I am becoming an editor (EiC) at TACL (Transactions of ACL) journal. Not what I expected to be doing in retirement, but I am a strong believer in journals as the best way to present research, and I want to help TACL become an even better venue for publishing NLP research.

We’re honoured that the pattern on the new Aberdeen Football Club away strip is inspired by the striking façade of the University’s Sir Duncan Rice Library, reinforcing the partnership between two of the great institutions of Aberdeen. University of Aberdeen Library.

Good to know * INLG also welcomes dual submissions. * The conference is held right before & relatively close to EMNLP, so you could attend both. * You can either submit directly (deadline: July 15) or commit a reviewed paper from ARR.

INLG (@inlg.bsky.social) submissions are now open! Please submit all of your work on Natural Language Generation. Submit systems, demos, experiments, position papers, squibs, linguistic analyses, as long as it is NLG-related. For more information, see: 2026.inlgmeeting.org #NLProc

The 2nd Call for Papers for #INLG2026 is out! Two ways to submit: 📄 Direct submissions, archival and not, by 15 July: openreview.net/group?id=acl... 💍 ARR commitments by 5 August: openreview.net/group?id=acl... ——— 📍Utrecht, NL — Oct 17–21, 2026, right before EMNLP 2026.inlgmeeting.org/calls.html

Really enjoyed helping my colleague Jakub Zbrzezny from our Divinity dept look at how well LLMs can translate biblical materials in a local Arabic dialect. Not surprisingly, LLMs good at translating out of dialect, but struggle to translate into dialect. aclanthology.org/2026.retroev...

I would like give my heartfelt congratulations to Eduardo Calò for successfully defending his PhD thesis on “Automatically Expressing the Meaning of Logical Formulae in Natural Lanaguage” at @cs-nlp-uu.bsky.social earlier today.

I am pleased to announce that the proceedings for RetroEval have now been published on ACL Anthology: aclanthology.org/volumes/2026...

The media is not properly covering this but they'll breathlessly report the rising price of SpaceX, luring in idiots thinking it'll go up forever. That'll drive the hype and price increase further. It's one giant pump and dump fleecing everyone's retirement accounts and retail investors.

Do you sometimes have to explain to engineers that the main role of science is not to produce software? Once in a while I see people comment on some paper along the lines of “but it’s not efficient” or “I can’t use this in production” as if this was what research is about.

Ehud gave a provocative closing talk about research culture at #RetroEval last week and I really agree with him. It's very hard to move slowly and do good science when the culture is to move fast and not worry too much so long as you're getting published, even if it's not useful or reproducible.

We had a fantastic time last week discussing the current challenges in NLG evaluation and celebrating the career of @ehudreiter.bsky.social. Pictures and a few video clips are now available: retroeval.github.io/_pages/media I would like to thank @uniofaberdeen.bsky.social for their support.

Took lots of noce pictures at my Retroeval retirement symposium. One of my favourites was me with my first and last PhD students, Sandra Williams and Yujun Wang!

I'm looking forward to my retirement workshop, which starts on Monday 1 June!! Will be great to catch up with former students and colleagues, and also discuss NLG evaluation. retroeval.github.io

Lists of the accepted papers for RetroEval are now available on the symposium website: retroeval.github.io/_pages/accep...

As Prof Ehud Reiter retires, we’re celebrating a University career that helped define how machines communicate. A pioneer of Natural Language Generation, his work laid the groundwork for modern AI - shaping how systems decide what to say, how to say it, & how to adapt to different audiences. 1/2

I wrote paper on "NLG Evaluation: Past, Present, Future" for Retroeval. Eval has changed enornously over my career! In future, I expect more on stuff relevant to real-world usage, including impact, qualitative studies, safety in worst/adversarial case arxiv.org/abs/2605.23715

At RetroEval 2026 we will have three fantastic keynotes: • Sina Zarrieß (@clausebielefeld.bsky.social) • Beatrice Alex @beatricealex.bsky.social (@heriotwattuni.bsky.social) • Albert Gatt (@utrechtuniversity.bsky.social) More details on the keynotes: retroeval.github.io/_pages/keyno...

HotelCheckSpan: A Benchmark Dataset for LLM Faithfulness huggingface.co/datasets/pat... by @patuchen.bsky.social, @tuetschek.bsky.social and @saad.me.uk 🏨 Hotel summary faithfulness benchmark with span-level error labels. lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-mai...

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

ArXiV has a new LLM policy (Screenshots with alt text so you don’t have to click through to the other place and see all the stupid responses)

Might be a sign of problems in the field when great researchers like Ehud can't put up with our reviewing processes anymore!

Have now resigned as ARR (meta-)reviewer. I will continue to do some reviewing after retirement, but not ARR. I dont think mega-conf are the right way to present important research findings, and ARR reviewing is not enjoyable, eg I have no control over what I am asked to review

And look who’s on the bill for the opening keynote: our PI Sina Zarrieß 🎉

I am happy to announce that registration for RetroEval 2026 (retroeval.github.io) is now open! Additionally, the program is now available including keynote speakers and accepted papers: retroeval.github.io/_pages/progr... Looking forward to seeing you at the @uniofaberdeen.bsky.social in June!

Any papers come to mind as really good examples of qualitative evaluation/analysis in NLP?

The International conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG) just issued the first Call For Papers: 2026.inlgmeeting.org/calls.html #nlproc

What % of the NLP papers measure their impact in the real world? This paper proposes an impact evaluation of NLP models or systems for real-world usage, changing the research culture of NLP to focus more on real-world impact and less on SOTA-chasing: doi.org/10.1162/COLI... @ehudreiter.bsky.social

We’ve opened up pre-registration for the Symposium on Natural Language Generation Evaluations (retroeval.github.io/index). Come join us in Aberdeen for two days of deep discussions on all things evaluation and celebrate the career of Prof. @ehudreiter.bsky.social: forms.office.com/e/ZbUmxGraAS

Der Düsseldorfer Heinrich Heine heute in meinem Tischkalender. Und er hat so recht. 🤓

Congratulations to Dr. Gennie Mansi, for successfully defending her PhD thesis. Dr. Mansi's work investigates AI in healthcare; how AI impacts legal liability of doctors, how AI design can interfere with delivery of care, and also we might improve the design of AI systems to account for liability

🚀 Announcing the Chinese BabyLM Challenge: the first shared task on data-efficient pretraining for Chinese. 📍 Co-located with NLPCC 2026 (Nov 3–5, Macau🇨🇳🇲🇴) Can you train a strong Chinese LM on just ~100M words? chinese-babylm.github.io 🧵 👇(1/6)

Congratulations to Dr. Simeon Junker, from the CLAUSE group at Bielefeld University, who successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on the topic “Visual Context and Communicative Goals in Referring Expression Generation”! 🥳 @clausebielefeld.bsky.social

🎉🎉🎉

If you're working on your submission to #RetroEval2026, the Symposium on Natural Language Generation Evaluations in honor of @ehudreiter.bsky.social, I've got some good news! The deadline has been extended to 28 April for archival submissions! Updated deadlines, etc, here: retroeval.github.io

New paper on LLMs and research methodology: Justify your prompts! direct.mit.edu/coli/article... #nlproc

Pro-tip when writing a thesis proposal: Ensuring that your proposal is clearly written and accessible to a broad audience on its relevance and potential impact cannot be stated enough. Ensure the *why* is present for each of research questions and the connections between them.

Computer haben (fast) kein Ablaufdatum. Lassen Sie ihr altes Gerät für einen guten Zweck weiterleben. Wir nehmen gebrauchte Computer, Smartphones, Tablets und die Peripherie dazu, bereiten sie auf und geben die Sachen dann kostenlos an Leute weiter, die sich die Geräte nicht leisten können.

📍It's official! #INLG2026 is coming to Utrecht, Netherlands, Oct 17-21! Hosted with support from Utrecht University and the local NLP community. Follow us here and check 2026.inlgmeeting.org for updates -- hope to see you there!

LLMs as Span Annotators: A Comparative Study of LLMs and Humans by @zdenekkasner.cz, @zouharvi.bsky.social, @patuchen.bsky.social, @ivankartac.bsky.social, K. Onderková, @oplatek.bsky.social, Dimitra Gkatzia, @saad.me.uk , @tuetschek.bsky.social & Simone Ballocu aclanthology.org/2026.mme-mai...

Picard management tip: Speak candidly, and encourage others to do likewise.

New blog: Questions from readers of my book A group who is reading my book sent me many questions, some of which we discussed in a call last week. I thought I would share the questions and my responses. ehudreiter.com/2026/03/03/q...

If you're not on the SIGGEN mailing list or in the NLG Discord server, you might not have seen that Barkavi Sundarajan has been leading a reading group about @ehudreiter.bsky.social's new book "Natural Language Generation". Join us Friday, 27 Feb, at 2pm UK time: discord.gg/hysgkK7Q?eve...

Still converting my UK appliances eight years on to the two pin Schuko plug…

This is why I always verify the results when I use AI

New blog: Dont ignore omissions! Evaluation of LLMs focuses on accuracy and hallucination. Completeness and omission also important; does the text include all the key information? Omissions are a huge problem in medical NLG, and in other NLG tasks as well. ehudreiter.com/2026/02/11/d...

A cool collection of @ehudreiter.bsky.social's Eureka Moments over several decades as a researcher: ehudreiter.com/2026/01/30/m...

I am pleased to announce the 1st call for papers for a special symposium on Natural Language Generation evaluations. This is in honour of @ehudreiter.bsky.social career and forthcoming retirement, will look back at how evaluations have changed and what is still left unaddressed. retroeval.github.io

1,265 kWh have been burned to date on MoltBots posting on MoltBook. Might not be a huge amount in the grand scheme of things but it’s a complete waste of energy on AI agents role-playing cringy sci-fi tropes and attempting to crypto-scam each other. www.linkedin.com/posts/sashal...