The Paradigm Shift: From Rules to Models in Natural Language Processing
International Summer School
Alicante, Spain, 15, 16 and 17 June 2026
https://summer-school.gplsi.es
Second Call for Participation
Natural Language Processing (NLP) has witnessed a clear paradigm shift:
the transition from rule-based approaches to data-driven language
models. While rule-based approaches dominated NLP for many years, during
the 1990s and early 2000s they gradually gave way to statistical and
machine-learning methods. It would be fair to say that data-driven
models--and, most prominently, Deep Learning (DL), including more
recently Large Language Models (LLMs)--have taken the world by storm.
Deep Learning models are now used almost everywhere, across nearly every
discipline, and Natural Language Processing is no exception. DL has
proved highly promising so far, delivering improvements for almost every
NLP task and application. However, as observed on numerous occasions,
the outputs of DL models are not always ideal, with some studies
reporting cases in which machine-learning approaches do not necessarily
outperform the 'old-fashioned' rule-based ones.
The overarching theme of the summer school will be this paradigm shift,
with lectures and practical sessions reflecting the latest trends at
both theoretical and practical levels. More specifically, the programme
will combine lectures focusing on theoretical foundations with hands-on
practical sessions.
Specific topics will include an Introduction to Large Language Models
(LLMs), Explainable AI in LLMs, Datasets and bias in LLMs, Building
foundational LLMs for low-resource languages, Machine Translation for
Low-Resource Languages, LLMs and sentiment analysis, Model and
hyperparameter optimisation and Eye-tracking and gaze data for NLP and
language models, among others.
The summer school will be ideal for both newcomers and experienced
professionals in NLP, computer science, data science, cybersecurity,
corpus linguistics, language technologies, and related disciplines,
offering a unique opportunity to deepen expertise and engage with the
rapidly evolving world of LLMs.
Panel discussion
A panel discussion on the future of NLP methods and LLMs is scheduled as
part of the summer school. The panel composition is available here:
https://summer-school.gplsi.es/panel/
Venue and dates
The summer school will take place at the research institute of
Informatics of the University of Alicante and will take place on 15, 16
and 17 June 2026.
Keynote speaker
Roberto Navigli (Sapienza University of Rome)
Lecturers
The list of summer school lecturers includes:
Tharindu Ranasinghe (Lancaster University)
Salima Lamsiyah (University of Luxembourg)
Cengiz Acartürk (Jagiellonian University)
Hansi Hettiarachchi (Lancaster University)
Juan Pablo Consuegra Ayala (University of Alicante)
Robiert Sepulveda Torres (University of Alicante)
Alicia Picazo Izquierdo (University of Alicante)
Isuri Anuradha (Lancaster University)
Damith Premasiri (Lancaster University)
Ernesto Luis Estevanell (University of Alicante)
Maram Alharbi (Lancaster University)
Summer school Directors
Tharindu Ranasinghe (University of Lancaster)
Salima Lamsiyah (University of Luxembourg)
Summer School Chair
Ruslan Mitkov (University of Alicante)
Advisory Committee
Manuel Palomar Sanz (University of Alicante)
Rafael Muñoz Guillena (University of Alicante)
Andrés Montoyo Guijarro (University of Alicante)
Organising Committee
Raúl García Cerdá (University of Alicante)
Alicia Picazo Izquierdo (University of Alicante)
Ernesto Luis Estevanell (University of Alicante)
Maram Alharbi (Lancaster University)
Registration
Registration will open in early April 2026. In the meantime, please see
the registration fees here: https://summer-school.gplsi.es/registration/
Related events
The summer school will follow the second international conference
_Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence_ (NLPAICS'2026)
which will take place in Alicante on 11 and 12 June 2026
(https://nlpaics2026.gplsi.es). Those who register for both events will
benefit from a discounted registration fee.
Further information
Further information will be provided in subsequent calls. Alternatively,
interested parties can email summer-school(a)dlsi.ua.es for more
information.
--
Amal Haddad Haddad (She/her)
Facultad de Traducción e Interpretación
Universidad de Granada |https://www.ugr.es/personal/amal-haddad-haddad
Lexicon Research Group |http://lexicon.ugr.es/haddad
Co-Convenor, BAAL SIG 'Humans, Machines,
Language'|https://r.jyu.fi/humala
Event Coordinator, BAAL SIG 'Language, Learning and Teaching'
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[Apologies for cross-posting]
A 2-year research fellowship in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is available in the Language Technology Group (LTG) at the University of Oslo (UiO), Norway.
The position is affiliated with the research project MORALCHANGE<https://www.samfunnsforskning.no/english/projects/aktive/moralchange-eng.ht…>, a cross-disciplinary collaboration between social scientists and NLP researchers exploring how changes in moral values shape political discourse and cultural divides over time.
For more information about the position and the research environment, please see the full announcement here: https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/298838/researcher-in-natural…
Closing date: 5th May 2026
Best regards,
-e
--
Erik Velldal
Language Technology Group
Section for Machine Learning
Department of Informatics, University of Oslo
Final call for papers: CORE Project Workshop @ESSLLI 2026
Referring expression choice in grounded contexts: Linguistic, cognitive,
and computational aspects
ESSLLI 2026 Workshop
3-7 August 2026, Prague, Czech Republic
Extended abstract submission deadline: April 15, 2026
Workshop URL: https://www.upf.edu/web/glif/esslli2026-workshop
ESSLLI 2026 URL: https://2026.esslli.eu
Workshop description:
When we refer to entities and events in our environment, particularly (but
not only) when visual information is present, we have choices. Depending on
what has been said before, who or what else is in a scene, and the
characteristics of what we want to refer to, we might say (among many other
options) "the person running", "the runner", "the woman in the red shirt",
"the one with the glasses", or "them over there". The extent of this
variation in referring expression (RE) choice has become evident in recent
large-scale datasets (Monroe et al. 2017, Silberer et al. 2020, He et al.
2023).
Some of the factors influencing some kinds of choices in RE use have been
amply studied – for example, between full noun phrases and shorter
expressions involving demonstratives or pronouns (Ariel 1990, Gundel et al.
1993 and much later work), or between noun phrases with and without
modification (e.g., Degen et al. 2020, Rubio-Fernandez and Jara-Ettinger
2020, and literature cited there). Others have received less attention –
these include choices among noun phrases that reflect different levels of
taxonomic granularity ("dog" vs. "husky", Graf et al. 2016, Kobrock et al.
2024, Liang and Liao 2024), choices arising from the cross-classifiability
of referents (woman vs. runner, Mädebach et al. 2022, Gualdoni et al.
2023), choices based on salience or contrast (Clarke et al. 2013,
Rubio-Fernández 2024, Bolea et al. to appear) or options for referring to
individuals based on what they are doing or the scenes they appear in
("person running" vs. "runner", Tagliaferri et al. 2023), sometimes with
the goal of producing particular sorts of causal inferences (Sasaki et al.
2025).
The goals of this workshop are 1) to further document and gain insight into
the range of this variation; 2) to highlight its relevance for
semantic/pragmatic theory, for theories of language and cognition, and for
the use of language in computation; and 3) to promote communication and
synergies between researchers at the interfaces of linguistics, cognitive
science, and computation who have studied different aspects of referring
expression choice in grounded contexts.
We welcome contributions on the following and other related questions:
- Cognitive biases that influence tendencies in RE choice in grounded
contexts.
- The role of contrast in RE choice.
- The role of the specific available linguistic alternatives and
alternative-based reasoning in influencing RE choice.
- The information load a referring expression has to bear given
extralinguistic sources of information in the context, especially visual
information.
- Lexical/constructional effects and association strength between RE
options and the referent in question.
- RE variability and language change
Invited speakers:
Raffaella Bernardi (Bolzano)
Laia Mayol (UPF)
Denis Paperno (Utrecht)
Submission guidelines:
Abstracts should be at most two pages in 12pt font (plus up to one extra
page for data and references). Since we want to promote participation and
discussion and no proceedings will be published, workshop submissions are
not limited to unpublished work. We welcome proposals for both long (30
min. + discussion) and short (15 min. + discussion) presentations. We also
plan to devote one day to a poster session accompanied by lightening talks.
Please indicate on your abstract which type(s) of participation you are
interested in.
Submission deadline: March 31, 2026. Submission is through Open Review at:
https://openreview.net/group?id=ESSLLI.eu/2026/Workshop/CORE
Contact email: louise.mcnally(a)upf.edu
Important dates:
Deadline for abstract submission: March 31, 2026
Notification of acceptance: April 30, 2026
Workshop dates: August 3-7, 2026
There is a vacancy for a position as Associate Professor at the Department
of Information Science and Media Studies, at the University of Bergen.
The position focuses on intelligent information systems, including areas
such as natural language processing, neuro‑symbolic methods, semantic
technologies, multimedia processing, and ethical and trustworthy AI.
Bergen is a beautiful city surrounded by fjords and mountains, and the
position offers generous conditions. Do not hesitate to contact me if you
have any questions.
More information is available in the full announcement here:
https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/297764/associate-professor-i…
Kind regards,
Samia
Dear all,
We are pleased to invite you to participate in the MultiLexNorm 2026 shared task, which will be hosted at EMNLP 2026.
Our shared task operates at the word level and focuses on lexical normalization, that is, transforming an utterance into its standard form (e.g., ppl → people) on the word level. It also includes one-to-many (1-to-n) and many-to-one (n-to-1) replacements. Participants will develop systems for lexical normalization across 17 languages.
Building on the previous task, which focused on Indo-European languages written in the Latin script, we now focus on languages written in other scripts, and have new benchmarks for Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese.
The data and more information about the task can be found on: https://noisy-text.github.io/2026/multi-lexnorm.html
Dates:
21-Jul Test data
01-Aug Final Evaluation
20-Aug Paper deadline
05-Sep Paper reviewed
15-Sep Camera ready
TBA Workshop
Best,
The organizers:
Rob van der Goot
Weerayut Buaphet
RetroEval 2026: Symposium on Natural Language Generation Evaluations
============================================
1-2 June 2026, Aberdeen, Scotland, United Kingdom
https://retroeval.github.io/
============================================
Evaluation in the field of Natural Language Generation (NLG) has changed considerably over the past several decades. This special symposium in honour of Prof. Ehud Reiter’s retirement provides a forum for academic and industry researchers to look back on the topic of how evaluations in the field of NLG have changed and to explore unaddressed challenges. The two day symposium will be held in-person at the Sir Duncan Rice Library in the historic University of Aberdeen, June 1-2, 2026. For this symposium, we welcome submissions of long papers, short papers, and extended abstracts.
*** Workshop Theme ***
Ehud Reiter has been a leading light in Natural Language Generation (NLG) research throughout the four decades he worked in this area, in both academia (Aberdeen) and industry (CoGenTech; Arria NLG). Ehud’s influence extends to all aspects of NLG, but the areas in which it has arguably been the strongest is evaluation of NLG systems. On the occasion of his retirement, this workshop, which is held in his honour, will therefore focus on evaluation of NLG systems, highlighting in particular some of the topics that Ehud has tended to emphasize (see below) such as the importance of reproducibility and the risks of data contamination.
*** Topics of Interest ***
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:
-- The aims of NLG and NLG evaluation
-- Intrinsic versus extrinsic NLG evaluation
-- Evaluation of NLG systems in the real world
-- Impact assessment of NLG systems and LLMs
-- New evaluation challenges arising from the use of LLMs
-- Hallucination annotation and its role in NLG evaluation
-- Statistical analysis for NLG evaluations
-- Data contamination in NLG evaluation
-- LLMs as evaluators: opportunities and pitfalls
-- The role of LLMs in the development of evaluation metrics
-- Reproduction and reproducibility of human evaluation experiments
-- Publication bias: What to do with negative results?
-- Pre-publication of research hypotheses in NLG evaluation
-- NLG evaluation versus psycholinguistic experimentation: what can we learn from each other?
-- Disciplinary cultures and evaluation methods
-- Evaluating NLG systems/LLMs for assistive technology
*** Submission Types ***
The workshop accepts the following submission types:
• Long Papers (archival)
• Short Papers (archival)
• Extended Abstracts (non-archival)
Accepted contributions will be presented as oral or poster presentations.
*** Archival Submissions ***
• Long papers:
• Up to 8 pages (excluding references)
• Unlimited references
• Up to 2 appendix pages
• 1 additional page in the final version to address reviewer comments
• Short papers:
• Up to 4 pages (excluding references)
• Unlimited references
• Up to 1 appendix page
• 1 additional page in the final version for reviewer comments
*** Non-Archival Submissions ***
• Extended abstracts:
• Up to 2 pages including references
• 1 additional appendix page for tables/figures
• Selection based on the symposium fit
*** Submission Format ***
• Two-column ACL 2026 format
• LaTeX template only
• PDF submissions only
• Submissions via OpenReview
*** Important Dates ***
Note: All deadlines are 23:59 UTC-12.
• ARR commitment deadline (archival): 16 March, 2026
• Direct paper submission deadline (archival): 24 April, 2026
• Direct paper submission deadline (non-archival): 1 May, 2026
• Notification of acceptance: 8 May, 2026
• Camera-ready deadline: 22 May, 2026
• Symposium dates: 1-2 June, 2026
*** Review Policy ***
Long and short papers will follow ACL double-blind review policies. Submissions must be anonymized, including self-references and links. Papers violating anonymity requirements will be rejected without review. Demo descriptions are exempt from anonymization.
Contact and Information
• Website: https://retroeval.github.io/
• Email: retroeval(a)googlegroups.com <mailto:retroeval@googlegroups.com>
Workshop Organisers: Saad Mahamood (Shopware), David Howcroft (University of Aberdeen), Kees van Deemter (Utrecht University), Albert Gatt (Utrecht University), Simone Balloccu (TU Darmstadt), Margaret Mitchell (Hugging Face), Alberto Bugarín Diz (CiTIUS & University of Santiago de Compostela), Jose María Alonso-Moral (CiTIUS & University of Santiago de Compostela), Adarsa Sivaprasad (University of Aberdeen), Chenghua Lin (Manchester University), and Alexandra Johnstone (University of Aberdeen).
[Apologies for cross-postings]
*********************************************************
TSD 2026 - SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS
*********************************************************
Twenty-ninth International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2026)
Brno, Czech Republic, 1-4 September 2026
http://www.tsdconference.org/
The conference is organized by the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk
University, Brno, and the Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of
West Bohemia, Pilsen. The conference is supported by International
Speech Communication Association.
Venue: Brno, Czech Republic
THE SUBMISSION DEADLINES:
April 10 2026 ............ Submission of abstracts
April 17 2026 ............ Submission of full papers
Submission of abstracts serves for better organization of the review
process only - for the actual review a full paper submission is
necessary. It is still possible to submit both by the full paper deadline.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Anders Soegaard, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
You may get updates by following new https://www.linkedin.com/company/tsdconference/
TSD SERIES
TSD series evolved as a prime forum for interaction between researchers in
both spoken and written language processing from all over the world.
Proceedings of TSD form a book published by Springer-Verlag in their
Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series. TSD Proceedings
are regularly indexed by Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation
Index/Web of Science. Moreover, LNAI series are listed in all major
citation databases such as DBLP, SCOPUS, EI, INSPEC or COMPENDEX.
CALL for SATELLITE WORKSHOP PROPOSALS
https://www.tsdconference.org/tsd2026/conf_workshop_proposals.html
The TSD 2026 conference will be accompanied by one-day satellite workshops
or project meetings with organizational support by the TSD organizing
committee. The organizing committee can arrange for a meeting room at the
conference venue and prepare a workshop proceedings as a book with ISBN by
a local publisher. The workshop papers that will pass also the standard TSD
review process will appear in the Springer proceedings. Each workshop is
a subject to proposal that should be sent via the proposal submission form
or discussed via the contact e-mail tsd2026(a)tsdconference.org ahead of the
respective deadline.
TOPICS
Topics of the conference will include (but are not limited to):
Corpora and Language Resources (monolingual, multilingual,
text and spoken corpora, large web corpora, large language models,
disambiguation, specialized lexicons, dictionaries)
Speech Recognition (multilingual, continuous, emotional
speech, handicapped speaker, out-of-vocabulary words,
alternative way of feature extraction, new models for
acoustic and language modelling)
Tagging, Classification and Parsing of Text and Speech
(morphological and syntactic analysis, synthesis and
disambiguation, multilingual processing, sentiment analysis,
credibility analysis, automatic text labeling, summarization,
authorship attribution)
Speech and Spoken Language Generation (multilingual, high
fidelity speech synthesis, computer singing)
Semantic Processing of Text and Speech (information
extraction, information retrieval, data mining, semantic web,
knowledge representation, inference, ontologies, sense
disambiguation, plagiarism detection, fake news detection)
Integrating Applications of Text and Speech Processing
(machine translation, natural language understanding,
question-answering strategies, assistive technologies)
Automatic Dialogue Systems (self-learning, multilingual,
question-answering systems, dialogue strategies, prosody in
dialogues)
Multimodal Techniques and Modelling (video processing, facial
animation, visual speech synthesis, user modelling, emotions
and personality modelling)
Papers on processing of languages other than English are strongly
encouraged.
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Elmar Noeth, Germany (general chair)
Rodrigo Agerri, Spain
Tomas Arias-Vergara, Germany
Vladimir Benko, Slovakia
Archna Bhatia, USA
Jan Cernocky, Czech Republic
Simon Dobrisek, Slovenia
Kamil Ekstein, Czech Republic
Karina Evgrafova, Russia
Yevhen Fedorov, Ukraine
Volker Fischer, Germany
Darja Fiser, Slovenia
Lucie Flek, Germany
Bjorn Gamback, Norway
Radovan Garabik, Slovakia
Alexander Gelbukh, Mexico
Louise Guthrie, USA
Jan Hajic, Czech Republic
Eva Hajicova, Czech Republic
Yannis Haralambous, France
Hynek Hermansky, USA
Daniel Hládek, Slovakia
Ales Horak, Czech Republic
Eduard Hovy, USA
Milos Jakubicek, Czech Republic
Maria Khokhlova, Russia
Aidar Khusainov, Russia
Daniil Kocharov, Russia
Miloslav Konopik, Czech Republic
Valia Kordoni, Germany
Evgeny Kotelnikov, Russia
Pavel Kral, Czech Republic
Siegfried Kunzmann, USA
Oier Lopez de Lacalle, Spain
Nikola Ljubesic, Croatia
Natalija Loukachevitch, Russia
Bernardo Magnini, Italy
David Mareček, Czech Republic
Jindrich Matousek, Czech Republic
Vaclav Matousek, Czech Republic
Roman Moucek, Czech Republic
Daša Munková, Slovakia
Agnieszka Mykowiecka, Poland
Hermann Ney, Germany
Joakim Nivre, Sweden
Juan Rafael Orozco-Arroyave, Colombia
Paula Andrea Perez-toro, Germany
Maciej Piasecki, Poland
Josef Psutka, Czech Republic
James Pustejovsky, USA
German Rigau, Spain
Paolo Rosso, Spain
Leon Rothkrantz, The Netherlands
Anna Rumshisky, USA
Milan Rusko, Slovakia
Pavel Rychly, Czechia
Mykola Sazhok, Ukraine
Pavel Skrelin, Russia
Petr Sojka, Czech Republic
Ján Staš, Slovakia
Georg Stemmer, Germany
Marko Robnik Sikonja, Slovenia
Marko Tadic, Croatia
Jan Trmal, Czechia
Tamas Varadi, Hungary
Zygmunt Vetulani, Poland
Aleksander Wawer, Poland
Alina Wroblewska, Poland
Jerneja Zganec Gros, Slovenia
FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE
The conference program will include presentation of invited papers,
oral presentations, and poster/demonstration sessions. Papers will be
presented in plenary or topic oriented sessions.
Social events including a trip in the vicinity of Brno will allow
for additional informal interactions.
SUBMISSION OF PAPERS
Authors are invited to submit a full paper not exceeding 12 pages
formatted in the LNCS style (including references). Those accepted
will be presented either orally or as posters. The decision about the
presentation format will be based on the recommendation of the
reviewers. Proceedings papers do not differentiate the presentation
format. The authors are asked to submit their papers using the
on-line form accessible from the conference website.
Papers submitted to TSD 2026 must not be under review by any other
conference or publication during the TSD review cycle, and must not be
previously published or accepted for publication elsewhere.
Publishing on preprint servers is not forbidden, but authors are
warned that when doing so this might influence the blind reviewing
conditions.
As reviewing will be blind, the paper should not include the authors'
names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references that reveal the
author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...",
should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously
showed (Smith, 1991) ...". Papers that do not conform to the
requirements above are subject to be rejected without review.
The paper format for review has to be in the PDF format with all
required fonts included. Upon notification of acceptance, presenters
will receive further information on submitting their camera-ready and
electronic sources (for detailed instructions on the final paper
format see https://www.tsdconference.org/tsd2026/paper_instr.html).
Authors are also invited to present actual projects, developed
software or interesting material relevant to the topics of the
conference. The presenters of demonstrations should provide an
abstract not exceeding one page. The demonstration abstracts will not
appear in the conference proceedings.
IMPORTANT DATES
April 10 2026 ............ Submission of abstracts
April 17 2026 ............ Submission of full papers
June 5 2026 .............. Notification of acceptance
June 15 2026 ............. Final papers (camera ready) and registration
August 8 2026 ............ Submission of demonstration abstracts
August 15 2026 ........... Notification of acceptance for
demonstrations sent to the authors
September 1-4 2026 ....... Conference date
Submission of abstracts serves for better organization of the review
process only - for the actual review a full paper submission is
necessary.
The accepted conference contributions will be published in Springer
proceedings that will be made available to participants at the time
of the conference.
OFFICIAL LANGUAGE
The official language of the conference is English.
ACCOMMODATION
The organizing committee will arrange discounts on accommodation in
the 4-star hotel at the conference venue. The current prices of the
accommodation will be available at the conference website.
ADDRESS
All correspondence regarding the conference should be
addressed to
Ales Horak, TSD 2026
Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University
Botanicka 68a, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic
phone: +420-5-49 49 18 63
fax: +420-5-49 49 18 20
email: tsd2026(a)tsdconference.org
The official TSD 2026 homepage is: http://www.tsdconference.org/tsd2026
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tsdconference/
LOCATION
Brno is the second largest city in the Czech Republic with a
population of almost 400,000 and is the country's judiciary and
trade-fair center. Brno is the capital of South Moravia, which is
located in the south-eastern part of the Czech Republic and is known
for its wide range of cultural, natural, and technical attractions.
South Moravia is a traditional wine region. Brno had been a Royal
City since 1347 and with its six universities it forms a cultural
center of the region.
Brno can be reached easily by direct flights from London, Milano, and
Malaga, and by trains or buses from Vienna (150 km) or Prague (230 km).
10th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH) @EMNLP: 1st CFP
*** First Call for Papers + Call for Mentors/Mentees ***
We invite paper submissions to the 10th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH), which will take place on 24-29 October at EMNLP 2026.
Website: https://www.workshopononlineabuse.com/cfp.html
Important Dates
* Registration deadline for mentorship programme: April 10, 2026
* Notification of mentor/mentee match: April 25, 2026
* Submission due: June 26, 2026
* ARR reviewed submission due: August 3, 2026
* Notification of acceptance: August 15, 2026
* Camera-ready papers due: September 10, 2026
* Workshop: 24-29 October 2026
Overview
Digital technologies have brought significant benefits to society, transforming how people connect, communicate, and interact. However, these same technologies have also enabled the widespread dissemination and amplification of abusive and harmful content, such as hate speech, harassment, and misinformation. Given the sheer volume of content shared online, addressing abuse and harm at scale requires the use of computational tools. Yet, detecting and moderating online abuse remains a complex task, fraught with technical, social, legal, and ethical challenges.
The 10th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH) invites paper submissions from a diverse range of fields, including but not limited to natural language processing, machine learning, computational social science, law, political science, psychology, sociology, and cultural studies. We explicitly encourage interdisciplinary research, technical and non-technical contributions, and submissions that focus on under-resourced languages. Non-archival papers and civil society reports are also welcome.
Topics covered by WOAH include, but are not limited to:
* New models or methods for detecting abusive and harmful online content, including misinformation;
* Biases and limitations in existing detection models or datasets for abusive and harmful content, especially those in commercial use;
* Development of new datasets and taxonomies for online abuse and harms;
* Novel evaluation metrics and procedures for detecting harmful content;
* Analyses of the dynamics of online abuse, its propagation, and its impact on different communities;
* Social, legal, and ethical considerations in detecting, monitoring, and moderating online abuse.
Special Theme: “Ten Years of WOAH: Reflecting on Progress and New Frontiers”
In its 10th edition, WOAH highlights the theme “Ten Years of WOAH: Reflecting on Progress and New Frontiers”. Over the past decade, WOAH has become a central interdisciplinary venue for online harms research. As harms and enabling technologies have evolved, the field has moved beyond an early focus on textual hate speech and harassment to address more complex phenomena. Advances in AI and online ecosystems have expanded the scale and diversity of harms. Transformer models, multimodal platforms, and recommendation systems have contributed to the escalation of issues like misinformation, radicalisation, child sexual exploitation, identity-based abuse, algorithmic bias, privacy violations, and AI-mediated harms. Methods tackling this have evolved from monolingual lexicon-based approaches to deep learning, multilinguality, multimodality, interpretability, and interdisciplinarity.
Despite this progress, fundamental challenges remain. There is limited consensus on what constitutes “harm”, how context and thresholds should be defined, or how harms vary across cultures and modalities. These ambiguities affect datasets and models, constrain comparability, and often marginalise affected communities. The past decade also calls for critical self-reflection. Research has frequently prioritised detection, high-resource languages, and narrowly defined phenomena over intervention, global perspectives, and systemic or structural harms, with insufficient attention to user agency, platform incentives, lived experience, and participatory approaches. Finally, ten years of work have underscored that interdisciplinarity is essential for addressing the sociotechnical nature of the phenomenon. Addressing future online harms will require deeper integration across NLP, ML, social sciences, law, policy, and HCI. WOAH 10 seeks to consolidate lessons from the past decade, identify enduring gaps, and connect research, practice, and policy to guide the next generation of work on online harms.
[NEW!] Mentorship Programme
In light of our theme of reflecting on the past decade, we as organisers have also taken time for self-reflection. While we emphasise the importance of interdisciplinary work, the increasing number of submissions (which we are extremely proud and happy about!) has required us to apply our submission guidelines more strictly. In recent years, these issues have been particularly relevant for submissions coming from outside the NLP community. This signals that, if we do not take action, we risk failing to promote the very diversity we aim to support.
After listening to feedback from the community, we have decided to lower this barrier by launching the first-ever WOAH Mentorship Programme.
Link to register as mentor: https://forms.gle/XaK8KBFomaWZZwG98
Link to register as mentee: https://forms.gle/AC5akVcdzsCvwqEo7
As a mentee, you will be able to propose your WOAH project idea and outline the type of guidance or supervision you are seeking. As a mentor, you will be expected to support your mentee by meeting at least three times during the project (at the beginning, midway, and towards the end). We encourage mentees to include their mentors as co-authors of their WOAH submission.
Timeline:
* Register for the mentorship programme by 10th April
* Notification of mentor/mentee match by 25th April
Submission
Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system.
Submission link: TBA
The workshop will accept three types of papers.
1) Academic Papers (long and short): Long papers of up to 8 pages, excluding references, and short papers of up to 4 pages, excluding references. Unlimited pages for references and appendices. Accepted papers will be given an additional page of content to address reviewer comments. Previously published papers cannot be accepted.
2) Non-Archival Submissions: Up to 2 pages, excluding references, to summarise and showcase in-progress work and work published elsewhere.
3) Civil Society Reports: Non-archival submissions, with a minimum of 2 pages and no upper limit. Can include work published elsewhere.
All submissions must use the official ACL style files<https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files>. Submissions that do not conform to the required styles, including paper size, margin width, and font size restrictions, will be rejected without review. All submissions should adhere to the workshop policies https://www.workshopononlineabuse.com/policies.html.
WOAH Community
We are excited to share the WOAH community Slack channel — a workspace for researchers interested in or working on understanding and addressing online abuse and harms!
Join us here: https://join.slack.com/t/hatespeechdet-47d7560/shared_invite/zt-2a8d96j4z-g…
Contact Info
Please send any questions about the workshop to organizers(a)workshopononlineabuse.com<mailto:organizers@workshopononlineabuse.com>
Organisers
Agostina Calabrese, Cohere
Thomas Davidson, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Christine de Kock, University of Melbourne
Urja Khurana, Delft University of Technology
Marta Marchiori Manerba, University of Turin
Paloma Piot, Universidade da Coruña
Zeerak Talat, University of Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. Is e buidheann carthannais a th’ ann an Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann, clàraichte an Alba, àireamh clàraidh SC005336.
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CARI'2026 – Last Call For Papers [Extended Deadline]
The 18th African Conference on Research in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics (CARI'2026)
October 21-24, 2026
University of Abomey-Calavi, Cotonou – Benin
https://cari-conf.bj/
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OVERVIEW
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CARI, the African Conference on Research in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, is the flagship event of ASDS - African Society in Digital Science (https://asds.africa/). It brings together researchers and practitioners from Africa and beyond to present and discuss advances in computer science and applied mathematics, aiming to strengthen collaboration, international cooperation, and the visibility of African research while fostering innovation to address the continent's challenges.
CARI'2026 will be held on October 21-24, 2026. The program will feature keynote talks, technical sessions, poster presentations, and panel discussions, preceded by workshops and tutorials on October 22, 2026.
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SCOPE AND TOPICS OF INTEREST
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CARI 2026 invites submissions in English of full papers presenting original research results and short papers reporting work in progress or position papers.
The conference is structured around two main tracks: Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Track: Computer Science
- Algorithms and optimisation
- Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science
- Distributed systems and cloud computing
- Networking and the Internet of Things
- Security, privacy, and dependable systems
- Digital sovereignty and computing for Africa
Track: Applied Mathematics
- Analysis of dynamical Systems
- Partial differential equations and their applications
- High-performance scientific computing
- Mathematical foundations of artificial intelligence
- Mathematical Modelling
- Stochastic Systems
CARI'2026 especially welcomes applied research addressing African contexts and challenges, with application domains including agriculture, healthcare, education, environmental systems, transportation, and logistics.
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IMPORTANT DATES (All deadlines are at 23:59 GMT)
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- Paper submission: 30 March, 2026 -> EXTENDED DEADLINE: 10 April, 2026
- Notification to authors: 22 June, 2026
- Camera-ready deadline: 6 July, 2026
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PAPER SUBMISSION AND PUBLICATION
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CARI'2026 accepts submissions (in English) in three categories:
- Full papers describing original research (up to 14 pages excluding references).
- Work-in-progress papers on early results (up to 7 pages in length excluding references).
- Position papers proposing novel or unconventional ideas - preferably supported by empirical data and measurements - that differ from prior published work (up to 7 pages excluding references).
All submissions must be original, unpublished, and not under consideration elsewhere. All submissions will be reviewed based on relevance, originality, significance, and clarity.
The use of AI systems to generate text (e.g. LLM) for inclusion in a CARI submission is only allowed for improving language and readability and if its role is properly documented in the paper (in the acknowledgements section).
Papers should follow the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) format (Springer) and be submitted via EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cari2026)
CARI 2026 employs a single-blind review process, with authors' names included in submissions.
As CARI'2024, all accepted papers should be published in Springer's book series Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS) or Trends in Mathematics and made available through the SpringerLink Digital Library (indexed in Scopus, ACM Digital Library, DBLP, and Google Scholar). Selected papers from CARI'2026 will be invited to submit extended versions for possible publication in ARIMA.
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FOR MORE INFORMATION
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Web: https://cari-conf.bj/
E-mail: Cari2026bj(a)gmail.com
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