1st International Workshop on
Language and Language Models
Budapest, Hungary | November 20-21, 2025
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Conference Programme Details

The conference will run from Thursday 20 November, 9:30 CET, until Friday 21 November, 17:30 CET.

Day One

Time Thursday 20 November 2025
09:00 – 09:30Registration
09:30 – 09:45Welcome remarks
09:45 – 10:45Keynote by Alessandro Lenci

Chair: Noémi Ligeti-Nagy

Beyond prediction: What LLMs miss about meaning and why


AbstractLarge Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable fluency, generating text that often feels indistinguishable from human writing. Yet beneath this surface competence lies a profound question: do these systems truly capture meaning? This talk explores the conceptual and cognitive limits of current LLMs, focusing on the distinction between statistical prediction and semantic representation. In particular, I will ask why pattern recognition alone cannot yield genuine semantic understanding.
10:45 – 11:15Coffee break




11:15 – 11:35		Section 1: Human-LLM comprehension

Chair: Gábor Prószéky

Natalia Moskvina, Raquel Montero, Masaya Yoshida, Ferdy Hubers, Paolo Morosi, Walid Irhaymi, Jin Yan, Elena Pagliarini, Fritz Günther and Evelina Leivada – Language comprehension in LLMs and humans across languages (abstract)
11:35 – 11:55Zétény Bujka, András Lukács, Péter Vedres and Anna Babarczy – Do Large Language Models possess a theory of mind? A comparative evaluation using the Strange Stories paradigm (abstract)
11:55 – 12:15Zoltán Bánréti and László Hunyadi – Challenging AI: How does an Artificial Intelligence learn an artificial language? (abstract)
12:15 – 12:35Christian Lang, Marco Gierke and Ngoc Duyen Tanja Tu – Orthographic diversity in Large Language Models – A case study of foreign word spelling in German (abstract)
12:35 – 12:55Lili Tamás, Mariann Lengyel and Noémi Ligeti-Nagy – Language Models achieve human-level sarcasm detection (abstract)
12:55 – 14:00Lunch
14:00 – 15:00Keynote by Erhard Hinrichs

Chair: Veronika Lipp

The added value of LLMs for lexicography and for lexical semantics


AbstractWith the availability of deep learning methods, LLMs, and generative AI, the question has been posed whether dictionaries — and lexicographic resources more generally –can be created by purely automatic means. This hypothesis has been identified as “the end of lexicography” by, among others, Gilles-Maurice de Shriver and David Joffe. On the basis of three use cases from digital lexicography, I want to examine this hypothesis and draw some more general conclusions about the added value of LLMs and generative AI for lexicography and for lexical semantics.




15:00 – 15:20		Section 2: Idioms, metaphors and terminology

Chair: Marko Tadić

Vasile Păiș, Maria Mitrofan, Verginica Barbu Mititelu and Dan Tufiș – Large Language Models as multiword expressions annotators (abstract)
15:20 – 15:40Irene Russo and Paola Vernillo – Seeing the unsaid: Visualizing English idioms with text-to-image generation (abstract)
15:40 – 16:00Gábor Simon, Tímea Borbála Bajzát, Natabara Máté Gyöngyössy, Péter Gergő Molnár, Noémi Prótár and Balázs Indig – Large Language Models in metaphor identification: The case of presuicidal interactions (abstract)
16:00 – 16:20Alexey Matyushin – LLMs as tools for drafting ad hoc pharmaceutical glossaries (abstract)
16:20 – 16:50Coffee break




16:50 – 17:10		Section 3: Language games and power plays

Chair: Martin Wynne

Ágoston Tóth – An LLM-motivated theory of language (abstract)
17:10 – 17:30Dániel Golden – Large Language Models and the philosophy of language games (abstract)
17:30- 17:50Silje Susanne Alvestad, Nele Poldvere, Asbjørn Følstad and Petter Bae Brandtzæg – Fakespeak in the age of Large Language Models: A comparative study of persuasion in AI-generated and human-written propaganda narratives (abstract)
17:50 – 18:10Katerina Zoi and Dimitrios Mysiloglou – Reconstructing the past: How LLMs reflect or adapt to Papadiamantis’ cultural worldview (abstract)
18:10 – 18:15Closing remarks
18:30 –
Conference dinner

Day Two

TimeFriday 21 November 2025
09:30 – 10:30Keynote by András Kornai

Chair: Dávid Márk Nemeskey

The linguistic power of LLMs (slides)


AbstractOpinion on the power of LLMs is on a broad spectrum. At the high end we find the view that these models are so good that we no longer need to deal with messy humans and can do all sorts of exciting linguistics by inspecting LLMs. At the low end we find the view that LLMs are stochastic parrots that cannot possibly have any bearing on how natural language works in humans. In this talk we approach the matter from the perspective of formal language theory, and conclude that there is nothing in natural language that stands in the way of treating LLMs as full and faithful models of human linguistic competence.
10:30 – 11:00Coffee Break




11:00 – 11:20		Section 4: Chat, translate, evaluate

Chair: Dan Tufiș

Noémi Prótár and Dávid Márk Nemeskey – Bridging the gap between qualitative and quantitative – How linguistic analysis can help automatic text simplification evaluation (abstract)
11:20 – 11:40Cecilia Domingo, Paul Piwek, Svetlana Stoyanchev and Michel Wermelinger – Reference processing in pair-programming dialogue (abstract)
11:40 – 12:00Bálint Levente Mórász and László János Laki – The impact of example-selection metrics on LLM-based machine translation (abstract)
12:00 – 12:20Roberto Jiménez de la Torre and Carlos Á. Iglesias – A modular LLM-enhanced agent-based system for the generation and evaluation of journalistic interview questions (abstract)
12:20 – 12:40Tommaso Sgrizzi, Asya Zanollo and Cristiano Chesi – Syntactic maps or surface hacks? Testing restructuring verb order and clitic placement in LLMs (abstract)
12:40 – 13:40Lunch




13:40 – 14:00		Section 5: LLMs in practice

Chair: Tamás Váradi

Botond Szemes and Kata Dobás – Digital literary memory in Central-East-Europe. Analysing Wikipedia with LLMs (abstract)
14:00 – 14:20Réka Dodé, Gábor Madarász, Mátyás Osváth, Kristóf Varga and Enikő Héja – Opportunities and challenges in classifying Hungarian scientific texts by field of science (abstract)
14:20 – 14:40Kata Ágnes Szűcs, Noémi Vadász, Zsolt Záros, Emese Varga and Zoltán Szatucsek – Integrating Large Language Models in structural data processing in Hungarian civil registers (abstract)
14:40 – 15:00Boglárka Vermeki – Modelling language proficiency with Puli-BERT-Large: A case study on CEFR classification in Hungarian learner texts (abstract)
15:00 – 15:20Zijian Győző Yang, Ágnes Bánfi, Réka Dodé, Gergő Ferenczi, Flóra Földesi, Enikő Héja, Mariann Lengyel, Gábor Madarász, Mátyás Osváth, Bence Sárossy, Kristóf Varga and Noémi Ligeti-Nagy – Toward Hungarian-centric language understanding: Hungarian-adapted PULI Large Language Models (abstract)
15:20 – 15:50Coffee Break
15:50 – 16:45Panel: Do LLMs “understand” language?

Moderator: Csaba Pléh (Central European University)

Panellists: Erhard Hinrichs (University of Tübingen), András Kornai (HUN-REN SZTAKI, BME), Alessandro Lenci (University of Pisa) and Tamás Váradi (ELTE Research Centre for Linguistics)
16:45 – 17:00Closing remarks, rewards