From 11 May to 16 May 2026, Gauri Bhagwat and Teresa Paccosi were in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, attending LREC 2026. During the entire week, we attended keynote sessions, prize talk, workshops, poster presentations, and engaging discussions with fellow researchers and experts from both academia and industry. Truly, it was an enriching experience that was full of new ideas.
Kicking Off with Workshops
The first two days and the last day of the conference were dedicated for workshop, providing an excellent opportunity to meet professionals working with language resources and computational linguistics. For the ‘Fourth Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA 2026)’, Teresa Paccosi had a poster presentation for the paper “Smelling the Past: Investigating Historical Models for Olfactory Event Extraction“, co-authored with Marijn Koolen.
Sharing Our Research
The main conference took place from 13 May to 15 May, and we were excited to present our own work on the very first day. During the main conference poster session, we presented our paper, “To Eat and Beyond: A FrameNet-Inspired Annotation of Food and Its Uses over Time“. To make the session a little more memorable, we had personalised tea bags as goodies for everyone, and they turned out to be a huge hit and a fantastic conversation starter! From curious glances to discussions with the fellow researchers who shared our interest in semantic annotation, historical language, and food-related research, we truly enjoyed presenting our work.
Highlights
The conference was a wonderful combination of excellent keynote talks, technical sessions, and the renowned Antonio Zampolli Prize Talk. One of the biggest highlight for us was to listen to Dan Jurafsky as he delivered his keynote. Over the past several months, we have been reading and discussing the book written by him and James H. Martin within our NLP book club, and it has been amazing to hear him talk personally about the present status and future perspectives of NLP.
Another memorable evening was the conference gala dinner at Pueblo Español, an open-air architectural museum showcasing Spanish architectural heritage. Local cuisine and live music with traditional dance performances added the final touch to a relaxing evening after 3 intense conference days and 2 workshop days.
Wrapping Up
From day one in Palma, we formed a new routine: attending presentations on exciting research, followed by a refreshing swim in the Mediterranean Sea. It was the perfect balance of learning, networking, and enjoying the beautiful surroundings. By the end of the week, we were leaving with new collaborations taking shape, many new professional connections, a healthy Mediterranean tan, and minds full of ideas that we are eager to bring back to our own research.
A heartfelt thank you to the organisers, speakers, and everyone we had the pleasure of meeting for making LREC 2026 such a rewarding and memorable experience.
Until next time…