South Asia—comprising Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka—is home to over two billion people and one of the richest linguistic regions in the world, with 700+ languages and ~25 major writing systems. Despite this richness, South Asian languages remain underrepresented in language technologies. Challenges persist across encoding and orthography, data scarcity, and cultural representation.
This symposium focuses on the challenges in processing South Asian languages, covering linguistic and cultural aspects, encoding/orthography, and resource constraints. We place a special emphasis on Tamil and Sinhala, two major languages of Sri Lanka with complex morphology, script-specific rules, and rich sociolinguistic variation.
Building on the success of CHiPSAL co-located with COLING 2025 and the upcoming second edition at LREC 2026, this symposium offers a forum to exchange challenges, insights, and solutions while promoting responsible and inclusive language technologies for South Asian languages.
This symposium will run alongside the major LFG conference, bringing together a vibrant international community of over 25 scholars and researchers from around the world.
Senior Principal Scientist, Adobe Sensei and Search
Computational linguist specializing in NLP and information retrieval; contributions across grammar engineering and search at PARC, Microsoft Bing, eBay, Amazon, and Adobe.
Co‑founder, ThinQ; formerly UT Austin, MIT, Stanford, NUS
Significant contributions to linguistic theory and inquiry‑oriented education; led innovative undergraduate program at NUS and continued work at IISER‑Pune.
Department of Linguistics, University of Konstanz
Professor of General & Computational Linguistics with extensive work on South Asian languages, grammar architecture, and large‑scale grammar development (notably Urdu).
Unlike traditional paper sessions, CHiPSAL uses a roundtable‑style format designed to foster interaction, discussion, and collaborative feedback. Participants share ongoing ideas or early‑stage projects; the emphasis is on dialogue to refine ideas, identify challenges, and explore collaborations.
Presenter outlines the research idea
Moderated discussion with audience & invited experts
Department of Computer Science
University of Jaffna
Jaffna, Sri Lanka
We invite submissions of short synopses (maximum 500 words) describing a research idea relevant to the theme. Each synopsis should include:
Submission Open: 01 March 2026
Submission Deadline: 30 June 2026
Notification of Acceptance: 10 July 2026
Symposium Date: 31 July 2026