YNLG 2026

The 2nd Workshop for Young Researchers in Natural Language Generation

October 17-21, 2026 • Utrecht, the Netherlands • Part of INLG 2026

Venue: tbd

📅 Important Dates

Submissions due:
August 13, 2026
Notification:
September 1, 2026
Camera-ready:
September 16, 2026
Workshop:
October 17-21, 2026 (exact date tbd)

🎯 Target Audience

Early-career researchers including:

PhD students
Master's students
Postdocs new to NLG

📝 Submission Format

2-page position papers including:

Research overview
Short biography
Questions for seniors
Roundtable topics

About YNLG 2026

YNLG aims to foster a welcoming community of early-career researchers in NLG by providing a platform for PhD students and Master's students to present work-in-progress research, receive feedback from senior researchers and peers, and engage in discussions about current trends and future directions in Natural Language Generation.

The workshop is organized under the auspices of the Special Interest Group on Natural Language Generation (SIGGEN) of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). YNLG 2026 will take place during INLG 2026 in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

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.
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

We would like to highlight that we do not have any funding for covering the participants' travel. Each participant is responsible for securing their own funding to attend the workshop.

Hackathon

Do you have an idea for the hackaton? We collect proposed tasks in the Hackathon Tasks Google Doc.

More details will be shared later.

Call for Papers

We invite early-career researchers to submit position papers to the first Workshop for Young Researchers in Natural Language Generation (YNLG 2026), to be held as part of INLG 2026 in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

YNLG aims to foster a welcoming community of early-career researchers in NLG by providing a platform for PhD students and Master's students to present work-in-progress research, receive feedback from senior researchers and peers, and engage in discussions about current trends and future directions in Natural Language Generation.

The workshop is organized under the auspices of the Special Interest Group on Natural Language Generation (SIGGEN) of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). YNLG 2026 will take place during INLG 2026 (October 17 - 21, 2026).

Important Dates

All deadlines are at 11:59 PM, UTC-12 (anywhere on Earth).

Submissions due:
August 13, 2026
Notification:
September 1, 2026
Camera-ready:
September 16, 2026
Workshop:
October 17-21, 2026 (exact date tbd)

Submission Format

Position Papers

We invite 2-page position papers (+ unlimited references) that should include:

Research Overview: A description of your past, present, and future research plans in NLG
Short Biography: A brief academic biography highlighting your background and research interests
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.
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.

For inspiration and examples of position papers from last year, check out the YNLG 2025 Proceedings.

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: 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 Overleaf template and be submitted as PDF files.

Contact

For questions about the workshop or submissions, please contact:
Kristyna Onderkova (onderkova@ufal.mff.cuni.cz)

Keynote Speakers

Daryna Dementieva

Technical University of Munich

Title: AI and Language Technologies for Social Good: Challenges, Opportunities, and Responsible Deployment

Abstract: Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing are evolving at an unprecedented pace, blurring the boundaries between traditional NLP, information retrieval, computational linguistics, and general-purpose AI. As language technologies become increasingly integrated into high-stakes domains, the central challenge is no longer only building more capable models, but ensuring that they are deployed responsibly, fairly, and for meaningful societal benefit.

In this keynote, I will present an overview of the current AI and NLP landscape through the lens of purpose for Social Good. Drawing on our recent research, I will discuss both the opportunities and the limitations of modern language technologies in societal domains such as healthcare, misinformation detection, crisis response, and, on the other hand, underrepresented languages. I will also reflect on open research challenges and discuss how researchers at all career stages can contribute to building systems based on language technologies and beyond that create lasting positive societal impact.