This repository contains the programme and links to tutorials and other materials for the UCREL Summer School 2026, hosted at Lancaster University from 20 to 22 July 2026.
The 2026 theme is: NLP, LLMs and Responsible and Explainable AI in Practice
The summer school is expected to bring together up to 50 participants from a broad range of AI-related fields, including natural language processing, machine learning, computer science, linguistics, digital humanities, and applied AI.
For the current public UCREL summer school page, see the UCREL NLP Summer School site.
| Time | Session | Presenter |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00 to 09:30 | Registration Arrivals, Badges, Wi-Fi, and Setup |
|
| 09:30 to 10:00 | Welcome Remarks & UCREL Overview Slides |
Dr Ignatius Ezeani Prof Paul Rayson |
| 10:00 to 11:00 | Keynote Frustratingly Simple and Efficient Multilingual Language Model Adaptation More... |
Prof Nikos Aletras Professor of NLP Sheffield University |
| 11:00 to 11:15 | Coffee and Tea Break | |
| 11:15 to 13:00 | Session 1: Tutorial NLP Pipeline for Text Classification and Sequence Labelling More... |
Dr Daisy Lal |
| 13:00 to 14:00 | Lunch Break and Networking | |
| 14:00 to 15:30 | Session 2: Tutorial Introduction to the USAS Semantic Tagging Framework with PyMUSAS More... |
Prof Paul Rayson Dr Andrew Moore |
| 15:30 to 16:00 | Coffee and Tea Break | |
| 16:00 to 17:00 | Session 3: Hackathon Kick-off Challenge briefing, team formation, idea scoping More... |
Dr Tharindu Ranasinghe Dr Andrew Moore Dr Damith Dola Mullage Dr John Vidler |
| Time | Session | Presenter |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00 to 09:30 | Networking Recap Day 1, outline Day 2 |
|
| 09:30 to 10:30 | Keynote How to train your model: Paradigms for training LLMs and how to know which one to use. More... |
Dr Riza Batista-Navarro Senior Lecturer in Text Mining, Natural Language Processing and Text Mining |
| 10:30 to 11:00 | Coffee and Tea Break | |
| 11:00 to 13:00 | Session 4: Tutorial LLM Prompting Techniques: RTCF, Few-shot, CoT, RAG and Constraints More... |
Chenji Jin, Pourya Farzi Dr Scott Piao |
| 13:00 to 14:00 | Lunch Break and Networking | |
| 14:00 to 15:30 | Session 5: Tutorial Building a Basic RAG System: indexing a corpus, retrieval, prompting, and evaluating responses |
Dr Hansi Hettiarachchi |
| 15:30 to 16:00 | Coffee and Tea Break | |
| 16:00 to 17:00 | Session 6: Hackathon Sprint Code and spec review, short clinic, discussions and support |
Dr Tharindu Ranasinghe Dr Andrew Moore Dr Damith Dola Mullage Dr John Vidler |
| Time | Session | Presenter |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00 to 09:30 | Networking Recap, hackathon reminders |
|
| 09:30 to 10:30 | Keynote Artificial Intelligence for Everyday Lives More... |
Dr Jacki O'Neill Founding Director, Microsoft Research Nairobi, Kenya |
| 10:30 to 11:00 | Coffee and Tea Break | |
| 11:00 to 13:00 | Session 7: Tutorial Machine Translation Quality Estimation in Low-Resource Scenarios |
Dr Tharindu Ranasinghe Dr Damith Dola Mullage |
| 13:00 to 14:00 | Lunch Break and Networking | |
| 14:00 to 15:00 | Session 8: Workshop Title: Mapping environmental impacts and potential rebound effects of AI In this session, we will work in groups to map out the socio-environmental impacts of the digital infrastructure that enables the use of AI and we will use the ‘Rebound Archetypes Cards’ to facilitate the discussion around the potential rebound effects of using AI in products and services. |
Dr Marcia Smith |
| 15:00 to 15:30 | Hackathon Results Team pitches, winners and prize presentation |
Dr Tharindu Ranasinghe Dr Andrew Moore Dr Damith Dola Mullage Dr John Vidler |
| 15:30 to 16:00 | Closing Reflections, announcements, certificates and group photo |
Prof Paul Rayson Dr Ignatius Ezeani |
- Foundational NLP workflows for classification, sequence labelling, and semantic analysis
- Large language models in practice, including prompting, RAG, and system-building
- Responsible, explainable, and inclusive AI for language technologies
- Hands-on collaboration through tutorials, networking, and a multi-day hackathon
The programme is designed for:
- PhD students and early-career researchers
- Research assistants and postdoctoral researchers
- Software developers and data scientists
- Researchers and practitioners working across NLP, AI, linguistics, and digital humanities
- This is the final programme but it may be updated as speakers and session details are confirmed or changed.
- Session titles and timings are subject to minor refinement.
Dr Ignatius Ezeani and the UCREL Summer School 2026 Organising Team, Lancaster University, UK
Final Programme · Subject to minor updates