Symposium Programme
All timings are in BST (Aberdeen, United Kingdom). This is programme version 1.4.3.
The Symposium takes place on the 7th floor of the Sir Duncan Rice Library at the University of Aberdeen.
Monday, 1st of June, 2026
| Time | Event | Presenter(s) | Session Chair |
|---|---|---|---|
| 09:00 09:30 | ⚪️ Registration 🪪 | ||
| 09:30 09:35 | ⚪️ RetroEval 2026 Symposium Welcome 👋 | Saad Mahamood | |
| 09:35 09:45 | ⚪️ University of Aberdeen Introductory Remarks | Nir Oren | |
| 09:45 10:30 | 🔴 Keynote: NLP Evaluation in the Face of Deceptively Fluent Models | Sina Zarrieß | Saad Mahamood |
| 10:30 10:45 | 🟤 Coffee Break ☕️ | ||
| 10:45 12:15 | 🟠 Oral Session 1: Evaluating NLG Architectures | Mengxuan Sun | |
| 10:45 11:15 | 🟠 Oral 1-1: A Comparative Evaluation of End-to-End and Pipeline Approaches for Summarisation | Fahime Same, Saad Mahamood, Srinivas Ramesh Kamath | |
| 11:15 11:45 | 🟠 Oral 1-2: RAG as a collapsed NLG pipeline | Adarsa Sivaprasad, Barkavi Sundararajan, David M. Howcroft | |
| 11:45 12:15 | 🟠 Oral 1-3: Decomposition Does Not Help: Evidence from Semantic Clustering in LLM-based Causal Graph Discovery | Nikolay Babakov, Alberto Bugarín-Diz | |
| 12:15 13:30 | 🟤 Lunch 🍴 | ||
| 13:30 15:00 | 🟠 Oral Session 2: Rethinking Evaluation | Adarsa Sivaprasad | |
| 13:30 14:00 | 🟠 Oral 2-1: Never Truly Out of Fashion: A Retrospective Look at Evaluation in NLG | Patrícia Schmidtová, Saad Mahamood, Ondřej Dušek | |
| 14:00 14:30 | 🟠 Oral 2-1: Oral 2-2: NLG Evaluation: Past, Present, Future | Ehud Reiter | |
| 14:30 15:00 | 🟠 Oral 2-1: Oral 2-3: Solving the Task but Not the Problem: A Customer Support Case Study on Why Extrinsic Evaluation Matters | Daniel Braun | |
| 15:00 15:30 | ⚪️ Get to the bus! | ||
| 15:30 16:30 | ⚪️ Bus to the castle 🚌 | ||
| 16:30 17:45 | ⚪️ Dunottar Castle Excursion 🏰 | ||
| 17:45 18:15 | ⚪️ Return to the bus! | ||
| 18:15 19:00 | ⚪️ Bus back to Aberdeen 🚌 | ||
| 19:30 21:30 | ⚪️ Celebratory Dinner at Chaophraya 🍴 |
Tuesday, 2nd of June, 2026
| Time | Event | Presenter(s) | Session Chair |
|---|---|---|---|
| 09:00 09:30 | ⚪️ Registration 🪪 | ||
| 09:30 10:15 | 🔴 Keynote From Benchmark to Bedside: Lessons learned in Clinical Natural Language Processing | Beatrice Alex | David M. Howcroft |
| 10:15 10:45 | 🟤 Coffee Break ☕️ | ||
| 10:45 11:45 | 🟠 Food for Thought | Saad Mahamood | |
| 10:45 11:15 | 🟠 FT-1-1: Evaluation and Assessment as Complementary Frameworks | Elie Antoine | |
| 11:15 11:45 | 🟠 FT-1-2: Ehud Reiter and the University of Santiago de Compostela: some notes and memories | Alejandro Ramos Soto, Nikolay Babakov, Javier González Corbelle, Jose Maria Alonso-Moral, Alberto Bugarín-Diz, Senén Barro | |
| 11:45 13:00 | 🟤 Lunch 🍴 | ||
| 13:00 13:45 | 🔴 Keynote: “It’s cheaper if you don’t involve people” | Albert Gatt | Simone Balloccu |
| 13:45 14:00 | 🟤 Get your tea 🫖 and coffee ☕️ for the poster session! | ||
| 13:45 14:45 | 🟢 Poster Presentations | Barkavi Sundararajan | |
| —– —– | 🟢 Poster 1-1: Towards Grounded Evaluation of Multimodal Machine Translation Systems* | Sami Ul Haq and Sheila Castilho | |
| —– —– | 🟢 Poster 1-2: Checking for implicit assumptions in data-to-text generation | Kristýna Onderková, Ondrej Dusek | |
| —– —– | 🟢 Poster 1-3: The Arabic Bible as an Evaluation tool: The Case Study of the Khalili Arabic Dialect | Jakub Zbrzezny, Ehud Reiter, Wei Zhao | |
| —– —– | 🟢 Poster 1-4: The NL4XAI program: A retrospective | Jose Maria Alonso-Moral | |
| 14:45 15:45 | 🟣 Panel Discussion I | Simone Balloccu | |
| 14:45 15:15 | 🟣 P-1-1: BabyTalk | Albert Gatt, Yaji Sirpada, Saad Mahamood | |
| 15:15 15:45 | 🟣 P-1-2: Commercial NLG - Data2Text | Ian Davy, Yaji Sirpada, Ehud Reiter | |
| 15:45 16:00 | 🟤 Coffee Break ☕️ | ||
| 16:00 16:45 | 🟣 Panel Discussion II | Kees van Deemter | |
| 16:00 16:45 | 🟣 P-2-1: Retrospective on Referring Expression Generation | Ehud Reiter, Albert Gatt, Sina Zarrieß, Fahime Same | |
| 16:45 17:30 | 🔴 Closing Keynote “Lets Improve Research Culture” | Ehud Reiter | Saad Mahamood |
| 17:30 18:00 | ⚪️ Closing surprises 🤫 |
* Remote presentation