21 September 2026, by Janis-Marie Paul

Photo: HCDS / Pawlowski

More than 250 participants from Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Guatemala, and many other countries came together in Hamburg for KONVENS 2026. Under the motto “Context Matters – NLP beyond text,” the conference offered a diverse programme addressing current developments and research questions in computational linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Across poster sessions, oral presentations, co-located workshops, and tutorials, participants explored a broad range of topics, including multimodal and multilingual NLP, Generative AI, educational applications, and computational social science. Throughout the programme, the conference theme highlighted a central challenge for contemporary NLP research: language and its computational processing cannot be considered independently of the social, cultural, and multimodal contexts in which they occur.

A particular highlight of the programme were the keynotes by Prof. Dr. Valentin Hofmann and Prof. Dr. Barbara Plank. Valentin Hofmann addressed the evaluation of large language models and the current debate surrounding the validity of established evaluation methods. Barbara Plank explored Human-Centered NLP and the many ways in which human perspectives and different contexts shape the development and evaluation of NLP systems.

Supporting early-career researchers and fostering exchange within the community were also central aspects of KONVENS 2026. Congratulations to Neele Falk on receiving her award!

Beyond the scientific programme, the conference offered many opportunities for participants to connect and experience Hamburg together. “Plattschnack”, local specialties, and a harbour tour on the Elbe provided the perfect setting to continue discussions from the sessions in a more informal atmosphere.

KONVENS 2026 was organised by Chris Biemann, Anne Lauscher, Heike Zinsmeister, Martin Semmann, Seid Muhie Yimam, and Darina Gold, with support from numerous colleagues at the Hub of Computing and Data Science (HCDS) and TAI, including Miriam Döring, Adeline Scharfenberg, Katrin Köster, Janis-Marie Paul, and Julia Pawlowski.

HCDS is delighted to have hosted KONVENS 2026 together with its partners and would like to thank all speakers, participants, organisers, and supporters who made the conference such a rewarding scientific and personal exchange.