Abstract
- KONVENS (Konferenz zur Verarbeitung natürlicher Sprache, Conference on Natural Language Processing) is an annual conference series on computational linguistics first held in 1992. Originally biennial until 2018, the conference is organized under the auspices of the German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology, the Special Interest Group on Computational Linguistics of the German Linguistic Society, the Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence, and SwissNLP. The 21st edition of KONVENS took place in Hildesheim, Germany, from September 9–12, 2025, and was jointly organized by the University of Hildesheim and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hannover. This year's conference centered on artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs), reflecting the scientific community's efforts to better understand and optimize the properties of LLMs. These topics were addressed in three plenary lectures, a lecture session on methodological issues, and a poster session on LLMs, as well as in sessions on other topics such as methods based on LLMs, discourse and semantics, multilinguality and translation, new language resources, applications of language technology beyond linguistics, and the identification of hate speech on social media. The proceedings are published in two volumes. The first volume contains all the peer-reviewed papers from the main conference, and the second volume contains the papers from the six workshops and shared tasks organised as part of the conference.