Official webpage: https://universaldependencies.org/udw25/

Joint paper submission portal: https://openreview.net/group?id=SyntaxFest/2025

Call for Papers

Universal Dependencies(UD) is a framework for cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation that has so far been applied to over 150 languages . The framework is aiming to capture similarities as well as idiosyncrasies among typologically different languages (e.g., morphologically rich languages, pro-drop languages, and languages featuring clitic doubling). The goal in developing UD was not only to support comparative evaluation and cross-lingual learning but also to facilitate multilingual natural language processing and enable comparative linguistic studies.

The Universal Dependencies Workshop series was started to create a forum for discussion of the theory and practice of UD, its use in research and development, and its future goals and challenges. Some of the previous workshops have been co-located with Coling, EMNLP, and SyntaxFest. We invite papers on all topics relevant to UD, including but not limited to:

• Theoretical foundations and universal guidelines
• Linguistic analysis of specific languages and/or constructions
• Language typology and linguistic universals
• Treebank annotation, conversion and validation
• Word segmentation, morphological tagging and syntactic parsing
• The use of the UD data for evaluating or understanding language models
• Linguistic studies based on the UD data

SyntaxFest is a biennial event that brings together a series of events focusing on topics such as empirical syntax, linguistic annotation, statistical language analysis, and natural language processing. Apart from the 8th UDW, it hosts TLT, DepLing, IWPT, and Quasy. Each workshop publishes its own proceedings, but all events follow a shared submission process, timeline, and programme. UniDive 1st Shared Task on Morphosyntactic Parsing takes place on Aug, 26.

• Paper submission Deadline: April 15, 2025
• Notification of acceptance: June 2, 2025
• Camera-ready version due June 16, 2025
• Conference dates August 26-29, 2025

We invite submissions in two formats:

• Regulars (long) papers up to 8 pages of content (excluding references and appendices). Regular papers should present substantial, original, and unpublished research, including empirical evaluation results where appropriate.
• Short papers up to 4 pages of content (excluding references and appendices). Short papers may offer smaller, focused contributions, such as work in progress, negative results, surveys, or opinion pieces.

Papers must be submitted digitally in PDF format via the online conference system: https://openreview.net/group?id=SyntaxFest/2025. When submitting, authors will be asked to indicate which workshops they wish their paper to be considered for and to specify whether their submission is archival or non-archival.

Please note that setting up an OpenReview account for the first time can take some time. To avoid last-minute issues, we strongly recommend registering an account in advance.

All submissions should follow the two-column ACL style guidelines. We strongly recommend the use of the LaTeX style files, OpenDocument, or Microsoft Word templates created for ACL: https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files. All papers must be anonymous, i.e., not reveal author(s) on the title page or through self-references. So, e.g., “We previously showed (Smith, 2020) …”, should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as “Smith (2020) previously showed …”.

Papers should describe original work; they should emphasise completed work rather than intended work, and should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results. Submissions will be judged on correctness, originality, technical strength, significance and relevance to the conference, and interest to the attendees.

All papers will undergo a double-blind peer review process, with final acceptance decisions made by the workshop organisers. Authors’ workshop preferences will be considered, but final placement decisions will be made by the organizers. Submissions that violate the requirements above will be rejected without review.

Accepted papers will be presented as oral or poster presentations. The mode of presentation will be determined by the workshop chairs and does not reflect the quality of the submission.

Workshop Chairs

Gosse Bouma (University of Groningen)
Çağrı Çöltekin (University of Tübingen)