37.1774, Confs: 3rd Workshop on Language Understanding in the Human-Machine Era @ EMNLP 2026 (Hungary)
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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1774. Fri May 15 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 37.1774, Confs: 3rd Workshop on Language Understanding in the Human-Machine Era @ EMNLP 2026 (Hungary)
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Date: 13-May-2026
From: Rui Sousa-Silva [rssilva at letras.up.pt]
Subject: 3rd Workshop on Language Understanding in the Human-Machine Era @ EMNLP 2026
3rd Workshop on Language Understanding in the Human-Machine Era @
EMNLP 2026
Short Title: LUHME
Date: 24-Oct-2026 - 29-Oct-2026
Location: Budapest, Hungary
Contact: Rui Sousa-Silva
Contact Email: rssilva at letras.up.pt
Meeting URL: https://luhme.up.pt
Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Computational Linguistics
Submission Deadline: 30-Jun-2026
The LUHME 2026 workshop on Language Understanding in the Human-Machine
Era is part of EMNLP - The 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in
Natural Language Processing (https://2026.emnlp.org)
Workshop Description:
LLMs have revolutionized the development of interactional artificial
intelligence (AI) systems, due to their accessibility to the general
public. Significant advances continue to be observed in fields and
applications such as multimodal conversational agents, emotionally and
socially aware dialogue, hyper-personalized and context-adaptive
interaction, human–AI collaboration and symbiotic AI, multi-party and
social conversation modelling, immersive and embodied conversational
systems, and responsible, controllable, and domain-aware interaction.
The use of these interactional AI systems is increasingly widespread,
as these models have produced remarkable achievements in several
benchmarks. State-of-the-art NLP systems achieve impressive
performance, but remain prone to brittleness in language understanding
(LU); they often lack robust modelling of communicative intentions,
pragmatic inference, and context-sensitive meaning, which are central
to many EMNLP tasks (dialogue, QA, safety, content moderation, etc.).
This raises doubts about the extent to which such systems can really
understand human language(s).
The rapid deployment of LLMs raises urgent questions about
interpretability, trust, and accountability of systems that produce
linguistically plausible but potentially misleading outputs. In this
scenario, this dedicated workshop provides a venue for
cross-fertilisation between formal/theoretical work and applied NLP,
in line with EMNLP’s focus on cutting-edge, high-impact research in
NLP.
The 3rd Language Understanding the Human-Machine Era workshop (LUHME
2026) focuses on how meaning is represented, inferred, and negotiated
across human and machine environments, with particular emphasis on
logic-aware, pragmatics-sensitive, and socially grounded approaches to
LU in NLP. The workshop brings together researchers in (computational)
linguistics, formal semantics/pragmatics, dialogue and discourse,
cognitive science, and AI safety/ethics to discuss what it means for
systems to understand language in situated, interactive contexts.
Relevant Topic Areas:
Submissions are invited on (but not limited to):
- Language understanding in LLMs
- Language grounding
- AI‑mediated communication in high‑stakes domains (law, health,
finance, governance)
- Psycholinguistic approaches to Language Understanding
- Discourse, pragmatics and Language Understanding
- Intent detection
- Computational treatment of speech acts, dialogue, and communicative
intentions in interaction
- Conversation analysis, narrative progression, and argumentation
- Turn‑taking, repair, and alignment in human–AI interaction
- Evaluation of Language Understanding
- Human vs. machine Language Understanding
- Machine translation/interpreting and Language Understanding
- Multimodality and Language Understanding
- Socio-cultural aspects in Language Understanding
- Effects and risks of language misunderstanding
- Manifestations of language (mis)understanding
- NLU and toxic content
- Ethical issues in Language Understanding
- Distributional semantics and Language Understanding
- Linguistic theory and LU by machines
- Linguistic, world, and commonsense knowledge in Language
Understanding
- Role of language professionals in the LLM era
- Understanding language and explainable AI
- Use of LLMs in generating, analysing or evaluating linguistic data
Diversity and Inclusion:
We particularly encourage submissions from underrepresented groups
from any demographic or geographic minority, with disability, or
others. The LITHME network (the nest of this proposal) is inherently
inclusive, as it involves members from all EU countries and promotes
participation from linguistic minorities. The workshop expands these
principles of inclusion, by bringing language and computer scientists
to the discussion on computational approaches to LU.
Paper Submission:
Prospective authors are invited to submit original, unpublished work
to the LUHME workshop, covering one or more of the workshop topics.
Submissions must not have substantial overlap in either contribution
or text with work previously accepted for publication as a full paper
in another archival forum. Papers at workshops without archival
proceedings and preprints are accepted.
At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the
conference by the early registration deadline to present the paper at
the workshop. This is a prerequisite for inclusion in the proceedings.
Submission Instructions:
Papers must be written in English, be prepared for double-blind review
using the ACL LaTeX template, and not exceed 8 pages. Authors are
encouraged to include an ethics and/or a limitations section, which,
together with references, does not count towards the page limit.
Papers must be submitted via OpenReview.
(https://openreview.net/group?id=EMNLP/2026/Workshop/LUHME)
Proceedings:
As in previous editions of the LUHME workshop, we intend to publish
accepted papers in the ACL Anthology.
Important Dates:
30 June 2026: Paper submission deadline
31 August 2026: Notification of acceptance
15 September 2026: Camera-ready papers
October 2026: LUHME workshop
Programme Committee:
TBA
Conference Organisers:
Rui Sousa-Silva (University of Porto, Portugal)
Henrique Lopes Cardoso (University of Porto, Portugal)
Maarit Koponen (University of Eastern Finland, Finland)
Antonio Pareja-Lora (Universidad de Alcalá, Spain)
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