Special Session
Special Session on
Speech and Text Processing for Low-Resource Languages -
STP-LRL
2026
5 - 7 March, 2026 - Marbella, Spain
Within the 18th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - ICAART 2026
CO-CHAIRS
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Mounir Zrigui
University of Monastir
Tunisia
http://www.utic.rnu.tn/francais/membm_zrigui.htm
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Brief Bio
Mounir Zrigui received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France, in 1987, and his Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) from Stendhal University, Grenoble, France, in 2008. Since 1986, he has held the position of Assistant Professor of Computer Science, first at the University of Brest, France, and later at the Faculty of Sciences of Monastir, Tunisia. He began his research in the RIADI Laboratory, focusing on various aspects of automatic natural language processing (both written and spoken) and artificial intelligence, before continuing his work at the LaTICE Laboratory. He is currently the Director of the Research Laboratory in Algebra, Number Theory and Intelligent Systems (RLANTIS) at the University of Monastir, Tunisia. Prof. Zrigui has led numerous research projects and published extensively in reputable international journals and conferences. He has supervised over twenty Ph.D. theses and more than one hundred research master’s students.
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Mohamed Ali Sghaier
University of Monastir
Tunisia
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Brief Bio
Dr Mohamed Ali Sghaier holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Higher Institute of Computer Science and Communication Technologies of Hammam Sousse (ISITCom), University of Sousse, Tunisia, obtained in 2021. He is currently a member of the Research Laboratory in Intelligent Systems at the Faculty of Sciences of Monastir (FSM). His research interests focus on natural language processing, particularly machine translation and sentiment analysis for under-resourced languages and dialects, with a special emphasis on the Arabic language and the Tunisian dialect. In addition to his research activities, he actively contributes to the academic community by serving as a reviewer for several well-recognized international journals and conferences. He is also involved in supervising several student research projects at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
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Mohamed Lazhar Bellagha
University of Monastir
Tunisia
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Brief Bio
Dr. Mohamed Lazhar Bellagha received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Sousse, Tunisia, in 2022. His research focuses on speech and speaker recognition, deep learning, and natural language processing, especially for low-resource languages. He is currently affiliated with the RLANTIS research laboratory at the University of Monastir, where he also teaches various undergraduate and graduate-level computer science courses. Dr. Bellagha has supervised several research projects, contributed to international conferences, and served as a program committee member in specialized sessions on deep learning and NLP. His current interests include leveraging large language models, multimodal data, and explainable AI to tackle real-world challenges in speech and text processing.
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SCOPE
Speech and text technologies have achieved significant progress in recent years, driven by deep learning and large-scale data. However, most advances still focus on high-resource languages, leaving many languages underrepresented.
The special session on Speech and Text Processing for Low-Resource Languages (STP-LRL) at ICAART 2026 aims to unite researchers and practitioners dedicated to advancing speech and text technologies for low-resource languages. It will provide a forum to discuss recent breakthroughs, share innovative approaches and resources, and address future challenges in creating inclusive and accessible language technologies.
We invite contributions presenting novel theoretical advances, practical implementations, and methods designed to overcome data scarcity and support low-resource languages.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Language modeling and representation learning for low-resource languages
- Speech recognition and synthesis for low-resource settings
- Machine translation involving low-resource language pairs
- Named entity recognition and information extraction in low-resource contexts
- Development of linguistic resources and annotated corpora
- Sentiment and emotion analysis in under-resourced languages
- Speech-to-text and text-to-speech applications supporting cultural preservation
- Evaluation metrics and benchmarks for low-resource NLP
- Multimodal analysis integrating text, speech, and visual content
- Recommendation systems in low-resource language contexts
- Applications of speech and text technologies in healthcare, education, and social services for underrepresented language communities
IMPORTANT DATES
Paper Submission:
December 17, 2025
Authors Notification:
January 14, 2026
Camera Ready and Registration:
January 22, 2026
SPECIAL SESSION PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Available soon.
PAPER SUBMISSION
Prospective authors are invited to submit papers in any of the topics listed above.
Instructions for preparing the manuscript (in Word and Latex formats) are available at: Paper Templates
Please also check the Guidelines.
Papers must be submitted electronically via the web-based submission system using the appropriated button on this page.
PUBLICATIONS
After thorough reviewing by the special session program committee, all accepted papers will be published in a special section of the conference proceedings book - under an ISBN reference and on digital support - and submitted for indexation by SCOPUS, Google Scholar, DBLP, Semantic Scholar, EI and Web of Science / Conference Proceedings Citation Index.
SCITEPRESS is a member of CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org/) and every paper is given a DOI (Digital Object Identifier).
All papers presented at the conference venue will be available at the SCITEPRESS Digital Library