Rico Sennrich receives ACL 2026 Test of Time Award
Congratulations to Prof. Dr. Rico Sennrich on receiving the ACL 2026 Test of Time Award together with Barry Haddow and Alexandra Birch. Their 2016 paper introduced a method that has become a foundational component of modern large language models.
At the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) in July, Prof. Dr. Rico Sennrich was honoured with the Test of Time Award alongside Barry Haddow and Alexandra Birch. The award recognizes research whose impact and relevance have endured a decade after publication.
Their award-winning paper, “Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units”, was published in 2016 and introduced a practical approach to handling rare and previously unseen words in neural machine translation. By breaking words into smaller units, known as subwords, the method enabled translation systems to process vocabulary more effectively.
Originally developed for machine translation, this approach has since become a foundational component of virtually all modern large language models (LLMs). Its influence extends far beyond its original application, with technologies building on this research now used by millions of people every day.
Rico's research and achievements are also featured in the latest issue of UZHmagazin (3/2026). The German-language portrait highlights the significance of his work and offers a more personal insight into the researcher behind these scientific contributions.