CFP: LT4HALA 2026 - The Fourth Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages

Website: https://circse.github.io/LT4HALA/2026/
Date: Monday, May 11 2026
Place: co-located with LREC 2026, May 11-16, Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Submission page: TBA

DESCRIPTION
LT4HALA 2026 is a one-day workshop that seeks to bring together scholars who are developing and/or are using Language Technologies (LTs) for historically attested languages, so to foster cross-fertilization between the Computational Linguistics community and the areas in the Humanities dealing with historical linguistic data, e.g. historians, philologists, linguists, archaeologists and literary scholars. LT4HALA 2026 follows LT4HALA 2020, 2022, 2024 that were organized in the context of LREC 2020, LREC 2022 and LREC-COLING 2024, respectively. Despite the current availability of large collections of digitized texts written in historical languages, such interdisciplinary collaboration is still hampered by the limited availability of annotated linguistic resources for most of the historical languages. Creating such resources is a challenge and an obligation for LTs, both to support historical linguistic research with the most updated technologies and to preserve those precious linguistic data that survived from past times.

Relevant topics for the workshop include, but are not limited to:

creation and annotation of linguistic resources (both lexical and textual);
role of digital infrastructures, such as CLARIN, in supporting research based on language resources for historical and ancient languages;
handling spelling variation;
detection and correction of OCR errors;
deciphering;
morphological/syntactic/semantic analysis of textual data;
adaptation of tools to address diachronic/diatopic/diastratic variation in texts;
teaching ancient languages with LTs;
NLP-driven theoretical studies in historical linguistics;
NLP-driven analysis of literary ancient texts;
evaluation of LTs designed for historical and ancient languages;
LLMs for the automatic analysis of ancient texts.


SHARED TASKS
LT4HALA 2026 will also host:

the 4th edition of EvaLatin, a campaign entirely devoted to the evaluation of NLP tools for Latin. This new edition will focus on two tasks: dependency parsing and Named Entity Recognition. Dependency parsing will be based on the Universal Dependencies framework.
the 5th edition of EvaHan, the campaign for the evaluation of NLP tools for Ancient Chinese. EvaHan 2026 will focus on Ancient Chinese OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Evaluation.
the 2nd edition of EvaCun, the campaign for the evaluation of Ancient Cuneiform Languages, with shared tasks on transliteration normalization, morphological analysis and lemmatization, Named Entity Recognition of Akkadian and/or Sumerian.


SUBMISSIONS
Submissions should be 4 to 8 pages in length and follow the LREC 2026 stylesheet (see below). The maximum number of pages excludes potential Ethics Statements and discussion on Limitations, acknowledgements and references, as well as data and code availability statements. Appendices or supplementary material are not permitted during the initial submission phase, as papers should be self-contained and reviewable on their own.

Papers must be of original, previously unpublished work. Papers must be anonymized to support double-blind reviewing. Submissions thus must not include authors’ names and affiliations. The submissions should also avoid links to non-anonymized repositories: the code should be either submitted as supplementary material in the final version of the paper, or as a link to an anonymized repository (e.g., Anonymous GitHub or Anonym Share). Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.

Submissions should follow the LREC stylesheet, which is available on the LREC 2026 website on the Author’s kit page.

Each paper will be reviewed by three independent reviewers.

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.

As for the shared tasks, participants will be required to submit a technical report for each task (with all the related sub-tasks) they took part in. Technical reports will be included in the proceedings as short papers: the maximum length is 4 pages (excluding references) and they should follow the LREC 2026 official format. Reports will receive a light review (we will check for the correctness of the format, the exactness of results and ranking, and overall exposition). All participants will have the possibility to present their results at the workshop. Reports of the shared tasks are not anonymous.

WORKSHOP IMPORTANT DATES
17 February 2026: submissions due
13 March 2026: reviews due
16 March 2026: notifications to authors
27 March 2026: camera-ready due

Shared tasks deadlines are available in the specific web pages: EvaLatin, EvaHan, EvaCun.

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).