CALL FOR PAPERS
The language technologies (LTs) that were applied in response to the Haitian
earthquake of 2010 showed to the world the life-saving potential for these technologies,
where their application was responsible for saving 1,000s of lives. Most concerning is
that in a world that is hit by more than 350 disasters in an average year, the most
severe of these disasters occur in regions where English is not spoken. With the
development of massively popular AI systems used as general-purpose machines, the
potential of LTs in disaster preparedness and response has rapidly grown.
In response, the focus of this workshop is on the direct application of LTs in crisis
preparedness and response, including recent work on multilingual and multimodal LT.
We invite submissions to the First Workshop on Language Technologies for Crisis
Preparedness and Response (LT4CPR) at AACL 2026. The workshop focuses on
advancing speech and language technologies that support crisis preparedness, crisis
response, communication in crises and disaster risk reduction, and aims to bring
together LT research communities with crisis management stakeholders (such as
practitioners, NGOs, and industry) to bring to the fore interdisciplinary solutions that
have real-world impact.
In this first edition, we especially welcome work on:
-
Identifying Community Needs: The crisis ecosystem is quite diverse, composed
by affected populations, policy-makers, NGOs, industry, public officers,
and emergency management. -
Interdisciplinary approaches for analysis, design, and evaluation of LT systems:
insights from communication studies, social sciences, psychology, among others,
on how to design and evaluate trustworthy crisis technology that fits stakeholders needs. -
Translating LT research into operational tools: how to go beyond AI model
development to user adoption of technology in high-stakes scenarios. - Ethics and societal implications of AI in crisis communication and management.
Topics of Interest
We invite submissions that fall under the following list (but not limited to):
- Research work on AI for crisis response, such as information extraction (e.g., NER and geolocation), situational awareness (e.g., automated triage), and more
- Qualitative studies to understand user needs and guide technology design
- Multilingual and multimodal research on crisis and humanitarian initiatives
- Evaluation and deployment considerations
- Automatic approaches to enhance or facilitate communication from and to communities during crisis (e.g., computational social media and news analysis, summarization, translation, etc.)
- Position papers and literature surveys on current trends, challenges and future directions
- Abstracts for talk proposals or field reports from practitioners, NGOs, humanitarian organizations, and field experts, including experience reports
Submission Types
The workshop will accept two types of papers:
-
Archival submissions: Papers of up to 8 pages of content, plus unlimited
pages for limitations, references and appendices. Accepted papers will be given an
additional page of content to address reviewer comments. Previously published papers
cannot be accepted. -
Non-Archival submissions: Up to 8 pages, excluding references, to
summarise and showcase in-progress work and work published elsewhere. These papers
may be presented at the workshop but will not appear in the proceedings.
Submission Tracks
The workshop offers two submission tracks. All deadlines are 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth).
Submission Tracks
The workshop offers two submission tracks. All deadlines are 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth).
Track 1 · Direct Submissions
Via OpenReview
For new work submitted directly to the LT4CPR workshop, authors may submit
archival or non-archival papers through OpenReview. The submission URL will be
provided in the next call for papers.
- Submission deadline: August 24, 2026
Track 2 · ARR Commitment
Via ACL Rolling Review (ARR) and OpenReview
Authors can commit their ARR submissions to the workshop through OpenReview.
Please include the ARR reviews and meta-reviews with the submission.
- Commitment deadline: August 31, 2026
Submission Instructions
- All submissions must follow the ACL 2026 style guidelines and must be anonymized for double-blind review.
-
Archival submissions must not be under review at another venue during the
LT4CPR review period. -
We follow the ACL Code of Ethics . We encourage authors to include an Ethical Considerations section
before the References section. This section does not count toward
the page limit.
Important Dates
All deadlines are 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth).
- Direct submission deadline: August 24, 2026
- ARR commitment deadline: August 31, 2026
- Notification of acceptance: October 1, 2026
- Camera-ready version due: October 10, 2026
- Workshop day: November 9, 2026
SHARED TASK
Automatic Situation Report Generation
We are pleased to announce the LT4CPR 2026 Shared Task on Automatic Situation
Report Generation, hosted as part of the LT4CPR Workshop at AACL-IJCNLP 2026.
The shared task focuses on generating structured situation reports from
crisis-related social media messages. Participants will develop systems that
identify and summarize important information about an unfolding crisis,
including reported impacts, affected populations, infrastructure damage,
response activities, resource needs, and other information relevant to
situational awareness.
The task is intended to support research at the intersection of natural
language processing, crisis informatics, summarization, information extraction,
multilingual language technology, and humanitarian response.
Task Overview
- Input
-
A collection of crisis-related social media messages, together with relevant
metadata and task documentation.
- Output
-
A structured and/or narrative situation report summarizing the key
information contained in the input messages.
Task Resources
The organizers plan to release:
- Training data
- Sample input, sample system output, and a sample gold-standard report
- Detailed input and output format documentation
- A situation-report template and machine-readable output schema
- Annotation and dataset documentation
- Baseline code and example outputs, where available
- Evaluation documentation, metrics, and evaluation scripts
- Submission-format validation tools
- Test data and system-submission instructions
- A submission platform for system outputs and shared-task papers
Participation tracks and additional task settings are currently being finalized
and will be announced separately.
Tentative Important Dates
- First Call for Participation: July 15, 2026
-
Training data and second Call for Participation:
August 1, 2026 - Final Call for Participation: August 15, 2026
- Participant registration deadline: August 25, 2026
- Test data release: September 1, 2026
- System output submission deadline: September 7, 2026
-
Shared-task paper submission deadline:
September 15, 2026 - Notification of acceptance: October 1, 2026
- Camera-ready deadline: October 10, 2026
- Workshop date: November 9, 2026
All deadlines are tentative and will be confirmed on the shared-task website.
System Description Papers
Participating teams will be invited to submit a system description paper
explaining their approach, experimental setup, use of external resources,
results, limitations, and relevant ethical considerations.
Researchers interested in participating are encouraged to register by
August 25, 2026.
Shared Task Website: LT4CPR 2026 Shared Task
Contact:lt4cpr.sharedtask [at] gmail.com
Please feel free to circulate this announcement among interested colleagues,
students, research groups, and relevant mailing lists.
We look forward to your participation.
Best regards,
LT4CPR 2026 Organizers
First Workshop on Language Technologies for Crisis Preparedness and Response
AACL-IJCNLP 2026