Call for workshops: EMNLP & AACL

[z...@zeerak.org]

[Apologies for cross-posting]

 

The Association for Computational Linguistics invites proposals for workshops to be held in conjunction with AACL 2026 or EMNLP 2026. We solicit proposals in all areas of computational linguistics, broadly conceived to include related disciplines such as linguistics, speech, information retrieval, and multimodal processing.

 

Workshops will be held at one of the following conference venues:

• AACL 2026 (Asia-Pacific Chapter of ACL, 2026), which will be held as a hybrid conference, and physically held in Hengqin, Zhuhai from November 6-10, 2026
• EMNLP 2026 (The 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing), which will be held as a hybrid conference, and physically held in Budapest, Hungary from October 24-29, 2026

 

The workshop and tutorial co-chairs will work together to assign workshops to the conferences. They will take into account location preferences and technical constraints provided by the workshop proposers. 

 

This call exclusively centres on AACL and EMNLP 2026; another set of calls for 2027 conferences will be released starting in July 2026.

Important Dates

AACL/EMNLP 2026 shared dates

• Proposal submission deadline: January 16, 2026
• Notification of acceptance: February 20, 2026

 

All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 (“anywhere on Earth”).

Submission Information

Proposals should be submitted as PDF documents. Note that submissions should be ready to be turned into a Call for Papers to the workshop within one week of notification.

The proposals should be at most two pages for the main proposal and at most two additional pages for information about the organizers, program committee, and references. Please use the LaTeX template for your submission. Failure to comply with these formatting guidelines, or to provide the listed information below, will result in a desk rejection of your proposal.

 

The two pages for the main proposal must include:

• A title, short name / acronym, and a brief description of the workshop topic and content.
• Some conferences might take place only or partially virtually. We request submissions to contain a brief discussion of planned measures to make sure a workshop is successful and productive in case of a hybrid or virtual-only attendance.
• A description of special requirements and technical needs.
• A description of any limitations that would restrict the workshop to a specific venue (AACL/EMNLP). For example: if the workshop is compatible with only one of these events, thematically, regionally,  or otherwise, or if the workshop cannot be held at a venue for logistical reasons. 
• If the workshop has been held before, details on: how many prior editions occurred, where previous workshops were held, how many submissions the workshop received in the last iteration and how many papers were accepted (also specify if they were not regular papers, e.g., shared task system description papers), and an estimate of how many in-person attendees the workshop attracted.
• Diversity and Inclusion Efforts (see more details below)
• (Optional/If Known) A list of invited speakers, with an indication of which ones have already agreed and which are tentative, and sources of funding for the speakers.
• (Optional) A description of any shared tasks associated with the workshop, and estimate of the number of participants. Having a shared task is optional.

 

The submission form will request information that does not factor into the decision process, but are necessary for logistical reasons: 

• An estimate of the maximum number of attendees at one given time
• Number of estimated in-person posters
• Preferred Venue (first and second preference). Providing a second preferred venue is optional, and we assume that providing a second preference indicates its compatibility for the workshop. While we will do our best to adhere to these preferences, we cannot guarantee that they will be satisfied.
• Duration of the workshop (1-day / 2-day workshop)

 

Note that the only financial support available to workshops is a single free workshop registration for an invited speaker. The workshop organizers must bear all other costs independently, including registration for more than one invited speaker.

 

The two pages for information about organizers, program committee, and references must include:

• The names, affiliations, and email addresses of the organizers, with a brief statement (2-5 sentences) of their research interests, areas of expertise, and prior experience in organizing workshops and related events.
• A list of Program Committee members, with an indication of which members have already agreed. Organizers should do their best to estimate the number of submissions (especially for recurring workshops) in order to (a) ensure a sufficient number of reviewers so that each paper receives 3 reviews, and (b) anticipate that no one is committed to reviewing more than 3 papers. This practice is likely to ensure on-time and thoughtful reviews.
• An indication if the workshop will consider papers submitted through ACL Rolling Review (ARR); use OpenReview as a platform (both to take papers from ARR and for their own review); or whether the workshop will only use START as a platform, and will not use ARR. In making this choice, please pay careful attention to the ARR deadlines and conference notifications.
• References

 

Submission is electronic at the following link: https://softconf.com/p/acl-workshops2026/ 
If you are resubmitting a proposal from the previous call, please create a new submission to be considered in the AACL/EMNLP review process.

Diversity and Inclusion

The proposals should describe the ways your workshop will support diversity in NLP. We suggest organizers consider the following points, while developing the proposal:

• Contribution to academic diversity: The proposals could explain how the subject matter of the workshop will contribute to the diversity of the field, e.g. use of multilingual data, indications of how the described methods scale up to various languages or domains, accessibility of resources, supporting underrepresented communities of NLP and so on.
• Diversifying representation: Following the WiNLP initiative, we recognize the current problems of demographic imbalance in the field. Therefore, we particularly encourage submissions including members of under-represented groups in computational linguistics. The proposals should describe how their selection of invited speakers, panelists, organizers, and program committee promotes diverse representation (for example, considering underrepresented demographics based on gender, ethnicity, nationality, and so on). We also suggest including speakers and panelists, who have not appeared as a keynote speaker or panelist in recent conferences.
• Diversifying participation: The proposals could describe how the call-for-papers and outreach will encourage people from marginalized groups to attend and submit to the workshop. Some examples include providing mentoring, subsidies, coordinating with affinity groups, diversifying the selection of papers and so on.

Organizer Responsibilities

The organizers of the accepted proposals will be responsible for publicizing and running the workshop, including reviewing submissions, producing the camera-ready workshop proceedings, organizing the meeting days, and playing their part to ensure that all participants are aware of ACL’s anti-harassment policy. It is crucial that organizers commit to all deadlines. In particular, failure to produce the camera-ready proceedings on time will lead to the exclusion of the workshop from the unified proceedings and author indexes. Workshop organizers cannot accept submissions for publication that will be (or have been) published 

elsewhere, although they are free to set their own policies on simultaneous submission and review. However, it is worth noting that workshops may also accept non-archival submissions, such as findings papers, for presentation, which are allowed in this case. Since the conferences will occur at different times, the timelines for the submission and reviewing of workshop papers, and the preparation of camera-ready copies, will be different for each conference. Suggested timelines for each of the conferences are given below. The workshop organizers are free to deviate from the proposed schedule for all dates that are not marked as inflexible, though changes should be made in consultation with the relevant workshop chairs. 

 

In submitting a proposal, workshop chairs will be asked to agree to the workshop non-compliance policy. All workshops must agree to this policy, which states that egregious cases of not living up to the responsibilities of running a workshop will be penalized by a 1-year ban on the organizers from submitting another workshop proposal. Workshop proposals for which all authors do not agree to this policy will be desk-rejected.

 

The ACL has a set of policies on workshops. You can find the ACL’s general policies on workshops, the financial policy for workshops, and the financial policy for SIG workshops in the Conference Handbook.

Review Process

Workshop proposals will be holistically reviewed by a committee of workshop chairs and  the ACL workshop officers based on: their originality and impact, the experience of the Organizing and Program Committees, and adherence of the workshop proposal to ACL’s code of ethics, including a discussion of the ethical considerations for the workshop topic if relevant. In addition to the proposals themselves, acceptance decisions will take into account the diversity of accepted topics, particularly in areas underrepresented in main conference spaces, to ensure a well-balanced and relevant workshop program. A well-written proposal can be rejected if it does not bring a new perspective to the workshop program, and we may merge workshops that propose similar programs.

 

This committee will also allocate workshops to the conferences included in the call, taking into account the location preferences and technical constraints given in the workshop proposal. However, the aim of the review process is to accept as many high-quality, diverse workshops as possible. Given space limitations at conference venues and the increasing number of workshop proposals, the review committee can not guarantee that a proposal will be co-located with their preferred venue in lieu of extenuating circumstances.

 

Workshop Chairs

AACL

• TBA

EMNLP

• Chrysoula (Chryssa) Zerva, Instituto Superior Técnico (IST)
• Steffen Eger, University of Technology Nuremberg (UTN)