First Call for Papers: The First International Workshop on Linguistic Analysis for Health (HeaLing’26) will be held at EACL 2026 in Rabat, Morocco, on March 24–29, 2026 (half-day workshop).
Important links:
• Workshop website: https://healing-workshop.github.io
• CFP & Submissions (OpenReview): OpenReview: HeaLing’26
• Contact: healing-workshop [at] googlegroups.com
Key Dates (AoE):
- Direct submission deadline: December 19, 2025
- Pre-reviewed (ARR) submission deadline: January 2, 2026
- Notification of acceptance: January 23, 2026
- Camera-ready due: February 3, 2026
- Workshop: March 24–29, 2026 (half-day, co-located with EACL 2026)
Scope: HeaLing explores how language informs and transforms medicine as a social and scientific practice, bringing together qualitative language-oriented approaches (e.g., discourse and conversation analysis, narrative medicine, linguistic ethnography) with computational methods (NLP/AI). We welcome researchers from medical humanities, social and historical studies of medicine, and computational language sciences. A central focus is the practical value of interpretive insights derived from language analysis.
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
- Computational + qualitative discourse analysis of clinical, scientific, policy, and other health-related texts (media, guidelines, patient narratives, clinical notes).
- Metaphor and framing in illness narratives, public health messaging, and clinical communication.
- Narrative medicine, story-centered clinical interventions, and evaluation of their effects.
- Historical and contemporary discourse studies of medical epistemologies (concepts, categories, expertise).
- Language, power, and inequality: how framing shapes access, stigma, and policy for marginalized populations.
- Responsible use of NLP/LLMs in medical language research (bias, explainability, mixed-methods validation).
- Digital humanities approaches: building/interrogating historical corpora, archives, and born-digital records.
- Translational impact: case studies where interpretive insights led to changes in practice, education, or policy.
Submission Format & Reviewing:
- Long papers: up to 8 pages (+ references)
- Short papers: up to 4 pages (+ references)
- ACL format (LaTeX/Word): https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files
- Anonymous submissions. Double-blind review by at least three reviewers. Final decisions by workshop organizers.
- Submit via the HeaLing OpenReview page (above) or through ACL Rolling Review (ARR) by the ARR deadline listed.
- Camera-ready versions receive one additional page to address reviewer comments.
Proceedings & Presentation: Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings and be presented orally or as posters.
Organizing Committee:
Ylva Söderfeldt (Uppsala University, Sweden);
Vera Danilova (Uppsala University, Sweden);
Julia Reed (University of Vienna, Austria);
Murathan Kurfalı (RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Sweden);
Gavin Farrell (University of Padua, Italy)
Inclusivity: We strongly encourage submissions focusing on underrepresented languages and communities.