PROPOR 2026: CALL FOR BEST PhD/MSc DISSERTATION AWARD

The PROPOR 2026 Best PhD / MSc Dissertation Award recognizes outstanding dissertations in academic research and development topics relevant to the computational processing of Portuguese and Galician. This award intends to recognize excellent young researchers in their early careers and highlight theoretical and technological issues of written and spoken Portuguese and Galician. The award is managed by the Best PhD / MSc dissertation committee.

Award winners will be invited to publish their thesis/dissertation extended abstracts in the PROPOR 2026 proceedings. They will receive a free registration to the main conference as part of the award. The two award winners and runners-up will be invited to prepare a presentation of their work for the main conference, using a particular format (A0 poster for poster presentation or slides for oral presentation).

The Award Ceremony will take place during the PROPOR 2026 Conference.

Submission Criteria and Procedure:

Eligible submissions are those from candidates who have successfully defended their Master and PhD Thesis dissertations within the three years preceding the contest submission deadline, except for thesis submitted to the previous contest held during PROPOR 2024. A letter from the primary dissertation advisor must be submitted with the extended abstract, stating that the candidate meets this eligibility criterion.

The dissertation must focus on some aspect of the written or spoken processing of any variety of Portuguese (including the language varieties of Portugal, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, São Tomé, Macau, Timor) or Galician.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Natural language processing tasks (e.g. parsing, word sense disambiguation, coreference resolution)
• Natural language processing applications (e.g. question answering, subtitling, summarization, sentiment analysis)
• Natural language generation
• Information extraction and information retrieval
• Speech technologies (e.g. spoken language generation, speech and speaker recognition, spoken language understanding)
• Speech applications (e.g. spoken language interfaces, dialogue systems, speech-to-speech translation)
• Resources, standardization and evaluation (e.g. corpora, ontologies, lexicons, grammars)
• NLP-oriented linguistic description or theoretical analysis
• Distributional semantics and language modeling
• Portuguese language varieties and dialect processing (including the language varieties of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Galicia, Guinea-Bissau, Macau, Mozambique, Portugal, and Sao Tome and Principe)
• Multilingual studies, methods, applications and resources including Portuguese/Galician

Important Dates

• Full and short paper submission deadline: Jan 9th, 2025 (23:59 GMT-12)Dec 12th, 2025 (23:59 GMT-12)
• Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: Feb 28th, 2026
• Camera-ready papers due: Mar 15th, 2026
• Conference: April 13th - 16th, 2026

Submissions

Each submission, consisting of two PDF files, must comply with the following:

• An extended abstract
• Letter from the primary dissertation/thesis supervisor.

Extended Abstract

The document must be in the form of an extended abstract that includes the nature of the problem researched, relevant theory, hypotheses tested, method, analysis and results and impacts (social, economical, technological, scientific, environmental).

Inclusion of publications, formal reports written by the author and other academic or nonacademic results from the PhD or MSc are particularly relevant and should be included in the extended abstract.

Extended abstracts must include URLs for the PDF of the complete MSc / PhD Thesis/Dissertation. We suggest placing it at the end, before references, and use of tinyurl.com for long URLs.

Extended abstracts are limited to 6 pages, including all figures, tables, and references and should begin with an abstract of 250 words or less. The abstract must be submitted in PDF format, following the same style as PROPOR 2026.

While recent editions have only accepted submissions in English, this year we are pleased to also accept papers written in Portuguese, reaffirming our commitment to promoting scientific exchange in our language.

Submissions must be sent through the CMT submission system bellow, selecting the PROPOR2026 Best Dissertations track:

CALL FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS

The overall purpose of a workshop is to provide participants with the opportunity to present and discuss novel research ideas on active and emerging topics of computational processing of Portuguese, Galician and their variants.

Workshops can take on several forms including (but not limited to) being organized around emerging research areas, challenge problems and industrial applications. The organizers of approved workshops are required to announce the workshop and call for papers, gather submissions, conduct the reviewing process and decide upon the final workshop program. They must also prepare a set of workshop proceedings in an electronic version. They may choose to form organizing or program committees for assistance in these tasks.

The workshop organizers are responsible for:

• Creating and distributing call-for-papers, call-for-participation and any other relevant advertising. The calls should make it clear that at least one author of any accepted paper must attend the event and that papers will be withdrawn if no such participation is secured with the payment of the workshop dues. The call should clearly describe the review and selection process. Finally, the calls must be framed to encourage as broad a participation as possible.
• Creating and publishing (on time) a website with all the relevant information about the workshop.
• Provide an extended abstract for the conference program.
• Review (at least two independent reviewers) and select the submitted papers.
• Schedule the presentations within the workshop.
• It should be noted that the conference organization does not budget for free registration, accommodation, or travel expenses for the workshop organizers or their invited speakers. The workshop organizers should therefore secure any source of funding/sponsorship deemed necessary for their invited speakers.
• Prepare electronic proceedings volumes by March 27 2026.
• Attend the workshop and select any required session chairs.

Important Dates

• Workshop proposals due: Dec 1st, 2025
• Notification of decision: Dec 15th, 2025
• Workshop web pages available and CFP: Dec 20, 2025
• Deadline for paper submission: Feb 2nd, 2026
• Notification to authors: Mar 10th, 2026
• Camera-ready deadline: Mar 20, 2026
• Prepare electronic proceedings volumes: Mar 27th, 2026 - strict deadline

Proposal Details

Proposals should be no more than three pages in length and must include

• Description of the workshop: title, abstract, objectives, relevance and its potential impact on the NLP community and society.
• Motivation: why a PROPOR workshop on this topic is needed.
• Description of the target audience
• List of core committed program committee members (2 to 3 members).
• Preliminary list of invited speakers (if any)
• For workshops previously held at PROPOR or other conferences, details on venue, attendance, and number of submissions from previous years should be provided.
• For new workshops, a list of potential attendees/submissions and/or a justification of the expected attendees and submissions.
• Relevant experience of the organizing committee.
• Duration of the workshop (full day or half day).
• Contact information (address, email, and phone - WhatsApp) for all organizers.
• A draft Call for Papers.
• Designation of a main contact person.

Proposals should be submitted via e-mail to propor2026wtst@gmail.com

CALL FOR SHARED TASK PROPOSALS

Shared tasks need to be focused on NLP for the Portuguese/Galician language.

The shared task organizers are responsible for:

• Creating and distributing call-for-participation and any other relevant advertising. The calls should make it clear that at least one author of each participant system must attend the event. The call should clearly describe the evaluation process.
• Creating and publishing (on time) a website with all the relevant information about the shared task.
• Provide an extended abstract for the conference program.
• Evaluate the submitted results.
• It should be noted that the conference organization does not budget for free registration, accommodation, or travel expenses for the shared task organizers.
• Prepare electronic proceedings volumes by March 27 2026.
• Attend the conference

Important Dates

• Shared task proposals due: Dec 1st, 2025
• Notification of decision: Dec 15th, 2025
• Shared task web pages available and linked to the main site: Dec 20th, 2025
• Camera-ready of short papers of the systems participating in the Shared task: Mar 25th, 2026
• Expected Tutorial date: Apr 13th, 2026
• Prepare electronic proceedings volumes: Mar 27th, 2026 - strict deadline
• Expected shared task meeting date: Apr 13th, 2026.

Proposal Details

Proposals should be no more than three pages in length and must include:

• Description of the shared task: a title and a brief description of the topic of the task and its potential impact on the NLP community and society.
• Description of the target audience.
• Description of the data sets that will be used in the shared task and their readiness Sketch of how the submitted systems will be evaluated.
• Proposed timeline for the shared task mainly including the dates for releasing trial, training and test data, and the evaluation period.
• Contact information (address, email, and phone - WhatsApp) for all organizers.
• Designation of a main contact person.

Submissions will be done via email to propor2026wtst@gmail.com

CALL FOR TUTORIAL PROPOSALS

Tutorials are intended to either provide a comprehensive introduction to core techniques/areas of interest or address advanced topics of language and speech processing including but not limited to the topics of the conference as stated in the call for papers. Especially encouraged are tutorials focusing on the computational processing of Portuguese, Galician and their variants.

Tutorial Speaker Responsibilities

Accepted tutorial speakers must provide an abstract of their tutorials for inclusion in the conference registration material. The description should be in the ASCII version that can be included in email announcements and published on the conference website. Tutorial speakers must provide tutorial materials, at least containing copies of the course slides, and a bibliography for the material covered in the tutorial. Each tutorial will be granted one registration to the main conference.

Important Dates

• Tutorial proposals due: Jan 8th, 2026
• Notification of decision: Jan 18th, 2026
• Tutorial descriptions to be included in the event web page: Jan 28th, 2026
• Tutorial course material due: Mar 25th, 2026
• Expected Tutorial date: Apr 13th, 2026

Submission Details

Proposals for tutorials should contain:

• A title and a brief description of the tutorial content and its relevance to the PROPOR community (not more than 2 pages).
• A brief outline of the tutorial structure showing that the tutorial's core content can be covered in a two- or three-hour slot (including a coffee break).
• The names, affiliations, email addresses, and websites of the tutorial instructors, including a one-paragraph statement of their research interests and areas of expertise.
• A list of previous venues and approximate audience sizes, if the same or a similar tutorial has been given elsewhere.
• A description of special requirements for technical equipment (e.g., Internet access).

Submissions will be done via email to propor2026wtst@gmail.com