The intersection of historical languages and artificial intelligence (AI) presents a rich and dynamic field of study, with the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the past and the ways in which we engage with historical texts. As digital technologies continue to advance, the need for interdisciplinary collaboration becomes increasingly apparent. The upcoming 2-day international conference on “Historical Languages and AI” aims to foster this collaboration by bringing together experts from computational literary studies, digital history, linguistics, and other domains that work with historical languages such as Latin.
The conference seeks to address the growing demand for innovative methods and tools that can enhance the analysis, preservation, and interpretation of historical languages. By leveraging AI technologies, researchers can unlock new insights into historical texts, improve the accuracy of translations, and develop more effective teaching methods for historical languages. The conference will provide a platform for scholars to share their latest findings, discuss emerging trends, and explore the practical applications of AI in historical language research. It explicitly includes historical stages of modern languages, such as Old English or Early New High German.
The conference is hosted by the Daidalos research project (Humboldt University Berlin, 2023-2026; daidalos-projekt.de ). The project is building a research infrastructure for methods of natural language processing (NLP). The target group is literary scholars in classical philology and related disciplines. The research infrastructure consists, on the one hand, of an interactive website on which interested parties can apply NLP methods to text corpora. On the other hand, the Daidalos project sees itself as a contact point for interested researchers. In this function, the project regularly invites researchers to workshops (https://daidalos-projekt.de/workshops), advises them within the framework of research tandems (https://daidalos-projekt.de/tandems), and provides materials for further training (https://daidalos-projekt.de/jupyterlite).
Topics of Interest
We welcome submissions on a wide range of topics related to historical languages and AI, including but not limited to:
Machine Learning
- Large Language Models / Large Action Models
- Usage for data modeling or corpus construction
- Challenges in low-resource scenarios
- Neural machine translation for historical texts
- Innovative approaches to historical language analysis
Linguistic analysis for literary studies
- Part-of-speech tagging
- Topic modeling
- Sentiment analysis
- Named entity recognition
- Word embeddings
Multilingual Information Retrieval, incl. cross-lingual embeddings
Evaluation of AI-driven methods and datasets
- Frameworks for mapping research questions to relevant AI models and methods
- Assessment of AI tools in historical language studies
Technical Infrastructure for Research & Teaching
- Integrating technologies like Jupyter Notebooks into larger software platforms
- Retrieval-augmented generation for domain-specific chatbots
Teaching & Learning Digital Literacies, incl. open educational resources for teaching natural language processing
Important Dates
Submission Deadline: September 1, 2025
Notification of Acceptance: October 15, 2025
Camera-Ready Submission: January 31, 2026
Conference Dates: March 5-6, 2026, Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin (Berlin, Germany)
Unfortunately, we cannot offer travel bursaries. Attending the conference itself is free of charge.
Submission types
Included in the open-access proceedings:
Long papers: up to 4000 words (ca. 8 pages, excl. bibliography and appendix). Long papers report on original and unpublished results. Long papers are presented as oral presentations (30 min talk + 15 min discussion). We welcome the use of appendices or other supplementary information.
Published only in the book of abstracts in our Zenodo Community:
Short papers: up to 2000 words (ca. 4 pages, excl. bibliography and appendix). Short papers report on focused contributions, and may present work in progress. Short papers are presented as short oral presentations (20 min talk + 10 min discussion). We welcome the use of appendices or other supplementary information.
Pitch Your Research Idea: Submit an abstract of up to 200 words (excl. bibliography and appendix) to give a 5-minute presentation during a pitch session. The presentations are followed by a Scientific Speed Dating Session and enable researchers to get in touch faster.Long papers
Workshops (90 min):
Submit a proposal for your intended workshop of up to 750 words. Workshops should be organized as hands-on research or learning opportunity. The workshops will take place on the second day of the conference (March 6, 2026). Workshop proposals should describe:
- the aims and setup of the workshop,
- the academic background for the work,
- an outline of the workshop, including the types of activities,
- the expected key outcomes,
- a short bio of each organizer or presenter, including their name, affiliation, email address,
- a plan for promoting the workshop to attract participants,
- specific requirements, including but not limited to special equipment (e.g., audio/video), software, physical space arrangements,
- any technical knowledge, skills, or experience participants should have before attending the workshop.
Submission Guidelines and Participation
All submissions must be in English or German.
Papers should be formatted according to the conference template: Template of the Association for Computational Linguistics. It supports both Microsoft Word and LaTeX.
Submissions will be peer-reviewed by the organizers.
Papers should be submitted as PDF documents via E-Mail: daidalos-projekt@hu-berlin.de
At least one author of each accepted submission must register to the conference and present the paper.
Proceedings of the conference will be published as a Propylaeum eBook in the Digital Classics Books series (for long papers) and on Zenodo (for all other submissions).
Contact Information
For any inquiries, please contact the conference organizers at daidalos-projekt@hu-berlin.de .
We look forward to receiving your submissions and welcoming you to the International Conference on Historical Languages and AI!
The Conference Organizing Committee of the Daidalos project (https://daidalos-projekt.de): Andrea Beyer, Konstantin Schulz, Anke Lüdeling, Florian Kotschka, Florian Deichsler, Malte Dreyer