To be held at EACL 2026 (March 24-29 in Rabat, Morocco)

Workshop description

The 8th SIGTYP Workshop aims to provide a forum for bridging linguistic typology, multilingual NLP, and adjacent areas to develop truly multilingual NLP methods. The workshop raises awareness of linguistic typology and its potential to broaden the global reach of multilingual NLP and introduces computational approaches to typology. We welcome open problems and discussion, inviting contributions from researchers in multilingual/cross-lingual NLP and leading scholars in linguistic typology. In 2026, we place a special emphasis on the utility of LLMs for typological research.

SIGTYP is the first dedicated venue for typology-related research and its integration in multilingual NLP. Appropriate topics include (but are not limited to):

Integration of typological features in language transfer and joint multilingual learning. Beyond techniques such as “selective sharing,” what other ways can we encode heterogeneous external knowledge in ML algorithms?
Development of unified taxonomy and resources. Building universal databases/models to support the understanding and processing of diverse languages.
Automatic inference of typological features. Pros/cons of existing techniques (e.g., heuristics from morphosyntactic annotation, propagation from related languages, supervised Bayesian/neural models) and emerging approaches.
Typology and interpretability. Using typological knowledge to interpret hidden representations of multilingual models, guide multilingual data generation/selection, and annotate texts.
Improvement and completion of typological databases. Combining linguistic expertise with data-driven methods to advance knowledge of cross-linguistic variation and universals.
Linguistic diversity and universals; cross-lingual annotation. Which phenomena/categories should be considered universal? How should they be annotated?
Using LLMs for typological studies. Can LLMs help formulate/test typological hypotheses? Can they make valid cross-linguistic generalisations?

Additional topics include constructed language generation, universals in diachronic language change, information-theoretic approaches to typology, and automated approaches to etymology.


Important Dates (23:59 AoE)

Direct submission deadline: December 19, 2025
Pre-reviewed (ARR) submission deadline: January 2, 2026
Notification of acceptance: January 23, 2026
Camera-ready deadline: February 3, 2026
Workshop date: During EACL 2026 (March 24–29, 2026; exact day TBA)


Submissions

We invite extended abstract submissions (non-archival) and general paper submissions (archival). The accepted submissions will be presented at the workshop, providing new insights and ideas. Extended abstracts should describe already published work or work in progress and should not exceed two (2) pages. This way, we will not discourage researchers from preferring main conference proceedings, while ensuring that engaging and thought-provoking research is presented at the workshop. For general (archival) submissions, we accept both long and short papers. Short papers should not exceed four (4) pages, long papers should not exceed eight (8) pages. Unlimited additional pages are allowed for the references section in all submission types.

Submissions should be anonymous, without authors or an acknowledgement section; self-citations should appear in third person.

Format:
Submissions must follow the ACL 2025 stylesheet (https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files), and both long and short paper submissions must follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings. All submissions must be in PDF format.

SIGTYP 2026: https://sigtyp.github.io/

Organizing Committee

Priya Rani, Michael Hahn, Andreas Shcherbakov, Oleg Serikov, Alexey Sorokin, Ryan Cotterell and Kat Vylomova

Anti-harassment policy

The workshop follows the ACL anti-harassment policy: https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=Anti-Harassment_Policy.


Contact
For any inquiries regarding the workshop, please send an email to the Organising Committee at sigtyp@gmail.com