DialRes-LREC 2026 workshop: “Dialects in NLP: A Resource Perspective”

Researchers from the Archimedes Unit of the Athena Research Center, Greece, together with the Athena Research Center team on Dialectal NLP, affiliated with the Institute for Language and Speech Processing, and in collaboration with researchers from George Mason University, are organizing the first edition of the DialRes-LREC 2026 workshop, “Dialects in NLP: A Resource Perspective”, to be held on 16 May 2026. More information is available here: https://dialres.github.io/dialres/index.html.

DialRes is co-located with the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2026) in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. The workshop aims to bring together researchers working on dialectal resources, with a particular focus both on their creation and on their evaluation through the study of dialects.

Despite being a first edition, DialRes received 43 submissions, of which 35 were accepted, and currently ranks third among the 46 workshops co-located with LREC 2026 in terms of registered participants.

The accepted papers cover both living and historical dialects from all continents. The workshop program can be found here: https://dialres.github.io/dialres/conferenceprogram.html). A map showing the papers and the geographical distribution of the language varieties they examine is provided below. Studies on historical dialects include work on English, German, Heptanesian Greek, Old Irish, and Transcarpathian varieties. Research on living dialects draws on data from a wide range of varieties, including Arabic, Aromanian, Bangla, Basque, Formosan, German, Italian, Kurdish, Modern Greek, and Slavic varieties (such as Pomak and Ukrainian), as well as Saaho and Wancho.

The papers address a wide range of topics, from the collection and development of oral and written dialect resources of various kinds—such as corpora, Universal Dependencies treebanks, benchmarks, and specialized databases—to their use in dialectometry and dialect classification. Many contributions also make use of state-of-the-art technologies, including Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), neural parsing, and Large Language Models (LLMs).

These very encouraging results show that DialRes offers the community a much-needed space for discussion, while also creating a strong foundation for future editions of the workshop..

Registrations are open through the LREC 2026 registration page: https://lrec2026.info/online-registration/.

The workshop is endorsed by UniDive and Archimedes, Athena Research Center, Greece.