Social Context Workshop
Co-located with LREC 2026 – Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Palau de Congressos de Palma – 12 May 2026
Full ay workshop
About
Language is a situated phenomenon. People use language to communicate within social contexts, where their linguistic choices are influenced by what is considered appropriate or necessary to shape the intended message, such as conventions, background knowledge and relations between participants. The context where these choices take place is characterized by the dynamic interaction of users who constantly switch their roles in a spatio-temporal environment. This often requires an extra-linguistic knowledge of the world to be interpreted, as well as taking into account the set of assumptions and beliefs that shape interpretation. Natural Language Processing (NLP) has not yet succeeded in accurately modeling these aspects of context.
Aim of the Workshop
The Social Context Workshop contributes to the definition of a shared framework for the study and processing of social context in NLP, aiming to foster the dialogue between the NLP community and pragmatics, sociolinguistics and sociology, traditionally interested in studying the influence of context on the construction of social meaning in communication.
Call For Paper
This year, the workshop is co-organized with the workshop “Integrating NLP and Psychology to Study Social Interactions” (NLPS). Here it is possible to find the joint Call for papers
Topics of Interest
We welcome submissions on topics including, but not limited to, the following:
- Adopting interdisciplinary methods for modeling context: exploring the integration of NLP with pragmatics and social sciences.
- Studying social communities: discussion and critical exploration of how to engage with communities of practice (i.e., groups of individuals who engage around a shared domain, developing common practices, norms and identities) and speech communities (i.e., groups that share expectations about language use).
- Investigating ethical challenges in the creation of NLP resources: participatory design, involving communities affected by specific issues (e.g., low-resource language speakers or non-binary, intersex and trans communities)
- Explaining behaviors in social interactions: studying the role of social attitudes, and how to model them as the result of the complex interaction between people’s backgrounds, communicative contexts, and events that trigger their behavior.