1st Call for Papers: SIGUL 2026 Joint Workshop with ELE, EURALI, and DCLRL Towards Inclusivity and Equality: Language Resources and Technologies for Under-Resourced and Endangered Languages
Atul Kr. Ojha
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SIGUL 2026 Joint Workshop with ELE, EURALI, and DCLRL
Towards Inclusivity and Equality: Language Resources and Technologies for Under-Resourced and Endangered Languages
We are pleased to announce the upcoming SIGUL 2026 Joint Workshop with ELE, EURALI, and DCLRL on Towards Inclusivity and Equality: Language Resources and Technologies for Under-Resourced and Endangered Languages, co-located with LREC 2026 in Palma, Mallorca, Spain. This workshop brings together researchers working on less-resourced, endangered, minority, low-density, and underrepresented languages to share novel techniques, resources, strategies, and evaluation methods. We emphasize the entire pipeline: data creation, modeling, adaptation/transfer, system development, evaluation, deployment, and ethical/community engagement.
We invite contributions on, but not limited to, the following topics:
Data collection, annotation, and curation for under-resourced languages (crowdsourcing, participatory methods, gamification, unsupervised or weakly supervised methods)
Learning with limited supervision (zero- or few-shot, PEFT, RAG with linguistic resources)
Multilingual alignment, representation learning, and language embeddings, including rare languages
Speech, multimodal, and cross-modal technologies for under-resourced languages (speech recognition, synthesis, speech-to-text, speech translation, multimodal resources)
Basic text processing (normalization, orthography, transliteration, tokenization/segmentation, morphological and syntactic processing) in and for low-resource settings.
Low-resource machine translation (pivoting, alignment, synthetic data)
Evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and metrics designed or adapted for underrepresented languages
Adaptation, domain adaptation, and robustness to domain shift in low-resource contexts
Responsible approaches, ethical issues, community engagement, data sovereignty, and language revitalization
Deployment, tools, and practical systems for underserved languages (e.g., mobile apps, dictionary or translation apps, linguistic tools)
Case studies of success and negative results (with lessons learned)
Interoperability, standardization, and metadata practices for datasets in low-resource scenarios
Special Themes
Language modeling for intra-language variation, dialects, accents, and regional variants of less-resourced languages
Many less-resourced languages display rich internal diversity, including dialects, accents, and regional or social varieties. This special theme focuses on developing language models and speech technologies that capture and respect intra-language variation rather than reduce it to a single “standard.” We welcome work on dialect identification and adaptation, accent-robust speech systems, normalization vs. diversity-preserving modeling, and cross-dialect transfer in low-data scenarios. Approaches combining linguistic insights, community participation, and ethical awareness are especially encouraged. The aim is to build technologies that reflect and sustain the true linguistic richness of under-resourced languages.
Ultra-Low-Resource Language Adaptation
This special theme focuses on methods that enable effective language and speech technology development under extreme data scarcity. We invite research on transfer learning, cross-lingual adaptation, multilingual pretraining, and self-supervised or few-shot approaches tailored to ultra-low-resource settings. Work on evaluation, data augmentation (including synthetic data), and leveraging typological or linguistic knowledge is also welcome. The goal is to advance techniques that extend modern language technologies to the most underrepresented languages, ensuring inclusivity in the digital age.
Community-Led Project Showcase
To help ground research in community needs, we invite brief (5–10 min) presentations by language community members, NGOs, or practitioners describing real-world challenges or resource needs. Position papers or research posters are appropriate formats for this category.
Important Dates
Paper Submission Deadline: February 20 (Friday), 2026
Notification of Acceptance: March 22 (Sunday), 2026
Submission of Camera-Ready: March 30 (Monday), 2026
Workshop Date: 11-12 May 2026
All deadlines are anywhere-on-earth (AoE).
Call for Papers
We welcome original research papers and ongoing work relevant to the topics of the workshop. Each submission can be one of the following categories:
research papers;
position papers for reflective considerations of methodological, best practice, and institutional issues (e.g., ethics, data ownership, speakers’ community involvement, de-colonizing approaches);
posters, for work-in-progress projects in the early stage of development or description of new resources;
demo papers and early-career/student papers (to be submitted as extended abstracts and presented as posters).
The research and position papers should range from four (4) to eight (8) pages, while demo papers are limited to four (4) pages. References don't count towards page limits. Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings, which include both oral and poster papers in the same format. Determination of the presentation format (oral vs. poster) is based solely on an assessment of the optimal method of communication (more or less interactive), given the paper content.
Submissions must be anonymous and follow LREC formatting guidelines.
For inquiries, send an email to claudi...@cnr.it.
Identify, Describe and Share your LRs!
When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC authors to share the described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.) to enable their reuse and replicability of experiments (including evaluation ones).