READIxTSAR 2026 Workshop, First Call for Papers
May 2026, Palma de Mallorca, Spain
https://readixtsar.github.io/
Hosted by LREC 2026
https://lrec2026.info/
READIxTSAR is a joint initiative between two previous workshops of
mutual interest: Tools and Resources for REAding DIfficulties (READI,
hosted at LREC 2020,22,24) and Text Simplification, Accessibility and
Readability (TSAR, EMNLP 2022,24,25, RANLP 2023). This year at LREC, the
committees of the two events have merged to deliver a joint event,
uniting accessibility research communities under a common umbrella. We
aim for READIxTSAR to be a focal point for communities of researchers
working on reading difficulties, accessibility and simplification to
network, share best practice and form new collaborations.
*Motivation and Context*
The growth of educational and assistive technologies for reading, aimed
at enhancing the performance of individuals with disabilities, provides
an important setting for Text Simplification research. The field of
special education has had a longstanding interest in technology and the
potential it holds for individuals with language/speech disabilities,
cognitive disorders, etc. (Edyburn, 2000). This workshop aims to present
state-of-the-art applications and approaches in technology-enhanced
reading and innovations in text accessibility. The workshop will address
specialized technology, tools, and resources, their impact on learning
to read and comprehension, and innovative works spanning research to
fieldwork, particularly in light of recent AI advances.
Research in automatic text simplification has evolved from deep learning
methods (Martin et al., 2020; Maddela et al., 2021; Sheang and Saggion,
2021) to leveraging foundational large language models (Kew et al. 2023;
Cripwell et al. 2023; Farajidizaji et al. 2024) through fine-tuning and
prompt-engineering. Despite these advancements, the Text Accessibility
and Text Simplification communities must address critical areas,
including: designing better evaluation metrics, developing context-aware
simplification solutions, creating appropriate language resources,
deploying simplification in real-world environments, studying discourse
factors, and identifying factors affecting readability. Addressing these
issues requires collaboration across CL/NLP, machine learning, UI/UX,
accessibility professionals, and public organizations, whom we invite to
participate through publication and attendance.
*Topics of Interest*
The joint event will accept submissions at the intersection of the
research areas of the two workshops, as well as submissions that are
targeted to the specific research interests of either workshop. An
indicative list of topics of interest are listed below.
- Lexical, syntactic and discourse adaptations or simplifications;
- ATS for sentences, paragraphs, or documents;
- Controllable text simplification and text generation of adapted
contents;
- Measuring and evaluating readability and text complexity;
- LLMs and agentic LLMs for text simplification, text adaptation and
readability
- The role of LLMs in supporting reading
- Complex word identification (CWI) and lexical complexity prediction
(LCP);
- Models, corpora, lexicons for text adaptation and text assessment;
- Evaluation of text adaptation or ATS systems;
- Meaning representation and multimodal text adaptation;
- Educational devices and/or smart technologies for supporting
reading and learning;
- Domain specific applications of the above topics (e.g. health, legal).
*Important Dates*
Submission Deadline: 16th February 2026
Notification of Results: 16th March 2026
Camera Ready: 30th March 2026
READIxTSAR Workshop: 11th, 12th or 16th May 2026
*Submission Instructions*
We invite submissions on topics of interest between 4 and 8 pages of
content. The page limit of 8 pages does not include acknowledgements,
references, potential Ethics Statements and discussion on Limitations in
line with the policy of the main LREC conference. All submissions must
follow the LREC stylesheet (https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/).
All submissions are double-blind. Any submissions which are
not-anonymised, over-length, poorly formatted or make excessive use of
appendices to circumvent page limits are liable to desk-rejection.
At the time of submission, authors are offered the opportunity to share
related language resources with the community. All repository entries
are linked to the LRE Map (https://lremap.elra.info/), which provides
metadata for the resource.
As in previous editions for Camera Ready a Plain Summary will be requested.
*“Share your LRs!” Initiative*
When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to
provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e.
also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used
for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your
research. Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC authors to share the
described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.) to enable their reuse and
replicability of experiments (including evaluation ones).
*Organizing Committee*
- Matthew Shardlow, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
- Thomas François, UCLouvain, Belgium
- Raquel Amaro, NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal
- Jorge Baptista, Universidade do Algarve & INESC-ID Lisboa, Portugal
- Rémi Cardon, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
- Eugénio Ribeiro, Iscte-IUL & INESC-ID Lisboa, Portugal
- Regina Stodden, University Bielefeld, Germany
- Rodrigo Wilkens, University of Exeter, UK
- Horacio Saggion, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
- Amalia Todirascu, Université de Strasbourg, France
Contact: [email protected]
_______________________________________________
Corpora mailing list -- [email protected]
https://list.elra.info/mailman3/postorius/lists/corpora.list.elra.info/
To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
