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June 15–17 2026, Bolzano 

June 15-16 : Libera Università di Bolzano, NOI Techpark, Via Alessandro Volta 13/A.
17 giugno: Centro di Ricerca EURAC, Viale Druso 1.

Supported by:

he Lectures on Computational Linguistics is an event organized yearly under the umbrella of AILC (Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Computazionale).  

The 2026 edition of AILC Lectures is organized together with theFree University of Bozen-Bolzano, Faculty of Engineering (Raffaella Bernardi) and Faculty of Education (Alessandro Vietti), in collaboration with EURAC Research Center (Luca Ducceschi). The 2026 edition is organized with a view on the impact of Computational Lingustics and Natural Language Processing for the Society. 

The event is primarily addressed to graduate students, Ph.D. candidates and Master students, but welcomes all those who might be interested in the topics. Participation is free but subject to registrazione > (up to 150 places available) and membership to AILC. 

The Lectures include: 

• Three 2-hours tutorials on  

• Three 2-hours hands-on laboratories; 

• Two Student Poster Sessions  

• Two evening lectures 

General Description 

Computational Linguistics (CL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) have reached their long-standing objectives and today the results of the international and national communities have gained enormous visibility through the success of ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, among others. Hence, there is a strong demand from the Society to be informed about our methods and results. Moreover, the time is ripe to focus on the interaction of CL/NLP results with the plethora of applications that can help improve the quality of everyday life and of the various enterprises.  

Against such background, the Lectures on Computational Linguistics 2026 will feature tutorials on the following topics: Minority Groups, and in particular Low Resource Languages, with a focus on linguistic variability in speech recognition and translation. Whether we consider dialects or minority languages, or different speaking styles, linguistic and social variability in speech poses a challenge to current speech recognition models, which are primarily trained on read speech data. The tutorials are therefore complemented by labs on i) Data Curation for minority languages and ii) Recognition of Spontaneous Speech. Moreover, the achievements of the NLP community make possible to look ahead and work together with experts on Robotic aiming to further boost Embodied Interactive AI systems. Finally, to be trustworthy and reliable, computational models need to be interpretable. Hence, the lectures will include also a lab on Explainability and Interpretability Methods. 

During the lunch breaks, students will have the opportunity to present their projects and receive feedback from researchers and peers and get in contact with various stakeholders.   

The program is further enriched with Evening Lectures by leading NLP practitioners from Academia and Industry. 

Program

Monday 15.06 – NOI Techpark 

• 9:00–9:30: Welcome and opening
• 9:30–11:30: Tutorial: Developing ASR Systems for Conversational Speech Transcription and Analysis – Barbara Schuppler (TU Graz) 
• 11:30-12:00: Break
• 12:00-13:30: Students Poster Session
• 13:30-15:00: Lunch Break
• 15:00–17:00: Lab I: Recognition in Spontaneous Speech – Loredana Schettino e Alessandro Vietti (Facoltà di Scienze della Formazione, UNIBZ)
• 17:00–17:30: Break
• 17:30–18:30: Evening Lecture: Small Language Models for Education – Aurélie Herbelot (Denotation UG)
• 18:30: Welcome drink

Tuesday 16.06 – NOI Techpark 

• 9:30–11:30: Tutorial II: Interactive Embodied AI: from the State-of-the-Art to Real-World Challenges in Cooperation, Safety, and Responsible Robotics – Oliver Lemon (Edinburgh Center for Robotics
• 11:30–12:00: Break
• 12:00–13:30: Students Poster Session
• 13:30–15:00: Lunch Break
• 15:00–17:00: Lab II: Mechanistic Interpretability – Leonardo Bertolazzi (University of Trento) 
• 17:00–17:30: PAUSA 
• 17:30–18:30: Conferenza serale: NLP: Where We Came From, Where We Are, Where We Are/Could Be Going – Julia Hockenmaier (University of Illinois)
• 20:00: Social Event 

Wednesday 17.06 – EURAC, Auditorium 

• 9:00–11:00: Tutorial: Minority Groups and Low Resource Languages – Barbara Plank (LMU Munich) 
• 11:00–11:30: Break
• 11:30–13:30: Lab III: Data Curation and Speech-to-Text Fine-Tuning for Minority Languages – Egon Stemle e Luca Ducceschi (EURAC) 
• 13:30–15:00: Lunch Break

Student's Presentation 

Students are invited to present their ongoing research during two Student Sessions. Interested participants are required to submit a 500-word abstract in English to ailc.lectures@gmail.com within the deadline of the 16th of May. Acceptance notices will be sent by the 23rd of May. 

Registration 

Registration closes on May 30th or earlier, if the max nr of places is reached. The link will be made available soon. 

Scientific Committee 

Raffaella Bernardi (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano)
Tommaso Caselli (University of Groningen)
Francesco Cutugno (University of Napoli Federico II)
Felice Dell'Orletta (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale CNR – Pisa)
Elisabetta Jezek (University of Pavia) 

Local Organisers 

 Raffaella Bernardi (Faculty of Engineering, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano)
Alessandro Vietti (Faculty of Education, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano)
Luca Ducceschi (EURAC Research Center) 

Organising Committee 

Simone Ciciliano (Faculty of Engineering, UNIBZ)
Domenico De Cristofaro (Faculty of Education, UNIBZ)
Umberto Domanti (Faculty of Engineering, UNIBZ)
Greta Franzini (EURAC)
Loredana Schettino (Faculty of Education, UNIBZ) 

Contact: ailc.lectures@gmail.com