Co-located with NAACL2025 from April 29 to May 4, 2025
@Albuquerque, New Mexico

Ancient languages contain rich human historical and cultural wealth. So far there has been some good advancement in applying language technologies to ancient languages such as Sumerian, Akkadian, Latin, Ancient Greek and Ancient Chinese, especially in the construction of digital language resources and resources to facilitate automatic analysis. The workshop on Ancient Language Processing aims to focus specifically on ancient languages and scripts from the emergence of writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt c. 3000 BCE to the entire world up till 800 AD. We wish to provide a recognized forum to further advance this subfield of NLP, where researchers and practitioners can meet and discuss their latest work, and exchange ideas in addressing shared epigraphical challenges in language processing across various ancient languages, such as non-Latin and non-alphabetic scripts, Right-to-Left, transliteration conventions and fragmentary texts. In addition, we propose two shared tasks: EvaCun, focusing on using LLMs for Cuneiforms, and EvaHan, addressing Named Entity Recoganition for Ancient Chinese. These tasks aim to provide an opportunity to tackle the unique challenges of ancient language processing.

Languages of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Mesopotamia: Sumerian, Akkadian
  • Iran: Elamite, old and middle Persian
  • Levant: Eblaite, Amorite, Aramaic (incl. Mandaic and Syriac), Ancient Hebrew, Phynician, Ugaritic
  • Anatolia: Hittite, Luwian and minor Anatolian languages
  • Egypt: Ancient Egyptian, Coptic
  • Mediterranean: Linear A and B, Ancient Greek, Latin
  • Arabia: Ancient North Arabian, old Arabic
  • India: Sanskrit, Eastern Panjabi, Pali
  • China: Literary Chinese, Tibetan
  • Mesoamerica: Mayan
  • Japan: Old Japanese

Call For Papers

Papers and contributions are encouraged for any work related to Natural Language Processing of Ancient Languages. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Charset (Unicode)
  • Input method (transliteration and transcription)
  • Tokenization (word segmentation)
  • Morphological analysis (both inflectional and derivational)
  • Philological issues in NLP
  • Linguistic Linked Data supporting NLP
  • Syntactic analysis
  • Semantic analysis
  • Machine translation
  • Pre-trained models
  • Deep learning based NLP
  • Multi-lingual comparison for NLP purposes
  • Data mining
  • Knowledge extraction
  • Language varieties and dialects
  • NLP issues in the analysis of broken texts and uncertain readings
  • Minimal computing in NLP

We welcome three types of submissions:

  • Long papers (full papers) that describe original and unpublished work in any topic area of the workshop. A long paper is limited to 8 pages for content, with unlimited number of pages for references.
  • Short papers (posters) that describe either work in progress or a research proposal. They may also be in the style of a position paper that surveys and criticizes existing literature. Short papers must include clear directions for future research. Submissions of this type are limited to 4 pages for content, with unlimited number of pages for references.
  • Tech report papers (for Shared Tasks) that describe work in either the EvaHan or the EvaCun shared task. They may also be in the style of a position paper that surveys and criticizes existing literature. Tech papers must include clear descriptions for their method and system performance. Submissions of this type are limited to 4 pages for content, with unlimited number of pages for references.

Please also note the following:

  • All submissions must follow the ACL two-column format, using the official ACL style templates, which are available from here (Latex and Word). Please submit your papers in PDF format.
  • The review for long and short papers will be double-blind. Please do not include any self-identifying information in the submission. This includes anonymizing the already-published work by removing acknowledgments, self-citations, etc. We do not run a double blinded review on tech report papers. Your paper must not be anonymous.
  • For papers accepted as a full paper, please follow the format requirement for long papers. For papers accepted as a poster and a tech report, please follow the format requirement for short papers. Papers that do not follow the required format may not be able to include the final proceedings.
  • All the accepted papers will be included in the ACL Anthology.

Important Days:

  • Paper submission due: Feburary 4, 2025 Extended to Feburary 9, 2025
  • Notification of acceptance: March 1, 2025 Extended to March 5, 2025 Extended to March 10, 2025
  • Camera-ready paper due:March 10, 2025 Extended to March 15, 2025 Extended to March 18, 2025

  • EvaHan & EvaCun Shared Tasks:
    • Registration for participation/Training data release: December 1, 2024 - Janurary 15, 2025
    • Test data release: Feburary 15, 2025
    • Running results submission: Feburary 21, 2025
    • Tech report submission deadline: Feburary 28, 2025
    • Notification of acceptance: March 5, 2025
    • Camera-ready papers due: March 15, 2025

  • ALP workshop date: May 4, 2025
Note: All deadlines are at 11:59PM UTC-12:00 (“anywhere on Earth”).

Papers may be submitted to ALP 2025 via the submission site.

Contact:

  • Direct your workshop related inquiries to: click
  • For shared tasks specific inquiries, please contact EvaHan, and EvaCun