Programme version 26.08.2026
All times are Sofia, Bulgaria time zone - GMT+3
9:30-9:50 - Registration and coffee
9.50-10:05 - Workshop Opening
10:05-11:05 - Panel of Bulgarian practitioners and representatives of public institutions in Bulgaria. Panellists: Prof. Tatyana Angelova, Prof. Andreana Eftimova from Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Mrs Reni Rangelova from the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Bulgaria - moderator Dr Ruslana Margova
11:05-11:45 - Practitioners Oral Presentations Session (Chair TBA)
11:05-11:20 - Genre transformation and legal elision: a comparative analysis of the European Commission's DSA guidelines and their simplified derivative for children - Iglika Ivanova
11:20-11:35 - Deep text comprehension in contemporary literary translation - Simona Kaleva
11:35-11:45 - Practical approaches to clarity and readability in medical, technical, and regulatory translation - Plamena Krasteva and Mariya Georgieva
11:45-12:30 - Humanities Oral Presentations Session (Chair Dr. Maria Todorova)
11:45-12:00 - Reading Achievements of Bulgarian 4th Graders in the International Literacy Study PIRLS ‘2021 - Tatyana Angelova
12:00-12:15 - Text Readability for Deaf Children Who Use Sign Language: Distinctive Features and Considerations - Ivelina Stoyanova and Darinka Borisova
12:15:12:30 - Does Readability Differ for Boys and Girls? Pilot Experiments for Bulgarian - Irina Temnikova, Nevena Grigorova, Iva Marinova, Stefan Minkov and Luchezar Donchev
12:30-13:30 - Lunch
13:30-14:30 - Natural Language Processing Panel. Panellists: Prof. Ruslan Mitkov (Lancaster University, UK/University of Alicante, Spain), Prof. Constantin Orasan (University of Surrey, UK), Dr Dimitar Kazakov (University of York, UK) and Dr Matthew Shardlow (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) - moderator Dr Irina Temnikova
14:30-15:00 - NLP Oral Presentations Session 1 (Chair TBA)
14:30-14:45-Effect of Ontologies and Prompt Scaffolds on Readability of LLM Pollination Advice - Tianda Sun, Thomas Timberlake, Jamie Carr and Dimitar Kazakov
14:45-15:00-Reinforcement Learning for improving Large Language Models' Catalan text simplification capabilities - Arnau Ayguadé Domingo, Horacio Saggion and Stefan Bott
15:00-15:30 - Coffee Break
15:30-16:00 - NLP Oral Presentations Session 2 (Chair TBA)
15:30-15:45-Text Simplification with Sentence Embeddings - Matthew Shardlow
15:45-16:00-Urdu-MultiLS: A Dataset for Lexical Simplification in Urdu - Saad Yaqub, Safiullah Khan and Matthew Shardlow
16:00-16:40 - Mixed Poster Session (Chair TBA)
Humanities:
Plain Language for Digital Rights: Applying ISO 24495-1 to the Bulgarian Communication of the Digital Services Act - Ruslana Margova
Gender Differences in Early Bulgarian Child Language as a Precursor of Reading Skills - Elena Andonova and Mihaela Barokova
Natural Language Processing (NLP):
From Stemmatology to NLP: Variant-Aware Classification of Semantically Related Texts - Iglika Nikolova-Stoupak, Soha Delbani, Amjad Ghemrawi, Oussama Masri and Rami Radwan
SimpCue: Cue-Based Prompting for Multilingual Text Simplification - Mehrzad Tareh, Horacio Saggion and Stefan Bott
GovAI-Ec: A new Corpus for the Simplification of Ecuadorian Public Texts in the Digital Governance - Jenny Ortiz Zambrano, Jéssica Yépez Holguín, Tania Peralta Guaraca, Mirella Ortiz Zambrano and Joel Barba Salazar
Ablation of Linguistic Features in the Lexical Complexity of Public Texts in Spanish - Jenny Ortiz Zambrano, Mirella Ortiz Zambrano, Joel Barba Salazar, Tania Peralta Guaraca and Jéssica Yépez Holguín
16:40-16:55 - Workshop Closing