NALEF

Nations of the Americas Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum

Multilingual and Multimodal Evaluation Forum for the Americas Latin America and the Caribbean.

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General Description

The NALEF Initiative is structured into two main parts:

Evaluation Labs

Labs to carry out the evaluation of information access systems and workshops to discuss and develop innovative evaluation activities in the context of the languages and cultures of the Americas and the Caribbean.

Peer-Reviewed Conference

Covers a wide range of topics, including:

  • Research continuing Evaluation Labs activities.
  • Experiments with multilingual and multimodal data, especially those generated within NALEF.
  • Research on evaluation methodologies and challenges relevant to linguistic diversity.

Promoting research, innovation, and development of information access systems with an emphasis on the multilingual and multimodal richness of the Americas and the Caribbean.

Research Infrastructure

Testing, adjustment, and evaluation of multilingual and multimodal systems.

Research on the use of unstructured, semi-structured, structured, and semantically enriched data.

Creation of reusable test collections and benchmarks for regional languages.

Exploration of new evaluation methodologies and innovative ways to use experimental data.

Discussion of results, approach comparisons, idea exchange, and knowledge transfer.

Shared Evaluation Campaign

A shared evaluation campaign for NLP and multimodal systems in the languages of the Americas and the Caribbean.

Its goal is to promote research in text processing, comprehension, and generation tasks, as well as multimodal tasks.

Supported Languages Include:
  • Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, Dutch.
  • Haitian Creole, Papiamento, Sranan Tongo, and other creoles.
  • Quechua, Nahuatl, Guarani, Aymara, Mapudungun, Wayuunaiki, etc.

Publication & Process

  • Tasks are reviewed by steering and program committees.
  • Organizers configure evaluation and promote the task.
  • Articles are included in NALEF proceedings via CEUR-WS.org.
  • Participants present systems at the NALEF workshop.

Labs

NALEF 2026

Explore labs and tasks for 2026.

Scope & Mission

Linguistic Diversity

Representing the full linguistic diversity of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Inclusive Participation

Fostering the participation of underrepresented communities.

Bridging Gaps

Bridging academic research and real-world applications.

Steering Committee

Edwin
Dr. Edwin Puertas

Artificial Intelligence Software Architect and Natural Language Processing (NLP) Researcher, with 20 years of experience in both academic and professional settings

UTB

jairo
Dr. Jairo Serrano Castañeda

Systems Engineer graduated from the Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar and Master’s in Free Software from the Universidad Autónoma de Bucaramanga. PhD candidate in Engineering at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

UTB

juan
Dr. Juan Carlos Martinez

Electronic Engineer, Master in Electric Power from Universidad Industrial de Santander. Ph.D. from Northeastern University, Boston. Fulbright–DNP–Colciencias Scholar (2007). Researcher and professor at Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar since 2004.

UTB

andrea
Andrea Menco Tovar

Mathematics graduate and holds a Master’s in Applied Statistics from Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Engineering, with a focus on Electronics and Computing, at Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar.

UTB

oneris
Oneris Rico, PhD

Research ScientistOneris contributes to Cross Labs research with his expertise in video content production and cinematography. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Keio in media design.

ScientistOneris

Supporting Institutions & Labs