Call for Papers

VarDial 2027 will be colocated with EACL 2027 in Athens, Greece, and will take place in a hybrid format (in person & online). We anticipate a discussion on computational methods and language resources for closely related languages, language varieties, and dialects. We welcome papers dealing with one or more of the following topics:

  • Language resources and tools for similar languages, varieties and dialects;
  • Evaluation of language resources and tools applied to non-dominant language varieties;
  • Cross-lingual transfer and adaptation of models to similar languages, varieties and dialects;
  • Automatic identification of lexical variation;
  • Automatic classification of language varieties;
  • Machine translation between closely-related languages, language varieties and dialects;
  • Corpus-driven studies in dialectology and language variation;
  • Computational approaches to mutual intelligibility between dialects and similar languages;
  • Text similarity and adaptation between language varieties;
  • Linguistic issues in the adaptation of language resources and tools (e.g., cognate detection, semantic discrepancies, lexical gaps, false friends);
  • Studies focusing on related creole languages and their lexifier languages;
  • Studies focusing on diachronic language variation (e.g. phylogenetic methods, historical dialects).

Important Dates

  • Direct Submission deadline: December 15, 2026
  • Pre-reviewed (ARR) submission deadline: date TBD
  • Notification of acceptance: January 20, 2027
  • Camera-ready paper due: January 29, 2027
  • Workshop at EACL (hybrid): March 9–14, 2027 (exact date TBD)

Instructions for Authors

We invite submissions of up to 8 pages of content, plus up to one page for ethical considerations and/or limitations, plus unlimited pages of references. Submissions may contain appendices, but the main text must be self-contained. We also welcome shorter contributions, but we do not make an explicit distinction between long and short papers.

We encourage research and resource development that centers the wants and needs of the relevant speaker communities. We recognize potential ethical and dual-use issues in the context of processing low-resource language data (e.g., technologies generating non-standard dialects can be perceived as parodying the dialect, and people might use non-standard dialects in order for their language not to be understood by technologies). Authors should handle such cases responsibly and, if applicable, discuss them in the main body and/or ethical considerations section of their submissions.

Papers that introduce datasets should mention whether the data will be released, and under what conditions. We encourage the release of open-source datasets.

All submissions must use the official ACL templates and follow the ARR guidelines with respect to anonymization, authorship, and citation/comparison. Submissions must follow the ACL code of ethics and the ACL publication ethics policies. AI usage needs to be disclosed. Submissions to VarDial may not be under review or published elsewhere (preprints are allowed). Submissions that violate the above policies, contain fabricated references, prompt injections, or are of low quality will be desk-rejected.

Contributions must be submitted to Softconf (URL to come).

To commit a paper with ARR reviews (such as rejected EACL main conference papers), upload the submission and a PDF of the reviews & meta-review here: (URL to come). The PDF with the reviews does not need to be anonymized.