37.1256, Confs: Workshop at ESSLLI 2026: Human Label Variation in Discourse and Pragmatic Phenomena (Czech Republic)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1256. Mon Mar 30 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.1256, Confs: Workshop at ESSLLI 2026: Human Label Variation in Discourse and Pragmatic Phenomena (Czech Republic)

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Date: 28-Mar-2026
From: Manfred Stede [stede at uni-potsdam.de]
Subject: Workshop at ESSLLI 2026: Human Label Variation in Discourse and Pragmatic Phenomena


Workshop at ESSLLI 2026: Human Label Variation in Discourse and
Pragmatic Phenomena
Short Title: HLV-DP

Date: 10-Aug-2026 - 14-Aug-2026
Location: Prague, Czech Republic
Meeting URL: https://hlv-dp.github.io

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

Submission Deadline: 24-Apr-2026

Workshop Description:
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.
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.
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):
 - Discourse phenomena that can benefit from incorporating HLV
 - Technical approaches to handling HLV (ideally with an eye on
discourse):
   - Soft-label vs. perspectivist approaches
   - Implementation of machine learning regimes that handle HLV
   - Evaluation of both automatic and manual annotation in the face of
HLV
   - Underspecification in representation formalism
 - Case studies
Submission Guidelines:
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.
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.
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).  
Submission deadline: April 24, 2026. Submission is via email (see
below)
Workshop organizers: Massimo Poesio (Utrecht Univ. and Queen Mary
University), Manfred Stede (Univ. of Potsdam)
Workshop website: https://hlv-dp.github.io
Contact (and submission) email: hlvdp at proton.me
Important Dates:
Deadline for abstract submission:  April 24, 2026
Notification of acceptance: May 8, 2026
Workshop dates: August 10-14, 2026 (one 90min slot per day)



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