AI in Language Research
International Conference

The AI in Language Research International Conference (AILRIC) is an international gathering of researchers, practitioners, and scholars working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and human language.  It brings together expertise from linguistics, natural language processing (NLP), speech technology, and allied disciplines to advance the analysis, processing, and generation of human languages.

Organized by the De La Salle University College of Computer Studies – Advanced Research Institute for Informatics, Computing, and Networking (AdRIC), through its Center for Language Technologies (CeLT) in partnership with the University of San Carlos Department of Computer, Information Sciences, and Mathematics and University of Cebu, AILRIC 2026 serves as a dynamic forum for presenting cutting-edge research, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, and strengthening research networks across institutions and regions.  Past events organized by the center have featured a diverse range of NLP topics and have been enriched by the participation of distinguished international invited speakers.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of AI - marked by the rise of large language models, multimodal systems, and data-driven approaches - AILRIC 2026 aims to critically engage with both technological advances and their linguistic, cultural, and societal implications.

AILRIC 2026 aims to:

1. Strengthen research ecosystems by establishing sustainable mechanisms for advancing AI-driven language research within academic and research institutions; 

2. Promote capacity building through exposure to current trends, methodologies, and tools in NLP, AI, and language technologies; 

3. Support research development by providing mentorship, collaboration opportunities, and technical guidance for ongoing and emerging projects; 

4. Foster interdisciplinary dialogue among linguists, computer scientists, and domain experts to address complex language-related challenges; and 

5. Encourage responsible and inclusive AI by highlighting issues of ethics, linguistic diversity, and low-resource language support.

AILRIC 2026 provides a platform for discussing both foundational and emerging challenges in AI-driven language research, including the integration of human language technologies for documentation, preservation, and large-scale processing of languages - particularly in multilingual and low-resource contexts.

Submissions are invited on, but not limited to, the following areas:

Submissions should describe unpublished completed original work.  Authors intending to submit should follow the two-column ACL format and may consist of up to six (6) pages of content, excluding references and appendices.  Please note that AILRIC is not an ACL event; the ACL template is adopted solely for formatting consistency.  Authors must use the template (A4 size) available at:

• https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files

• For .docx file: https://2023.aclweb.org/calls/style_and_formatting/

No page number should appear in the paper.  Submissions will be judged based on relevance, technical strength, significance and opportunities, and interest to the attendees.  As the reviewing will be blind, authors must not indicate their names and affiliations in the papers.  Papers must be submitted through the Easy Chair Conference System:

• https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ailric2026

Accepted papers will be presented orally or as posters as determined by the committee.  Oral papers and abstracts of poster papers will be included in the proceedings.

Select oral papers presented at AILRIC 2026 will be invited for submission to the 2027 issues of the Philippine Computing Journal, subject to the journal’s peer-review process.

The Student Research Workshop (SRW) at AILRIC 2026 provides a dedicated venue for undergraduate and graduate students to present work-in-progress, exploratory studies, and small-scale projects in the area of AI and language research.

The workshop aims to foster early-stage research development by offering students the opportunity to receive constructive feedback from peers and senior researchers, while engaging with the broader AILRIC community.

Submissions may be less mature than full conference papers but should clearly articulate:

• The research problem or motivation 

• The methodology or approach 

• Initial findings (if available) 

• Challenges, limitations, and next steps

Submission dates coincide with AILRIC 2026 and must follow the prescribed template (A4 size).  The first author must be a student, and the presenter must also be a student.

• https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files

• For .docx file: https://2023.aclweb.org/calls/style_and_formatting/

As the reviewing will be blind, authors must not indicate their names and affiliations in the papers.  Submissions will be made through the same EasyChair submission site as the main conference, with authors selecting the Student Research Workshop (SRW) track.

• https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ailric2026

In natural language processing (NLP), it is common practice to leverage data and resources from linguistically similar languages to address data scarcity.  Such approaches, often seen in cross-lingual transfer and multilingual modeling, assume that similarity between languages can be operationalized and exploited.  However, for many Philippine languages, systematic and empirically grounded measures of similarity remain underexplored. This shared task is motivated by the need to better understand and quantify these relationships.

Accepted shared task papers will be presented through a poster session at AILRIC 2026.

Participants will be asked to:

• Use publicly available data or construct their own dataset

• Compute pairwise similarity scores between selected languages

• Generate a similarity matrix representing these relationships

• Produce language clusters (e.g., dendrograms, embeddings, or other visualizations)

• Compare results with established linguistic classifications (e.g., Ethnologue or other scholarly resources) and provide a well-motivated interpretation of the observed structures

The task is intentionally open-ended to allow diverse methodologies, including:

• Lexical similarity (e.g., edit distance, cognate detection)

• Character- and token-level distributional similarity (e.g., n-grams)

• Embedding-based similarity (e.g., word/sentence embeddings)

• Phonological or orthographic similarity modeling

• Typological or feature-based comparison

• Multimodal or metadata-informed approaches (e.g., geography, speaker communities)

Submission dates coincide with AILRIC 2026 and must follow the prescribed template (A4 size).

• https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files

• For .docx file: https://2023.aclweb.org/calls/style_and_formatting/

As the reviewing will be blind, authors must not indicate their names and affiliations in the papers.  Submissions will be made through the same EasyChair submission site as the main conference, with authors selecting the Student Research Workshop (SRW) track.

• https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ailric2026

Payment can be made through bank deposit.

• Account No. (in PHP):  004588008272    

• Account Name:  DE LA SALLE UNIVERSITY, INC.    

• Bank Name:  BDO Unibank Inc

• Bank Address:  2422 Taft Avenue Malate Manila  1004  Philippines    

• SWIFT Code:  BNORPHMM  

• Kindly specify at the Purpose/Remarks: AILRIC

The deposit slip should also be presented during onsite check-in.

The full registration fee covers admission to all conference sessions, lunch, morning and afternoon coffee breaks, and the gala dinner. Accommodation and airport transportation are not included in the registration fee.

Early bird rate is available for payments made on or before July 15, 2026.

All participants must register using the registration form.

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