Third Workshop on Ancient Language Processing
Co-located with ACL 2027 in August 2027
@Kyoto, Japan
One-day workshop; exact date to be announced.
Ancient languages preserve humanity’s earliest recorded intellectual and cultural achievements, yet they remain among the most challenging targets for language technologies. Progress is constrained by structural difficulties intrinsic to philological research: scarce and non-growing corpora, damaged and fragmentary textual artefacts, limited expert annotation concentrated in a small number of institutions, absence of native speakers, and non-Latin, non-alphabetic writing systems with unstable Unicode and input conventions. Meaningful advances require methods tailored for low-resource, high-expertise multimodal scenarios, alongside evaluation metrics that distinguish genuine philological progress from fluent yet unverifiable model outputs.
ALP 2027 is the third edition of the Ancient Language Processing workshop series. It builds upon ALP 2023 (co-located with RANLP 2023, Varna, Bulgaria) and ALP 2025 (co-located with NAACL 2025, Albuquerque, USA). It complements related events including Ancient Language Translation (ALT), ML4AL, and the bi-yearly LT4HALA workshop series. ALP covers ancient languages and scripts from the emergence of writing around 3400 BCE up to 800 CE across global civilizations.
This one-day workshop will bring together computational linguists, philologists, archaeologists, digital-humanities researchers, and heritage-sector practitioners. We invite original research papers, resource descriptions, position papers, and shared-task system papers. Accepted papers will appear in the ACL Anthology proceedings.
Languages of interest
Languages of interest span Mesopotamia, Iran, the Levant, Anatolia, Egypt, the Mediterranean, Arabia, South Asia, East Asia and Mesoamerica, including but not limited to Sumerian, Akkadian, Ancient Egyptian, Hittite, Ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Literary Chinese, Old Tibetan, Old Japanese, and Mayan.
Shared Tasks
ALP 2027 hosts EvaCun 2027 (end-to-end OCR for cuneiform languages) and EvaHan 2027 (ancient-Chinese text-difficulty grading). View task descriptions.
Important Dates (preliminary)
These are placeholder dates from the first-call draft. Final dates and exact days will be announced. All deadlines are at 11:59 PM Anywhere-on-Earth (AoE, UTC−12:00).
| Event | Preliminary timing |
|---|---|
| Paper submission deadline | March 2027 — exact date TBA |
| Shared-task training-data release | January 2027 — exact date TBA |
| Shared-task test-data release | January 2027 — exact date TBA |
| Notification of paper acceptance | April 2027 — exact date TBA |
| Camera-ready submission | May 2027 — exact date TBA |
| ALP 2027 workshop day | August 2027, Kyoto, Japan — exact date TBA |
Previous Workshops
Contact
For inquiries, please contact the organizing committee at alp-workshop-organizers-2027@googlegroups.com.