COLING 2027: Final Call for Papers
Website: https://2027.coling-iccl.org/
The 32nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2027) will take place in Macau, China, May 9-14 2027. COLING 2027 invites the submission of long and short papers featuring substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of computational linguistics and natural language processing.
Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, the following areas:
- Benchmarking and Evaluation
- Computational Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
- Computational Social Science and Sociolinguistics
- Cross-lingual and Multilingual NLP (including Machine Translation)
- Dialogue and Interactive Systems
- NLP for Digital Humanities and Cultural Analytics
- Discourse and Pragmatics
- Ethics, Bias, Fairness, Alignment and Security
- Human-AI Interaction and Social Impact of AI systems (including User Studies)
- Information Extraction and Retrieval
- Interpretability and Analysis of NLP Models
- Knowledge-based NLP and Reasoning
- Language Acquisition, Learning and Evolution
- Language Diversity and NLP for Low-resourced/Less-studied Languages
- Language Modeling, including Novel Architectures
- Language Resources
- Linguistic Theories and Language Modeling for Linguistic Insights
- Machine Learning, including Resource-efficiency and Explainability
- Agent-based LLM systems
- Morphology and Syntax: Segmentation, Tagging, Chunking and Parsing
- Multimodality and Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond
- Natural Language Generation, Summarization and Simplification
- NLP and LLM Applications
- Phonology and Speech: Recognition, Synthesis, Spoken Language Modeling
- Semantics: Lexical and Sentence-Level
- Sentiment Analysis, Opinion and Argument Mining, Offensive Language Detection
Special Theme: NLP for Linguistics
The scientific study of language, linguistics, is a broad field of research that aims to understand the many facets of natural language, across the millions of varieties spoken and used around the globe, including its acquisition, evolution, and relation to social structures and the human mind. A long-standing question in linguistic research is how to model the ubiquitous variation and diversity found within and across languages and language communities, as well as underlying universals and linguistic typology.
Historically, computational linguistics and NLP have been closely connected to the scientific study of language, with mutual influence and exchange of ideas, but this connection has weakened over time as NLP has become increasingly reliant on data-intensive methods and focused on applications rather than linguistic insights. The development of LLMs has further amplified this divergence, reinforcing the emphasis on well-resourced languages, commercial use cases, and a narrow set of modeling approaches (transformers), at the expense of linguistic and social diversity and with less emphasis on scientific goals. Recently, a growing body of work in computational linguistics has attempted to narrow the gap between computational language modeling and linguistics, although so far mainly by using data and concepts from linguistics to analyze and evaluate LLMs, rather than to understand language itself.
The COLING 2027 special theme, NLP for Linguistics, invites papers that explore the use of NLP and LLMs to advance linguistic research, with a particular focus on linguistic diversity. Instead of asking what linguistics can do for NLP, we encourage the complementary perspective: what can NLP do for the scientific analysis and modeling of language as spoken by humans around the globe? Of special importance is research that explores under-researched languages and linguistic phenomena, investigates the needs of underrepresented groups and communities of speakers, and advances our understanding of how current NLP models can contribute to the scientific study of language and linguistic diversity. Furthermore, the theme track explicitly invites papers that take a critical scientific perspective on current NLP technology, reflect on potential limitations of existing models, or propose new NLP-based methods for the scientific study of language.
Submission Details
All papers must be submitted through ACL Rolling Review (ARR). The latest possible submission time is the ARR 2026 October cycle, but papers that have already received reviews and a meta-review from ARR in earlier cycles can also be committed to COLING 2027. Please note that the October ARR cycle is shared between COLING 2027 and NAACL 2027 and that authors will be able to choose which conference they want to commit their paper to (only) after the meta-reviews have been released.
COLING 2027 invites the submission of long papers of up to eight (8) pages and short papers of up to four (4) pages. These page limits only apply to the main body of the paper. At the end of the paper (after the conclusion but before the references), there must be a mandatory section discussing limitations and, optionally, a section on ethical considerations. Papers can include an unlimited number of pages of references and an unlimited appendix. Authors should follow the guidelines on the ARR website (https://aclrollingreview.org/), where templates are also available.
Special theme papers: The special theme can only be selected when committing to COLING 2027 after the meta-review stage. For the first submission to ARR, just choose the best fit among the standard tracks.
Important Dates
- ARR submission deadline (long & short papers): October 12, 2026
- Commitment after meta-reviews: December 23, 2026
- Notification of acceptance: February 10, 2027
- Virtual Conference (online presentations): May 6–7, 2027
- Main Conference (in-person only): May 9–14, 2027
General Chairs
- Katrin Erk, University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Chengqing Zong, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Program Chairs
- Minlie Huang, Tsinghua University
- Joakim Nivre, Uppsala University
- Alexis Palmer, University of Colorado Boulder
- Sina Zarrieß, University of Bielefeld
For questions about submissions: coling2027-pcchairs [at] googlegroups.com