PROPOR 2026: Call for Best PhD/MSc Dissertation Award

[GARCIA GONZALEZ MARCOS]

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PROPOR 2026: 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese

Salvador - BA, Brazil

April 13th to 16th 2026

https://propor2026.ufba.br/

CALL FOR BEST PhD/MSc DISSERTATION AWARD

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The PROPOR 2026 Best PhD / MSc Dissertation Award recognizes outstanding dissertations in academic research and development topics relevant to the computational processing of Portuguese and Galician. This award intends to recognize excellent young researchers in their early careers and highlight theoretical and technological issues of written and spoken Portuguese and Galician. The award is managed by the Best PhD / MSc dissertation committee.

Award winners will be invited to publish their thesis/dissertation extended abstracts in the PROPOR 2026 proceedings. They will receive a free registration to the main conference as part of the award. The two award winners and runners-up will be invited to prepare a presentation of their work for the main conference, using a particular format (A0 poster for poster presentation or slides for oral presentation).

The Award Ceremony will take place during the PROPOR 2026 Conference.

Submission Criteria and Procedure:

Eligible submissions are those from candidates who have successfully defended their Master and PhD Thesis dissertations within the three years preceding the contest submission deadline, except for thesis submitted to the previous contest held during PROPOR 2024. A letter from the primary dissertation advisor must be submitted with the extended abstract, stating that the candidate meets this eligibility criterion.

The dissertation must focus on some aspect of the written or spoken processing of any variety of Portuguese (including the language varieties of Portugal, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, São Tomé, Macau, Timor) or Galician. 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Natural language processing tasks (e.g. parsing, word sense disambiguation, coreference resolution)
• Natural language processing applications (e.g. question answering, subtitling, summarization, sentiment analysis)
• Natural language generation
• Information extraction and information retrieval
• Speech technologies (e.g. spoken language generation, speech and speaker recognition, spoken language understanding)
• Speech applications (e.g., spoken language interfaces, dialogue systems, speech-to-speech translation)
• Resources, standardization and evaluation (e.g., corpora, ontologies, lexicons, grammars)
• NLP-oriented linguistic description or theoretical analysis
• Distributional semantics and language modeling
• Portuguese language varieties and dialect processing (including the language varieties of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Galicia, Guinea-Bissau, Macau, Mozambique, Portugal, São Tomé and Principe)
• Multilingual studies, methods, applications and resources, including Portuguese/Galician
  
  

Each submission, consisting of two PDF files, must comply with the following:

• An extended abstract 
•  Letter from the primary dissertation/thesis supervisor

Extended Abstract:

The document must be in the form of an extended abstract that includes the nature of the problem researched, relevant theory, hypotheses tested, method, analysis and results and impacts (social, economical, technological, scientific, environmental).  

Inclusion of publications, formal reports written by the author and other academic or nonacademic results from the PhD or MSc are particularly relevant and should be included in the extended abstract.

Extended abstracts must include URLs for the PDF of the complete MSc / PhD Thesis/Dissertation. We suggest placing it at the end, before references, and use of tinyurl.com for long URLs.  

Extended abstracts are limited to 6 pages, including all figures, tables, and references and should begin with an abstract of 250 words or less. The abstract must be submitted in PDF format, following the same style as PROPOR 2026.

Submissions must be sent via the following URL: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/PROPOR2026. Please select the track: PROPOR2026 Best Dissertations.

For inquiries, contact the Committee Chairs.

Important dates:

• Submission deadline: December 12th 2025
• Notifications: February 28th 2026
• Camera-ready: March 15th 2026
• Conference: April 13th - 16th 2026

Scientific Committee Chairs:

Marcos Garcia - Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

Aline Paes - Universidade Federal Fluminense