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KONVENS 2026 Second Call for Conference Papers https://konvens2026.uni-hamburg.de/

We are delighted to share the second call for papers with you for Konferenz zur Verarbeitung natürlicher Sprache (KONVENS) 2026, organized under the auspices of the GSCL, the DGfS-CL, the ÖGAI, and SwissNLP. This year’s KONVENS will take place in Hamburg, September 14 – 17 under the special theme “Context Matters: NLP Beyond Text”. The conference will include a diverse program including talks by our two keynote speakers:

* Dr. Valentin Hoffmann, Allen Institute for AI * Prof. Dr. Barbara Plank, LMU Munich.

We invite the submission of long and short papers featuring substantial, original, and unpublished research on Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics, to be archived in the ACL Anthology, as well as abstract submissions that describe research in progress or published elsewhere. Beyond standard research contributions, submissions are welcome that present negative results, survey an area, introduce new resources, articulate a position, report novel linguistic insights obtained using existing computational methods, or reproduce (successfully or not) previous findings.

We welcome the following types of paper submissions:

* Long papers (up to 8 pages plus references), describing original research with substantial new results. * Short papers and demos (up to 4 pages plus references), including small and focused contributions, work in progress, as well as descriptions of projects, systems and resources. * Abstracts (1 page, non-archival), which will be presented at the poster session and printed in the proceedings, but which will be non-archival. We especially invite submission on ongoing projects, student projects, past or ongoing bachelor and master theses, ongoing or recently completed PhD theses, and opinion pieces in this category to foster interaction and discussion in our community.

Papers can be submitted either to the main conference track or to the special track “Context Matters”.

Context Matters Track

The widespread use of large language models (LLMs) and other types of language technology in research and real-world applications has fundamentally reshaped how natural language processing (NLP) systems interact with people and their environments. As NLP systems increasingly operate in socially embedded, high-impact settings like search, conversational agents and recommendation systems in business, education, medicine, law, and beyond, it becomes crucial to move beyond text in isolation and to account for the many forms of context that shape language use and interpretation. These include user-related factors (e.g., identity aspects like socio-demographic characteristics and the resulting perspectival differences), cultural and societal context, interaction history, application constraints, and signals from other modalities.

The “Context Matters” track focuses on how different forms of context influence NLP systems, their design, their behavior, and their use. We invite work that studies NLP not as decontextualized text processing, but as situated technology embedded in human, social, disciplinary, and multimodal environments. Here, disciplines and application domains are important not only as areas of use, but as sources of structured contextual knowledge, perspectives, and methodological traditions — particularly from the social sciences and humanities, but also law, education, psychology, economics, and the natural sciences.

In particular, the special theme includes: * Research that models user- and group-related context, such as identity aspects, socio-demographic variables, cultural background, or perspectival differences, and examines how these factors affect language use, system behavior, or system impact * Work that draws on or operationalizes concepts from other disciplines like the social sciences and related fields (e.g., social theory, cultural analysis, behavioral perspectives) to better understand linguistic phenomena, system outputs, or evaluation settings * Research analyzing social, societal, and institutional context, including norms, power structures, and real-world deployment environments, especially with respect to ethics, bias, and societal consequences * Studies of application context, where domain-specific constraints (e.g., in education, law, public administration, or the natural sciences) shape both language use and system requirements * Approaches that move beyond text-only processing and integrate multiple modalities (e.g., vision, audio, video, sensor data), with attention to the distinct contextual signals these modalities introduce * Work incorporating interactional context, such as dialogue history, user intent, and evolving human–AI interaction dynamics

While the modelling component should include language, we especially encourage contributions that treat language as part of a broader contextual ecosystem, aiming toward more grounded, adaptive, and socially aware NLP systems.

Papers must be in English and formatted in accordance with the ACL style sheet and submitted via the submission link :https://openreview.net/group?id=GSCL.org/KONVENS/2026/Conference

Please consider the OpenReview policy for new accounts:

* New profiles created without an institutional email will go through a moderation process that can take up to two weeks. * New profiles created with an institutional email will be activated automatically.

KONVENS also adopts the ACL policies for submission, review, and citation, the ACL privacy policy, and the ACL code of ethics.

Further information can be found on the conference website:

https://konvens2026.uni-hamburg.de/

Submissions need to be anonymized to ensure double-blind review. However, we allow for pre-prints to be posted any time before or during the review period. We strongly encourage authors to use LaTeX in preparing their document.

Important dates:

30.4.2026 Paper Submission Deadline 12.7.2026 Notification of Acceptance 01.8.2026 Camera-Ready Deadline 14.9. – 17.9.2026 KONVENS in Hamburg

See you in Hamburg!

Your conference chairs, Chris Biemann, Anne Lauscher, and Heike Zinsmeister

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Prof. Dr. Heike Zinsmeister (sie/ihr) Linguistik des Deutschen / Korpuslinguistik Universität Hamburg, Institut für Germanistik, Raum C7012 Von-Melle-Park 6, Postfach #15, D-20146 Hamburg

Tel.: +49 (40) 2395-27119 heike.zinsmeister@uni-hamburg.de http://www.slm.uni-hamburg.de/germanistik/personen/zinsmeister.html