Natural Language Processing has witnessed a clear paradigm shift: the transition from rule-based approaches to data-driven language models. While rule-based approaches dominated NLP for many years, during the 1990s and early 2000s they gradually gave way to statistical and machine-learning methods.
Data-driven models, and most prominently Deep Learning including Large Language Models, now shape almost every corner of NLP. Even so, their outputs are not always ideal, and some studies still report cases in which machine-learning approaches do not necessarily outperform classical rule-based ones.
The overarching theme of the summer school is this paradigm shift, with lectures and practical sessions reflecting the latest trends at both theoretical and practical levels. The programme combines lectures on theoretical foundations with hands-on practical sessions.
The summer school is intended for both newcomers and experienced professionals in NLP, computer science, data science, cybersecurity, corpus linguistics, language technologies, and related disciplines.
Keynote speech: Roberto Navigli (Sapienza University of Rome), Is Lexical Semantics Dead in the LLM Era?
We are delighted to announce Roberto Navigli as keynote speaker of the summer school.
Confirmed lectures:
- Quantum Natural Language Processing: Foundations, Challenges, and Insights — Elena Lloret
- Explainable AI in Natural Language Processing — Salima Lamsiyah
- Quality Estimation for Machine Translation — Tharindu Ranasinghe
- Understanding Language Models — Hansi Hettiarachchi
- LLMs for low-resource languages — Robiert Sepulveda Torres and Iván Martínez
- Fairness in Machine Learning: Evaluating Gender Bias in LLMs — Juan Pablo Consuegra-Ayala
- Gaze data for NLP research: recording methods and analysis — Cengiz Acarturk
- Beyond the Single Text: NLP Reading in Digital Humanities — Isuri Anuradha
- Automatic hyperparameter optimisation and model selection for NLP pipelines — Ernesto Luis Estevanell
- Legal NLP in the LLM era — Damith Premasiri
- Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages — Alicia Picazo-Izquierdo
- Sentiment analysis: from rule-based methods to Large Language Models — Maram Alharbi
Panel discussion: A panel discussion, The future of NLP methods and language models, is scheduled as part of the summer school. The panel is moderated by Ruslan Mitkov and full details are available on the Panel page.
Venue, dates and accommodation: The summer school will take place at the Research Institute of Informatics of the University of Alicante on 15, 16 and 17 June 2026. Recommended accommodation and travel information are available on the Venue & Accommodation page (prospective participants are advised to book accommodation at their earliest convenience, as availability is limited).
Directors, chair and committees: Summer School Directors are Tharindu Ranasinghe and Salima Lamsiyah. The Summer School Chair is Ruslan Mitkov. Full committee membership is available on the People page.
Registration: Registration is available on the Registration page. Early-bird registration closes on 25 May 2026.
Related events: The summer school follows NLPAICS 2026, which takes place in Alicante on 11 and 12 June 2026. Participants attending both events benefit from discounted registration.
Further information: The website is updated regularly. For additional information, write to summer-school@dlsi.ua.es.