*Call for Papers* *CHiPSAL 2026* *Second Workshop on Challenges in Processing South Asian Languages @LREC 2026* *16 May 2026*

We are pleased to announce the *Second Workshop on Challenges in Processing South Asian Languages (CHiPSAL 2026)*, to be held in *hybrid mode on 16 May 2026*, co-located with *LREC 2026*.

CHiPSAL 2026 invites *substantial, original, and unpublished research* on all areas of natural language processing, language resources, and evaluation—covering spoken, signed, and multimodal language—as well as system demonstrations. We welcome long and short papers addressing challenges, resources, tools, and innovations for *South Asian languages*. Topics include, but are not limited to:

- Encoding and Unicode issues - Orthographic complexities - Morphology and generation - Dialectal variation and standardisation - Code-mixing and multilingualism - Building linguistic resources - Speech recognition and synthesis - Technology for linguistic heritage preservation - Benchmarking models - Large language models for South Asian languages

------------------------------ *Important Dates (AoE)*

- Submission Deadline: *20 February 2026* - Notification of Acceptance: *20 March 2026* - Camera-ready Papers:* 30 March 2026* - Workshop (Hybrid): *16 May 2026*

------------------------------ *Submission Guidelines*

CHiPSAL 2026 accepts *oral*, *poster*, and *poster+demo* papers.

- Short papers: 4 pages - Long papers: 8 pages (Excluding ethics/limitations, references, acknowledgements, and data/code availability statements)

All submissions must:

- Follow the *LREC 2026 stylesheet*: https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/ - Be *fully anonymised* for double-blind review - Include required ethics/limitations and data/code availability statements - Be self-contained (no appendices or supplementary files at submission) - Be relevant to South Asian language processing

Papers must report *original, unpublished work*. Concurrent submissions must be declared. Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings.

Authors are encouraged to submit related resources to the *LRE Map*: https://lremap.elra.info/ ------------------------------ *Shared Tasks*

CHiPSAL 2026 also hosts two shared tasks:

1.

*Multimodal Hate and Sentiment Understanding in Low-Resource Memes* https://sites.google.com/view/chipsal/shared-tasks_1/shared-task-1

*Multilingual ASR for South Asian Languages* https://sites.google.com/view/chipsal/shared-tasks_1/shared-task-2

We warmly encourage participation in these shared tasks. ------------------------------ *More Information*

Workshop website: https://sites.google.com/view/chipsal/ *Organising Committee*

- Kengatharaiyer Sarveswaran, University of Jaffna, Jaffna, Sri Lanka. - Ashwini Vaidya, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India. - Bal Krishna Bal, Kathmandu University, Kathmandu, Nepal. - Surendrabikram Thapa, Virginia Tech, USA. - Tafseer Ahmed, Mohammad Ali Jinnah University, Karachi, Pakistan.

Do not miss the opportunity to submit your work, strengthen the South Asian NLP community, and support the development of language technology in one of the world’s most populous and linguistically diverse regions.

We look forward to your contributions.

Best regards, *The CHiPSAL 2026 Organising Committee*