The 10th International Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Uralic Languages IWCLUL 2025
The 10th International Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Uralic Languages (IWCLUL 2025) will be organized as a self-standing event. The proceedings of the event will be published in the ACL anthology. The conference will take place in December 10-12, 2025 in Joensuu, Finland at University of Eastern Finland.
The purpose of IWCLUL is to bring together researchers working on computational approaches to Uralic languages (e.g. Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, Võro, the Sámi languages, Komi (Zyrian, Permyak), Mordvin (Erzya, Moksha), Mari (Hill, Meadow), Udmurt, Nenets (Tundra, Forest), Enets, Nganasan, Selkup, Mansi, Khanty, Veps, Karelian (Olonets), Karelian, Ingrian (Izhorian), Votic, Livonian and Ludic). All Uralic languages exhibit rich morphological structure, which makes processing them challenging for state-of-the-art computational linguistic approaches, the majority also suffer from a lack of resources and many are endangered. Appropriate topics include (but are not limited to):
- Multilingual approaches in NLP presenting work on at least one Uralic language
- LLMs and their use in the context of (endangered) Uralic languages
- Position papers
- Parsers, analysers and processing pipelines of Uralic languages
- Lexical databases, electronic dictionaries
- Finished end-user applications aimed at Uralic languages, such as spelling or grammar checkers, machine translation or speech processing
- Evaluation methods and gold standards, tagged corpora, treebanks
- Reports on language-independent or unsupervised methods as applied to Uralic languages
- Surveys and review articles on subjects related to computational linguistics for one or more Uralic languages
- Any work that aims at combining efforts and reducing duplication of work
- How to elicit activity from the language community, agitation campaigns, games with a purpose
Paper submission
We solicit original and unpublished work related to NLP approaches for Uralic languages. Short papers can be up to 4 pages in length and long papers up to 8 pages. Both submission formats can have an unlimited number of pages for references. All submissions must follow the ACL stylesheet (Overleaf template).
The submissions must be anonymous and they will be peer-reviewed by our program committee. The peer review is double blind.
Papers must be submitted using OpenReview by the submission deadline. At least one of the authors of an accepted paper must attend the event to present the paper. There will be no registration/publication fees.
Accepted papers (short and long) will be published in the proceedings that will appear in the ACL Anthology. Accepted papers will also be given an additional page to address the reviewers’ comments. The length of a camera ready submission can then be 5 pages for a short paper and 9 for a long paper with an unlimited number of pages for references.
You may also contribute to the event by submitting a lightning talk. Lightning talks are submitted as 750-word abstracts. Lightning talks are suited for discussing ideas or presenting work in progress. The abstracts will be published in a lightning proceedings.
Schedule
Wednesday 10.12 Location: AG109 (Agora/Philosophical Faculty)
| 14:00-18:00 | Karelian Workshop | . | |————-|——————–|——–|
Resources and Tools for Computational Work on Karelian and Other Small Uralic Languages 14:00-18:00.
Thursday 11.12. Location: AT100 (Agora/Theology)
| 09:15-09:30 | Workshop opening | |
|---|---|---|
| 09:30-10:30 | Keynote | Josh Wilbur |
| 10:30-11:20 | Lightning talks | |
| 11:20-11:40 | Coffee break | |
| 11:40-12:40 | Oral session 1 | |
| 11:40-12:00 | From NLG Evaluation to Modern Student Assessment in the Era of ChatGPT: The Great Misalignment Problem and Pedagogical Multi-Factor Assessment (P-MFA) | Mika Hämäläinen, Kimmo Leiviskä |
| 12:00-12:20 | Benchmarking Finnish Lemmatizers across Historical and Contemporary Texts | Emily Öhman, Leo Huovinen, Mika Hämäläinen |
| 12:20-12:40 | The world’s first South Sámi TTS – a revitalisation effort of an endangered language by reviving a legacy voice | Katri Hiovain-Asikainen, Thomas Brevik Kjærstad, Maja Lisa Kappfjell, Sjur Nørstebø Moshagen |
| 12:40-13:40 | Lunch | |
| 13:40-15:00 | Oral session 2 | |
| 13:40-14:00 | Can advances in NLP lead to worse results for Uralic languages and how can we fight back? Experiences from the world of automatic spell-checking and correction for Finnish | Flammie A Pirinen |
| 14:00-14:20 | A Hybrid Multilingual Approach to Sentiment Analysis for Uralic and Low-Resource Languages: Combining Extractive and Abstractive Techniques | MIKHAIL KRASITSKII, Grigori Sidorov, Olga Kolesnikova, Al |
| 14:20-14:40 | Language technology resources for the minority Finnic languages | Flammie A Pirinen, Trond Trosterud, Jack Rueter |
| 14:40-15:00 | Kildin Saami-Russian-(English) Parallel Corpus Building | Evan Hansen |
| 15:00-15:20 | Coffee break | |
| 15:20-16:40 | Oral session 3 | |
| 15:20-15:40 | SampoNLP: A Self-Referential Toolkit for Morphological Analysis of Subword Tokenizers | Iaroslav Chelombitko, Ekaterina Chelombitko, Aleksey Komissarov |
| 15:40-16:00 | Timur and the Mansi spellchecker | Csilla Horváth |
| 16:00-16:20 | ORACLE: Time-Dependent Recursive Summary Graphs for Foresight on News Data Using LLMs | Lev Kharlashkin, Eiaki V. Morooka, Yehor Tereshchenko, Mika Hämäläinen |
| 16:20-16:40 | Creating a multi-layer Treebank for Tundra Nenets | Nikolett Mus, Bruno Guillaume, Sylvain Kahane, Daniel Zeman |
Friday 12.12 Location: AG109 (Agora/Philosophical Faculty)
| 10:00 | Day 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| 10:00-11:00 | Oral session 4 | |
| 10:00-10:20 | Benchmarking Large Language Models for Lemmatization and Translation of Finnic Runosongs | Lidia Pivovarova, Kati Kallio, Antti Kanner, Jakob Lindström, Eetu Mäkelä, Liina Saarlo, Kaarel Veskis, Mari Väina |
| 10:20-10:40 | Fine-Tuning Whisper for Kildin Sami | Enzo Gamboni |
| 10:40-11:00 | Digitization Work at the Finno-Ugrian Society: Livonian Case Study | Niko Tapio Partanen, Jack Rueter, Valts Ernštreits |
| 11:00-12:00 | Lunch | |
| 12:00-13:00 | Oral session 5 | |
| 12:00-12:20 | Siberian Ingrian Finnish: FST and IGTs | Ivan Ubaleht |
| 12:20-12:40 | Case–Number Dissociation in Finnish Noun Embeddings: fastText vs. BERT Layer Effects | Alexandre Nikolaev, Yu-Ying Chuang, R. Harald Baayen |
| 12:40-13:00 | Evaluating OpenAI GPT Models for Translation of Low-Resource Uralic Languages: A Comparison of Reasoning and Non-Reasoning Architectures | Yehor Tereshchenko, Mika Hämäläinen, Svitlana Myroniuk |
| 13:00-13:20 | Coffee break | |
| 13:20-14:20 | SIGUR business meeting |
Remote attendance
We aim for an inclusive event and we understand that some people have difficulties to travel. If you have a valid reason why you cannot attend the event in person (visa issues, health issues etc.) you may present your paper remotely.
Important dates:
Paper submission (full and short): October 26, 2025 (extended)
Notification of acceptance: November 10, 2025
Camera ready deadline: November 23, 2025
Workshop: December 10-12, 2025
All times are Anywhere on Earth (AoE).
Keynote
Joshua Wilbur (University of Tartu), title “Pite Saami and the Digital Turn”
Venue
University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland Agora-Building (Yliopistokatu 4)
10.12 - AG109 (Agora/Philosophical Faculty)
11.12 - AT100 (Agora/Theology)
12.12 - AG109 (Agora/Philosophical Faculty)
Organizers
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Mika Hämäläinen, Metropolia University of Applied Sciences
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Michael Rießler, University of Eastern Finland
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Lev Kharlashkin, Metropolia University of Applied Sciences
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Eiaki Morooka, Metropolia University of Applied Sciences
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Maarit Koponen, University of Eastern Finland
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Ilia Moshnikov, University of Eastern Finland
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Flammie Pirinen, UiT The Arctic University of Norway
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Diana Kulashekhar, University of Eastern Finland
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Mahla Baniasadi, University of Eastern Finland
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Nusrat Prova, University of Eastern Finland
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Varoon Bakshi, University of Eastern Finland
In case of questions, you can send an email to lev.kharlashkin@metropolia.fi or aki.morooka@metropolia.fi
Program committee
- Fejes László, Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics
- Gunta Kļava, University of Latvia
- Sourav Das, Indian Institute of Information Technology Kalyani
- Balázs Indig, Eötvös Lorand University
- Laleh Davoodi, Abo Akademi University
- Flammie A Pirinen, Norgga árktalaš universitehta
- Trond Trosterud, University of Tromsø
- Csilla Horváth, University of Szeged
- Iaroslav Chelombitko, Neapolis University Paphos
- Aleksei Dorkin, University of Tartu
- Sebastian Oliver Eck, University of Oxford
- Khalid Alnajjar, F-Secure Oyj
- Jules Bouton, Université Paris Cité
- Valts Ernštreits, University of Latvia
- Michael Rießler, University of Eastern Finland
- Timofey Arkhangelskiy, Universität Hamburg
- Samy Ouzerrout, Université d’Orléans
- Jyoti Kunal shah, Automatic Data Processing
- Youngsook Song, Lablup
- David Dale, FAIR at Meta
- Abhi Desai, New England College