CfP: NLPercep: The First Workshop on Centering Social Perception in Natural Language Processing
The First Workshop on Centering Social Perception in Natural Language Processing (NLPercep’26) will be co-located with the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM’26) and will take place on Tuesday, May 26, 2026 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
Deadline for paper submission: March 10, 2026
Social perception plays a central role in how language is interpreted: readers form impressions about intent, politeness, credibility, identity, and more from subtle linguistic cues. However, most NLP systems model these phenomena using surface-level proxies (e.g., fixed labels for “toxicity,” “politeness,” or “demographic information”), often treating socially grounded judgments as fixed properties of text. As a result, they can blur the distinction between what a text is intended to convey and how it is perceived in context, limiting our ability to build systems that reflect how people interpret language across contexts and communities.
NLPercep’26 aims to bridge this gap by bringing together researchers from NLP, computational social science, sociolinguistics, psychology, and related fields to study how language is perceived and not just what it encodes. The workshop places particular emphasis on the role of social perception in the era of large language models (LLMs) and evolving communication norms.
We invite interdisciplinary contributions that advance theoretical grounding, computational modeling, and empirical understanding of social perception in language. We welcome submissions on topics including, but not restricted to, the following:
self-perception, identity, and self-expression in language;
social group perception, stereotypes, and bias;
sociolinguistic perception and language attitude;
social norms, moral values, and evaluative judgments;
computational and NLP approaches to social perception;
large language models (LLMs) and social perception.
Submission types
We invite the following types of submissions:
Archival:
Long papers (5 to 8 pages) that present original research, from preliminary findings to established contributions, including theory, experiments, or applications.
Short papers (up to 4 pages) that introduce emerging ideas, work in progress, or early-stage research with clear significance.
Non-archival:
Extended Abstracts (up to 2 pages)that present ongoing work, position papers, previously published work, or research projects. Abstracts can be submitted either for inclusion in the proceedings (archival) or as non-archival contributions.
Format
All papers must follow the AAAI two-column, camera-ready style, for US Letter (8.5" x 11") paper (available templates: AAAI 2025 Author Kit on Overleaf or AAAI 2025 Author Kit.zip [Word and LaTeX]). The review process will be double-blind. Please anonymize your papers by removing identifying information such as author names, affiliations, and funding details.
Important Dates
Paper submission deadline: March 10, 2026
Notification of acceptance: April 15, 2026
Camera ready: May 15, 2026
NLPercep Workshop day: May 26, 2026
Note: All deadlines are 11:59 pm UTC -12h (anywhere on earth).
Organizers
Hongyu Chen, University of Stuttgart
Aswathy Velutharambath, University of Stuttgart
Amelie Wührl, IT University of Copenhagen
Sofie Labat, Ghent University, Harvard University
Lindsay Goolsby, University of Denver
Aidan Combs, The Ohio State University
Agnieszka Faleñska, University of Stuttgart
Roman Klinger, University of Bamberg
Website and Contact
For further information and updates, visit the NLPercep website: https://nlpercep.github.io/workshop/