DialRes-LREC26 brings dialectal NLP into the spotlight at LREC 2026

Athena Research Center, through its Archimedes AI Unit and the Institute for Language and Speech Processing, organised the first edition of the workshop DialRes-LREC26: Workshop on Dialects in NLP — A Resource Perspective. DialRes was collocated with the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), organized byEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA), and took place in Palma de Mallorca (Spain), May 16, 2026.

DialRes focuses on the challenges and opportunities in dialectal NLP from a resource perspective. It seeks to bring together researchers from linguistics, computational linguistics, digital humanities, and related areas to share work on the creation, documentation, and exploitation of dialectal resources.

Prof. Barbara Plank, LMU Munich and Visiting Prof ITU Copenhagen, delivered the keynote talk titled: “Beyond the Standard: Dialectal Variation at the Heart of NLP”.

The first edition of DialRes received strong engagement from the community, attracting 43 submissions, 34 accepted papers, and 70 participants (50 in person and 20 online). European Language Resources Association was represented by Joseph Mariani, Research Director Emeritus at CNRS and former President of ELRA, as well as Chalid Choukri, Secretary General of ELRA.

It is a great pleasure to announce that DialRes has already inspired the growth of a community dedicated to dialectal NLP. The variation-aware-NLP community is now active on Slack at varnlpworkspace.slack.com.

All workshop materials, including the keynote talk, proceedings, presentations, reviewer list, and announcements, are available on the DialRes website.