies (Baldwin and Kim, 2010), such as “by and large”, “hot dog”, “make a decision” and “break one's leg” are still a pain in the neck for Natural Language Processing (NLP). The notion of MWE encompasses closely related phenomena: idioms, compounds, light-verb constructions, phrasal verbs, rhetorical figures, collocations, institutionalized phrases, etc. Given their irregular nature, MWEs often pose complex problems in linguistic modeling (e.g., annotation), NLP tasks (e.g., parsing), and end-user applications (e.g., natural language understanding and Machine Translation), hence still representing an open issue for computational linguistics (Miletić and Schulte im Walde, 2024; Ramisch et al., 2023; Phelps et al., 2024; Mahajan et al., 2024). For more than two decades, the topic of modeling and processing MWEs for NLP has been the focus of the MWE workshop, organized by the [ https://multiword.org/ | MWE section ] of [ http://www.siglex.org/ | ACL-SIGLEX ] in conjunction with major NLP conferences since 2003. Impressive progress has been made in the field, but our understanding of MWEs still requires much research, considering their need and usefulness in NLP applications. This is also relevant to domain-specific NLP pipelines that need to tackle terminologies most often realized as MWEs. Topics The dominating trend in MWE research presented at the workshop focuses on large language models, particularly examining their capabilities and limitations across diverse tasks. Papers present research on Swedish, Ukrainian, Romanian, Galician, Marathi, Turkish, Korean, Sinhala, and Chinese. Research discusses language-specific phenomena that challenge existing annotation schemes and identification methodologies, particularly in morphologically complex and typologically distinct languages. The programme of the MWE 2026 Workshop is available here: [ https://multiword.org/mwe2026/ | https://multiword.org/mwe2026/ ] Co-located Shared tasks The workshop MWE 2026 will host [ https://unidive.lisn.upsaclay.fr/doku.php?id=other-events:parseme-admire-st… | two shared tasks ] : * PARSEME 2.0, whose objective is to identify and paraphrase MWEs in written text, and * AdMIRe 2 (Advancing Multimodal Idiomaticity Representation) , which explores the comprehension ability of multimodal models for MWEs in a variety of languages. Organizing Committee Verginica Barbu Mititelu, A. Seza Doğruöz, Alexandre Rademaker, Atul Kr. Ojha, Mathieu Constant, Ivelina Stoyanova Anti-harassment policy The workshop follows the ACL anti-harassment policy. Contact For any inquiries regarding the workshop, please send an email to the Organizing Committee at [ mailto:mwe2026workshop@gmail.com | mwe2026workshop(a)gmail.com ] .

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Deadline extension Workshop DeTermIt! @ LREC 2026 - 2 March 2026
by Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio 22 Feb '26

22 Feb '26

[apologies for cross posting] DeTermIt! Workshop @ LREC 2026 11 May 2026 (afternoon) hybrid event (in-person + online)! Second Workshop on Evaluating Text Difficulty in a Multilingual Context Location: Palau de Congressos de Palma, Palma de Mallorca (Spain) - Paper submissions (extended): 2 March 2026 Submission link: https://softconf.com/lrec2026/DeTermIt2026/ ***** NEWS ***** - Best Student Paper Award: the best student paper (i.e., a paper whose first author is a PhD student or equivalent) will receive a free workshop registration for the corresponding (student) author. - Keynote: We’re delighted to announce Horacio Saggion (Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra) as our keynote speaker! ##################### Final Call for Papers Schedule - Paper submissions: 2 March 2026 - Notification of acceptance: 13 March 2026 - Camera-ready due: 30 March 2026 - Workshop: one of 11, 12, or 16 May 2026 (half-day) All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 AoE (“Anywhere on Earth”) For more information, please visit: Website: https://determit2026.dei.unipd.it/ ##################### In today’s interconnected world, where information dissemination knows no linguistic bounds, it is crucial to ensure that knowledge is accessible to diverse audiences, regardless of language proficiency and domain expertise. Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) and text difficulty assessment are central to this goal, especially in the age of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI (GenAI), which increasingly mediate access to information. The second edition of the DeTermIt! workshop focuses on the evaluation and modeling of text difficulty in multilingual, terminology-rich contexts, with a particular emphasis on the interaction between: - text simplification, - terminology and conceptual complexity, and - LLM/GenAI-based generation and rewriting. The 2026 edition builds on the first DeTermIt! workshop held at LREC-COLING 2024 (https://determit2024.dei.unipd.it/), as well as related initiatives such as the CLEF SimpleText track (https://simpletext-project.com/), which provides reusable data and benchmarks for scientific text summarization and simplification. DeTermIt! 2026 aims to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in terminology-aware simplification, lexical and conceptual difficulty, and evaluation protocols for GenAI systems. We welcome contributions that address theoretical, methodological, and applied aspects of text difficulty, including resource creation and evaluation (e.g., corpora, datasets, and benchmarks), with a focus on how linguistic complexity, specialized terminology, and domain knowledge interact with human understanding. In particular, we encourage work that explores how LLMs and GenAI can be evaluated, constrained, or guided to produce readable, faithful, and accessible texts. ##################### Topics of Interest ##################### We invite submissions on (but not limited to) the following themes: 1. Theoretical and Modeling Perspectives - Cognitive and linguistic models of text and lexical complexity. - Multilingual readability and text difficulty prediction. - Modeling conceptual difficulty and domain-specific terminology. - Theoretical connections between lexicography, terminology, and text simplification. 2. Terminology and Conceptual Complexity - Identification and classification of specialized terms and concepts. - Estimation of term difficulty for lay readers and second language learners. - Use of terminological databases, ontologies, and knowledge graphs in simplification pipelines. - Methods for adapting domain-specific terminology for accessible communication (e.g., in medicine, law, technology). 3. Generative and Explainable AI for Text Simplification - LLM- and GenAI-based approaches to text simplification and paraphrasing. - Terminology-Augmented Generation (TAG) and term-preserving simplification. - Evaluation of GenAI outputs: readability, factuality, terminology fidelity, and hallucination analysis. - Readability-controlled or difficulty-controlled generation; controllable simplification. - Human-centered and explainable approaches to text accessibility in GenAI systems. 4. Resources, Benchmarks, and Evaluation Frameworks - Corpora, annotation schemes, and benchmarks for text difficulty and simplification. - Datasets and methods for evaluating terminology-aware simplification and explanation. - FAIR and reusable resources for multilingual text accessibility. - Evaluation protocols and metrics for cross-lingual and cross-domain simplification and GenAI-based rewriting. 5. Applications and Case Studies - Domain-specific simplification (e.g., healthcare, legal, scientific communication). - Tools and systems for educational settings, language learning, or accessible communication. - User studies, human evaluation setups, and mixed-method approaches to assessing text difficulty and GenAI-assisted simplification. - Industrial and real-world experiences with integrating ATS and terminology into LLM-driven workflows. ##################### Submission Guidelines ##################### We invite original contributions, including research papers, case studies, negative results, and system demonstrations. When submitting a paper through the START system of LREC 2026, authors will be asked to provide essential information about language resources (in a broad sense: data, tools, services, standards, evaluation packages, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of the research. ELRA strongly encourages all authors to share the resources described in their papers to support reproducibility and reusability. Papers must be compliant with the stylesheet adopted for the LREC 2026 Proceedings (see https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/). The workshop proceedings will be published in the LREC 2026 workshop proceedings. PAPER TYPES We accept three types of submissions: - Regular long papers – up to eight (8) pages of content, presenting substantial, original, completed, and unpublished work. - Short papers – up to four (4) pages of content, describing smaller focused contributions, work in progress, negative results, or system demonstrations. - Position papers – up to eight (8) pages of content, discussing key open challenges, methodological issues, and cross-disciplinary perspectives on text difficulty, terminology, and GenAI. References do not count toward the page limits. ##################### Organizers ##################### Chairs Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio, University of Padua, Italy Federica Vezzani, University of Padua, Italy Liana Ermakova, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, France Hosein Azarbonyad, Elsevier, The Netherlands Jaap Kamps, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Scientific Committee Florian Boudin - Nantes University, France Lynne Bowker - University of Ottawa, Canada Sara Carvalho - Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal Rute Costa - Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal Eric Gaussier - University Grenoble Alpes, France Natalia Grabar - CNRS, France Ana Ostroški Anić - Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics, Croatia Tatiana Passali - Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Grigorios Tsoumakas - Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Sara Vecchiato - University of Udine, Italy Cornelia Wermuth - KU Leuven, Belgium ##################### Contact ##################### For inquiries, please contact: giorgiomaria.dinunzio(a)unipd.it <mailto:giorgiomaria.dinunzio@unipd.it>

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2nd CfP: Shared Task in Vocabulary Difficulty Prediction at BEA Workshop, ACL 2026.
by Skidmore, Lucy (Exams) 20 Feb '26

20 Feb '26

Dear all, We invite participation in our Shared Task on Vocabulary Difficulty Prediction for English Learners, which will be hosted at The<https://sig-edu.org/bea/2026> <https://sig-edu.org/bea/2026> 21st Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications<https://sig-edu.org/bea/2026> (co-located with ACL 2026) both online and in person in San Diego, CA, United States. This shared task focuses on predicting the difficulty of English vocabulary for learners with different L1 backgrounds. Evaluation will use the British Council’s Knowledge-based Vocabulary Lists (KVL), which provide psychometrically calibrated difficulty scores for English learners with Spanish, German, and Mandarin L1s. The task includes a Closed Track, limited to the provided data and standard NLP resources, and an Open Track, which allows external data and use of LLMs, to explore the full potential of current AI approaches. Important Dates 26 January: Release of training data and baseline models<https://github.com/britishcouncil/bea2026st> 20 March: Test data release 27 March: System submissions from teams due 3 April: Announcement of evaluation results by the organisers 24 April: System papers due 1 May: Paper reviews returned 12 May: Final camera-ready submissions 2-3 July: BEA 2026 workshop at ACL Further details can be found at our shared task website<https://www.britishcouncil.org/data-science-and-insights/bea2026st>. Please send any questions to vocabularychallenge(a)britishcouncil.org<mailto:vocabularychallenge@britishcouncil.org> or post a new topic in our forum<https://groups.google.com/g/bea-2026-shared-task/>. We look forward to your participation! Organisers: Mariano Felice (British Council) and Lucy Skidmore (British Council). The British Council is the United Kingdom's international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities. A registered charity: 209131 (England and Wales) SC037733 (Scotland). This message is for the use of the intended recipient(s) only and may contain confidential information. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender and delete it. The British Council accepts no liability for loss or damage caused by viruses and other malware and you are advised to carry out a virus and malware check on any attachments contained in this message.

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Final Call and Deadline Extension — Joint Workshop on Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Language Technologies and Computational Approaches to Language Data Pseudonymization, Anonymization, De-identification, and Data Privacy
by Maria Irena Szawerna 20 Feb '26

20 Feb '26

**Apologies for cross-posting** Final Call for Papers: Joint Workshop on Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Language Technologies (LEGAL2026) and Computational Approaches to Language Data Pseudonymization, Anonymization, De-identification, and Data Privacy (CALD-pseudo 2026) Website: https://legal2026.mobileds.de/ Submission: https://softconf.com/lrec2026/LEGAL2026/ We invite submissions to the Joint Workshop on Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Language Technologies (LEGAL2026) and Computational Approaches to Language Data Pseudonymization, Anonymization, De-identification, and Data Privacy (CALD-pseudo 2026), to be held at LREC 2026 on the 12th of May 2026. Important Dates * 20th 22nd of February 2026, 23:59 CET: paper submission deadline * 30th March 2026: camera ready deadline (strict) * 12th May 2026: workshop date Introduction Access to text and speech data is essential for research, yet personal and sensitive information often prevents open sharing. Techniques such as pseudonymization and anonymization offer potential solutions, but their effectiveness, limitations, and impact on data utility require deeper investigation. Balancing privacy protection with meaningful scientific use remains a key challenge. At the same time, legal and ethical requirements increasingly shape how language resources can be created, processed, and distributed. Regulatory frameworks, such as the GDPR, the Data Act, and the Artificial Intelligence Act, affect access, reuse, and documentation duties for both text and speech data, creating a complex environment that demands interdisciplinary insight. The workshop brings these two perspectives together by addressing both the technical and practical aspects of de-identification as well as the legal and ethical obligations governing data handling. Topics include anonymization and pseudonymization methods, compliance in practical workflows, provenance and rights tracking, and emerging approaches to legal metadata. The goal is to foster responsible, legally sound, and technically robust innovation in human language technologies. Topics of Interest We invite contributions from all disciplines involved in the creation, processing, governance, and de-identification of text and speech data. Submissions may address theoretical, empirical, methodological, legal, or technical questions, including cross-disciplinary work. We particularly encourage research on less-represented languages and on data from under-represented communities. 1. Legal Aspects of Language Data (LEGAL2026) * Regulatory frameworks and global governance * Intellectual property, data protection, and LLM governance * Ethics, fairness, trust, and transparency * Compliance in practice * Ethics, fairness, and trust * Operationalizing compliance * Emerging and grey areas * Interdisciplinary and cross-border coordination 2. Pseudonymization, Anonymization, and De-identification: Theoretical, Methodological, and Technical Aspects (CALD-pseudo 2026) * Detection and classification of personal information (PI) * Replacement and transformation of PI * Utility and bias after de-identification * Approaches to evaluation and adversarial testing * Dataset creation for de-identification research * Low-resource scenarios * Speech-specific challenges * Cross-disciplinary applications and challenges We invite submissions from fields where de-identification of data plays an important role, including but not limited to Computational Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Digital Humanities, Social Sciences, Political Sciences, Medical Science etc., from the perspectives of researchers, public organizations, and industry. Submission Guidelines Authors are invited to submit original and unpublished research papers in the following categories: * Long papers (up to 8 pages) for substantial contributions * Short papers (up to 4 pages) for: * Small, focused contributions or ongoing or preliminary work * Extended abstracts for non-technical submissions only, such as conceptual, theoretical, legal, ethical, policy-oriented, or position papers. Extended abstract submissions are expected to be developed into regular papers by the camera-ready submission deadline. The full papers will be published as workshop proceedings along with the LREC main conference. They should follow the LREC stylesheet, which is available on the conference website on the Author’s kit<https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/> page. Unlike the main conference, we allow appendices of up to 10 pages already in the review phase. However, the reviewers will not be required to look in the appendices and must be able to review the paper based on everything contained within the main body of the paper (as if there were no appendices). Submission deadline: 22nd of February 2026, 23:59 CET Submission link: https://softconf.com/lrec2026/LEGAL2026/ 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). Keynote Talks We are delighted to announce the workshop will host keynote talks from two speakers: * Paweł Kamocki, Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Germany * Ivan Habernal, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany Workshop Organizers LEGAL 2026: * Ingo Siegert, Otto-von-Guericke Universität Magdeburg, Germany * Paweł Kamocki, Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Germany * Kossay Talmoudi, ELDA, France * Khalid Choukri, ELDA, France CALD-pseudo 2026 * Maria Irena Szawerna, University of Gothenburg, Sweden * Simon Dobnik, University of Gothenburg, Sweden * Therese Lindström Tiedemann, University of Helsinki, Finland * Pierre Lison, Norwegian Computing Center & University of Oslo, Norway * Ildikó Pilán, Norwegian Computing Center, Norway * Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, University of Gothenburg, Sweden * Lisa Södergård, University of Helsinki, Finland * Elena Volodina, University of Gothenburg, Sweden * Xuan-Son Vu, Lund University & DeepTensor AB, Sweden Program Committee A list of program committee members is available on the workshop webpage. Contact For inquiries, please contact ingo.siegert(a)ovgu.de for questions about LEGAL2026 or mormor.karl(a)svenska.gu.se for questions about CALD-pseudo 2026. Best regards, Maria Irena Szawerna ____________________ PhD student Språkbanken Text<https://spraakbanken.gu.se/> Institutionen för svenska, flerspråkighet och språkteknologi<https://www.gu.se/svenska-spraket> UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG<https://www.gu.se/> https://spraakbanken.gu.se/om/personal/maria-szawerna

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SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENSION to February 26: The 1st Workshop on Computational Affective Science (CAS 2026), co-located with the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) 2026
by Roman Klinger 20 Feb '26

20 Feb '26

FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS: The 1st Workshop on Computational Affective Science (Deadline Extended) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Third and Final Call for Papers: The 1st Workshop on Computational Affective Science (CAS 2026), co-located with the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) 2026 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, May 11-16. (Submission deadline extended to 20 Feb 2026). Website: https://casworkshop.github.io/ Contact: <cas-workshop(a)googlegroups.com> We invite submissions to the first Workshop on Computational Affective Science (CAS 2026), co-located with LREC 2026, on research related to the understanding of affect and emotions through language and computation. CAS will accept archival long and short paper submissions, featuring substantial, original, and unpublished research. We also encourage submissions of extended abstracts from researchers in the broader Affective Science community, with up to two pages of content featuring the research background/hypotheses and a description of methods/results. Extended abstracts are non-archival, offering the option for publication and presentation at other conference venues. ------------ MOTIVATION ------------ Affect refers to the fundamental neural processes that generate and regulate emotions, moods, and feeling states. Affect and emotions are central to how we organize meaning, to our behavior, to our health and well-being, and to our very survival. Despite this, and even though most of us are intimately familiar with emotions in everyday life, there is much we do not know about how emotions work and how they impact our lives. Affective Science is a broad interdisciplinary field that explores these and related questions about affect and emotions. Since language is a powerful mechanism of emotion expression, there is a growing use of language data and advanced natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to shed light on fundamental questions about emotions. The Workshop on Computational Affective Science (CAS) aims to be a dedicated venue for work focused specifically on the link between NLP and affective science. Interdisciplinary Scope: The workshop takes an interdisciplinary approach to affective science and aims at bringing together NLP researchers, scientists, and theorists from many research areas, including psychology, sociology, neuroscience, and philosophy. Although work in sentiment analysis is decades old, this work often proceeds separately and in different fields from research and theory in affective science. Meanwhile, affective scientists in psychology, sociology, neuroscience and philosophy increasingly seek to use linguistic tools to shed light on the nature of emotions, moods, and feeling states. CAS is therefore co-organized by an interdisciplinary group of researchers (spanning NLP and Affective Science) to foment collaboration at this exciting frontier of research. ------------ SUBMISSIONS ------------ We invite long and short archival paper submissions, as well as non-archival extended abstracts on a broad range of topics at the intersection of affective science and natural language processing, including but not limited to: 1. The Nature of Affect and Computational Modeling of Emotions Computational experiments that add to our understanding of affect and emotions, including findings relevant to: - theories and nature of emotion - the biology or neuroscience of emotions - appraisal models - dimensional models (valence / arousal / dominance) - models of constructed emotion - cognitive-affective architectures - emotion dynamics (emergence, intensification, decay, transitions) - emotion granularity - emotion regulation - affective embodiment - evolutionary and developmental affect - emotion–cognition interactions These areas are relevant not just to human affect, but may also apply to data animals and artificial agents. 2. Affective Data and Resources Work on compiling and annotating affect-related information in text, speech, facial and bodily expression, and physiological signals (ECG, EEG, GSR, multimodal biosensing), with a focus on text data (monolingual or multilingual) and multimodal data suitable for an NLP venue. Data from underserved languages is especially encouraged. 3. Emotion Recognition, Prediction, and Inference At the instance level: - emotion classification (discrete emotions, dimensional ratings) - emotion intensity estimation - emotion cause detection - context-aware affect inference (culture, situation, social setting) - structured emotion analysis At the aggregate level: - creating emotion arcs - determining broad trends in emotions over time or across locations - tracking emotional responses toward entities of interest (e.g., climate change) - document-level and cross-document emotion analysis - labeling social networks 4. Applications Including but not limited to: - Affect and health, psychopathology, and mental disorders - Affect and behavior/social science (e.g., interpersonal affect, empathy, group-level affect, affect contagion, computational emotion regulation) - Affect and education - Affect and literature/narratives/digital humanities - Affect and commerce 5. Explainability and Interpretability in Computational Affective Models Work aimed at improving the transparency and interpretability of affective systems. This includes understanding how models represent and infer emotions and identifying key cues driving predictions. 6. Ethics, Fairness, Theory Integration, Philosophical Implications - Bias and generalizability of affective systems across demographics - Privacy and ethics in affective data collection - Examining whether automatic NLP systems rely on current and valid theories of affect and emotion - The implications of machines modeling or simulating affect - Societal considerations surrounding affective artificial agents ------------ IMPORTANT DATES ------------ *Submission deadline (**Extended**): 26 Feb 2026* Notification of acceptance: 16 March 2026 Camera Ready Paper due: 30 March 2026 Workshop date: 16 May 2026 ------------ SUBMISSION DETAILS ------------ We invite submissions for archival long and short papers, as well as non-archival extended abstracts. Archival long and short papers should feature novel and unpublished work relating to the topics detailed above. We also invite submissions of extended abstracts from researchers in the broader Affective Science community, with up to two pages of content featuring the research background/hypotheses and a description of methods/results. Extended abstracts are non-archival, offering the option for publication and presentation at other conference venues. Archival Track: Long Paper: Consists of up to 8 pages of content, with additional pages for references, limitations, ethical considerations, and appendices. Short Paper: Consists of up to 4 pages of content, with additional pages for references, limitations, ethical considerations, and appendices. (When preparing camera ready papers, you will be allowed one extra page to address comments by the reviewers.) Non-Archival Track: Extended Abstract: Up to 2 pages. ------------ SUBMISSION FORMAT ------------ All submissions must use the LREC 2026 template and follow the guidelines found at: https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/ (Note: extended abstracts can be limited to being 1-2 pages in length). Mandatory Ethics Section: We ask all authors to include a section on Ethical Considerations in their submission, touching on the ethical concerns and broader societal impacts of the work. This discussion section will not count towards the page limit. ------------ SUBMISSION SITE ------------ All submissions must be made through the SoftConf portal: https://softconf.com/lrec2026/CAS ------------ ADDITIONAL DETAILS ------------ Website: https://casworkshop.github.io/ Attendance: The workshop will follow the attendance policy of the main conference (https://lrec2026.info/registration-policy/ ). ------------ ORGANIZERS ------------ - Christopher Bagdon, University of Bamberg, Germany - Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla, National Research Council Canada - Kristen A. Lindquist, The Ohio State University, USA - Lyle Ungar, University of Pennsylvania, USA - Roman Klinger, University of Bamberg, Germany - Saif M. Mohammad, National Research Council Canada ***Contact us at <cas-workshop(a)googlegroups.com> with any questions.***

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[new deadline extension] Call for paper: The Information Disorder Workshop
by s.frenda＠hw.ac.uk 20 Feb '26

20 Feb '26

The Information Disorder Workshop Collocated with LREC 2026 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain https://information-disorder-workshop.github.io/ * March 3: Paper submission (extension) * March 17: Notification of acceptance * March 30: Camera-ready submission * May 12, 2026: InDor at LREC! Online disinformation is a pressing challenge for our societies. Its role in influencing elections (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017) and behaviours (van der Linden et al., 2020) has gathered the attention of different societal actors aimed at mitigating its negative impact. The Natural Language Processing (NLP) community is contributing to fighting this phenomenon with a growing number of datasets (Hussain et al., 2025) and technologies (VeraAI, AskVera, Bellingcat) (Lupi et al., 2023; Wuhrl et al., 2023) for the automatic recognition of fake news. However, this field of research suffers from a lack of a common theoretical framework, which causes a fragmentation of approaches. The increasing attention of the NLP community to human-label variation (Plank, 2022) raises additional challenges regarding the cross-cultural and pragmatic implications that determine the spreading of disinformation (Dabbous et al., 2022). The goal of the Information Disorder (InDor) workshop is to promote an interdisciplinary and intersectorial discussion towards the development of NLP research on disinformation. Information Disorder is a recent framework introduced by Wardle and Derakhshan (2017) to organize theories, definitions, and approaches for the study of disinformation. The framework is characterized by two main pillars: 1) acknowledging the need to categorize fake news under a finer-grained taxonomy of disorders (mis-information, dis-information, and mal-information); 2) exploring the role of the contextual factors that determine the spreading of fake news. InDor aims to Define a common theoretical ground for the research on disinformation in NLP and beyond Discuss the cultural factors determining subjectivity to disinformation Promote interdisciplinarity in the development of datasets and models Discuss the impact of real-world applications to contrast disinformation The InDor workshop (half-day duration) will be co-located with the fifteenth biennial Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) held at the Palau de Congressos de Palma in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, on 11-16 May 2026. Submissions 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). In addition, authors will be required to adhere to ethical research policies on AI and may include an ethics statement in their papers. The papers should be submitted as a PDF document, conforming to the formatting guidelines provided in the call for papers of the LREC conference. Templates are provided here https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/ We accept three types of submissions (see the website for details) Regular research papers; Non-archival submissions: like research papers, but will not be included in the proceedings; (Non-archival) research communications: 1-page abstracts summarising relevant research published elsewhere. InDor will also accept submissions that have been rejected from ACL rolling review or other conferences (e.g., LREC), provided they are accompanied by their reviews, and they fit the topic of the workshop. Research papers (archival or non-archival) may consist of up to 8 pages of content. Research communications may consist of up to 1 page of content. Please make the submission here: https://softconf.com/lrec2026/InDor26/ Topics We invite original research papers specifically on the following topics, with a particular focus on resources, taxonomies, and benchmarks for the evaluation of NLP systems on Information Disorder: new interdisciplinary theoretical proposals and foundational aspects surveys on Information Disorder multiculturality and multilinguality in datasets and technologies interdisciplinary computational methods and frameworks community- and user-centred approaches real-world applications to contrast false information experimental applications and projects for social good evaluation of Information Disorder-focused systems generative approaches to contrast false information participatory approaches positions on Information Disorder Submissions are open to all and are to be submitted anonymously (and must conform to the instructions for double-blind review). All papers will be refereed through a double-blind peer review process by at least three reviewers, with final acceptance decisions made by the workshop organisers. Scientific papers will be evaluated based on relevance, significance of contribution, impact, technical quality, scholarship, and quality of presentation. Attendance At least one author of each accepted paper is required to participate in the conference and present the work, in-person or online. Workshop organisers: Simona Frenda, Heriot-Watt University Marco Antonio Stranisci, University of Turin Shaina Ashraf, Phillips University of Marburg Ada Ren, Macquarie University Ioannis Konstas, Heriot-Watt University Usman Naseem, Macquarie University Contact us at s.frenda(a)hw.ac.uk if you have any questions. Website: https://information-disorder-workshop.github.io/

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Job: Full-time permanent Research Engineer Position in NLP (deadline 19/03/26)- Bibliome team at MaIAGE-INRAE, France
by Louise Deleger 20 Feb '26

20 Feb '26

Full-time permanent Research Engineer Position in NLP Bibliome team at MaIAGE-INRAE, France The Bibliome team<http://bibliome> (MaIAGE<https://maiage.inrae.fr/> laboratory) is offering a full-time permanent position of research engineer in Natural Language Processing at INRAE research center within Paris-Saclay University, located in the Paris area, France. INRAE<https://www.inrae.fr/en> (France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment) is a public leading research institute, internationally recognised for the scientific excellence and societal impact of its work. INRAE addresses major global challenges related to biodiversity preservation, sustainable agricultural and food systems, climate change adaptation, and environmental risk management. Within this context, the Bibliome team develops cutting-edge NLP research at the intersection of AI and Life Sciences with the aim of advancing large-scale knowledge extraction from documents, using state-of-the-art transformer architectures, large language models (LLMs), knowledge graphs, and domain ontologies. It develops advanced methods for entity linking, relation extraction, semantic representation, and structured knowledge integration, along with robust evaluation frameworks and reusable research software contributing to next-generation knowledge infrastructures. This position offers the opportunity to work in a dynamic interdisciplinary environment, combining fundamental research, methodological innovation, and high-impact applications. Position description and recruitment conditions at: https://jobs.inrae.fr/concours/concours-externes-ingenieurs-cadres-technici… Contacts : Robert.Bossy(a)inrae.fr<mailto:Robert.Bossy@inrae.fr> Louise.Deleger(a)inrae.fr<mailto:Louise.Deleger@inrae.fr> Key dates: - Application deadline : 19 March 2026 - Interview: from 1st to 19 June 2026 - Starting date: September/October 2026

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