Overview
We invite submissions to SURGeLLM: Structured Understanding, Retrieval, and Generation in the Era of Large Language Models, a workshop co-located with ACL 2026.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to interact with structured data such as tables, databases, charts, time series, graphs, and workflows. Despite recent progress, significant challenges remain in faithful understanding, reliable reasoning, controllable generation, and robust evaluation over structured artifacts. SURGeLLM aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to advance methods, systems, and evaluations for LLMs operating over structured data.
Topics of Interest
We welcome archival and non-archival submissions on topics including (but not limited to):
- Methods for tabular understanding and question answering (multi-table reasoning, multi-hop inference, and multimodal integration)
- Natural language interfaces to structured data (Text-to-SQL, semantic parsing, schema linking, and data discovery)
- Structure-aware retrieval (tables, cells/rows, chart elements, maps, workflows, and code fragments)
- Structured generation (text → tables/charts/figures/code) with faithfulness, controllability, and robust evaluation
- Agentic systems for structured data understanding and analysis (time series, graphs, tabular, etc.)
- Data-centric AI for LLMs on structured data (representation learning, augmentation, robustness, and domain adaptation)
- Benchmarking and evaluation (scalability, throughput, contamination, reproducibility, and human-centered assessment)
- Applications and governance for LLMs over structured data (DataOps, privacy, fairness, and reliability)
Paper Format
We invite the following types of submissions:
- Long papers: Up to 8 pages (excluding references and appendices)
- Short papers: Up to 4 pages (excluding references and appendices)
All submissions should follow the ACL formatting guidelines. Archival submissions will be included in the ACL Anthology. Non-archival submissions are welcome for presentation only (e.g., previously published or concurrently submitted work).
Submission Scope
We welcome a broad spectrum of contributions, including:
- New tasks, benchmarks, and evaluation frameworks for structured reasoning, retrieval, and generation
- Models and training recipes (prompting, fine-tuning, structure-specialized embeddings, agentic pipelines)
- Systems and deployment lessons (DataOps, governance, reliability, throughput/latency, and human factors)
- Careful ablations, negative results, and reproducibility studies that illuminate failure modes and trade-offs
Workshop Format
The workshop will feature invited talks, contributed paper presentations, and a poster session to foster discussion across the NLP, IR, ML, and data management communities.
Key Dates
- Direct paper submission deadline: March 5, 2026
- Pre-reviewed ARR commitment deadline: March 24, 2026
- Notification of acceptance: April 28, 2026
- Camera-ready paper due: May 12, 2026
Submission Information
For submission guidelines, formatting instructions, and submission links, please visit:
https://surgellm.github.io/acl2026/cfp/
We look forward to your submissions and to an engaging workshop at ACL 2026.
Best regards,
The SURGeLLM Organizing Committee