GlobalNLP2025 @ RANLP 2025

Venue and Date

The first Workshop on "Beyond English: Natural Language Processing for All Languages in an Era of Large Language Models" (GlobalNLP 2025) will be held at the RANLP 2025 conference in Varna, Bulgaria, on 11-13 September 2025.

Brief Technical Description

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has advanced dramatically with the introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI, greatly enhancing text generation, machine translation, and knowledge retrieval for high-resource languages such as English, Chinese, German, Spanish, and French. However, a large proportion of the world's languages—ranging from low-resource (e.g., Indigenous, African, Indian languages and minority languages) to under-resource (e.g., Irish language), and medium-resource (e.g., Baltic, South Asian, and Slavic languages)—continue to face significant challenges due to data scarcity, linguistic complexity, and limited computing resources.

This workshop is dedicated to advancing NLP for all languages—high-resource, medium-resource, under-resourced, and low-resource alike. We aim to foster an inclusive environment that addresses the linguistic and technical needs of every language community, regardless of resource availability.

We encourage both technical and non-technical papers containing experimental, theoretical, or methodological contributions. We explicitly seek interdisciplinary proposals that focus on participatory methods to develop NLP. This workshop intends to examine creative strategies that bridge the NLP gap across all language categories, utilizing cutting-edge techniques such as (but are not limited to):

• Data-Efficient NLP: Transfer learning, few-shot and zero-shot techniques to overcome data limitations.
• Multilingual and Cross-Lingual Models: Approaches for training and adapting models to diverse linguistic structures, including morphologically rich and agglutinative languages.
• Semantic-Based Approaches: Ontology-based information extraction, semantic similarity, entity linking, and connection extraction.
• Linked Data and Knowledge Graphs: Structured knowledge for machine translation, information retrieval, and reasoning for underrepresented languages.
• Practical Applications: Real-world use in education, healthcare, climate action, government policy, and multilingual content creation.
• Corpus Creation and Linguistic Tools: Tools for building corpora, model development, evaluation metrics, and error analysis.
• Reusability of Linguistic Resources: In tasks such as machine translation, POS tagging, and syntactic parsing and others.
• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage: Computational approaches to historical texts, linguistic preservation, and the integration of NLP with humanities disciplines such as history, literature, and cultural studies.
• Practical Applications of Large Language Models: Applications of LLMs across diverse domains such as software engineering (code generation, bug detection, documentation), Internet of Things (natural language interfaces, device management), image processing (multimodal models combining text and visuals), and recommendation systems (personalized content, user intent modeling), enabling interdisciplinary communication and collaboration.

This workshop brings together academics, industry experts, and linguists to collaborate on making NLP more inclusive, equitable, and effective for all languages.

Target Audience

This workshop is designed for NLP researchers, linguists, industry experts, and AI practitioners working on language technologies, especially those in resource-constrained environments. The major goal is to bring together established and emerging scholars to discuss new ways to construct, optimize, and implement Large Language Models (LLMs) and other NLP techniques for low, mid, and underrepresented languages.

We anticipate between 20 to 40 participants, including academic researchers, industry executives, and students. Our contributors will come from universities, research institutes, technology businesses, and non-profit organizations that specialize in language technology development, linguistic resource generation, and computational modeling for languages.

Workshop Format

• Keynote talks by prominent researchers
• Paper presentations (oral and poster sessions)
• Panel discussion on multilingual LLM challenges
• Interactive demos and practical applications
• All accepted papers will be published in ACL proceedings

Organizing Committee

• Sudhansu Bala Das (University of Galway, Ireland)
• Pruthwik Mishra (SVNIT Surat, India)
• Alok Singh (University of Oxford, UK)
• Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad (AfricaNLP, Imperial College London)
• Asif Ekbal (IIT Jodhpur, India)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE (arranged in alphabetical order)

• Alexander Gelbukh (Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico)
• Bidyut Kumar Patra (IIT BHU, India)
• Clarence Teo (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
• Gaurish Thakkar (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
• Helena Moniz (Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal)
• Idris Abdulmumin (DSFSI, University of Pretoria)
• Ibrahim Said Ahmad (Northeastern University)
• Juri Opitz (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
• Luan Thanh Nguyen (Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam)
• Marie-Aude Lefer (UCLouvain, Belgium)
• Mohammed Hasanuzzaman (Queen's University Belfast, UK)
• Moritz Schaeffer (Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany)
• Muslim Jameel Sayed (Atlantic Technological University, Ireland)
• Pádraic Moran (University of Galway, Ireland)
• Paolo Rosso (Valencia Polytechnic University, Spain)
• Paul Buitelaar (University of Galway, Ireland)
• Soumik Mandal (NYU Tandon School of Engineering, USA)
• Surangika Ranathunga (Massey University, New Zealand)
• Uthayasanker Thayasivam (University of Moratuwa, Srilanka)

Important Dates

• Paper submission deadline: 15 July 2025
• Notification of acceptance: 31 July 2025
• Camera-ready versions deadline: 30 August 2025
• Camera-ready proceedings ready: 8 September 2025
• RANLP Conference: 8-10 September 2025 (Monday-Wednesday)
• Paper Submission link: https://softconf.com/ranlp25/GlobalNLP2025/
• Workshops and Shared Tasks: 11-13 September 2025 (Thursday-Saturday)

Registration and Fees: For information on registration categories, fees, and deadlines, please visit the following page:
https://ranlp.org/ranlp2025/index.php/fees-registration/

Paper Submission

Authors are encouraged to submit their original research papers via the official RANLP 2025 submission portal. Please follow the provided guidelines carefully to ensure a smooth submission and review process.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions must follow the RANLP 2025 submission guidelines, using ACL-style templates (LaTeX or MS Word).

• Long papers: Up to 8 pages (excluding references)
• Short papers: Up to 4 pages (excluding references)

Publication: Accepted papers will be included in the ACL Anthology.