10th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH) @EMNLP: 1st CFP
*** First Call for Papers + Call for Mentors/Mentees *** We invite paper submissions to the 10th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH), which will take place on 24-29 October at EMNLP 2026. Website: https://www.workshopononlineabuse.com/cfp.html Important Dates
* Registration deadline for mentorship programme: April 10, 2026
* Notification of mentor/mentee match: April 25, 2026
* Submission due: June 26, 2026
* ARR reviewed submission due: August 3, 2026
* Notification of acceptance: August 15, 2026
* Camera-ready papers due: September 10, 2026
* Workshop: 24-29 October 2026
Overview
Digital technologies have brought significant benefits to society, transforming how people connect, communicate, and interact. However, these same technologies have also enabled the widespread dissemination and amplification of abusive and harmful content, such as hate speech, harassment, and misinformation. Given the sheer volume of content shared online, addressing abuse and harm at scale requires the use of computational tools. Yet, detecting and moderating online abuse remains a complex task, fraught with technical, social, legal, and ethical challenges.
The 10th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH) invites paper submissions from a diverse range of fields, including but not limited to natural language processing, machine learning, computational social science, law, political science, psychology, sociology, and cultural studies. We explicitly encourage interdisciplinary research, technical and non-technical contributions, and submissions that focus on under-resourced languages. Non-archival papers and civil society reports are also welcome.
Topics covered by WOAH include, but are not limited to:
* New models or methods for detecting abusive and harmful online content, including misinformation;
* Biases and limitations in existing detection models or datasets for abusive and harmful content, especially those in commercial use;
* Development of new datasets and taxonomies for online abuse and harms;
* Novel evaluation metrics and procedures for detecting harmful content;
* Analyses of the dynamics of online abuse, its propagation, and its impact on different communities;
* Social, legal, and ethical considerations in detecting, monitoring, and moderating online abuse.
Special Theme: “Ten Years of WOAH: Reflecting on Progress and New Frontiers” In its 10th edition, WOAH highlights the theme “Ten Years of WOAH: Reflecting on Progress and New Frontiers”. Over the past decade, WOAH has become a central interdisciplinary venue for online harms research. As harms and enabling technologies have evolved, the field has moved beyond an early focus on textual hate speech and harassment to address more complex phenomena. Advances in AI and online ecosystems have expanded the scale and diversity of harms. Transformer models, multimodal platforms, and recommendation systems have contributed to the escalation of issues like misinformation, radicalisation, child sexual exploitation, identity-based abuse, algorithmic bias, privacy violations, and AI-mediated harms. Methods tackling this have evolved from monolingual lexicon-based approaches to deep learning, multilinguality, multimodality, interpretability, and interdisciplinarity.
Despite this progress, fundamental challenges remain. There is limited consensus on what constitutes “harm”, how context and thresholds should be defined, or how harms vary across cultures and modalities. These ambiguities affect datasets and models, constrain comparability, and often marginalise affected communities. The past decade also calls for critical self-reflection. Research has frequently prioritised detection, high-resource languages, and narrowly defined phenomena over intervention, global perspectives, and systemic or structural harms, with insufficient attention to user agency, platform incentives, lived experience, and participatory approaches. Finally, ten years of work have underscored that interdisciplinarity is essential for addressing the sociotechnical nature of the phenomenon. Addressing future online harms will require deeper integration across NLP, ML, social sciences, law, policy, and HCI. WOAH 10 seeks to consolidate lessons from the past decade, identify enduring gaps, and connect research, practice, and policy to guide the next generation of work on online harms.
[NEW!] Mentorship Programme
In light of our theme of reflecting on the past decade, we as organisers have also taken time for self-reflection. While we emphasise the importance of interdisciplinary work, the increasing number of submissions (which we are extremely proud and happy about!) has required us to apply our submission guidelines more strictly. In recent years, these issues have been particularly relevant for submissions coming from outside the NLP community. This signals that, if we do not take action, we risk failing to promote the very diversity we aim to support.
After listening to feedback from the community, we have decided to lower this barrier by launching the first-ever WOAH Mentorship Programme.
Link to register as mentor: https://forms.gle/XaK8KBFomaWZZwG98
Link to register as mentee: https://forms.gle/AC5akVcdzsCvwqEo7
As a mentee, you will be able to propose your WOAH project idea and outline the type of guidance or supervision you are seeking. As a mentor, you will be expected to support your mentee by meeting at least three times during the project (at the beginning, midway, and towards the end). We encourage mentees to include their mentors as co-authors of their WOAH submission.
Timeline:
* Register for the mentorship programme by 10th April
* Notification of mentor/mentee match by 25th April
Submission
Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system.
Submission link: TBA
The workshop will accept three types of papers.
1) Academic Papers (long and short): Long papers of up to 8 pages, excluding references, and short papers of up to 4 pages, excluding references. Unlimited pages for references and appendices. Accepted papers will be given an additional page of content to address reviewer comments. Previously published papers cannot be accepted.
2) Non-Archival Submissions: Up to 2 pages, excluding references, to summarise and showcase in-progress work and work published elsewhere.
3) Civil Society Reports: Non-archival submissions, with a minimum of 2 pages and no upper limit. Can include work published elsewhere.
All submissions must use the official ACL style fileshttps://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files. Submissions that do not conform to the required styles, including paper size, margin width, and font size restrictions, will be rejected without review. All submissions should adhere to the workshop policies https://www.workshopononlineabuse.com/policies.html.
WOAH Community
We are excited to share the WOAH community Slack channel — a workspace for researchers interested in or working on understanding and addressing online abuse and harms!
Join us here: https://join.slack.com/t/hatespeechdet-47d7560/shared_invite/zt-2a8d96j4z-gk...
Contact Info
Please send any questions about the workshop to organizers@workshopononlineabuse.commailto:organizers@workshopononlineabuse.com
Organisers
Agostina Calabrese, Cohere
Thomas Davidson, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Christine de Kock, University of Melbourne
Urja Khurana, Delft University of Technology
Marta Marchiori Manerba, University of Turin
Paloma Piot, Universidade da Coruña
Zeerak Talat, University of Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. Is e buidheann carthannais a th’ ann an Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann, clàraichte an Alba, àireamh clàraidh SC005336.