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International Conference on Software and Systems Reuse, Product Lines, and Configuration (VARIABILITY 2026): First Call for Journal First Papers
by Announce 19 Jan '26

19 Jan '26

*** First Call for Journal First Papers *** International Conference on Software and Systems Reuse, Product Lines, and Configuration (VARIABILITY 2026) 29 September - 2 October 2026, 5* St. Raphael Resort and Marina Limassol, Cyprus https://conf.researchr.org/home/variability-2026 The VARIABILITY conference series brings together the communities previously served by ICSR, SPLC, and VaMoS, forming a unified venue for research on variability, configuration, customization, and related disciplines in software and systems engineering. VARIABILITY 2026 invites Journal-First presentations of papers recently published in leading software engineering journals, including TSE, TOSEM, IST, EMSE, JSS, ASEJ, SoSyM, and reputable open-access journals. This initiative provides authors with the opportunity to engage directly with the VARIABILITY community, while offering attendees a richer and more diverse program. The Journal-First papers remain published in their respective journals, and a one-page summary will be included in the VARIABILITY 2026 proceedings with a pointer to the original publication. Scope To qualify for a Journal-First presentation at VARIABILITY 2026, a paper must meet these criteria: • It was published on the publisher’s website between May 2024 and March 2026. • It fits within the scope of VARIABILITY 2026, as described in the research track call (https://conf.researchr.org/track/variability-2026/variability-2026-papers#C…), and can bring new insights or directions to the community. • It presents new research results or significant extensions of prior work that have not been presented at SPLC, VaMoS, or ICSR before. • It has not been presented at, and is not under review for, Journal-First Tracks of other related conferences. How to Submit Authors of papers that meet the above criteria are invited to submit a short proposal for presentation. The proposal should be one page and include the following: • Paper title, authors, extended abstract, and a link or DOI to the original journal paper. • If the journal paper builds on or is related to previously published work (such as a poster or tool demo), the proposal must clearly explain why it should be considered a Journal- First paper. • All proposals must be submitted as a PDF via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=variability2026 (Journal-First Track). • Please upload both the proposal PDF and a ZIP file containing the original journal paper. Accepted papers will be published in the VARIABILITY 2026 Companion Proceedings published by Springer in the LNCS series. A Journal-First proposal must be at most one page long and it must follow the Springer guidelines: https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-gu… . By submitting your paper for inclusion in these proceedings, you acknowledge that you and your co-authors must comply with Springer’s publications policies (https://www.springer.com/gp/editorial-policies) including requirements related to research integrity, copyright, and ethical standards. Any alleged violations of these policies may be investigated by Springer and could result in corrective actions, including withdrawal of the paper. Evaluation and Selection Proposals will be selected based on the quality of the publication and the journal, after confirming that the paper fits the scope of the conference. Since the papers have already been peer-reviewed and accepted by their journals, they will not undergo another technical review. The goal is to include as many papers as possible in the Journal-First Track. However, if an unusually high number of papers are received, some might not be accepted. If needed, priority will be given to papers that best align with the conference topics of interests and the structure of the sessions. Conference Attendance For each paper accepted into the Journal-First Track, at least one author must register for the conference and attend to give the oral presentation. Important Dates (AoE) • Submission of Papers: 2 April 2026 • Notification of Acceptance: 1 June 2026 • Camera-Ready Submission: 15 July 2026 • Author Registration: 15 July 2026 Organisation General Chairs • George A. Papadopoulos, University of Cyprus, Cyprus • Gilles Perrouin, FNRS & University of Namur, Belgium Research Track Chairs • Thorsten Berger, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany • Ina Schaefer, KIT, Germany Industry Track Chairs • Shaukat Ali, Simula Research Lab and Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway • Martin Becker, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany Journal First Track Chairs • Mathieu Acher, University Rennes, Inria, CNRS, IRISA, France • Xhevahire Tërnava, LTCI, Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France Doctoral Symposium Track Chairs • Rick Rabiser, LIT CPS, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria • Iris Reinhartz-Berger, University of Haifa, Israel Demos and Tools Track Chairs • Sandra Greiner, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark • Leopoldo Teixeira, Federal University of Pernambuco Projects Showcase Chairs • Daniel Struber, Chalmers, University of Gothenburg, Radbound University, Sweden • Dalila Tamzalit, Nantes Université, France Hall of Fame Chairs • Martin Becker, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany • Goetz Botterweck, Lero - The Irish Software Research Centre and University of Limerick, Ireland • Natsuko Noda, Shibaura Institute of Technology, Japan Workshops Chairs • Lidia Fuentes, Universidad de Malaga, Spain • Malte Lochau, University of Siegen, Germany Tutorials Chairs • Loek Cleophas, Eindhoven University of Technology and Stellenbosch University, The Netherlands • Mahsa Varshosaz, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark Proceedings Chair • Sophie Fortz, King's College London, UK Publicity Chairs • Wesley Assunção, North Carolina State University, USA • Kentaro Yoshimura, Hitachi Ltd, Japan Local Organiser and Finance Chair • George A. Papadopoulos, University of Cyprus, Cyprus

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[CFP – Deadline Extended] LPKM 2026
by imen touati 19 Jan '26

19 Jan '26

Call for Papers The ANLP Research Group of the MIRACL Laboratory, University of Sfax, Tunisia, is pleased to announce the 4th International Conference on Language Processing and Knowledge Management LPKM 2026, which will be held in Sousse, Tunisia, from May 5 to 7, 2026. This edition provides an opportunity to present cutting-edge research, promote interdisciplinary collaborations, and address emerging challenges in language processing, knowledge management, artificial intelligence, and intelligent systems Relevant topics for the conference include, but are not limited to, the following areas: 1. Artificial Intelligence and Data Science - Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Agents - Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning - Natural Language Processing (NLP) - Large Language Models (LLMs) - Data Science and Knowledge Engineering - Computer Vision and Image Processing 2. Systems, Software, and Security - Systems and Computing - Information Systems - Software Engineering and Software Architecture - System and Software Security - Security and Trust - Cloud Computing and Internet of Things (IoT) - Blockchain and Distributed Systems 3. Theory and Formal Methods - Algorithms, Automata, and Complexity - Logic, Semantics, and Theory of Programming - Static Analysis, Verification, and Testing 4. Cross-Domain AI Applications - AI in Healthcare - AI in Auditing - AI in Taxation, Economics, and Management - AI in Intelligent Automation - AI in Fraud Detection and Risk Management - AI in Finance and Financial Systems - AI-Driven Decision-Support Systems Paper Submission Authors are invited to submit their papers in PDF format via the CMT conference management system. Submitted papers must: - be written in English, - present original work not previously published or submitted elsewhere, - not exceed 10 pages (including tables, figures, and references), - follow the Springer LNCS format. All submissions will be reviewed based on relevance, originality, significance, and clarity. The conference proceedings will be submitted to Springer for publication and for indexing in DBLP and Scopus. Important Dates - Paper Submission Deadline (Extended): 31 January 2026 - Notification of Acceptance: 5 March 2026 - Camera-Ready Submission: 20 March 2026 - Conference Dates: 5–7 May 2026 For further information, please contact the organizing committee at: lpkm2026(a)fsegs.u-sfax.tn Conference website: https://sites.google.com/fsegs.usf.tn/lpkm-2026/home ___________________________ ___________________________________Imen TouatiPhd in Computer sciences

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[Jobs] PhD and postdoc positions in Human-Centric Explainable NLU
by Isabelle Augenstein 19 Jan '26

19 Jan '26

The Natural Language Understanding Research group<https://www.copenlu.com/> at the Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen<https://di.ku.dk/> is offering a PhD and postdoc position each on a new interdisciplinary project on “Human-Centered Explainable Retrieval-Augmented LLMs”<https://dff.dk/en/our-funded-projects/see-an-overview-of-supported-research…> funded by the Independent Research Foundation Denmark<https://dff.dk/en/>, led by Isabelle Augenstein<https://isabelleaugenstein.github.io/> and Irina Shklovski<https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ufIlFCIAAAAJ&hl=en>. Read more about reasons to join CopeNLU here<https://www.copenlu.com/post/why-ucph/>. PhD position The PhD position is fully funded for three years and open to candidates with a Master’s degree or equivalent in Computer Science or a related field. The PhD student’s research is expected to focus on explanation steering for human-centric RAG. The ideal candidate would thus have an educational background, prior research or work experience in ML or NLP. The PhD student would be supervised by Isabelle Augenstein<https://isabelleaugenstein.github.io/> and co-supervised by Irina Shklovski<https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ufIlFCIAAAAJ&hl=en>, and also collaborate with the larger project team. In addition to a postdoc to be recruited, this includes external collaborators, including in information retrieval. Read more about the position and apply here<https://employment.ku.dk/phd/?show=153280> by 1 February 2026 to be considered. The expected start date is 1 September 2026. Postdoc position The postdoc position is also offered for three years and open to candidates with a PhD degree in Computer Science or another relevant field. The postdoc’s duties will be to conduct research on user-centric RAG and information needs of people interacting with AI. The ideal candidate would thus have an educational background, prior research or work experience at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing. The postdoc would work with Irina Shklovski<https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ufIlFCIAAAAJ&hl=en> and Isabelle Augenstein<https://isabelleaugenstein.github.io/>, and also collaborate with the larger project team. Read more about the position and apply here<https://jobportal.ku.dk/videnskabelige-stillinger/?show=153139> by 1 February 2026 to be considered. The expected start date is 1 September 2026. Isabelle Augenstein, Dr. Scient., Ph.D. Professor and Head of the NLP Section, Department of Computer Science (DIKU) Co-Lead, Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence University of Copenhagen Østervold Observatory Øster Voldgade 3 1350 Copenhagen augenstein(a)di.ku.dk<mailto:augenstein@di.ku.dk> http://isabelleaugenstein.github.io/

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2nd CfP and Mentorship Provision — Workshop on Dialects in NLP: A Resource Perspective (at LREC 2026)
by s.bompolas＠athenarc.gr 19 Jan '26

19 Jan '26

2nd Call for Papers and Mentorship Provision Dialects in NLP: A Resource Perspective (DialRes-LREC26) Workshop at LREC 2026 — Palma de Mallorca, Spain Dialectal and non-standard varieties pose persistent challenges for linguistic resource development. While in-depth study and large-scale resource creation for dominant or standard varieties have driven major advances in language technology, linguistic resources that adequately represent dialectal variation remain scarce. It therefore remains an open question whether standard-centric practices address dialectal variation or instead create new problems for dialects. DialRes-LREC26 invites submissions on the creation, analysis, and evaluation of dialectal resources, including—but not limited to—work that critically examines how standard-centric methodologies impact dialects in the development of linguistic resources and models. We especially encourage contributions addressing the consequences of such practices for speech and morphosyntactic modelling, OCR of dialectal and historical texts, orthographic normalisation and homogenisation, annotation practices and lemmatisation strategies that abstract away or suppress dialectal forms, as well as analyses of how these choices affect dialects and their communities methodologically, economically, and socially. The workshop focuses on problems, limitations, and trade-offs in developing dialectal resources from a linguistic perspective, while encouraging the creation and evaluation of resources in formats that enable reuse by the NLP community. Workshop Topics • Development and evaluation of dialectal oral and textual resources • Orthographic normalisation and homogenisation, including their impact on dialectal variation • Dialects vs. standard language varieties in annotation frameworks • Cross-lingual and cross-dialectal transfer and model adaptation • Resource scalability issues and techniques • Use and limitations of large language models (LLMs) in dialectal resource development • OCR for dialectal, non-standard, and historical texts: challenges, errors, and downstream effects • Resources for, and applications supporting, dialect revitalisation and preservation • Dialectal studies and teaching from a resource-oriented perspective • Working on dialectal resources: academic, financial, legal, and societal issues • Enabling and empowering dialect communities to develop their own resources Author Support The workshop will offer individual tutoring and mentoring upon request. Interested authors should contact the organizers at least 10 days before the paper submission deadline at: dialres-lrec26(a)googlegroups.com This support is addressed especially to early-career researchers and contributors working with dialectal data who have limited or no prior experience in developing NLP-oriented resources. Submission Information Instructions for Authors Submissions are electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system via the link: https://softconf.com/lrec2026/DialRes. They must be 4 to 8 pages long (excluding references and potential Ethics Statements) and follow the LREC stylesheet, available on the conference website on the Author’s kit page Author’s Kit. All templates are also available from this page. Important Dates • 20 February 2026 — Submission Deadline • 11 March 2026 — Notification of Acceptance • 28 March 2026 — Camera-ready Papers Due Resubmissions from the LREC Main Conference It will also be possible to submit papers that were rejected from the LREC 2026 main conference to DialRes 2026. Such submissions must be revised to fit the scope and format of the workshop and must comply with the same anonymization requirements. Endorsements The workshop is endorsed by UniDive COST Action CA21167 and Archimedes Athena R.C. Organizing Committee • Antonios Anastasopoulos — George Mason University / Archimedes–Athena RC • Stella Markantonatou — ILSP / Archimedes–Athena RC • Angela Ralli — University of Patras / Archimedes–Athena RC • Marcos Zampieri — George Mason University • Stavros Bompolas — Archimedes–Athena RC • Vivian Stamou — Archimedes–Athena RC

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Call For Participation: MedGenVidQA Shared Task at BioNLP 2026
by deepak.gupta＠nih.gov 19 Jan '26

19 Jan '26

Dear Colleagues and Friends, We are pleased to announce MedGenVidQA, a shared task co-located with BioNLP 2026. This challenge focuses on generative approaches to medical video question answering and aims to develop models for the following tasks: - Task A: Retrieving relevant multimodal information for medical questions. - Task B: Locating visual segments as answers to medical questions within professional medical videos. - Task C: Generating multimodal question-answer pairs from medical videos. For more details, please visit the shared task website: https://medgenvidqa.github.io/ Important Dates - Release of training and validation datasets: Jan 16, 2026 - Release of multimodal corpus: Jan 30, 2026 - Release of test sets: Feb 16, 2026 - Run submission deadline: Mar 15, 2026 (Task A); Mar 31, 2026 (Tasks B and C) - Release of official results: Apr 10, 2026 - Paper submission deadline: Apr 24, 2026 We look forward to your participation. Please join our Google Group (https://groups.google.com/g/medgenvidqa2026) for important updates. If you have any questions, you may contact us through the Google Group or via email. Thank you, MedGenVidQA 2026 Organizers

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[IRAI-ECIR 2026] First Workshop on Information Retrieval for Accountability and Integrity
by Yohei Seki 18 Jan '26

18 Jan '26

Hello, We are excited to invite you to IRAI 2026 - the First Workshop on Information Retrieval for Accountability and Integrity, a full-day pilot workshop dedicated to exploring how IR and NLP can help evaluate forward-looking statements, verify commitments, and restore trust across public and private domains. - What IRAI aims to do Information systems shape public discourse, decisions, and trust?yet we lack systematic ways to evaluate the accuracy of forward-looking statements (e.g., campaign promises, corporate forecasts). Media coverage is selective, standards are uneven, and the signal is buried in noise. The result: accountability gaps and eroded confidence. IRAI brings IR and NLP communities together to assess the fulfilment and reliability of claims and commitments. It complements ECIR’s mission by tackling a pressing, real-world challenge with societal impact. - Aligned with the NLP community IRAI 2026 will be part of the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) held in Delft on April, 2nd 2026 as it highlights concrete applications for social good. - Important Information * When: Apr 2, 2026 * Where: Delft, Netherlands * Submission Deadline: Feb 1, 2026 * Notification Due: Feb 21, 2026 * Final Version Due: Mar 1, 2026 - More info and Registration: https://nlpfin.github.io/sites/ECIR2026.html -- IRAI organizers

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Call For Papers and Participation: BioNLP 2026 and Shared Tasks @ ACL 2026
by ddemner＠mail.nih.gov 18 Jan '26

18 Jan '26

BIONLP 2026 and Shared Tasks @ ACL 2026 https://aclweb.org/aclwiki/BioNLP_Workshop *Tentative* Important Dates (All submission deadlines are 11:59 p.m. UTC-12:00 “anywhere on Earth”) Paper submission deadline: April 17 (Friday), 2026 Notification of acceptance: May 4 (Monday), 2026 Camera-ready paper due: May 12 (Tuesday), 2026 Workshop: July 3 OR 4, 2026 Please watch for the updates! SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS ----------------------------------------- Two types of submissions are invited: full papers and short papers. Full papers should not exceed eight (8) pages of text, plus unlimited references. These are intended to be reports of original research. BioNLP aims to be the forum for interesting, innovative, and promising work involving biomedicine and language technology, whether or not yielding high performance at the moment. This by no means precludes our interest in and preference for mature results, strong performance, and thorough evaluation. Both types of research and combinations thereof are encouraged. Short papers may consist of up to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited references. Appropriate short paper topics include preliminary results, application notes, descriptions of work in progress, etc. Electronic Submission Submissions must be electronic and in PDF format, using the Softconf START conference management system Submissions need to be anonymous. Submission site for the workshop: START system (link coming soon) Please follow the ACL formatting guidelines: https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files Dual submission policy: papers may NOT be submitted to the BioNLP workshop if they are or will be concurrently submitted to another meeting or publication. WORKSHOP OVERVIEW AND SCOPE ----------------------------------------- The BioNLP workshop, associated with the ACL SIGBIOMED special interest group, is an established primary venue for presenting research in language processing and language understanding for the biological and medical domains. The workshop has been running every year since 2002 and continues getting stronger. Many other emerging biomedical and clinical language processing workshops can afford to be more specialized because BioNLP truly encompasses the breadth of the domain and brings together researchers in bio- and clinical NLP from all over the world. The interest in biomedical and clinical language continues to broaden due to unprecedented advances supported by success stories in improving health through supporting patients and clinicians. Access to biomedical information became easier, and more people generate and access health-related text. Only language technologies can enable and support adequate use of the biomedical and clinical text in most use cases. The advances in pre-trained language models and foundation models make all parties involved in healthcare turn to language technologies in the hope of getting tangible support in satisfying information needs, facilitating research and improving clinical documentation and healthcare. In addition to exposing BioNLP researchers to the mainstream ACL research, the workshop is a venue for informing the mainstream ACL researchers about the fast growing and important domain of biomedical / clinical language processing. BioNLP 2026 will focus on evaluation frameworks and metrics that reflect the needs of health-related use cases and provide a good estimate of reliability of the proposed solutions. BioNLP 2026 will continue focusing on transparency of the generative approaches and factuality of the generated text. Language processing that supports DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility) continues to be of utmost importance. The work on detection and mitigation of bias and misinformation continues to be paramount. Research in languages other than English, particularly, under-represented languages, and health disparities are always of interest to BioNLP. Other areas of interest include, but are not limited to: * Entity identification and normalization (linking) for a broad range of semantic categories; * Extraction of complex relations and events; * Discourse analysis; Anaphora / coreference resolution; * Question Answering; Summarization; Text simplification; * Resources and strategies for system testing and evaluation; * Synthetic data generation and data augmentation; * Translating NLP research into practice: tangible explainable results of biomedical language processing applications. * Reproducibility of the published findings. SHARED TASKS ----------------------------------------- BioNLP has a long-standing tradition of sponsoring Shared Tasks. This year, we invited SIGBioMed members to submit a description of a shared task to be included with the BioNLP proposal. We received four strong detailed descriptions of the tasks, which were reviewed by the workshop organizers. These well-defined and timely tasks are briefly described below. MedExACT This task involves detection and labeling of medical decisions in ICU discharge summaries, with evaluation metrics emphasizing both accuracy and fairness across demographic and disease subgroups at the span and token levels, as well as through stratified analyses to measure robustness against biases in sex, race, English proficiency, and disease type. Baseline models such as RoBERTa indicated the complexity of the task, and participants will be supported with expedited access to MedDec through PhysioNet, a public leaderboard, and a starter kit in Python. The training and validation splits of MedDec are currently available on PhysioNet, while the test split has not been released and will remain withheld until the evaluation phase. Please join the google group to receive notifications and register your team https://groups.google.com/g/medexact-acl2026. If you have any question, feel free to send an email to medexact-acl2026+owner(a)googlegroups.com. PsyDefDetect: Detecting Psychological Defense Mechanisms in Conversations This task focuses on classifying Seeker’s utterances in supportive conversations into specific Psychological Defense Levels based on the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales (DMRS) framework. The benchmark addresses the challenge of capturing subtle linguistic cues of deep-seated psychological mechanisms within highly informal and context-dependent emotional dialogues. This initiative supports research at the intersection of clinical psychology and NLP, aiming to operationalize complex psychological constructs for computational analysis. Participating systems will be ranked using Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F1-score. Task Homepage: https://psydefdetect-shared-task.github.io/ MedGenVidQA The MedGenVidQA shared task focuses on developing systems that utilize generative models to retrieve relevant multimodal (textual and visual) sources and to localize visual answers within medical videos in response to consumer and healthcare professional medical queries. Additionally, resource creation in the medical domain is both costly and time-consuming, as it often requires medical expertise. In this context, we also aim to assess the capability of generative models to create question–answer pairs from medical videos. Following earlier editions of medical question answering tasks: MedVidQA 2023, MedVidQA 2024, BioGen 2024, and BioGen 2025, this shared task expands medical video question answering for both professionals and consumers, with a focus on generative approaches to solving these tasks. See details at https://medgenvidqa.github.io/ Clinical Skill QA This task extends evaluation to a multimodal setting. Given an image of a medical student’s procedure, a question, and four answer options, the goal is for participants to train a model to generate the correct response. The dataset will be constructed from ~80 video clips of medical student clinical procedures, collected from a partner medical school. This task provides a unified framework for benchmarking, diagnosing, and advancing LLM capabilities for both clinical decision support and medical training. Evaluation will follow a multiple-choice QA setup with accuracy as the primary metric, with additional stratified analyses by skill type and modality.

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CfP: 2nd Workshop on Computational Humor (CHum @ ACL 2026)
by Tristan Miller 17 Jan '26

17 Jan '26

Call for papers: 2nd Workshop on Computational Humor (CHum 2026) ================================================================ The 2nd Workshop on Computational Humor (CHum 2026) will take place virtually on July 3 or 4, 2026 as part of the 64th Annual Meeting of the the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026). Scope and topics ---------------- CHum 2026 aims to foster further work on modeling the processes of humor with current methods in computational linguistics and natural language processing, against the theoretical backdrop of humor research and with reference to relevant corpora of textual, visual, and multimodal materials. A principal goal of the workshop is to unite researchers who can together probe the limits of various meaning representations -- symbolic, neural, and hybrid -- for humor processing. We welcome contributions on any topic relevant to the computational processing of humor, including but not limited to the following: * LLMs, knowledge representation * Resources and evaluation * Human-computer interaction * Computer-mediated communication * Assisted content creation * Machine and computer-assisted translation * Digital humanities applications * Formal modeling of humor * Proof-of-concept humor detection and classification Particularly encouraged are submissions describing inter- or multi-disciplinary work, whether completed or in progress, and position papers that critically discuss the past, present, and future of computational humor systems. Submission instructions ----------------------- Long and short papers should be formatted according to the same guidelines for the main ACL 2026 conference papers <https://2026.aclweb.org/calls/main_conference_papers/>. Submission instructions will be added to a future version of this call and also posted to the workshop website <https://chumweb.org/>. Important dates --------------- All deadlines are at 23:59 UTC-12:00 ("anywhere on Earth"). * Initial submission: March 5, 2026 * Notification of acceptance: April 28, 2026 * Camera-ready submission: May 12, 2026 * Workshop: July 3 or 4, 2026 Organizers ---------- * Christian F. Hempelmann, East Texas A&M University * Julia Rayz, Purdue University * Ori Amir, Fulbright University Vietnam * Tristan Miller, University of Manitoba * Tiansi Dong, University of Cambridge Further information ------------------- * Website: <https://chumweb.org/> * E-mail: chum(a)groups.io -- Dr. Tristan Miller, Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science, University of Manitoba https://clam.cs.umanitoba.ca/ | Tel. +1 204 474 6792

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CFP: BioNLP 2026 and Shared Tasks @ ACL 2026
by ddemner＠gmail.com 17 Jan '26

17 Jan '26

BIONLP 2026 and Shared Tasks @ ACL 2026 https://aclweb.org/aclwiki/BioNLP_Workshop *Tentative* Important Dates (All submission deadlines are 11:59 p.m. UTC-12:00 “anywhere on Earth”) Paper submission deadline: April 17 (Friday), 2026 Notification of acceptance: May 4 (Monday), 2026 Camera-ready paper due: May 12 (Tuesday), 2026 Workshop: July 3 OR 4, 2026 Please watch for the updates! WORKSHOP OVERVIEW AND SCOPE ----------------------------------------- The BioNLP workshop, associated with the ACL SIGBIOMED special interest group, is an established primary venue for presenting research in language processing and language understanding for the biological and medical domains. The workshop has been running every year since 2002 and continues getting stronger. Many other emerging biomedical and clinical language processing workshops can afford to be more specialized because BioNLP truly encompasses the breadth of the domain and brings together researchers in bio- and clinical NLP from all over the world. The interest in biomedical and clinical language continues to broaden due to unprecedented advances supported by success stories in improving health through supporting patients and clinicians. Access to biomedical information became easier, and more people generate and access health-related text. Only language technologies can enable and support adequate use of the biomedical and clinical text in most use cases. The advances in pre-trained language models and foundation models make all parties involved in healthcare turn to language technologies in the hope of getting tangible support in satisfying information needs, facilitating research and improving clinical documentation and healthcare. In addition to exposing BioNLP researchers to the mainstream ACL research, the workshop is a venue for informing the mainstream ACL researchers about the fast growing and important domain of biomedical / clinical language processing. BioNLP 2026 will focus on evaluation frameworks and metrics that reflect the needs of health-related use cases and provide a good estimate of reliability of the proposed solutions. BioNLP 2026 will continue focusing on transparency of the generative approaches and factuality of the generated text. Language processing that supports DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility) continues to be of utmost importance. The work on detection and mitigation of bias and misinformation continues to be paramount. Research in languages other than English, particularly, under-represented languages, and health disparities are always of interest to BioNLP. Other areas of interest include, but are not limited to: * Entity identification and normalization (linking) for a broad range of semantic categories; * Extraction of complex relations and events; * Discourse analysis; Anaphora / coreference resolution; * Question Answering; Summarization; Text simplification; * Resources and strategies for system testing and evaluation; * Synthetic data generation and data augmentation; * Translating NLP research into practice: tangible explainable results of biomedical language processing applications. * Reproducibility of the published findings. SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS ----------------------------------------- Two types of submissions are invited: full papers and short papers. Full papers should not exceed eight (8) pages of text, plus unlimited references. These are intended to be reports of original research. BioNLP aims to be the forum for interesting, innovative, and promising work involving biomedicine and language technology, whether or not yielding high performance at the moment. This by no means precludes our interest in and preference for mature results, strong performance, and thorough evaluation. Both types of research and combinations thereof are encouraged. Short papers may consist of up to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited references. Appropriate short paper topics include preliminary results, application notes, descriptions of work in progress, etc. Electronic Submission Submissions must be electronic and in PDF format, using the Softconf START conference management system Submissions need to be anonymous. Submission site for the workshop: START system (link coming soon) Please follow the ACL formatting guidelines: https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files Dual submission policy: papers may NOT be submitted to the BioNLP workshop if they are or will be concurrently submitted to another meeting or publication. SHARED TASKS ----------------------------------------- BioNLP has a long-standing tradition of sponsoring Shared Tasks. This year, we invited SIGBioMed members to submit a description of a shared task to be included with the BioNLP proposal. We received four strong detailed descriptions of the tasks, which were reviewed by the workshop organizers. These well-defined and timely tasks are briefly described below. MedExACT This task involves detection and labeling of medical decisions in ICU discharge summaries, with evaluation metrics emphasizing both accuracy and fairness across demographic and disease subgroups at the span and token levels, as well as through stratified analyses to measure robustness against biases in sex, race, English proficiency, and disease type. Baseline models such as RoBERTa indicated the complexity of the task, and participants will be supported with expedited access to MedDec through PhysioNet, a public leaderboard, and a starter kit in Python. The training and validation splits of MedDec are currently available on PhysioNet, while the test split has not been released and will remain withheld until the evaluation phase. Please join the google group to receive notifications and register your team https://groups.google.com/g/medexact-acl2026. If you have any question, feel free to send an email to medexact-acl2026+owner(a)googlegroups.com. PsyDefDetect: Detecting Psychological Defense Mechanisms in Conversations This task focuses on classifying Seeker’s utterances in supportive conversations into specific Psychological Defense Levels based on the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales (DMRS) framework. The benchmark addresses the challenge of capturing subtle linguistic cues of deep-seated psychological mechanisms within highly informal and context-dependent emotional dialogues. This initiative supports research at the intersection of clinical psychology and NLP, aiming to operationalize complex psychological constructs for computational analysis. Participating systems will be ranked using Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F1-score. Task Homepage: https://psydefdetect-shared-task.github.io/ BioGen The task focuses on grounding answers with reference attribution to mitigate generation of false statements by LLMs when answering biomedical questions. BioGen 2026 introduces generation of multimodal answers from textual and visual sources with citations, leveraging PubMed and HealthVidQA as multimodal sources. The test set is based on the information requests submitted by self-identified non-clinicians to the MedlinePlus service provided by the National Library of Medicine. The evaluation will leverage BioACE, an automated metric that strongly correlates with human evaluation on the BioGen 2024 textual dataset. Clinical Skill QA This task extends evaluation to a multimodal setting. Given an image of a medical student’s procedure, a question, and four answer options, the goal is for participants to train a model to generate the correct response. The dataset will be constructed from ~80 video clips of medical student clinical procedures, collected from a partner medical school. This task provides a unified framework for benchmarking, diagnosing, and advancing LLM capabilities for both clinical decision support and medical training. Evaluation will follow a multiple-choice QA setup with accuracy as the primary metric, with additional stratified analyses by skill type and modality. Organizers ----------------------------------------- Dina Demner-Fushman, US National Library of Medicine Sophia Ananiadou, National Centre for Text Mining and University of Manchester, UK Kirk Roberts, UTHealth, Houston, Texas Jun-ichi Tsujii, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan

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2nd Call for paper: The Information Disorder Workshop
by Marco Antonio Stranisci 16 Jan '26

16 Jan '26

The Information Disorder Workshop Collocated with LREC 2026 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain https://information-disorder-workshop.github.io/ * February 17: Paper submission * March 17: Notification of acceptance * March 30: Camera-ready submission * May 12, 2026: InDor at LREC! Online disinformation is a pressing challenge for our societies. Its role in influencing elections (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017) and behaviours (van der Linden et al., 2020) has gathered the attention of different societal actors aimed at mitigating its negative impact. The Natural Language Processing (NLP) community is contributing to fighting this phenomenon with a growing number of datasets (Hussain et al., 2025) and technologies (VeraAI, AskVera, Bellingcat) (Lupi et al., 2023; Wuhrl et al., 2023) for the automatic recognition of fake news. However, this field of research suffers from a lack of a common theoretical framework, which causes a fragmentation of approaches. The increasing attention of the NLP community to human-label variation (Plank, 2022) raises additional challenges regarding the cross-cultural and pragmatic implications that determine the spreading of disinformation (Dabbous et al., 2022). The goal of the Information Disorder (InDor) workshop is to promote an interdisciplinary and intersectorial discussion towards the development of NLP research on disinformation. Information Disorder is a recent framework introduced by Wardle and Derakhshan (2017) to organize theories, definitions, and approaches for the study of disinformation. The framework is characterized by two main pillars: 1) acknowledging the need to categorize fake news under a finer-grained taxonomy of disorders (mis-information, dis-information, and mal-information); 2) exploring the role of the contextual factors that determine the spreading of fake news. InDor aims to - Define a common theoretical ground for the research on disinformation in NLP and beyond - Discuss the cultural factors determining subjectivity to disinformation - Promote interdisciplinarity in the development of datasets and models - Discuss the impact of real-world applications to contrast disinformation The InDor workshop (half-day duration) will be co-located with the fifteenth biennial Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) held at the Palau de Congressos de Palma in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, on 11-16 May 2026. Submissions When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC authors to share the described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.) to enable their reuse and replicability of experiments (including evaluation ones). In addition, authors will be required to adhere to ethical research policies on AI and may include an ethics statement in their papers. The papers should be submitted as a PDF document, conforming to the formatting guidelines provided in the call for papers of the LREC conference. Templates are provided here https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/ We accept three types of submissions: - Regular research papers; - Non-archival submissions: like research papers, but will not be included in the proceedings; - (Non-archival) research communications: 1-page abstracts summarising relevant research published elsewhere. InDor will also accept submissions that have been rejected from ACL rolling review, provided they are accompanied by their reviews, and they fit the topic of the workshop. Research papers (archival or non-archival) may consist of up to 8 pages of content. Research communications may consist of up to 1 page of content. Please make the submission here: https://softconf.com/lrec2026/InDor26/ Topics We invite original research papers specifically on the following topics, with a particular focus on resources, taxonomies, and benchmarks for the evaluation of NLP systems on Information Disorder: - new interdisciplinary theoretical proposals and foundational aspects - surveys on Information Disorder - multiculturality and multilinguality in datasets and technologies - interdisciplinary computational methods and frameworks - community- and user-centred approaches - real-world applications to contrast false information - experimental applications and projects for social good - evaluation of Information Disorder-focused systems - generative approaches to contrast false information - participatory approaches - positions on Information Disorder Submissions are open to all and are to be submitted anonymously (and must conform to the instructions for double-blind review). All papers will be refereed through a double-blind peer review process by at least three reviewers, with final acceptance decisions made by the workshop organisers. Scientific papers will be evaluated based on relevance, significance of contribution, impact, technical quality, scholarship, and quality of presentation. Attendance At least one author of each accepted paper is required to participate in the conference and present the work, in-person or online. Workshop organisers: Simona Frenda, Heriot-Watt University Marco Antonio Stranisci, University of Turin Shaina Ashraf, Phillips University of Marburg Ada Ren, Macquarie University Ioannis Konstas, Heriot-Watt University Usman Naseem, Macquarie University Contact us at s.frenda(a)hw.ac.uk if you have any questions. Website: https://information-disorder-workshop.github.io/ Marco, UNITO <https://www.unito.it/persone/mstranis> and aequa-tech <https://aequa-tech.com/> "Aoki è sboccato e ancora inesperto, ma dentro di sé nasconde una sensibilità delicata e gentile. È questo ciò che mi comunicano le sue storie. Hayashi, sono certo che lei riuscirà a illuminare il suo cammino" Taiyo Matsumoto

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