WiNLP 2026 Workshop - Call for Papers
Workshop Description
The Widening NLP (WiNLP) workshop aims to foster an inclusive environment that highlights the contributions of researchers from underrepresented groups in NLP. Anyone who self-identifies as coming from an underrepresented background—based on gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, disability, or otherwise—is encouraged to submit. In 2026, WiNLP will place additional emphasis on access, disability, and diversity across scientific backgrounds, disciplines, training, and underrepresented languages.
The full-day event will include invited talks, oral presentations, poster sessions, and mentorship programming. The workshop provides an opportunity for junior members of the community to showcase their work and connect with senior mentors for feedback and career advice. Most importantly, the workshop aims to provide an inclusive and welcoming space and to lower structural barriers to joining and collaborating with the NLP community at large.
While presentation opportunities prioritize researchers from underrepresented groups, allies are encouraged to attend, learn, mentor, and support presenters.
Submission Guidelines
While everyone is encouraged to attend, the opportunity to present a talk or poster is intended for members of underrepresented groups at all career levels, including students, postdocs, professors, and other researchers.
Submissions are invited in two categories:
- Thesis Proposals: Designed for graduate students (Master’s or PhD) to present their research plans and receive constructive feedback.
- Research Papers: Encompasses both work-in-progress with preliminary results and completed research.
Submissions in both categories can be either:
- Long Papers: Up to 8 pages of content, plus unlimited references and appendices. An additional content page is permitted upon acceptance (maximum 9 pages).
- Short Papers: Up to 4 pages of content, plus unlimited references and appendices. An additional content page is permitted upon acceptance (maximum 5 pages).
- Extended Abstracts: Up to 2 pages of content, plus unlimited references and appendices. An additional content page is permitted upon acceptance (maximum 3 pages).
Authors may choose whether their submission is archival or non-archival.
- Archival papers will be published in the EMNLP 2026 WiNLP Proceedings.
- Non-archival papers may be submitted to other venues in the future, except for another WiNLP workshop.
Please note that submissions must be fully self-contained: supplementary materials may be included only in the appendix, and reviewers are not required to review them. It will not be possible to submit separate supplementary files.
Submission Requirements
- Submissions must adhere to the official ACL style templates which are available as an Overleaf template and also a downloadable directly (Latex). Papers must be in a two-column ACL format and submitted as PDF files.
- Submissions must be anonymized for review to ensure fairness.
- Topics: Submissions can cover a wide range of topics in computational linguistics and NLP, including but not limited to:
- Safety and alignment in large language models (LLMs)
- AI/LLM agents
- Human-AI interaction and cooperation
- Retrieval-augmented language models
- Mathematical, symbolic, and logical reasoning in NLP
- Computational social science and NLP for social good
- Code models
- Interpretability, model editing, transparency, and explainability
- LLM efficiency
- Generalizability and transfer learning
- Dialogue and interactive systems
- Discourse, pragmatics, and reasoning
- Low-resource methods for NLP
- Ethics, bias, and fairness
- Natural language generation
- Information extraction and retrieval
- Linguistic theories, cognitive modeling, and psycholinguistics
- Machine translation
- Multilinguality and language diversity
- Multimodality and language grounding (e.g., vision, robotics)
- Neurosymbolic approaches to NLP
- Phonology, morphology, and word segmentation
- Question answering
- Resources and evaluation
- Semantics (lexical, sentence-level, textual inference)
- Sentiment analysis, stylistic analysis, and argument mining
- Speech processing and spoken language understanding
- Summarization
- Hierarchical structure prediction, syntax, and parsing
- NLP applications
Multiple Submission Policy
WiNLP enforces a strict no-multiple-submission policy for archival papers submitted directly to the workshop. A paper submitted as an archival direct submission to WiNLP must not be under review at another journal, conference, or workshop during the WiNLP submission and review period. WiNLP submissions must not overlap significantly in content or results with work that is already published or that will be published elsewhere. Non-archival submissions may be submitted to other venues in the future, but they may not be submitted simultaneously to another WiNLP workshop.
ARR Commitment
In addition to direct submissions, WiNLP 2026 welcomes commitments of papers that have already been reviewed through ACL Rolling Review (ARR). Papers that have already received ARR reviews and a meta-review may be committed to WiNLP through the designated OpenReview ARR commitment site. These papers will not be re-reviewed by a new set of reviewers. Instead, the WiNLP organizers will make acceptance decisions based on the existing ARR reviews and meta-review, together with the fit of the paper to the workshop’s scope and mission. ARR-committed papers must still satisfy WiNLP’s submission requirements, including anonymization rules where applicable, formatting requirements, and relevance to the workshop. As with direct submissions, authors may indicate whether their paper should be considered archival or non-archival, subject to compatibility with ARR and EMNLP 2026 workshop policies.
Submission Links
Pre-submission Mentorship: https://openreview.net/group?id=EMNLP/2026/Workshop/WiNLP_Pre-Submission_Mentorship
Direct Submission: https://openreview.net/group?id=EMNLP/2026/Workshop/WiNLP_Direct_Submission
ARR Commitment: https://openreview.net/group?id=EMNLP/2026/Workshop/WiNLP_ARR_Commitment
Important Dates
All deadlines are 11:59 PM UTC-12:00 “Anywhere on Earth”
| Event | Date |
|---|---|
| Pre-submission mentoring submission deadline | June 1, 2026 |
| Pre-submission feedback release | July 5, 2026 |
| Paper submission deadline | July 26, 2026 |
| ARR Commitment deadline | August 24, 2026 |
| Acceptance notifications | September 6, 2026 |
| Camera-ready deadline | September 27, 2026 |
| Travel grant applications due | September 13, 2026 |
| Travel grant notifications | September 27, 2026 |
Pre-Submission Mentorship Program
WiNLP offers an optional pre-submission mentorship program to help authors improve the quality of their writing and presentation before final submission.
- Submission: Authors must submit a draft of their paper via the designated openreview submission link by June 1, 2026. The draft should adhere to the same formatting and length guidelines as final submissions.
- Feedback: Mentors will provide feedback by July 5, 2026, offering suggestions to improve writing and presentation. Authors are encouraged to incorporate this feedback before the final submission deadline.
- Anonymous: The mentorship process is anonymized.
- Final Submission: Authors who participate in the mentorship program should submit their final paper as a new submission via OpenReview by July 26, 2026 to be considered for WiNLP workshop. Participation in the mentorship program is not a prerequisite for submitting a paper to WiNLP.
Travel Support
WiNLP offers a limited number of travel grants to support one author per accepted submission. Grants may cover expenses such as registration, travel, lodging, or visa costs. Funded authors may choose to attend virtually if preferred.
- Travel grant application deadline: September 13, 2026
- Notification: September 27, 2026
- Eligibility: One author per accepted submission is eligible. The funded author must be identified in the travel grant application form.
Additional funding for virtual attendance by other authors may be considered if surplus funds are available, but in-person attendance for additional authors is not guaranteed. Travel expenses are handled via reimbursement, primarily through USD check or PayPal. Authors unable to front travel costs should contact the organizers early to discuss alternatives.
Authors are encouraged to explore local funding options (e.g., institutional support) to maximize the reach of WiNLP’s limited funds. We also recommend that additional student authors keep an eye out for the EMNLP call for student volunteers and the call for D&I subsidies as possible opportunities for further funding.
Contact information
Website: https://winlp-workshop.github.io/
X (former Twitter): @winlpworkshop
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/winlpworkshop.bsky.social
Facebook: Widening NLP
LinkedIn: Widening NLP
E-mail: winlp-chairs@googlegroups.com