Joint Call for Papers

SoCon and NLPSI will be co-located with the 15th conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’26), held in Palau de Congressos de Palma, Palma de Mallorca (Spain), on 11-16 May 2026.

Deadline for paper submission: February 6th, 2026 website: https://socon-nlpsi.github.io

Overview

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has undergone a significant evolution, opening up the possibility of capturing high-level aspects of human communication. Key areas of interest include the pragmatics, social dynamics, and the integration of social context, to further explore communicative intent. The SoCon and NLPSI workshops share a common interest in the social dimension of communication, although they address distinct challenges.

The Social Context Workshop focuses on exploring the mechanisms through which context shapes language use to accurately model it. The workshop takes an interdisciplinary approach, seeking to establish a shared vocabulary on this topic and to explore how NLP can be integrated with Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, and Sociology. By promoting alternatives to traditional crowdsourcing techniques, it aims to provide a platform for advancing community-centred approaches in NLP.

The NLPSI Workshop examines the core psychological processes that shape human behavior and communication, as well as the factors that influence how individuals perceive, process, and produce language, and the impact of these processes on communication. This interdisciplinary workshop welcomes researchers from NLP, Social Psychology, and Affective Computing, intending to conduct large-scale studies that explore key theories and research questions across these domains.

Driven by the shared interest in human communicative behaviors and interactive dynamics, we announce a joint Call for Papers, organized into two specialized tracks: SoCon and NLPSI. To ensure the most appropriate review and placement, authors should direct their work to the track that best aligns with the core focus of their research contributions.

SoCon Track

Towards Responsibly Infusing NLP With Social Context, Community Meanings, and Pragmatics Through Interdisciplinary NLP Efforts.

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. The Social Context trackWorkshop 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. The track, traditionally interested in studying the influence of context on the construction of social meaning in communication.

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.

For any questions, contact us at social-context-workshop@googlegroups.com .

NLPSI Track

Bridging the gap between NLP and psychological insights to foster a deeper understanding of social interactions.

As technology transforms communication, understanding individuals within their social interactions is vital for human-centered applications. Psychology offers a rich foundation of theories related to cognition, affect, and social dynamics, while Natural Language Processing facilitates large-scale analysis and generation of text data. Yet, these fields have evolved separately: psychology relies on small, controlled studies, while NLP handles vast text data but often misses underlying human behavior patterns. Recent research trends indicate that psychology research has increasingly leveraged automated text analysis tools, evolving from traditional methods to large language models for a nuanced understanding of human behaviour. Conversely, NLP researchers are integrating established psychological theories to better understand user intentions and behavior in language and enhance the interpretability of models. Despite these promising avenues, a significant knowledge gap remains: NLP researchers often lack familiarity with psychological theories that could inform their analyses, while psychologists may not be up-to-date with the latest state-of-the-art techniques in NLP.

The NLPSI Workshop aims to bridge thethis gap between psychology and NLP by fostering collaboration between these fields and encouraging the development of integrative models that enhance our understanding of human communication. The track

We welcome submissions on topics including, but not limited to, the following:

Psychological constructs: (e.g., beliefs, motives, feelings, affect, personality).
Psychological studies: especially those focused on interaction.
Language and social identities: including ethnicity and group affiliation.
Communication patterns: such as empathy, persuasion, and conflict resolution.
Role of emotions in interpersonal communication: including phenomena like emotion contagion and interpersonal emotion regulation.
LLMs in experimental, interactional studies.

For any questions, contact us at nlpsi-workshop-organizers.nlproc@uni-bamberg.de .

Submission Types

We welcome the following types of submissions:

Long papers (up to 8 pages) that present original research, from preliminary findings to established contributions, including theory, experiments, or applications.
Short papers (up to 4 pages) that introduce emerging ideas, work in progress, or early-stage research with clear significance.
Extended Abstracts (up to 2 pages)that present ongoing work, position papers, previously published work, or research projects. Abstracts can be submitted either for inclusion in the proceedings (archival) or as non-archival contributions.

Submission Guidelines

All submissions will be double-blind reviewed
Submissions should follow LREC guidelines. Here are all the templates (LaTeX, Word, Open Office, Overleaf LaTeX templates).
Page limit applies to the main content of the papers. Sections including limitations, ethical considerations, acknowledgements, references and appendices do not count toward this limit.
Submit through Softconf [ADD LINK HERE]

When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC authors to share the described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.) to enable their reuse and replicability of experiments (including evaluation ones). In addition, authors will be required to adhere to ethical research policies on AI and should include an ethics statement in their papers.

Workshop Format

The workshop will follow the attendance policy of the main conference. The workshop will be a full-day event featuring: Keynote speeches from leading experts in the field Paper presentations (oral and lightning talks) interactive activity: annotation lab

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: February 16th, 2026
Notification of acceptance: March 23th, 2026
Camera ready: March 30th 2026
Workshop day: May 12th, 2026

Organizers

SoCon Marco Antonio Stranisci, University of Turin Soda Marem Lo, University of Turin Sabine Weber, Bamberg University Rossana Damiano, University of Turin Simona Frenda, Heriot-Watt University Roman Klinger, Bamberg University Vivian Patti, University of Turin Marteen Sap, Carnegie Mellon University Seid Muhie Yimam, Hamburg University

NLPSI Aswathy Velutharambath, University of Bamberg Sofie Labat, Ghent University Neele Falk, University of Stuttgart Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco, Bocconi University Roman Klinger, University of Bamberg Véronique Hoste, Ghent University