AIRI Researcher on EACL 2026 in Morocco: A Computer Vision Specialist's Perspective on the NLP World

When a computer vision specialist attends a natural language processing conference, that's already a story in itself. Andrey Moskalenko, a research fellow at the FusionBrain laboratory at AIRI, found himself at EACL for the first time in late March 2026 — one of the major European conferences on NLP, which for the first time in its history was held not in Europe, but in Morocco. EACL stands for European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Despite the "European" in its name, in 2026 the organizers moved the event to Marrakech — the conference's first debut on the African continent. The format remained familiar: four main days from March 24 to 29 and another two days of workshops — a total of six intensive days of science and networking. Andrey came not as an observer.

Together with two colleagues from the FusionBrain.Robotics team, they presented two papers co-authored with the "Applied NLP" team at the same AIRI. Such internal collaboration between CV and NLP teams at one institute is revealing: when researchers from different disciplines write papers together, it's a sign that multimodality has ceased to be exotic and has become the working mode.

For someone from computer vision, the world of NLP looks both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. The general logic of the research process is the same: datasets, baselines, metrics, ablation studies, endless experiments. But the emphasis shifts.

In CV, the engineering component is strong — architectures, inference speed, real-time image processing. In NLP, more attention is paid to linguistic nuances, evaluation of generation quality, and subjective metrics that are difficult to describe with a formula. Networking at EACL proved to be a separate value.

Conferences of this level gather researchers from dozens of countries, and hallway conversations often yield more than presentations in the halls. For a young scientist, the first major international conference is above all a chance to understand how the global community is structured, who does what, and where the field as a whole is heading. Morocco added a cultural layer to all of this: Marrakech is not a standard European venue, and for many participants it was their first visit to Africa.

AIRI, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, is one of Russia's leading institutes in the field of AI. The FusionBrain laboratory specializes in multimodal systems that combine visual perception and language models. Participation in EACL with two papers is a signal that the institute continues to integrate into the international academic agenda.

That a CV researcher travels to an NLP conference and returns with two published papers is no accident. It reflects a real shift: language and visual models are converging, research teams are mixing, and disciplinary boundaries increasingly exist only in conference names. EACL 2026 in Morocco became for Andrey Moskalenko an entry point into this intersection — and, judging by his outlook, far from the last.