Call for Papers: 3rd Workshop on Language Understanding in the Human-Machine Era (LUHME)

The LUHME 2026 workshop on Language Understanding in the Human-Machine Era is part of EMNLP - The 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (https://2026.emnlp.org)

Workshop description LLMs have revolutionized the development of interactional artificial intelligence (AI) systems, due to their accessibility to the general public. Significant advances continue to be observed in fields and applications such as multimodal conversational agents, emotionally and socially aware dialogue, hyper-personalized and context-adaptive interaction, human–AI collaboration and symbiotic AI, multi-party and social conversation modelling, immersive and embodied conversational systems, and responsible, controllable, and domain-aware interaction. The use of these interactional AI systems is increasingly widespread, as these models have produced remarkable achievements in several benchmarks. State-of-the-art NLP systems achieve impressive performance, but remain prone to brittleness in language understanding (LU); they often lack robust modelling of communicative intentions, pragmatic inference, and context-sensitive meaning, which are central to many EMNLP tasks (dialogue, QA, safety, content moderation, etc.). This raises doubts about the extent to which such systems can really understand human language(s).

The rapid deployment of LLMs raises urgent questions about interpretability, trust, and accountability of systems that produce linguistically plausible but potentially misleading outputs. In this scenario, this dedicated workshop provides a venue for cross-fertilisation between formal/theoretical work and applied NLP, in line with EMNLP’s focus on cutting-edge, high-impact research in NLP.

The 3rd Language Understanding the Human-Machine Era workshop (LUHME 2026) focuses on how meaning is represented, inferred, and negotiated across human and machine environments, with particular emphasis on logic-aware, pragmatics-sensitive, and socially grounded approaches to LU in NLP. The workshop brings together researchers in (computational) linguistics, formal semantics/pragmatics, dialogue and discourse, cognitive science, and AI safety/ethics to discuss what it means for systems to understand language in situated, interactive contexts.

Relevant topic areas Submissions are invited on (but not limited to):

* Language understanding in LLMs * Language grounding * AI‑mediated communication in high‑stakes domains (law, health, finance, governance) * Psycholinguistic approaches to Language Understanding * Discourse, pragmatics and Language Understanding * Intent detection * Computational treatment of speech acts, dialogue, and communicative intentions in interaction * Conversation analysis, narrative progression, and argumentation * Turn‑taking, repair, and alignment in human–AI interaction * Evaluation of Language Understanding * Human vs. machine Language Understanding * Machine translation/interpreting and Language Understanding * Multimodality and Language Understanding * Socio-cultural aspects in Language Understanding * Effects and risks of language misunderstanding * Manifestations of language (mis)understanding * NLU and toxic content * Ethical issues in Language Understanding * Distributional semantics and Language Understanding * Linguistic theory and LU by machines * Linguistic, world, and commonsense knowledge in Language Understanding * Role of language professionals in the LLM era * Understanding language and explainable AI * Use of LLMs in generating, analysing or evaluating linguistic data

Diversity and Inclusion We particularly encourage submissions from underrepresented groups from any demographic or geographic minority, with disability, or others. The LITHME network (the nest of this proposal) is inherently inclusive, as it involves members from all EU countries and promotes participation from linguistic minorities. The workshop expands these principles of inclusion, by bringing language and computer scientists to the discussion on computational approaches to LU.

Paper Submission Prospective authors are invited to submit original, unpublished work to the LUHME workshop, covering one or more of the workshop topics. Submissions must not have substantial overlap in either contribution or text with work previously accepted for publication as a full paper in another archival forum. Papers at workshops without archival proceedings and preprints are accepted. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the conference by the early registration deadline to present the paper at the workshop. This is a prerequisite for inclusion in the proceedings.

Submission Instructions Papers must be written in English, be prepared for double-blind review using the ACL LaTeX template, and not exceed 8 pages. Authors are encouraged to include an ethics and/or a limitations section, which, together with references, does not count towards the page limit. Papers must be submitted via OpenReview. (https://openreview.net/group?id=EMNLP/2026/Workshop/LUHME)

Proceedings As in previous editions of the LUHME workshop, we intend to publish accepted papers in the ACL Anthology. Proceedings of the First LUHME Workshophttps://aclanthology.org/volumes/2024.luhme-1/ Proceedings of the Second LUHME Workshophttps://aclanthology.org/volumes/2025.luhme-1/

Important dates 30 June 2026: Paper submission deadline 31 August 2026: Notification of acceptance 15 September 2026: Camera-ready papers October 2026: LUHME workshop

Programme Committee TBA

Workshop Organisers

Rui Sousa-Silva (University of Porto, Portugal) Henrique Lopes Cardoso (University of Porto, Portugal) Maarit Koponen (University of Eastern Finland, Finland) Antonio Pareja-Lora (Universidad de Alcalá, Spain)