Conference Chair

Ruslan Mitkov (Lancaster University and University of Alicante)

Programme Committee Chairs

Saad Ezzini (King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals)
Salima Lamsiyah (University of Luxembourg)
Tharindu Ranasinghe (Lancaster University)

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has witnessed remarkable progress in recent years, largely driven by the emergence of deep learning architectures and, more recently, large language models (LLMs). Nevertheless, these advances have disproportionately benefited high-resource languages that possess abundant data for model training. By contrast, low-resource languages – which account for at least 85% of the world’s linguistic diversity and are often spoken by smaller or marginalised communities – have not yet reaped the full benefits of contemporary NLP technologies.

This imbalance can be attributed to several interrelated factors, including the scarcity of high-quality training data, limited computational and financial resources, and insufficient community engagement in data collection and model development. Developing NLP applications for low-resource languages poses major challenges, particularly the need for large, well-annotated datasets, standardised tools, and robust linguistic resources.

Neural language models have transformed NLP, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of tasks. However, their effectiveness remains heavily dependent on the availability of extensive pre-training resources. Consequently, language models often exhibit limited performance when applied to low-resource languages, both during training and evaluation. In response, there has been a growing research movement dedicated to the development and adaptation of language models tailored to low-resource settings.

Although several workshops have previously addressed NLP for low-resource languages, LaTeLL represents the first international conference dedicated specifically to the automatic processing of such languages. The event aims to provide a forum for researchers to present and discuss their latest work in NLP in general, and in the development and evaluation of language models for low-resource languages in particular.

Further information and contact details

The follow-up calls will provide more details on the conference venue and list keynote speakers and members of the programme committee once confirmed.

The conference website is www.latell.org/2026/ and will be updated on a regular basis. For further information, please email 2026@latell.org

Registration will open in March 2026.