Call for Papers
*SEM 2026: The 15th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics
San Diego, CA (Co-located with ACL 2026)
Website: https://starsem2026.github.io/
*SEM brings together researchers interested in the semantics of natural languages and its computational modelling.
The conference embraces a wide range of approaches including data-driven, neural, probabilistic, and symbolic.
Both practical applications and theoretical contributions are welcome.
*SEM invites submissions related to the computational modelling of natural language semantics (broadly understood)
and its applications. Relevant areas include theoretical aspects of computational semantics, empirical and
data-driven approaches, resources, evaluation, and tools.
*SEM encourages authors to consider ethical aspects of their work and to discuss ethical questions and implications
relevant to their research. *SEM also values reproducibility.
Please fill out the appropriate form if you would like to volunteer as a reviewer or as an Area Chair.
Questions may be directed to startsem-2026-pcs [at] googlegroups.com.
New for *SEM 2026
One-Day Conference. Unlike past iterations, *SEM 2026 will be a one-day conference.
Centering Research Questions. Research questions in *SEM and NLP generally can be categorized into:
- New findings about language (linguistic phenomena, semantic patterns)
- New findings about people (language use, behavior, health, ethics, etc.)
- New findings about automatic language processing (advancing language understanding through ML/AI and other approaches)
Authors are asked to identify the predominant research question type for their work in the submission form.
There are no quotas or preferential treatment for any category.
Lasting Impact. Reviewers will explicitly assess the potential lasting impact of each submission,
including contributions with longer-term scientific value.
Topics of Interest include (but are not limited to):
- Lexical and compositional semantics
- Statistical, machine learning, and deep learning methods for semantics
- Multilingual and cross-lingual semantics
- Word sense disambiguation and induction
- Sentiment analysis and computational affective science
- Semantic parsing and syntax-semantics interface
- Textual inference, entailment, and question answering
- Discourse, pragmatics, and dialogue
- Knowledge mining and commonsense reasoning
- Language generation
- Grounding and multimodal semantics
- Psycholinguistics and human semantic processing
- Interpretability and explainability
- Ethical aspects and bias in semantic representations
Submission Instructions
Submissions must describe unpublished work and be written in English.
We solicit both long and short papers.
Long papers may consist of up to 8 pages of content plus unlimited references.
Short papers may consist of up to 4 pages of content plus unlimited references.
Limitations and Ethics Statement sections are allowed and encouraged and do not count toward the page limit.
Submissions must follow ARR formatting requirements.
Submission Route and Deadline
*SEM solicits direct submissions (not through ARR).
The deadline for direct submissions is February 13, 2026.
Submissions are made through OpenReview.
Submission link:
https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/StarSEM/2026/Conference
Multiple submissions are permitted but must be declared at submission time.
Important Dates
- Direct submission deadline: February 13, 2026
- Notification of acceptance: May 5, 2026
- Camera-ready deadline: May 26, 2026
- Conference date: July 6, 2026
All deadlines are 11:59pm UTC-12h (Anywhere on Earth).
There is no anonymity period requirement.