22nd Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2026)

https://multiword.org/mwe2026/

Organized, sponsored, and endorsed by SIGLEX, the Special Interest Group on the Lexicon of the ACL, and by UniDive https://unidive.lisn.upsaclay.fr Cost Action CA21167.

Half-day workshop collocated with the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026, https://2026.eacl.org/), Rabat, Morocco.

NEW Important Dates

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Direct Submission deadline: December 19, December 27, 2025 -

Pre-reviewed (ARR) submission deadline: January 2, January 5, 2026 -

Notification of acceptance: January 23, 2026 -

Camera-ready paper due: February 3, 2026 -

Workshop dates: *March 28*, 2026,

All deadlines are at 23:59 UTC-12 (Anywhere on Earth).

Hybrid (on-site & on-line)

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Multiword expressions (MWEs), i.e., word combinations that exhibit lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and/or statistical idiosyncrasies (Baldwin and Kim, 2010), such as “by and large”, “hot dog”, “make a decision” and “break one's leg” are still a pain in the neck for Natural Language Processing (NLP). The notion of MWE encompasses closely related phenomena: idioms, compounds, light-verb constructions, phrasal verbs, rhetorical figures, collocations, institutionalized phrases, etc. Given their irregular nature, MWEs often pose complex problems in linguistic modeling (e.g., annotation), NLP tasks (e.g., parsing), and end-user applications (e.g., natural language understanding and Machine Translation), hence still representing an open issue for computational linguistics (Miletić and Schulte im Walde, 2024; Ramisch et al., 2023; Phelps et al., 2024; Mahajan et al., 2024).

For more than two decades, the topic of modeling and processing MWEs for NLP has been the focus of the MWE workshop, organized by the MWE section https://multiword.org/ of ACL-SIGLEX http://www.siglex.org/ in conjunction with major NLP conferences since 2003. Impressive progress has been made in the field, but our understanding of MWEs still requires much research, considering their need and usefulness in NLP applications. This is also relevant to domain-specific NLP pipelines that need to tackle terminologies most often realized as MWEs.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

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Computationally-applicable theoretical work in psycholinguistics and corpus linguistics; -

Annotation (expert, crowdsourcing, automatic) and representation in resources such as corpora, treebanks, e-lexicons, WordNets, constructions (also for low-resource languages); -

Processing in syntactic and semantic frameworks (e.g. CCG, CxG, HPSG, LFG, TAG, UD, etc.); -

Discovery and identification methods, including for specialized languages and domains such as clinical or biomedical NLP; -

Interpretation of MWEs and understanding of text containing them; -

Language acquisition, language learning, and non-standard language (e.g. tweets, speech); -

Evaluation of annotation and processing techniques; -

Retrospective comparative analyses from the PARSEME shared tasks; -

Processing for end-user applications (e.g. MT, NLU, summarisation, language learning, etc.); -

Implicit and explicit representation in pre-trained language models and end-user applications; -

Evaluation and probing of pre-trained language models; -

Resources and tools (e.g. lexicons, identifiers) and their integration into end-user applications; -

Multiword terminology extraction; -

Adaptation and transfer of annotations and related resources to new languages and domains including low-resource ones.

Co-located Shared tasks

The workshop MWE 2026 will host two shared tasks https://unidive.lisn.upsaclay.fr/doku.php?id=other-events:parseme-admire-st-call#call_for_participation :

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PARSEME 2.0, whose objective is to identify and paraphrase MWEs in written text, and -

AdMIRe 2 (Advancing Multimodal Idiomaticity Representation), which explores the comprehension ability of multimodal models for MWEs in a variety of languages.

Submission formats

The workshop invites two types of submissions:

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archival submissions that present substantially original research in both long paper format (8 pages + references) and short paper format (4 pages + references). -

non-archival submissions of abstracts describing relevant research presented/published elsewhere, which will not be included in the MWE proceedings.

Paper submission and templates

Papers should be submitted via the workshop's submission page https://openreview.net/group?id=eacl.org/EACL/2026/Workshop ( https://openreview.net/group?id=eacl.org/EACL/2026/Workshop). Please choose the appropriate submission format (archival/non-archival). Archival papers with existing reviews will also be accepted through the ACL Rolling Review. Submissions must follow the ACL stylesheet https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files.

Authors are encouraged, wherever relevant, to adopt the conventions on citing, glossing and translating multilingual examples of MWEs https://gitlab.com/parseme/pmwe/-/blob/master/Conventions-for-MWE-examples/PMWE_series_conventions_for_multilingual_examples.pdf promoted by the editors of the Phraseology and Multiword Expressions book series https://langsci-press.org/catalog/series/pmwe published by Language Science Press.

Organizing Committee

Verginica Barbu Mititelu, A. Seza Doğruöz, Alexandre Rademaker, Atul Kr. Ojha, Mathieu Constant, Ivelina Stoyanova

Anti-harassment policy

The workshop follows the ACL anti-harassment policy.

Contact

For any inquiries regarding the workshop, please send an email to the Organizing Committee at mwe2026workshop@gmail.com.