Dear SIGDIAL community,
This is a reminder that the submission deadline for the 2nd Workshop for Young Researchers in Natural Language Generation (YNLG 2026) is only one week away ( August 10 , 2026). In addition to position papers, we are excited to officially open our Call for Hackathon Proposals ! Do you have a task idea, a dataset or research question you want to explore during the second day of the workshop? We want your proposals! Anyone planning to join us for the hackathon can propose a task. Submit your task idea using our shared [ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gs5jmrO2RU0eq5e_JRFUPbMei2dcuUUlkLN4qH0tinM/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.2m7kijflp7af | task collection document ] . YNLG 2026 workshop will be held in person as part of INLG 2026 ( October 17 –18, 2026) in Utrecht, Netherlands. It aims to foster a welcoming community of early-career researchers in NLG by providing a platform to present work-in-progress, receive feedback from senior researchers, and engage in discussions about current trends and future directions in Natural Language Generation. Website : [ https://ynlg-workshop.github.io/ | https://ynlg-workshop.github.io/ ] Workshop Format YNLG 2026 will be a two-day, in-person workshop featuring: * Day 1: Workshop featuring poster sessions, keynote talks, and roundtable discussions. * Day 2: Hackathon for collaborative research and coding projects. A call for projects is coming soon. * Poster Sessions or Lightning Talks : Two sessions where participants present their submissions and engage with fellow researchers * Keynote Talks : Daryna Dementieva (AI and Language Technologies for Social Good), more to be announced. * Interactive Roundtables : Small-group discussions on both research topics and practical aspects of academic life * Networking Social Event : An informal evening event with sightseeing and dinner Important Dates All deadlines are at 11:59 PM, UTC-12 (also known as Anywhere on Earth). * Submissions due : August 10 , 2026 * Notification of acceptance : September 1 , 2026 * Camera-ready papers due : September 16 , 2026 (Optional) * Workshop : October 17 -18, 2026 (during INLG 2026) Submission Format Position Papers : We invite 2-page position single author papers (+ unlimited references) that should include: 1. Research Overview : A description of your past, present, and future research plans in NLG 2. Short Biography : A brief academic biography highlighting your background and research interests 3. Questions for Senior Researchers : Specific questions you would like to ask senior researchers. These can be related to research or the general PhD experience and future careers. We will anonymize and aggregate these questions and release the answers for all of them with the proceedings of the workshop. 4. Topics for Roundtable Discussions with Peers : Suggestions for topics you would like to see discussed during the workshop's interactive roundtable sessions The position paper format is designed to facilitate meaningful discussions during the workshop's poster sessions and roundtable discussions, rather than presenting fully completed research. There is no anonymity requirement, and participants are encouraged to share their research backgrounds. The participants can choose whether they prefer their submission to be published with the workshop proceedings. Topics of Interest We invite position papers on any topic related to Natural Language Generation, including but not limited to: * Large Language Models (LLMs) for NLG * Evaluation and error analysis of NLG systems * Explainability and trustworthiness of NLG systems * Bias and fairness in NLG systems * Data-to-text, concept-to-text, text-to-text, and vision-to-text approaches * Grounded language generation * NLG in dialogue systems and chatbots * Storytelling and narrative generation * Summarization and paraphrasing * Multimodal and multimedia generation * NLG for low-resourced languages * Ethical considerations in NLG * NLG applications and real-world deployment * Computational efficiency of NLG models * Content and text planning * Surface realization and lexicalization Submission Instructions Papers should be submitted through the workshop's submission system: [ https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/INLG/2026/Workshop/YNLG | OpenReview ] . All submissions will be checked by the organizers for topic fit. If applicable, the submission will receive at least two reviews from our program committee to suggest feedback and further research directions. Papers should be prepared using the Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems [ https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/yrrsds-2022-template/ychnwqgtxqpb | Overleaf template ] and be submitted as PDF files. Contact For questions about the workshop or submissions, please contact: Kristyna Onderkova ( [email protected] ) Organizers * Barkavi Sundararajan (University of Aberdeen) * Kristyna Onderkova (Charles University) - Contact Person * Miriam Anschütz (Technical University of Munich) * Nils Feldhus (University of Groningen) * Patricia Schmidtova (Charles University) * Rudali Huidrom (Dublin City University, ADAPT) * Yongxin Zhou (Université Grenoble Alpes) We look forward to welcoming you to YNLG 2026 and fostering the next generation of NLG researchers!
