<Apologies for cross-postings>
--------------------------------------
*CALL FOR PARTICIPATION *
--------------------------------------
MIRROR@IberLEF20206: Motivational Interviewing Response & Rating via
Synthetic cOnversational tuRns
Challenge platform now online: https://www.mirror-iberlef.lat/dashboard
Just register, log in, and start making submissions.
-------------------------------
****Task description****
-------------------------------
We invite the community to develop Generative AI (GenAI) methods for
creating synthetic conversation turns that can substantially improve the
performance of models trained to recognize behavior codes (BCs) in the
context of motivational interviews. A BC is a discrete, observable
clinician action (e.g., asking a question, giving information) that is
counted during coding of a motivational interviewing session to quantify
specific techniques used. These codes allow raters to tally how often
particular clinician behaviours occur, which helps assess adherence to
MI-consistent versus MI-inconsistent practice. Our ultimate goal is to
generate valuable data for training models for the automatic assessment
of clinicians’ motivational-interviewing skills. These skills — crucial
for promoting behavior change among patients — can be evaluated by using
the “Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity (MITI)” rubric
(https://tinyurl.com/38byjrwy).
**
*This is a data-centric competition: *participants are expected to
produce high-quality datasets representing a wide range of clinical
conversations (rather than training a model) to enhance the performance
of a frozen baseline model used for BC classification. We encourage
participants to include samples featuring clients from diverse
backgrounds, varied conversation topics, and conversing with different
types of health professionals.
Participants in this competition should provide three datasets (one per
pair of considered BCs) of at most 100 labeled conversation turns that
will be used to fine-tune pretrained models; the fine-tuned models will
then be used to make predictions for a hold-out dataset. The performance
of the fine-tuned model will be used as the leading evaluation metric to
rank participants. The considered pairs of BCs are:
(1) Simple reflection vs. Complex reflection;
(2) Open question vs. Closed question;
(3) Persuasion vs. Giving Information.
Sample submissions, and detailed instructions on the formatting,
evaluation criteria and competition platform will be available at the
MIRROR website.
-------------------------------
****Important dates****
-------------------------------
* Mar 9th: Start of the development phase (platform starts receiving
submissions for the validation set)
* May 1st: Start of the final phase (platform starts receiving
submissions for the test set)
* May 11th: End of evaluation campaign (deadline for submission of runs)
* May 22nd; Publication of official results
* Jun 8th: Deadline for paper submission
* Jun 23th: Acceptance notification
* Jun 30th: Camera-ready submission deadline
* Sep, TBD: Publication of proceedings
* Sep, TBD: Workshop with SEPLN 2026
-------------------------------
****Organizing team****
-------------------------------
* Luis J. Arellano INAOE, Mexico
* Carlos Olachea INAOE, Mexico
* John Piette, University of Michigan, USA
* Hugo Jair Escalante, INAOE, Mexico
* Delia Irazú Hernández, INAOE, Mexico
* Luis Villaseñor, INAOE, Mexico
* Manuel Montes, INAOE, Mexico
Contact: Hugo Jair Escalante (hugo.jair(a)gmail.com)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*********
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Second 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
Abstract submission deadline: March 31, 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
Dear Corpora list,
I am looking for applicants for two fully funded PhD/postdoc positions for 3 years starting ~September 2026.
Project description:
LMLM proposes to build Linguistically Motivated Language Models (LMs). This involves adapting both the training regime and the LM architecture to incorporate different linguistic levels. The hypothesis is that this will lead to mitigation of shortcut learning and, in turn, more reliable LMs. The project will start on the lower levels, investigating how internal structures of words can be used in LMs, followed by words and the syntax level. There will be a strong focus on evaluation, incorporating both standard metrics and benchmarks as well as linguistically oriented and compositionality benchmarks.
The successful candidate(s) will be part of the NLPnorth research group in the Data Science section of ITU, and are also encouraged to become affiliated with the AI Pioneer center. They will be supervised by me and a co-supervisor which is selected on a per-candidate basis. LMLM is funded by Carlsberg (https://www.carlsbergfondet.dk/en/what-we-have-funded/cf25-1861/).
More information is available on: https://candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationInit.aspx?cid=119&ProjectId=181… , and feel free to contact me with any questions.
Best,
Rob (https://robvanderg.github.io/)
[Apologies for cross-postings]
*********************************************************
TSD 2026 - FIRST 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.
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. 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.
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
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-east part of the Czech Republic and is known
for a wide range of cultural, natural, and technical sights.
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 and Milano,
and by trains or buses from Vienna (150 km) or Prague (230 km).
[Apologies for cross-postings]
CALL FOR PAPERS
CV4Edu: Computer Vision × Education: building a cross-community agenda for multimodal vision in classrooms
In conjunction with CVPR 2026, June 3 or 4, Denver, CO, US.
Website: https://cv4edu.github.io/
Computer vision (CV) plays a central role in multimodal human-centered AI, yet most models are trained on web-scale benchmarks that poorly reflect real classrooms. Educational data are noisy, private, small-scale, and multimodal (e.g., video, audio, text). Students’ cognitive/behavioral states (e.g., engagement, mind-wandering) and learning processes (e.g., self-regulation, collaboration) can be inferred from subtle multimodal cues (e.g., gaze, pose, facial features). Still, today’s models struggle to generalize to classroom data, limiting reliability in deployed human-centered applications (e.g., assistive technology, collaborative AI). CV4Edu brings together computer vision, natural language processing, human-computer interaction, and educational researchers to chart a community agenda for efficient, privacy-aware multimodal data-driven models that are more reliable in low-resource, real-world classroom settings — potentially launching shared datasets, metrics, and unified practices.
Our goal is to support research that bridges CV, NLP, HCI, cognitive science, and the learning sciences/education communities. We welcome submissions both within and beyond education contexts—such as multimodal modeling, sensing, behavior forecasting, cognitive state inference, robotics, and embodied AI—provided they discuss transferability to classroom settings (e.g., what may break or carry over under noise, occlusions, viewpoints, multi-person dynamics, privacy constraints, limited annotations, distribution shift, hardware variability).
***********************************
TOPICS
The workshop topics include (but are not limited to):
Multimodal classroom perception
- Face, gaze, pose, gesture, posture, affect, and prosody
- Video, audio, gaze sensors, and wearables (egocentric and exocentric)
- Multimodal fusion, representation learning, and cross-view / multi-camera setups
Language-centered multimodal learning analytics
- Linking speech/text to video events, gaze/attention, and instructional context
- Classroom NLP: ASR robustness, diarization, evaluating and mitigating bias, discourse modeling, dialogue/tutoring interactions, simplification, misconception detection
- Retrieval-augmented classroom analytics, model adaptation, evaluation for learning-aligned outcomes
Robustness & generalization
- Domain shift beyond the lab, occlusions, noisy data, and missing modalities
- Few-/low-shot learning, continual and on-device adaptation
- Generalization across classroom layouts and populations
Human behavior modeling for learning
- Engagement, attention, affect, confusion, self-regulation, and metacognition
- Collaboration, group dynamics, and teacher–student interactions
- Gaze-informed models, saliency/scanpath prediction, activity recognition
Temporal modeling & intervention
- Sequential/temporal models of learning processes
- Behavioral forecasting, early-warning systems, and interventions
- Real-time inference, feedback, and human-in-the-loop systems
Interpretability, reliability & evaluation
- Interpretable models, uncertainty estimation, and calibration
- OOD detection, fairness, and bias analysis
- Evaluation protocols aligned with learning outcomes
Privacy-aware, datasets & deployments
- Privacy-preserving data collection, anonymization, de-identification, and governance
- Annotation strategies, construct-aligned labeling, active learning, synthetic data, and dataset curation
- Classroom-ready systems, scalable multimodal data-collection frameworks, edge/on-device inference, and real-world deployments
**We encourage general computer-vision, visually grounded NLP, and human-centered, collaborative AI submissions (e.g., behavioral modeling, pose/activity recognition, gaze estimation, attention modeling, multimodal learning, methods “in the wild”, cognitive state inference and forecasting) that make a clear connection to educational/learning environments (even if primarily in the discussion).**
***********************************
SUBMISSIONS
The workshop invites submissions presenting original research, emerging ideas, datasets and benchmarks, systems, applications, and position papers advancing methods for real-world educational settings. We welcome both archival and non-archival contributions.
All submissions must follow the CVPR 2026 paper template and official style guidelines (https://cvpr.thecvf.com/Conferences/2026/AuthorGuidelines).
Archival Track (Full Papers)
Papers submitted to the Archival Track must present original, unpublished work and will be considered for inclusion in the official CVPR 2026 workshop proceedings. The main text must be 6–8 pages in length and formatted according to the CVPR 2026 submission guidelines (https://cvpr.thecvf.com/Conferences/2026/CallForPapers). References and appendices are not subject to a page limit.
Non-Archival Track (Extended Abstracts + Short / Position Papers)
We invite non-archival submissions describing ongoing/early-stage work (e.g., preliminary results, datasets or benchmarks in progress, negative results, lessons learned), position papers, and work previously published elsewhere (including papers on arXiv or at other venues). Our goal is to foster discussion and community building. These submissions will not be included in the official proceedings. Extended abstracts may be up to 2 pages and short/position papers up to 4 pages (excluding references), formatted according to the CVPR 2026 submission guidelines (https://cvpr.thecvf.com/Conferences/2026/CallForPapers).
Review Process
- All submissions will undergo double-blind peer review.
- Submissions will receive 3 reviews — two reviews, followed by a meta-review.
- Submissions must comply with CVPR policies.
- An ethics/IRB checklist is required where applicable, and an optional ethics and broader impact statement may be included.
Important Dates (AoE)
- Archival Paper Submission Deadline: **March 16, 2026** (NEW)
- Archival Notification of Decision: **March 24, 2026** (NEW)
- Archival Camera-Ready Deadline: April 10, 2026
- Non-Archival Submission Deadline: May 10, 2026
- Non-Archival Notification: May 15, 2026
**Note: The archival notification date is earlier this year due to updated IEE metadata submission requirements.**
Submission Site
Archival papers can be submitted through the OpenReview Submission Site (https://openreview.net/group?id=thecvf.com/CVPR/2026/Workshop/CV4Edu).
Non-proceedings papers and abstracts can be submitted through the OpenReview Submission Site (link to be posted).
***********************************
ORGANIZERS
Ekta Sood: University of Colorado Boulder
Joyce Horn Fonteles: Vanderbilt University
Mariah Bradford: Colorado State University
Paul Gavrikov: Independent researcher
Prajit Dhar: University of Marburg
Janis Pagel: University of Cologne
Trisha Mital: Dolby Laboratories
Gautam Biswas: Vanderbilt University
Sidney D'Mello: University of Colorado Boulder
Contact: cv4edu.cvpr(a)gmail.com
The next webinar in the Edge Hill University Linguistics Research Group Speaker Series will take place on Thursday 26th March, 2-3pm (online via Teams).
Title: Media Representations of Blindness in UK Newspapers: A Corpus-Based Study
Speakers: Dr Costas Gabrielatos (English and Creative Arts), Dr Valeria Occelli (Psychology)
Abstract: In this talk, we present a study investigating how UK newspapers portray blindness and blind people and how media discourse may influence public representations of visual impairment. We compiled the Blindness UK Press Corpus, consisting of articles published between 2014 and 2023 across ten national UK newspapers. Using collocation analysis of the lemmas blind and blindness, semantic preference analysis, and discourse prosody analysis based on manual annotation, we examined references to individuals and to the condition. Results show that blind individuals are rarely granted agency or voice. References to blindness are largely metaphorical and predominantly negative, and discussions of the condition focus mainly on pathology and limitation.
Click here to register: https://forms.gle/s9Um9RR5xGzqeqca6.
Registration will close at 5pm on Wednesday 25th March. The teams link will be sent out on the morning of the 26th March.
If you have any questions, please email Dr Imogen Marcus: marcusi(a)edgehill.ac.uk.
Hi
I am posting for the first time and wondering : how do I insert a hyperlink?
Thanks!
Imogen
Dr Imogen Marcus, Senior Lecturer in English Language
Edge Hill University
Edge Hill Linguistics Research Group Speaker Series 2025-2026: <https://sites.edgehill.ac.uk/lrg/forthcoming-events/>
Linguistics Research Group Speaker Series<https://sites.edgehill.ac.uk/lrg/speaker-series/>
________________________________
Edge Hill University<http://ehu.ac.uk/home/emailfooter>
Modern University of the Year, The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2022<http://ehu.ac.uk/tef/emailfooter>
University of the Year, Educate North 2021/21
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Call for Papers: LM Playschool (LMP 2026)
Improving Language Models through Learning from Dialogue Interaction
Co-located with EMNLP 2026 — 24-29 October 2026, Budapest
Website: https://lm-playschool.github.io/
The LM Playschool Workshop (LMP 2026) invites submissions exploring the frontier of language agents that learn, adapt, and improve through situated interaction. We focus on conversational, collaborative, goal-oriented, and multi-turn environments—moving beyond static training and evaluation datasets to explore whether interactive learning can yield more data-efficient, robust, and adaptable language agents.
💡 WORKSHOP VISION
LMP 2026 aims to bridge the gap between three ongoing research trends:
1. Game-based Benchmarking (functional linguistic competence).
2. Machine Language Acquisition (social interaction vs. massive text observation).
3. Interactive Learning Signals (communicative success vs. token-level rewards).
🎯 TOPICS OF INTEREST
We welcome original research and work-in-progress on:
* Architectures and training regimes for interactive agents.
* Intrinsic rewards and learning signals (RL from game-state success).
* Benchmarking via dialogue games.
* Data efficiency and social interaction.
* Social cognition and Theory of Mind in interactive systems.
* Human-agent collaboration and coordination.
* Embodied interactive agents.
* Communicative and perceptual grounding.
🏆 THE LM PLAYSCHOOL CHALLENGE (SHARED TASK)
LMP 2026 will feature a new shared task: post-training LLMs to master communicative skills in unseen dialogue games while retaining original language capabilities. Rules and settings will be announced soon on our website!
📝 SUBMISSION TRACKS
We welcome either long or short submissions for the following tracks:
1. Challenge track: Technical reports for the LM-Playschool challenge (archival).
2. Paper-only track: Work-in-progress (archival or non-archival) or recently published papers (non-archival).
📅 IMPORTANT DATES
* Starter pack release: Late March 2026
* ARR paper submission deadline: May 25, 2026
* Challenge submission deadline: July 10, 2026
* Direct paper submission deadline (challenge track and paper-only track): July 17, 2026
* Notification of acceptance: August 20, 2026
* Camera ready due: September 20, 2026
* Workshop at EMNLP’26 in Budapest: October 24-29, 2026 (Budapest)
For more information, visit our website: https://lm-playschool.github.io/
We look forward to your submissions!
The LMP 2026 Organizing Committee:
Raffaella Bernardi, Raquel Fernández, Mario Giulianelli, Sherzod Hakimov, Alexander Koller, Dieu-Thu Le, Oliver Lemon, Davide Mazzaccara, Sabrina McCallum, David Schlangen, Alessandro Suglia.
2nd Call for Papers
13th International Conference on CMC and Social Media Corpora for the Humanities (CMC-Corpora 2026)
📍 University of Oulu, Finland
📅 27–28 August 2026
🌐 https://cmc2026.org<https://cmc2026.org/>
We invite submissions for CMC-Corpora 2026, the 13th edition of the conference series focusing on corpora and computational approaches to computer-mediated communication and social media.
The conference welcomes research on the development, analysis, and computational processing of CMC and social media corpora, including multimodal and large-scale datasets from contemporary platforms such as messaging apps, social networks, and video-sharing environments.
Submission types
• Short papers (3–5 pages) – oral presentations
• Poster abstracts (max. 300 words) – work-in-progress and demos
Topics include (but are not limited to)
• Development and annotation of CMC and social media corpora
• Sociolinguistic and discourse analysis of online communication
• Multimodal communication and social media data
• Multilingualism and code-switching in digital contexts
• NLP and AI methods for CMC analysis
• Large language models and computational approaches to social media data
Important dates
Submission deadline: 15 April 2026
Notification: 1 June 2026
Conference: 27–28 August 2026
Submission portal
https://www.conftool.net/cmc2026
Full call for papers, templates, and guidelines
https://cmc2026.org<https://cmc2026.org/>
We look forward to your submissions and to welcoming you to Oulu.
The organizing committee
Steven Coats
Maarit Siromaa
Jarkko Toikkanen
Hanne Juntunen
University Lecturer, Docent
English, Faculty of Humanities
University of Oulu
P.O. Box 8000, FI-90014 University of Oulu
Finland
https://cc.oulu.fi/~scoats
HUMIC – Humans and Machines in Conversation: Linguistic, Social and Relational Perspectives on Conversational AI
https://www.ias.surrey.ac.uk/event/humic-humans-and-machines-in-conversatio…
University of Surrey | In-person Workshop
16th June 2026
As generative AI and large language models reshape how we interact with chatbots, voice assistants and conversational agents, HUMIC focuses on the linguistic, social and relational dimensions of these technologies—areas often overlooked in technical development. HUMIC<https://www.ias.surrey.ac.uk/event/humic-humans-and-machines-in-conversatio…>, led by Dr. Doris Dippold and supported by the Surrey Institute for Advanced Studies, the BAAL Special Interest Group ‘Humans, Machines, Languages’ and the Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI, aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue and connect academic insights with industry practice. Such insights are vital for developing conversational technologies that are context-aware, socially responsive, and cater for their users’ rapport needs.
We invite contributions that explore the complex interplay between humans and machines with reference to these factors. We welcome submissions from researchers working across the disciplines, for example but not limited to linguistics, psychology, sociology, natural language processing, UX research, and conversation design. Submissions may focus on any domain. We particularly welcome submissions from industry, focusing for example on common challenges and practices in designing conversational systems with linguistic, social and relational perspectives in focus.
During the workshop, participants will be invited to participate in a collaborative session. The session will encourage the generation of new research ideas and explore how research can respond to industry challenges. Selected works resulting from this workshop will be considered for a potential special issue.
Keynote Speakers:
* Maaike Groonewege (ConvoCat, Netherlands)<https://www.linkedin.com/in/maaikegroenewege/?originalSubdomain=nl> – Linguist and Conversation Designer
* Bettina Migge (University College Dublin, Ireland)<https://people.ucd.ie/bettinamigge> – Language and AI Technology
* Christian Hildebrand (University of St Gallen, Switzerland)<https://www.ibt.unisg.ch/team/christian-hildebrand/> – AI and Language in Consumer Behaviour
We invite 300-word proposal on topics related to the workshop. Themes of interest include, but are not limited to:
* Linguistic and pragmatic dimensions of human-machine dialogue
* Social and relational dynamics in conversational AI, including rapport-building, empathy and trust
* Designing inclusive and accessible conversational systems that account for the needs of diverse users (linguistic, cultural, neurodiverse)
* Linguistic choices and their role in shaping user expectations, satisfaction, engagement and decision-making
* Evaluation methods and metrics for linguistic, social and relational outcomes in human–machine interaction (qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods)
* Model training and fine-tuning strategies for enhancing linguistic, social and relational outcomes in human–machine interaction.
* Interdisciplinary and academic-industry collaboration in the development of linguistically, socially and relationally aware conversational technologies
Accepted submissions will be assigned to oral or poster presentation formats according to the mode of presentation best suited to their content.
Submission Details:
* Abstract length: 300 words (excluding title, authors and references)
* Deadline: 16th March 2026
* Notification of acceptance: 27th April 2025
* Submission: HUMIC – Humans and Machines in Conversation<https://forms.office.com/e/gyLXEs9QFi>
ORGANISERS
Dr Doris Dippold<https://www.surrey.ac.uk/people/doris-dippold>, Literature and Languages, University of Surrey
Dr Fabio Fasoli<https://www.surrey.ac.uk/people/fabio-fasoli>, School of Psyschology, University of Surrey
Dr Di Fu<https://www.surrey.ac.uk/people/di-fu>, School of Psychology, University of Surrey
Dr Richard Green<https://www.surrey.ac.uk/people/richard-green>, School of Health Sciences, University of Surrey
Assistant Professor Amal Haddad<https://www.ugr.es/personal/amal-haddad-haddad>, University of Granada
Prof Constantin Orasan<https://www.surrey.ac.uk/people/constantin-orasan>, Literature and Languages, University of Surrey
Dr Valentina Pitardi<https://www.surrey.ac.uk/people/valentina-pitardi>, Strategy, Marketing and International Business, University of Surrey
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Prof Constantin Orăsan
Professor of Language and Translation Technologies
Centre for Translation Studies<https://www.surrey.ac.uk/centre-translation-studies>
Personal page: https://www.surrey.ac.uk/people/constantin-orasan
Office: 06LC03, Phone: +44 (0) 1483 68 4115
Library and Learning Centre, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH, UK