GATE researchers contributed to the scientific programme and specialised workshops and presented papers in computational linguistics and information environment analysis
GATE Institute played an active role in the Seventh International Conference on Computational Linguistics in Bulgaria – CLIB 2026, held in Sofia from 7 to 10 September. The conference was officially opened by Prof. Sylvia Ilieva, Director of GATE Institute, together with Prof. Svetla Koeva, Director of the Institute for Bulgarian Language at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Iliya Krastev from A Data Pro, and Veselin Georgiev from Plan A.
GATE was represented in the scientific programme by researchers from its Generative Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and Information Environments Analysis research groups, presenting work at the intersection of artificial intelligence, language technologies, disinformation, and online content analysis.
A highlight of the conference programme was the international CLEAR-TEXT workshop, organised by researchers from several institutions, with Dr Irina Temnikova, Ruslana Margova and Nevena Grigorova from GATE, together with Dr Maria Todorova from the Institute for Bulgarian Language at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, among its main organisers. The workshop brought together Bulgarian and international experts from different fields and included two panel discussions.
The computational linguistics panel featured internationally recognised researchers Prof. Ruslan Mitkov, Prof. Constantin Orăsan, Assoc. Prof. Dimitar Kazakov and Dr Matthew Shardlow, who discussed approaches to measuring and improving text comprehensibility. Dr Ruslana Margova moderated part of the discussions and, together with Iglika Ivanova, presented research related to readability, media literacy and the clear communication of the Digital Services Act.
During the plenary session, Dr Irina Temnikova presented results from a pilot eye-tracking experiment with children, conducted as part of GATE’s internal B-CLEAR project, which aims to develop a readability index for the Bulgarian language. The research also involved Nevena Grigorova, Iva Marinova, Stefan Minkov and Lachezar Donchev. Stanislav Penkov chaired the natural language processing session, while Dobromir Tsolyov and Georgi Goranov supported the organisation of the workshop.
Another significant element of GATE’s participation was the acceptance of six research papers for presentation at CLIB 2026. The studies address LLM-based discourse analysis for low-resource languages, automatic detection and explanation of logical fallacies, pseudoscientific misinformation, eye-tracking approaches to disinformation research, resources for propaganda detection in Bulgarian, and syntactic patterns in political discourse.
GATE’s participation continued in the final part of the conference with a specialised four-hour course developed and delivered by Dr Irina Temnikova, focusing on the role of linguists in computational linguistics.
GATE’s overall presence at CLIB 2026 reflects the Institute’s continued work towards developing more robust, explainable and linguistically and culturally aware technologies for the Bulgarian language.