About WoLaLa
The 1st International Workshop on Language and Language Models (WoLaLa) is an interdisciplinary initiative launched by the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics (HUN-REN) to build a lasting community at the intersection of culture, language and artificial intelligence. Taking place in Budapest on 20–21 November 2025, WoLaLa serves as both a showcase and incubator for fresh, critical perspectives on how large language models (LLMs) shape and are shaped by humanistic inquiry.
Our Mission
- Bridge SSH and AI: Empower scholars in the social sciences and humanities – linguists, philosophers, digital humanists and beyond – to engage directly with LLM technologies, share best practices, and co-create methodologies that respect language, cognition and culture.
- Demystify the hype: Move beyond buzzwords to rigorously probe the real capabilities, limitations and ethical dimensions of state-of-the-art language models, with special attention to under-resourced and “small” languages.
- Foster sustainable collaboration: Establish WoLaLa as a recurring forum, where friendships, partnerships and joint projects can flourish across institutions in Central and Eastern Europe and around the globe.
What we hope to achieve
- Cultivate an SSH-driven research agenda that directs AI development toward richer, more equitable language technologies.
- Build an open network of practitioners who will continue to exchange insights, co-author publications and mentor the next generation of humanities-centered AI researchers.
- Seed innovative applications of LLMs in linguistic analysis, cultural heritage, cognitive science and beyond, demonstrating the fertilizing power of AI when steered by humanistic values.
WoLaLa is more than a one-off workshop: it’s the first step in a long-term effort to redefine how AI and language scholarship can co-evolve. We invite you to join us in shaping the future of language intelligence.