First Call for Papers
Theme: Beyond Text: Bangla in the Era of Reasoning, Agents, and Multimodal Intelligence
Co-located with NAACL 2027, San Francisco, California, United States, June 2027
Workshop website: https://blp-workshop.github.io/
Foundation models are moving language technology beyond text generation toward reasoning, retrieval, agents, speech, and multimodal interaction. However, many of these advances remain concentrated in resource-rich languages. Despite a long history of NLP and speech research, Bangla remains underrepresented in frontier AI systems, particularly in reasoning, agentic applications, culturally grounded knowledge, speech-native models, multimodal understanding, and safety. Further challenges arise from dialectal, code-mixed, transliterated, and diaspora varieties, as well as related languages such as Assamese.
The Third Workshop on Bangla Language Processing (BLP 2027) aims to bring together researchers working in NLP, speech, multimodal AI, and human-centered computing to advance language technologies that can understand, reason, communicate, and act effectively in diverse Bangla settings. Building on BLP 2023 and BLP 2025, this edition focuses on linguistically inclusive, culturally grounded, trustworthy, multimodal, and accessible AI.
We invite original research papers presenting new methods, datasets, benchmarks, evaluations, applications, and analyses. Bangla is the primary focus, while comparative studies involving related or underrepresented languages are welcome when they offer insights transferable to Bangla and other low-resource settings. We particularly encourage research that addresses real-world linguistic diversity and practical constraints on data and computation.
Topics of Interest
We welcome papers on topics including, but not limited to:
- Foundation Models: Bangla and multilingual large language models; pretraining, adaptation, and instruction tuning; synthetic data; efficient models; cross-lingual transfer; and robustness to dialects, code-mixing, and transliteration.
- Reasoning and Agents: Verifiable, symbolic, and neuro-symbolic reasoning; retrieval-augmented generation; long-context understanding and memory; tool use, planning, and code generation; and single- and multi-agent systems.
- Speech and Conversational AI: Automatic speech recognition, speech synthesis, and AudioLLMs; spoken question answering and dialogue; code-switched speech; speaker and language recognition; and conversational systems.
- Multimodal and Grounded AI: Vision-language and audio-visual models; multimodal question answering and reasoning; document and scene understanding; multimodal generation; and culturally grounded multimodal evaluation.
- Trustworthy and Human-Centered AI: Safety and alignment; adversarial robustness; hallucination and factuality; bias, fairness, and interpretability; cultural understanding; human-AI interaction; accessibility; and responsible deployment.
- Resources, Evaluation, and Efficient NLP: Corpora, datasets, and benchmarks; representative resources for underrepresented varieties; human and LLM-based evaluation; data-efficient learning and inference; and core NLP tasks such as machine translation, information extraction, question answering, and summarization.
Planned Shared Tasks
BLP 2027 also plans to organize three shared tasks:
- Task 1 - Adversarial Prompt Classification: Identifying benign and adversarial prompts in Bangla, including jailbreaks, prompt injection, and code-mixed or transliterated attempts to bypass LLM safety safeguards.
- Task 2 - Multilingual Question Answering: Culturally and regionally grounded open-ended QA in Bangla, English, Assamese, and Hindi, with monolingual QA and multilingual QA settings based on the MultiNativQA resource.
- Task 3 - BLP Datathon: Collecting regional Bangla speech recordings and identifying where open-source automatic speech recognition (ASR) models struggle with different dialects and accents through community-driven participation.
Detailed task guidelines, datasets, evaluation procedures, and participation timelines will be announced separately at https://blp-workshop.github.io/sharedtasks.
Important Dates
- Paper submission deadline: February 15 (Monday), 2027
- Notification of acceptance: March 26 (Friday), 2027
- Camera-ready deadline: April 16 (Friday), 2027
- Workshop: June 2027, co-located with NAACL 2027 (exact date TBA)
All deadlines are 11:59 p.m. Anywhere on Earth (AoE).
Submission Details
We welcome original, unpublished research, including completed work and promising work in progress. Submissions will undergo double-blind peer review, with acceptance decisions made by the workshop program chairs.
Submission categories are:
- Full papers: Up to 8 pages.
- Short papers: Up to 4 pages, including work in progress and innovative research ideas.
- Shared-task system papers: Up to 4 pages.
Camera-ready versions may use up to 9 pages for full papers and 5 pages for short papers, subject to the final proceedings guidelines. Accepted papers will be presented orally or as posters.
All submissions must follow the official ACL/ARR two-column formatting guidelines. Authors should use the official style files without modification. We recommend checking submissions with ACL PubCheck, which should also be used for camera-ready papers. For double-blind reviewing and anonymity requirements, please consult the ARR anonymity guidelines.
Further details on submission procedures, including any ARR-reviewed paper route, will be announced on the workshop website.
Submission portal: TBA
Invitation to Review
Researchers with relevant publication experience who are interested in joining the program committee are invited to complete this reviewer interest form.
Mentoring Program
We offer a mentoring program to support students and newcomers. It includes pre-submission mentoring to help finalize paper drafts and a buddy program during the in-person workshop. If you would like to receive mentoring, please sign up using the mentoring registration form.
Sponsors
We invite companies and institutions to partner with us in advancing Bangla language technology and research. Sponsoring BLP 2027 provides an opportunity to engage with leading researchers, industry professionals, and emerging scholars from around the world while supporting innovation and collaboration in Bangla language processing.
Workshop Organizers
- Firoj Alam, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar
- Sudipta Kar, Oracle Health AI, Seattle, USA
- Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar
- Nishat Raihan, University of Notre Dame, USA
- Md Arid Hasan, University of Toronto, Canada
- Naeemul Hassan, University of Maryland, USA
- Enamul Hoque Prince, York University, Canada
- Tasnim Mohiuddin, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar
- Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Dialpad, Canada