A half-day workshop co-located with the 19th International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG 2026), Utrecht, Netherlands.
Join us on Sunday, 18 October 2026, at the Spoorwegmuseum. Lunch is provided at the venue free of charge.
Program and Registration
The workshop program and accepted papers are now available, featuring a keynote and presentations of accepted work.
Autoregressive transformers have dominated Natural Language Generation for years. While scaling these models has brought remarkable results, next-token prediction is not the only path forward. This workshop creates a dedicated forum — the Alternative Architectures and Paradigms (AAP) Workshop — to broaden the academic focus and look beyond traditional Transformers.
We aim to bring together foundational AI builders and language generation experts to explore non-traditional architectures that learn, process, and generate language differently: structures that scale efficiently, update their memories dynamically, and make language systems more transparent and factually accurate.
Important Dates
| Event | Date |
|---|---|
| Workshop Paper Submission Due | 9 August 2026 |
| Paper Acceptance Notification | 15 September 2026 |
| Camera-Ready Papers Due | 23 September 2026 |
| INLG 2026 Conference | 17–21 October 2026 |
| AAP Workshop | 18 October 2026 |
Keynote Speaker
Chen Shani
Chen Shani is a Senior Lecturer at Tel Aviv University, where she leads the CoAI Lab, studying concepts, knowledge, and cognition in AI systems. Her research focuses on understanding what language models represent, how their knowledge is organized, and how these representations can be deliberately shaped. Before joining Tel Aviv University, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University and a researcher at Amazon. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Keynote: From Found to Designed: Concepts as a Design Axis for Large Language Models
View the keynote in the workshop program →
Organizers
This workshop is organised by members of the NLP@Utrecht community, a research group spanning Utrecht University and UMC Utrecht. The group works at the intersection of natural language processing, machine learning, and real-world applications — combining expertise in language model evaluation, explainable AI, and clinical NLP.
Contact: r.j.a.kuiper@umcutrecht.nl · a.bagheri@uu.nl