<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB"><b>ESSLI 2026 Workshop:<br>Human Label Variation in Discourse and Pragmatic Phenomena</b></span></font></font></p><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB"><b>Prague, August 10-14, 2026</b></span></font></font></p><p lang="en-GB" style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><br></p><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB"><b>Call for Papers </b></span></font></font></p><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB"><b>Workshop description</b></span></font></font></p><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">Over the past 20 years, the NLP community has given steadily-increasing attention to the idea of regarding human annotation disagreement not as a nuisance but as a potential asset that can be exploited for understanding the respective task better. In practice, this means that multiple annotations are not just adjudicated or averaged (and the individual annotations then thrown away) but taken as a spectrum that constitutes a "complex ground truth", for instance in the form of probability distributions over labels attached to items. </span></font></font></p><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">While some of the pioneering work on appreciating human label variation (HLV) came from research in discourse tasks such as anaphoric reference and discourse structure, the great majority of the recent work in the HLV community has concentrated on tasks in which variation arises from subjective differences, such as humour or offensive language detection, whereas the study of variation in pragmatics and discourse has seen relatively little progress. This is on the one hand surprising - pragmatics and discourse are highly prone to interesting variation in human judgement - but may well be an effect of the relative complexity of the annotation tasks, which make treatments of HLV difficult. </span></font></font></p><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">In this workshop, we aim to bring together experts on HLV and on discourse phenomena, and to identify ways forward. We welcome contributions on the following topics, for example (the list is not meant to be exhaustive):</span></font></font></p><ul><li><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">Discourse phenomena that can benefit from incorporating HLV</span></font></font></p></li><li><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">Technical approaches to handling HLV (ideally with an eye on discourse):</span></font></font></p><ul><li><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">Soft-label vs. perspectivist approaches</span></font></font></p></li><li><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">Implementation of machine learning regimes that handle HLV</span></font></font></p></li><li><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">Evaluation of both automatic and manual annotation in the face of HLV </span></font></font></p></li><li><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">Underspecification in representation formalism</span></font></font></p></li></ul></li></ul><ul><li><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">Case studies </span></font></font></p></li></ul><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><strong style="font-weight: bold;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">Submission guidelines:</span></font></font></strong><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB"><br>Abstracts should be at most two pages in 12pt font (plus up to two pages for references and appendix material). We primarily aim to promote participation and active discussion, and no proceedings will be published. Therefore, workshop submissions are not limited to unpublished work. </span></font></font></font></p><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">We welcome proposals for both long (30 min. + discussion) and short (15 min. + discussion) presentations as well as poster presentations. Be sure to indicate your target type on the abstract.</span></font></font></font></p><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">Subject to discussion at the end of the workshop, we envisage the possibility of a follow-up publication in the form of a journal special issue (with a new call for papers and reviewing process). </span></font></font></font></p><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><strong style="font-weight: bold;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">Submission deadline:</span></font></font></strong><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB"> </span></font></font><font color="#000000"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">April 24, 2026. </span></font></font><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">Submission is via email (see below)</span></font></font></font></p><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><strong style="font-weight: bold;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">Workshop organizers: </span></font></font></strong><strong style="font-weight: bold;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Massimo Poesio (Utrecht Univ. and Queen Mary University), Manfred Stede (Univ. of Potsdam)</span></span></font></font></strong></font></p><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><strong style="font-weight: bold;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">Workshop website:</span></font></font></strong><strong style="font-weight: bold;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> https://hlv-dp.github.io</span></span></font></font></strong></font></p><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><strong style="font-weight: bold;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">Contact (and submission) email: </span></font></font></strong><strong style="font-weight: bold;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB"><span style="font-weight: normal;">hlvdp@proton.me</span></span></font></font></strong><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB"></span></font></font></font></p><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><strong style="font-weight: bold;"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">Important dates:</span></font></font></strong></font></p><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">Deadline for abstract submission: April 24, 2026</span></font></font></font></p><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">Notification of acceptance: May 8, 2026</span></font></font></font></p><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 16px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font color="#363733"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><span lang="en-GB">Workshop dates: August 10-14, 2026 (one 90min slot per day)</span></font></font></font></p><p style="direction: ltr; margin-bottom: 0.28cm; line-height: 18.559999px; background-image: none; background-position: 0% 0%; background-size: auto; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; background-origin: padding-box; background-clip: border-box;"><br><br></p></body></html>