The tutorials, the workshops and the main conference will take place at the same building. Each workshop will run in parallel with the other and with the tutorial sessions on 7 September 2026.

Venue: Federation of the Scientific and Technical Unions in Bulgaria (FNTS) – 108 Georgi S. Rakovski St

PROGRAMME | 7 September 2026 | TUTORIALS

08:30 – 9:00 | Registration (Floor 2, Lobby)

TUTORIALS | Floor 3, Hall 312

09:00 – 12:30 | TUTORIAL: Ollama, No Drama: Step-by-Step Guide of Practical Local AI

Lecturer: Dimitar Hristov (Institute for Bulgarian Language, BAS)

13:30 – 17:00 | TUTORIAL: Composing Theoretical and Computational Linguistic Problems

Lecturer: Ivan Derzhanski (Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, BAS)

17:15 – 18:15 | KEYNOTE TALK: Natural Language Processing in the Era of Artificial Intelligence: The Wind of Change is Blowing

Speaker: Prof. Ruslan Mitkov (Lancaster University, University of Alicante)

18:30 – 21:00 | Welcome reception (Place TBA)

PROGRAMME | 8 September 2026 | MAIN CONFERENCE

Floor 2, Hall 4

08:30 – 9:00 | Registration

09:00 – 9:15 | Conference opening

MANIPULATIVE LANGUAGE, DISINFORMATION, FACT CHECKING

09:15 – 10:00 | KEYNOTE TALK: Factuality Challenges in the Era of Large Language Models

Speaker: Prof. Preslav Nakov (Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence)

10:00 – 11:00 | Session Presentations

  • 10:00 – 10:20 – Irina Temnikova, Devora Kotseva, Ruslana Margova, Todor Kiriakov, Yolina Petrova, Nevena Grigorova, Alexander Komarov, Bogomil Katanov, Boryana Kostadinova and Stefan Minkov
    PROPer-BG: A New Publicly Accessible Package of Resources for Propaganda Detection in Bulgarian
  • 10:20 – 10:40 – Jordan Kralev
    Direct Projection of Visual Features into Linguistic Embeddings for Domain-Adapted Multimodal Learning
  • 10:40 – 11:00 – Öner Aytaş, Mehmet Ali Bayram, Tuğçe Şen, Banu Diri and Göksel Biricik
    Mitigating Security Vulnerabilities in Open-Source Large Language Models via a Supervisor Agent Architecture

11:00 – 11:30 | Coffee Break

LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS (LLMS) AND LANGUAGE MODELLING

11:30 – 12:30 | Session Presentations

  • 11:30 – 11:50 – Svetla Boytcheva, Sylvia Vassileva and Pavel Boytchev
    BGSynthMedic: Synthetic Parallel English-Bulgarian Discharge Summary Corpus with Automatic Annotations
  • 11:50 – 12:10 – George Pashev, Silvia Gaftandzhieva
    SymLang: A Structured Symbolic Intermediate Representation for Optimized Human-AI Communication in Assistive Clinical Technologies
  • 12:10 – 12:30 – Yolina Petrova and Nikola Blajev
    Zero-Shot Detection of AI-Generated Bulgarian Text via Binoculars Framework

12:30 – 13:30 | LUNCH BREAK / POSTER SESSION

POSTERS

  • Mullosharaf Arabov
    A Systematic Benchmark of Machine Transliteration Models for the Tajik-Farsi Language Pair: A Comparative Study from Rule-Based to Transformer Architectures
  • Mullosharaf Arabov, Karomatullo Habibullozoda and Nurali Shirinov
    TajikNLP: An Open-Source Toolkit for Comprehensive Text Processing of Tajik (Cyrillic Script)
  • Abdelouahab Baflah
    A Qualitative Error Analysis of Whisper-Based Sentiment Recognition in Algerian Spoken Arabic: Prosodic and Pragmatic Failures in a Low-Resource Dialect
  • Nevena Grigorova, Stanislav Penkov, Keith Kiely, Dobromir Tsolyov, Iglika Ivanova
    Syntactic Patterns in Political Speech: Dependency-Based Ad Hominem Detection in Bulgarian Social Media
  • Iryna Karamysheva, Jakob Horsch
    Imploring You to Investigate More Languages: A Corpus-based Contrastive Study of Ukrainian and English Causative Constructions
  • Ján Mačutek, Michaela Koščová, Michaela Nogolová and Radek Čech
    What to Take as the Basic Verb Form? A Pilot Study in Czech
  • Ruslana Margova
    Detecting Pseudoscientific Narratives in Bulgarian Science Communication: Nationalistic Mystification, Pseudo-Expertise and Cultural Blind Spots in AI-Assisted Analysis
  • Mila Marcheva-Nash and Weiwei Sun
    PS-CHILDES-BG: A Constituency Treebank of Bulgarian Morphemically Tokenised Child-directed Speech
  • Stanislav Penkov
    A WordNet-Aligned Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies for Low-Resource NLP
  • Ekaterina Tarpomanova
    Balkan Focus Particles in Bulgarian: bash and taman

LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS (LLMS) AND LANGUAGE MODELLING

13:30 – 15:10 | Session Presentations

  • 13:30 – 13:50 – Amina Laggoun, Youness Moukafih, Ouassim Karrakchou, Kamel Smaili
    Towards Frugal BERT Models for Maghrebi Dialects: Pruning and Distillation Approaches
  • 13:50 – 14:10 – Maria Khokhlova, Mikhail Koryshev
    Thematic Dominants of German-Language Catholic Hymns: Automatic Analysis using Word Embeddings
  • 14:10 – 14:30 – Mehmet Ali Bayram, Öner Aytaş and Tuğçe Şen
    Morphology-Aware Tokenization Improves Turkish Sentence Embeddings under Controlled Training Conditions
  • 14:30 – 14:50 – Brandon Caillahua Mendoza
    Genetic Algorithms with Normalized Fitness Functions for Low-Resource Language Identification: A Case Study on Archaic Romanian and Medieval Slavonic Liturgical Manuscripts
  • 14:50 – 15:10 – Natalia Dankova
    Analysing French Narrative Texts Generated by ChatGPT-5

15:10 – 15:30 | Coffee Break

LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS (LLMS) AND LANGUAGE MODELLING

15:30 – 17:10 | Session Presentations

  • 15:30 – 15:50 – Verginica Barbu Mititelu, Elena Irimia, Simina Popa, Mihaela Cristescu, Catalin Mihaila, Lea Radu, Ioana Bucsa
    The Romanian Component of the Parallel ELEXIS Corpus: ELEXIS-Ro
  • 15:50 – 16:10 – Atanas Atanasov
    A Dual-Interface Syntax Tree Editor with Automated Assessment for Learning Management Systems
  • 16:10 – 16:30 – Maria Sampedro Mella
    Developing a Pragmatic Annotation System for a Spoken Corpus
  • 16:30 – 16:50 – Tsvetelina Stefanova, Petya Osenova
    Evaluating the Linguistic Properties of AI-Generated Bulgarian News Texts
  • 16:50 – 17:10 – Svetla Koeva
    Towards a New Grammar Checker for Bulgarian

18:00 – 20:00 | Guided walking tour

PROGRAMME | 9 September 2026 | MAIN CONFERENCE

Hall 4

09:15 – 10:00 | KEYNOTE TALK: TBA

Speaker: Dr Khalid Choukri (European Language Resources Association)

EXPLORING LANGUAGE VIA LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS

10:00 – 11:00 | Session Presentations

  • 10:00 – 10:20 – Radu Ion, Verginica Barbu Mititelu, Elena Irimia, Maria Mitrofan and Vasile Păiș
    Benchmarking Language Models on Romanian Eighth-Grade National Exams
  • 10:20 – 10:40 – Karla Csuros, Madalina Chitez, Roxana Rogobete and Petya Osenova
    Building a Cross-lingual Corpus of BA Theses: Rationale and Preliminary Observations
  • 10:40 – 11:00 – Maria Todorova, Valentina Stefanova, Tsvetana Dimitrova, Mihaela Moskova, Hristina Kukova, Svetlozara Leseva, Svetla Koeva, Ivelina Stoyanova and Dimitar Georgiev
    Hybrid Benchmark for Long-Text Understanding and Reasoning in Bulgarian

11:00 – 11:30 | Coffee Break

SPECIAL SESSION ON SEMANTIC RELATIONS, FRAMENETS AND ONTOLOGIES

11:30 – 12:30 | Session Presentations

  • 11:30 – 11:50 – Marina Bagi, Aleksandra Marković and Ranka Stanković
    Toward a Serbian FrameNet: Resource Construction, Methodology, and Initial Annotation Results
  • 11:50 – 12:10 – Maria Khokhlova
    A Comparative Study of Synonym Generation in Russian with Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models in a Zero-Shot Setting
  • 12:10 – 12:30 – Ranka Stanković, Cvetana Krstev, Milica Ikonić Nešić and Miloš Utvić
    Relation Extraction from Text of Various Domains: A Serbian Case Study

12:30 – 13:30 | LUNCH BREAK AND POSTER SESSION

CORPORA, RESOURCES, ANNOTATION

13:30 – 15:10 | Session Presentations

  • 13:30 – 13:50 – Andrea Nadalini, Claudia Marzi, Marcello Ferro, Vito Pirrelli, Maria Todorova, Valentina Stefanova, Tsvetana Dimitrova, Hristina Kukova and Svetla Koeva
    Assessing Reading Development through Finger-Voice Span: a Comparative Study of Bulgarian and Italian
  • 13:50 – 14:10 – Ruslana Margova and Irina Temnikova
    Experiment Design of a Balanced Eye-Tracking Study for Measuring the Cognitive Impact of the Stimulus Word “Disinformation”
  • 14:10 – 14:30 – Tatiana Sherstinova, Irina Petrova, Aleksei Melnik, Sofiia Chepovetskaia, Karina Azarevich, Viktoria Deborina
    Everyday Speech of Russian Students: From Field Recordings to the ESC Speech Corpus (Data Processing and Representation)
  • 14:30 – 14:50 – Gunta Nešpore-Bērzkalne, Mikus Grasmanis and Ilze Lokmane
    Multi-word Expressions in the Electronic Dictionary Tēzaurs: Integrating Data from Different Sources
  • 14:50 – 15:10 – Dobromir Tsolyov, Keith Kiely, Georgi Goranov, Iglika Ivanova, Stanimir Dimitrov
    Optimizing LLM-based Discourse Analysis in Low-Resource Languages: A Case Study of Bulgarian Euro Adoption Narratives

15:10 – 15:30 | Coffee Break

EXPLORING LANGUAGE IN USE: CORPUS-BASED STUDIES

15:30 – 17:10 | Session Presentations

  • 15:30 – 15:50 – Iglika Nikolova-Stoupak, Gaël Lejeune, Eva Schaeffer-Lacroix
    Quantifying Literary Style: A Corpus-Based Study
  • 15:50 – 16:10 – Tomás Chismol Carbonell
    Zipfian Structure, Eurolect and Translationese: Exploratory Analysis of an EU Legal Corpus in English, French, Spanish and Bulgarian
  • 16:10 – 16:30 – Silvie Cinková, Ivana Kvapilíková and Jan Černý
    Lexical Surprisal from Large Language Models: Cautionary Notes for Legal Discourse
  • 16:30 – 16:50 – Junya Morita
    Corpus-based Study of Word Formation: Anti-agentive Nominals in English and Japanese
  • 16:50 – 17:10 – Ivan Derzhanski, Olena Siruk
    When Bulgarian ‘Still’ Meets Ukrainian ‘Already’

17:10 | Closing remarks

19:00 | Conference dinner

PROGRAMME | 10 September 2026 | MAIN CONFERENCE

TUTORIALS | Floor 3, Hall 312

08:30 – 9:00 – Registration

09:00 – 12:30 | TUTORIAL: The Work of Linguists in Computational Linguistics

Lecturer: Irina Temnikova (Big Data for Smart Society Institute – GATE)

13:30 – 15:00 | TUTORIAL: Hack the Agent: Vulnerabilities and Security in AI Systems

Lecturer: Ivan Ivanov (Stihia.ai)