Workshop description

Most work on NLP focuses on language in its canonical written form. This has often led researchers to ignore the differences between written and spoken language or, worse, to conflate the two. Instances of conflation are statements like "Chinese is a logographic language" or "Persian is a right-to-left language", variants of which can be found frequently in the ACL anthology. These statements confuse properties of the language with properties of its writing system. Ignoring differences between written and spoken language leads, among other things, to conflating different words that are spelled the same (e.g., English bass), or treating as different, words that have multiple spellings (e.g., Japanese umai ‘tasty’, which can be written 旨い, うまい, ウマい, or 美味い). Furthermore, methods for dealing with written language issues (e.g., various kinds of normalization or conversion) or for recognizing text input (e.g. OCR & handwriting recognition or text entry methods) are often regarded as precursors to NLP rather than as fundamental parts of the enterprise, despite the fact that most NLP methods rely centrally on representations derived from text rather than (spoken) language. This general lack of consideration of writing has led to much of the research on such topics to largely appear outside of ACL venues, in conferences or journals of neighboring fields such as speech technology (e.g., text normalization) or human-computer interaction (e.g., text entry).

This year's workshop will feature an invited talk by Zev Handel (University of Washington) on East Asian writing systems, a tutorial on working with different writing systems, and posters and presentations for submitted work. For the first time ever, CAWL will feature a cash prize of $500 USD for the best student submission.

CAWL workshops are organized under the guidance of the ACL Special Interest Group on Writing Systems and Written Language (SIGWrit).

For questions about the workshop, please contact the workshop organizers at cawl-2026-organizers@googlegroups.com

Schedule

Organizing Committee

• Kyle Gorman, CUNY Graduate Center & Google Research, USA
• Costantine Lignos, Brandeis University, USA
• Zoey Liu, University of Florida, USA
• Claytone Sikasote, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Program Committee

• David Ifeoluwa Adelani, University College London, UK
• Sina Ahmadi, George Mason University, USA
• Enas Albasiri, Nvidia, USA
• Cecilia Overdotter Alm, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
• Steven Bedrick, Oregon Health & Science University, USA
• Alexander Gutkin, Google Research, UK
• Nizar Habash, NYU Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
• Yannis Haralambous, IMT Atlantique & CNRS Lab-STICC, France
• Christo Kirov, Google Research, USA
• Matthew Malone, CUNY Grad Center, USA
• Yuval Pinter, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
• William Poser, independent scholar, Canada
• Djamé Seddah, Sorbonne University & Inria, France
• Brian Roark, Google Research, USA
• Maria Ryskina, MIT, USA