CoNLL 2026 | CoNLL (original) (raw)

CoNLL is a top tier conference focusing on theoretically, cognitively and scientifically motivated approaches to computational linguistics and NLP. CoNLL 2026 will take place in San Diego, California, United States, July 3-4, 2026 (co-located with ACL).

CoNLL welcomes work targeting any aspect of language and its computational modeling, including:

• Computational Psycholinguistics, Cognition and Linguistics
• Computational Usage-Based Grammars (e.g., Construction Grammars)
• Computational Social Science and Sociolinguistics
• Interaction and Dialogue
• Language Acquisition, Learning, Emergence, and Evolution
• Multimodality and Grounding
• Typology and Multilinguality
• Speech and Phonology
• Syntax and Morphology
• Lexical, Compositional and Discourse Semantics
• Theoretical Analysis and Interpretation of ML Models for NLP
• Resources and Tools for Scientifically Motivated Research
• Language and the Brain

Keynote Speakers
Michael C. Frank (Stanford University)
Title: "Comparing early language learning in children and language models"

Adele Goldberg (Princeton University)
Title: "Compositionality and creativity in natural language and LLMs"

Program

Friday, July 3, 2026, Harbor B

09:00 - 09:15 Opening Remarks

09:15 - 10:30 Keynote by Michael C. Frank

10:30 - 11:00 Coffee Break

11:00 - 12:30 Computational Psycholinguistics and Cognition

• Evaluating Humanlike Memory Effects in Transformers Using Item Recognition Tasks, Christian Clark and William Schuler
• Information-Theoretic Storage Cost in Sentence Comprehension, Kohei Kajikawa, Shinnosuke Isono and Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
• Word predictability estimates from language models are not robust to tokenizer vocabulary, Kien Nguyen and Suhas Arehalli
• Sense and Sensitivity: “Reasoning” Models are More Robust, but can Diverge from Human Consensus in a Legal Interpretation Task, Dawson Petersen, Abhishek Purushothama and Nathan Schneider
• Syntactically-guided Information Maintenance in Sentence Comprehension, Shinnosuke Isono and Kohei Kajikawa

12:30 - 14:00 Lunch Break

14:00 - 15:30 Poster Session

• Event-Guided Slot Interaction for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking, Ying Xia, Wei Liu
• Capturing Classic Authorial Style in Long-Form Story Generation with GRPO Fine-Tuning, Jinlong Liu, Mark G. Lee, Mohammed Bahja, Venelin Kovatchev
• On the scaling relationship between cloze probabilities and language model next-token prediction, Cassandra L Jacobs, Loïc Grobol
• RECAP: Resistance Capture in Text-based Mental Health Counseling with Large Language Models, Anqi Li, Yuqian Chen, Yu Lu, Zhaoming Chen, Yi Zhu, Yuan Xie, Zhenzhong Lan
• A Dataset for Oral Reading in Young English Readers, Madison Rose, Michael Bennie, Valeria Pagliai, Hatice Kubra Karakis, Qian Shen, Xinyi Tai, Walter L. Leite, Zoey Liu
• From Dependency to CCG to Incremental CCG: Approaches to Flexible Word Order in Turkish, Ozge Bakay, Oğuz Kerem Yıldız, Rajesh Bhatt, Brian Dillon, Olcay Taner Yildiz
• Mechanistic Interpretability of Animacy Effects on Structure Choice in GPT-2, Yue Li, Yan Cong, Elaine J. Francis
• Discovering Lexical Gaps Using Embeddings from Multilingual LLMs, Yoonwon Jung, Aaron S. Cohen, Ben Bergen
• Revisiting Age of Acquisition in Curriculum Learning: Disentangling Lexical Features and Semantic Structure, Ian Gifford, Aaron Shah, Catherine Chen, Taimaa Kassab Bachi, Eva Portelance
• Logic-Level Evaluation of Logical Table-to-Text Generation, Lena Trigg, Dean F. Hougen, Ahsan Bilal
• What Exactly do Children Receive in Language Acquisition? A Case Study on CHILDES with Automated Detection of Filler-Gap Dependencies, Zhenghao Zhou, William Dai, Maya Viswanathan, Simon Charlow, R. Thomas McCoy, Robert Frank
• An Information-Theoretic Study of RLHF-Induced Uniformity in Large Language Model Outputs, Nolan Chai, Tianqi Zhang, Alex Warstadt
• Bridging Linguistic Structure and Mechanistic Interpretability for Conceptual Interpretation in Language Models, Nura Aljaafari, Danilo Carvalho, Andre Freitas
• Traces of Social Competence in Large Language Models, Tom Kouwenhoven, Michiel van der Meer, Max J. van Duijn
• Metric Grammars: A usage-based grammatical formalism that supports generation, parsing and morphological innovation, Whitney Tabor, Hyosun Lee
• Automated Refinement of Essay Scoring Rubrics for Language Models via Reflect-and-Revise, Keno Harada, Lui Yoshida, Takeshi Kojima, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo
• A framework for analyzing concept representations in neural models, Burin Naowarat, Hao Tang, Sharon Goldwater
• Language Model Behavioral Phases are Consistent Across Architecture, Training Data, and Scale, James Michaelov, Roger Levy, Benjamin Bergen
• Finding Answers to Questions: Bridging between Type-based and Computational Neuroscience Approaches, Staffan Larsson, Jonathan Ginzburg, Robin Cooper, Andy Lücking

15:30 - 16:00 Coffee Break

16:00 - 17:30 Language Acquisition, Interpretability, Language and the Brain

• Collocational bootstrapping: A hypothesis about the learning of subject-verb agreement in humans and neural networks, Claire Hobbs and R. Thomas McCoy
• Cognitively Inspired Developmental Trajectories Improve Explore-Exploit Dynamics in Neural Agent Emergent Communication, Jan Dziewoński, Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco and Tessa Verhoef
• Addressing the Ecological Fallacy in Larger LMs with Human Context, Nikita Soni, Dhruv Vijay Kunjadiya, Pratham Piyush Shah, Dikshya Mohanty, H. Andrew Schwartz and Niranjan Balasubramanian
• Linguistic Profiling of Transformer Embedding Geometry, Lucia Domenichelli, Dominique Brunato and Felice Dell’Orletta
• Uncovering Autoregressive LLM Knowledge of Thematic Fit in Event Representation, Safeyah Khaled Alshemali, Daniel Bauer and Yuval Marton
• What Brain Data Adds to Language Model Training, Gabriele Merlin, Omer Moussa and Mariya Toneva

Saturday, July 4, 2026, Harbor B

09:00 - 10:30 Keynote by Adele Goldberg

10:30 - 11:00 Coffee Break

11:00 - 12:30 Usage-based Grammars, Typology and Multilinguality

• A Method for Learning Large-Scale Computational Construction Grammars from Semantically Annotated Corpora, Paul Van Eecke and Katrien Beuls
• Child-directed speech facilitates production, not comprehension, in BabyLMs, Bastian Bunzeck and Sina Zarrieß
• Language Models Learn Constructional Semantics, Not To Mention Syntax: Investigating LM Understanding of Paired-Focus Constructions, Wesley Scivetti, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox, Nathan Schneider, Kanishka Misra and Leonie Weissweiler
• Differences in Typological Alignment in Language Models’ Treatment of Differential Argument Marking, Iskar Deng, Nathalia Xu and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld
• Harnessing Linguistic Dissimilarity for Language Generalization on Unseen Low-Resource Varieties, Jinju Kim, Haeji Jung, Youjeong Roh, Jong Hwan Ko and David R. Mortensen

12:30 - 14:00 Lunch Break

14:00 - 15:30 Multimodality, Grounding and Interaction

• Measuring the Effects of Visual Salience in Human and AI Descriptions with Image Editing, Nina Gregorio, Edoardo Ponti and Sharon Goldwater
• Symbolic Grounding Reveals Representational Bottlenecks in Abstract Visual Reasoning, Mohit Vaishnav and Tanel Tammet
• Now They See It, Now They Don’t: Multimodal Reward Models Exhibit Unreliability in Physical World Constraints, Sadaf Ghaffari and Nikhil Krishnaswamy
• Who Generates More Empathetic Responses—Humans or LLMs? A Comparative Evaluation with Human and LLM Judges, Anuradha Welivita, Fawzia Zeitoun and Pearl Pu
• Modeling Human Adversarial Strategy Adaptation in Multi-Turn Language Model Interactions, Zijun Ding
• CAIT: A Syntactic Parsing Toolkit for Child–Adult InTeractions, Francesca Padovani, Xiulin Yang, Bastian Bunzeck, Jaap Jumelet, Yevgen Matusevych, Nathan Schneider and Arianna Bisazza

15:30 - 16:00 Coffee Break

16:00 - 17:30 Award Session and Community Discussion

• When transformers learn impossible languages, what do they learn? Ram Janarthan, Coleman Haley and Sharon Goldwater
• Readers make targeted regressions to plausible errors in reanalysis of "noisy-channel garden-path" sentences, Thomas Hikaru Clark, Roger P. Levy and Edward Gibson
• Presupposition and Reasoning in Conditionals: A Theory-Based Study of Humans and LLMs, Tara Azin, Yongan Yu, Raj Singh and Olessia Jouravlev
• Community Discussion, moderated by Omri Abend, Antske Fokkens, Claire Bonial and Yevgeni Berzak

Online Presentations

• ThinkStruct: RST-Aware Attention for Logical Reasoning in Machine Reading Comprehension, Nhi Thao Tran, Tien Le, Toan Pham, Quoc Hoang Vu
• Could language models win the International Linguistics Olympiad?, Jamie Garnham, Ehsan Shareghi
• From Sparse to Sense-Grounded: Wikipedia Training for Ukrainian Visual-WSD, Yurii Laba, Rostyslav O. Hryniv
• Examining Large Language Models' form-meaning mappings of information structure constructions in Mandarin Chinese, Shihui Li, Xiaojuan Tan, Jelke Bloem
• Same Predictions, Different Processes: A Multi-Level Comparison of Human and Multimodal LLM Language Prediction, Shuqi Wang, Zhenguang Cai

Program Committee

Area Chairs
Christian Bentz (Saarland University)
Giovanni Cassani (Tilburg University)
Grzegorz Chrupała (Tilburg University)
Verna Dankers (Mila Quebec AI institute and McGill University)
Jonathan Dunn (University of Illinois Urbana Champaign)
Kilian Evang (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
Frank Ferraro (University of Maryland, Baltimore County)
Aina Garí Soler (INRIA Paris)
Jon Gauthier (UCSF)
Stefan Hartmann (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
Nikhil Krishnaswamy (Colorado State University)
Martha Lewis (University of Amsterdam)
Yevgen Matusevych (University of Groningen)
R. Thomas McCoy (Yale University)
Kate McCurdy (Saarland University)
James Michaelov (MIT)
Kanishka Misra (UT Austin)
Maria Pacheco (University of Colorado Boulder)
Tiago Pimentel (ETH Zurich)
Giulia Rambelli (Aix-Marseille University)
Nathan Schneider (Georgetown University)
Steven Schockaert (Cardiff University)
Sebastian Schuster (University of Vienna, University College London)
Shane Steinert-Threlkeld (University of Washington)
Remi van Trijp (Sony Computer Science Laboratories)
Ashwini Vaidya (IIT Delhi)
Ekaterina (Kat) Vylomova (University of Melbourne)
Alina Wróblewska (Polish Academy of Sciences)

Publication Chairs
Katrien Beuls, Université de Namur
Paul Van Eecke, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Publicity Chairs
Harish Tayyar Madabushi, University of Bath
Charlotte Pouw, University of Amsterdam
Bastian Bunzeck, Bielefeld University

Program Chairs
Claire Bonial, Georgetown University
Yevgeni Berzak, Technion

Contact
Questions? E-mail conll.chairs@gmail.com

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