CfP: IMPACT-SPEECH@EMNLP’26

[Ravi Shekhar]

Dear Colleagues, 

We invite submissions to IMPACT-SPEECH: Identifying, Measuring, Preventing, and Assessing Consequences of Bias in Speech LLMs, a workshop that brings together researchers from speech processing, natural language processing, machine learning, and social sciences to discuss emerging challenges related to bias in speech-enabled large language models and multimodal speech systems. 

🌐 Website: https://impactspeech.github.io/ 

The Workshop will be co-located with EMNLP 2026 in Budapest, Hungary, October 24–29, 2026.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to :

- Fairness evaluation for speech models, including methods to measure disparities across accents, genders, speaker identities, socioeconomic groups, and other factors.

- Bias detection and benchmarking datasets for speech systems, including the development of datasets designed to identify and evaluate bias in speech recognition, speech generation, and speech-enabled LLMs.

- Ethical considerations in speech AI development, including responsible data collection, annotation practices, transparency, accountability, and governance of speech technologies.

- Evaluation of Speech LLMs for fairness and inclusivity, including methods to assess bias in speech understanding, speech generation, and multimodal speech-language systems.

- Cross-lingual and multilingual fairness, with a focus on challenges faced by underrepresented languages, dialects, and low-resource speech communities.

- Bias mitigation strategies for speech systems, including algorithmic approaches, training strategies, and fairness-aware adaptation techniques.

- Real-world impacts of biased speech technologies, including implications for accessibility, employment, digital inclusion, and human–AI interaction.

- Responsible deployment and governance of speech technologies, including best practices for monitoring, auditing, and mitigating bias in real-world applications.

Important Dates

- Direct paper submission deadline: 15 July 2026

- Pre-reviewed ARR commitment deadline: 25 August 2026

- Extended abstract deadline: 25 August 2026

- Notification of acceptance: 3 September 2026

- Workshop date: 29 October 2026

All deadlines are 11:59 PM Anywhere on Earth. 

IMPACT-SPEECH welcomes both archival and non-archival papers:

- Archival papers: Research papers presenting original empirical or theoretical results 

- Non-archival papers: Previously published, work-in-progress, and extended abstracts

Papers may be submitted as long papers (up to 8 pages plus references), short papers (up to 4 pages plus references), and extended abstracts (up to 2 pages plus references). 

Papers should be submitted in the ACL format following the ACL Author guidelines. The review process will be two-way anonymized; therefore, all identifying information must be removed from submissions.  

For questions, please contact: impactspee...@gmail.com 

On behalf of the workshop organisers:

Ravi Shekhar, Monorama Swain, Jagabandhu Mishra, Sandipan Dhar, Haralambos Mouratidis, Matthew Purver