36.3816, Confs: Workshop at LREC 2026: Learning Non-Literal Expressions with Small Data (Spain)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3816. Thu Dec 11 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3816, Confs: Workshop at LREC 2026: Learning Non-Literal Expressions with Small Data (Spain)

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Date: 10-Dec-2025
From: Markus Egg [markus.egg at hu-berlin.de]
Subject: Workshop at LREC 2026: Learning Non-Literal Expressions with Small Data


Workshop at LREC 2026: Learning Non-Literal Expressions with Small
Data

Date: 11-May-2026 - 11-May-2026
Location: Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Contact: Valia Kordoni
Contact Email: evangelia.kordoni at anglistik.hu-berlin.de

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Text/Corpus
Linguistics

Submission Deadline: 20-Feb-2026

Overview:
Non-Literal Expressions (NLEs) in natural language are a reflection of
fundamental cognitive processes such as analogical reasoning and
categorisation, and are deeply rooted in everyday communication. NLEs
understanding is therefore an essential task for language modeling.
This task is especially challenging because it cannot be tackled by
falling back on individual word meanings, but requires taking into
account larger chunks of surrounding text or even contextual
information. At the same time, it is important because the reliable
processing of NLEs is relevant for optimizing downstream tasks like
translation and summarization.
This workshop focuses on understanding of Non-Literal Expressions.
While most of the earlier work on NLEs had been devoted to metaphor
and metonymy, recent activities target other forms of NLEs as well,
e.g., hyperbole (deliberate exaggeration), litotes (understatement),
rhetorical questions, and irony. Humanly annotated corpora for NLEs
have very recently started becoming available to the research
community and may serve as the basis for data-driven approaches to
NLEs processing, with the interrelated goals of first identifying and
then interpreting such expressions. Such data is mostly of high
linguistic quality, but still very limited in size. Thus, the
workshop’s focus is on adaptation of Language Models (LMs) and Deep
Learning (DL) for processing of Non-Literal Expressions with limited
high-quality data, since such constructs still pose big identification
and processing challenges in natural language analysis tasks.
Topics of Interest:
We are interested in contributions which focus on the use of
techniques like self-training for leveraging unlabelled data, as well
as in work that focuses on the incorporation of external linguistic
resources and knowledge injection to enrich features, and also in
research that describes work on utilisation of multitask learning with
the aim to benefit from related tasks.
The workshop also wants to discuss alternative approaches which may
elaborate on the use of pre-trained Language Models (LMs) as a
foundation and the application of techniques like contrastive learning
and clustering to identify challenging examples within the data, the
ultimate aim of the workshop being to highlight the necessity of
high-quality data, as well as cross-lingual datasets.
Invited Speakers:
- Prof. Barbara Plank, LMU Munich (https://bplank.github.io/)
- Debanjan Ghosh, Princeton, USA
Details will be announced on the workshop website (tba).
Submission Guidelines:
Papers must be submitted electronically through Softconf: [link to
come]. Submissions should:
 - Be 4–8 pages, excluding references and optional Ethics Statements
 - Follow the LREC 2026 style guidelines, available on the conference
website: https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/
 - Use templates provided here:
https://lrec2026.info/calls/second-call-for-papers/
Authors will be asked to supply information on any language resources
(broadly defined — data, tools, standards, evaluation sets, etc.) used
in or resulting from their work. ELRA strongly encourages sharing such
resources to support reproducibility and reuse.
Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings. Presentation
format (oral/poster) will be based solely on how best to communicate
the work.
Important Dates:
 - 20 February 2026 — Submission Deadline
 - 11 March 2026 — Notification of Acceptance
 - 28 March 2026 — Camera-ready Papers Due
Endorsements:
The workshop is endorsed by: Collaborative Research Centre 1412
"REGISTER" funded by DFG Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German
Research Foundation)
Organizers:
 - Markus Egg — Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
 - Valia Kordoni - Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany



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