3rd and Final CfP — Workshop on Dialects in NLP: A Resource Perspective (at LREC 2026)

[vivian stamou]

Dialects in NLP: A Resource Perspective (DialRes-LREC26)

Workshop at LREC 2026 — Palma de Mallorca, Spain, May 16, 2026

Hybrid event — in person and online

Website: https://dialres.github.io/dialres/

Contact: dialres...@googlegroups.com 

Dialectal and non-standard varieties pose persistent challenges for linguistic resource development. While in-depth study and large-scale resource creation for dominant or standard varieties have driven major advances in language technology, linguistic resources that adequately represent dialectal variation remain scarce. It therefore remains an open question whether standard-centric practices address dialectal variation or instead create new problems for dialects.

DialRes-LREC26 invites submissions on the creation, analysis, and evaluation of dialectal resources, including—but not limited to—work that critically examines how standard-centric methodologies impact dialects in the development of linguistic resources and models. We especially encourage contributions addressing the consequences of such practices for speech and morphosyntactic modelling, OCR of dialectal and historical texts, orthographic normalisation and homogenisation, annotation practices and lemmatisation strategies that abstract away or suppress dialectal forms, as well as analyses of how these choices affect dialects and their communities methodologically, economically, and socially.

The workshop focuses on problems, limitations, and trade-offs in developing dialectal resources from a linguistic perspective, while encouraging the creation and evaluation of resources in formats that enable reuse by the NLP community.

Workshop Topics

• Development and evaluation of dialectal oral and textual resources
• Orthographic normalisation and homogenisation, including their impact on dialectal variation
• Dialects vs. standard language varieties in annotation frameworks
• Cross-lingual and cross-dialectal transfer and model adaptation
• Resource scalability issues and techniques
• Use and limitations of large language models (LLMs) in dialectal resource development
• OCR for dialectal, non-standard, and historical texts: challenges, errors, and downstream effects
• Resources for, and applications supporting, dialect revitalisation and preservation
• Dialectal studies and teaching from a resource-oriented perspective
• Working on dialectal resources: academic, financial, legal, and societal issues
• Enabling and empowering dialect communities to develop their own resources

Submission Information

Instructions for Authors Submissions are electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system via the link: https://softconf.com/lrec2026/DialRes. They must be 4 to 8 pages long (excluding references and potential Ethics Statements) and follow the LREC stylesheet, available on the conference website on the Author’s kit page Author’s Kit. All templates are also available from this page.

Invited Speaker

Prof. Barbara Plank, LMU Munich (https://bplank.github.io/) 

Important Dates

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

Resubmissions from the LREC Main Conference

It will also be possible to submit papers that were rejected from the LREC 2026 main conference to DialRes 2026. Such submissions must be revised to fit the scope and format of the workshop and must comply with the same anonymization requirements.

Endorsements The workshop is endorsed by UniDive COST Action CA21167 and Archimedes Athena R.C.

Organizing Committee

• Antonios Anastasopoulos — George Mason University / Archimedes–Athena RC
• Stella Markantonatou — ILSP / Archimedes–Athena RC
• Angela Ralli — University of Patras / Archimedes–Athena RC
• Marcos Zampieri — George Mason University
• Stavros Bompolas — Archimedes–Athena RC
• Vivian Stamou — Archimedes–Athena RC