Year: 2026
Type: paratext
Abstract: Message from the Organizing CommitteeAs researchers achieve unprecedented technological breakthroughs in natural language processing, the need to understand the systems underlying these advances is more pertinent than ever.BlackboxNLP, now in its ninth iteration, has played an important role in bringing together scholars from a diverse range of backgrounds in order to rigorously study the behavior, representations, and computations of "black-box" neural network models.Our workshop showcases original, cutting-edge research on topics including but not limited to:• Adapting and applying analysis techniques from other disciplines, such as neuroscience, to analyze high-dimensional vector representations in artificial neural networks.• Examining model performance on simplified or formal languages.• Proposing architectural modifications to increase models' interpretability.• Testing if interpretable information can be decoded from internal representations.• Open-source tools for analysis, visualization, or explanation to democratize access to interpretability techniques in NLP.• Meta-evaluation of analysis methods to assess their validity.• Understanding how and when language models rely on context information.• Analysing the linguistic properties captured by contextualised word representations.• Scaling up analysis methods for large language models (LLMs).• Mechanistic interpretability, reverse engineering approaches to understanding particular properties of neural models.• Evaluation of techniques for steering LLM output behavior.• Uncovering the reasoning processes of LLMs.• Understanding under the hood of memorization in LLMs.• Insights into LLM Failures.• Translating interpretability insights into practical solutions to address key challenges in NLP.• Opinion pieces about the state of interpretability in NLP.The ninth BlackboxNLP workshop will be held in Budapest, Hungary on October 29th, 2026, hosted by the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP).45 full papers, 12 non-archival extended abstracts, 10 ARR commitments, and 19 reproducibility special track papers were accepted for in-person presentations, from a total of 312 submissions.This year's workshop will also feature three invited talks.BlackboxNLP 2026 would not have been possible without the high-quality peer reviews submitted by our program committee, as well as the logistical assistance provided by the EMNLP organizing committee.We gratefully acknowledge financial support from our sponsors, NDIF.Our invited speakers, authors, and presenters have allowed us to put together an outstanding program for all participants to enjoy.Welcome to BlackboxNLP!We look forward to seeing you in Budapest.
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7224352575