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1st Workshop on NLP and Large Language Models for the Iranian Language Family
March 29, 2026
9:00 - 12:30
Rabat, Morocco
co-located with
The 19th Conference on the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026)
Submissions closed • Program now available • Registration via EACL 2026
SilkRoadNLP 2026
How to Participate
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Attend: Join us at SilkRoadNLP 2026 in Rabat as part of EACL 2026. All EACL attendees are welcome. [Register here]
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Presenters: See Program for the presentation schedule and Author Information for the camera-ready instructions.
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Build the Community: Connect with linguists, language specialists, NLP practitioners, and Iranologists to advance Iranian-language NLP through transparent, culturally informed, and ethical approaches to AI.
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Community Hub: Papers and shared resources will be posted in our GitHub repository (datasets, links, tools, and updates).
Workshop Goals
As large language models increasingly shape the linguistic landscape, it has become ever more urgent to ensure that the voices of low-resource languages are not lost in the process. SilkRoadNLP is dedicated to advancing computational research and responsible AI for the Iranian linguistic family—a richly diverse group of languages spanning Iran, Afghanistan, Central and South Asia, and the Caucasus. Building robust datasets, tools, and evaluation frameworks for these languages is not only a technical priority, but a matter of cultural preservation and digital equity.
SilkRoadNLP: The first ACL forum on low-resource NLP and LLMs
in the Iranian language family.
At its core, the workshop provides a collaborative platform for scholars, engineers, and community researchers to explore the linguistic, historical, and social dimensions of NLP for Iranian languages. These include Persian (Farsi), Dari, and Tajik, as well as Kurdish, Pashto, Balochi, Gilaki, Mazandarani, Luri, Ossetic, and related varieties—many of which remain severely under-represented in computational research despite their deep literary and oral traditions.
The rise of foundation models brings both promise and peril: without deliberate inclusion, LLMs risk amplifying linguistic inequality and erasing local nuance.
SilkRoadNLP responds to this moment by fostering a cross-disciplinary dialogue between NLP, linguistics, and cultural studies. We are working toward technologies that represent, rather than replace, the languages and communities of this vast region.
Join us at SilkRoadNLP 2026 to connect with researchers and community members working on Iranian languages in the LLM era: resources, evaluation, modeling, ethical data collection, linguistic analysis, and culturally grounded NLP. Your contributions will help build the data, tools, and collaborations needed to ensure that these languages thrive in the age of LLMs. The workshop is open to all EACL attendees.