First Call for Papers of the Workshop on Dialects in NLP (LREC 2026)

First call for papers for the "Workshop on Dialects in NLP: A Resource Perspective" at the three-day Language Resources Association Conference (LREC) 2026. This workshopwill be held in conjunction with LREC 2026, Palma de Mallorca, Spain on 11, 12 and 16 May 2026. It is a hybrid event and attendance can be in person or online. 

Overview

DialRes-LREC26 addresses the growing need for high-quality resources supporting dialect-focused NLP. The workshop aims to bring together researchers from linguistics, computational linguistics, digital humanities, and adjacent fields to exchange insights on the creation, documentation, evaluation, and use of dialectal resources.

Topics of Interest

We invite submissions relating to any aspect of developing or using resources for dialectal NLP. Topics include - but are not limited to - the following:

⚬ Creation and evaluation of spoken and written dialect resources
⚬ Orthographic normalization and standardization
⚬ Treatment of dialect–standard distinctions in annotation frameworks for speech and text
⚬ Cross-dialect and cross-lingual transfer; model adaptation methods
⚬ Scalability issues and resource-efficient techniques
⚬ Use of LLMs in resource creation, augmentation, annotation, or processing
⚬ Resources supporting dialect preservation, revitalization, and community engagement
⚬ Pedagogical, sociolinguistic, and linguistic applications viewed through a resource lens
⚬ Practical considerations when working with dialect resources (legal, financial, academic, societal)
⚬ Empowering dialect communities in developing their own resources

Prof. Barbara Plank, LMU Munich, Germany, Iwill be an nvited speaker and more details will be announced on the workshop website.

Submission Guidelines

Papers must be submitted electronically through Softconf. Submissions should:

⚬ Be 4–8 pages, excluding references and optional Ethics Statements
⚬ Follow the LREC 2026 style guidelines, available on the conference website: https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/ 
⚬ Use templates provided here: https://lrec2026.info/calls/second-call-for-papers/
⚬ Authors will be asked to supply information on any language resources (broadly defined - data, tools, standards, evaluation sets, etc.) used in or resulting from their work. ELRA strongly encourages sharing such resources to support reproducibility and reuse.
⚬ Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings. Presentation format (oral/poster) will be based solely on how best to communicate the work.
⚬ For inquiries: dialres-lrec26@googlegroups.com

Important Dates

20 February 2026 - Submission Deadline
11 March 2026 - Notification of Acceptance
28 March 2026 - Camera-ready Papers Due

Endorsements

The workshop is endorsed by:

⚬ Archimedes Unit of the Athena Research Center, Greece
⚬ UniDive COST Action CA21167, which supports work on language diversity and resource development

Organizing Committee

⚬ Antonios Anastasopoulos - George Mason University, USA, and Archimedes Unit of the Athena Research Center, Greece
⚬ Stella Markantonatou - Institute of Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) of the Athena Research Center, Greece and Archimedes Unit of the Athena Research Center, Greece
⚬ Angela Ralli - University of Patras, Greece, and Archimedes Unit of the Athena Research Center, Greece
⚬ Marcos Zampieri - George Mason University, USA
⚬ Stavros Bompolas - Archimedes Unit of the Athena Research Center, Greece
⚬ Vivian Stamou - Archimedes Unit of the Athena Research Center, Greece



The official LREC website can be found here.