20 April 2026, by Janis-Marie Paul

Photo: Janis-Marie Paul/UHH

The Hub of Computing and Data Science (HCDS) will be strongly represented at ACL 2026, with multiple research papers accepted to one of the world’s leading conferences in Natural Language Processing (NLP).

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics will take place from July 2–7, 2026, in San Diego. The conference brings together top researchers from academia and industry and serves as a key venue for presenting cutting-edge advances in computational linguistics.

HCDS contributions at ACL 2026

The accepted papers reflect the breadth and impact of research conducted at HCDS:

Main Conference Track:

CommonLID: Re-evaluating State-of-the-Art Language Identification Performance on Web Data

This contribution provides a critical reassessment of state-of-the-art language identification systems under realistic web-scale conditions.

Findings Track:

POLAR: A Benchmark for Multilingual, Multicultural, and Multi-Event Online Polarization
This work addresses the growing societal relevance of online polarization by introducing a benchmark that captures multilingual, multicultural, and cross-event dynamics.

Just Use XML: Revisiting Joint Translation and Label Projection
This paper revisits established methods for combining machine translation and label projection, highlighting opportunities for more efficient multilingual NLP workflows.

Together, these works contribute to advancing robust, scalable, and socially relevant NLP methodologies.

Active role in the research community

Beyond publishing research results, HCDS researchers are actively shaping the international NLP community. As part of SemEval—one of the most prominent evaluation campaigns in computational linguistics—they are co-organizing  two shared tasks co-located with ACL:

• SemEval POLAR Task
• Narrative Similarity Task

Such shared tasks are essential for driving progress in the field, as they provide standardized datasets, clearly defined challenges, and comparable evaluation frameworks.

International visibility and impact

The strong presence at ACL 2026 highlights HCDS’s international visibility and its contribution to advancing research at the intersection of computing and data science. It also demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in tackling both technical and societal challenges in AI and language technologies.