Call for proposals

Online and In-Person at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
February 27, 2026 • 10AM – 6PM Eastern Time

Proposals Due: December 30, 2025 • Notification of Acceptance: January 27, 2026

Since the 2023 release of LatinCy—pretrained Latin NLP pipelines for use with the spaCy framework—the pipelines and associated models and datasets have been downloaded hundreds of times and cited in several research papers. This year the pipelines will see their most important release yet: they are being refactored and rebuilt from scratch, such that they include components that are among the best performing on tasks such as Latin lemmatization, POS tagging, and morphological tagging. To recognize the occasion of the project’s third “birthday,” we are hosting the LatinCy Developers/Users First Annual Meeting, a hybrid event both online and in-person at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World on Friday February 27, 2026.

The meeting will consist of five (5) sessions:

  1. LatinCy at 3: State-of-the-Project Report and Development Plan
  2. Panel 1: Projects & Applications using LatinCy
  3. Panel 2: Research using LatinCy
  4. Special Report: NLP Frameworks for Historical Languages Beyond Latin
  5. Open Forum for Feature Requests and Other Development Suggestions

We are currently accepting proposals for Panels #1 and #2. If you are involved in a project or application for which LatinCy is a key component or you are in the process of publishing research in areas including (but not limited to) Latin philology or literary criticism in which LatinCy models or tools feature prominently, we invite you to submit a proposal for a 15-minute presentation. We will also consider proposals that use Latin BERT as part of their work.

The twin goals of this meeting are (1) for LatinCy users to gain a better understanding of both where this project sits in the current ancient-world NLP landscape and the development plan over the next five years; and (2) for LatinCy users to learn how the project is being used by the digital classics community and offer feedback, learned lessons, etc. It is also hoped that users will find opportunities for direct contribution to this open-source project in terms of improved performance and outputs, bug fixes, new pipeline features and related datasets, better interoperability with other projects, and more. As the project continues to grow in size and complexity, there is also interest in creating a proper development team; one avenue of discussion for the open forum could be suggestions for distributing maintenance responsibilities for LatinCy’s many subprojects.

The meeting will be hybrid. Lunch will be served for in-person attendees and there will be a reception to follow the event.

Proposals of 150-200 words for presentations in Panels #1 and #2 should be emailed to pjb311[at]nyu[dot]edu and are due Tuesday December 30. The proposals should include both (1) a description of the project/research goals and progress and (2) a description of how LatinCy/Latin BERT is used as part of the project/research workflow. Projects/work at all stages of development are encouraged to submit. Please indicate whether you would like to present remotely or in person. We will notify accepted presenters by January 27.

This meeting is organized by Patrick J. Burns and the LatinCy project, with support from the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World Library.

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