With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and language technologies, internet usage has continued to surge globally, enabling many widely spoken languages to adapt successfully to the digital age. However, regional and underresourced languages still face significant challenges due to limited computational resources, annotated datasets, and specialized tools. One such group is the Dravidian language family, primarily spoken in South India and Sri Lanka, with communities across Nepal, Pakistan, Malaysia, London, and other parts of the world. The Dravidian languages, with a history spanning more than 4,500 years and spoken by millions of speakers, are under-resourced in speech and natural language processing. Despite growing research interest, gaps persist in areas such as speech recognition, multimodal processing, and generative AI applications for Dravidian languages. This is the sixth workshop on speech and language technologies for Dravidian languages, building upon the success of the previous editions. DravidianLangTech-2026 continues to serve as a collaborative forum for researchers, practitioners, and students to share insights and advance computational methods for Dravidian languages. The main objectives of DravidianLangTech-2026 are as follows,
The broader objectives of DravidianLangTech-2026 will be
To explore challenges and innovations in developing speech and language resources for Dravidian languages.
To design and adapt language technologies for multilingual, multimodal, and code-mixed Dravidian contexts.
To facilitate collaboration between the global Dravidian language community and international scholars across computational linguistics, AI, and digital humanities.
To address ethical, cultural, and inclusivity aspects in the creation of language technologies for under-represented communities.
To encourage the integration of Agentic AI frameworks for building interactive, explainable, and collaborative language systems in Dravidian contexts.
Call for Papers :
DravidianLangTech-2026 welcomes theoretical, empirical, and application driven contributions on any Dravidian languages (e.g., Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Tulu, Allar, Aranadan, Attapadya, Kurumba, etc.) that advance language processing, speech technologies, multimodality, or resource development. Submissions can address challenges in monolingual, bilingual, and code-mixed settings as well as crosslingual and low-resource transfer approaches.
Topics of interest include but are not limited to
Corpus(Data) development, annotation tools, benchmarks, and evaluation methodologies
Detecting Hate Speech, Offensive Language, Misinformation, Fake News, Spam, and Rumor
Generative AI and Prompt Engineering for Dravidian languages
Agentic AI and Multi-agent Systems: workflow orchestration, reasoning agents, and collaborative agents for Dravidian language processing
Multimodal processing: Text, Speech, Image, Video, and Memes in Dravidian contexts
Speech Technology: Automatic Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis, Voice Conversion
Impaired/Normal Speech Recognition and Assistive Technologies for Dravidian speech
Accent Recognition, Verification, and Dialect Modeling
Emotion and Sentiment Recognition from Dravidian Speech and Text
Machine Translation and Cross-lingual Transfer in Dravidian languages
Language Resources for Generative and Instruction-Tuned LLMs
Document Analysis and Understanding for Dravidian texts and scripts
Object Detection and Recognition in multimodal Dravidian datasets
Ethical and Fair AI for Low-resource Language Communities
Healthcare and Mental Health Applications (e.g., depression detection, doctor-patient communication) in Dravidian speech
Educational Applications: Digital literacy, inclusive tools for rural Dravidian language communities
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Workshop Paper Submission Link
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Important Dates
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First call for workshop papers: December 10, 2025
Second call for workshop papers: January 15, 2026
Third call for workshop papers: February 20, 2026
Direct paper submission deadline: March 5, 2026
Pre-reviewed ARR commitment deadline: March 24, 2026
Notification of acceptance: April 28, 2026
Camera-ready paper due: May 12, 2026
Pre-recorded video due (hard deadline): June 4, 2026
Workshop dates: July 2-3, 2026