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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

Presentation Mode

All accepted papers must be presented at LT4CPR 2026 to appear in the proceedings. Both in-person and virtual presentation options are available.

Submission Tracks

The workshop offers two submission tracks. All deadlines are 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth).

Submission Instructions

• All submissions must follow the ACL 2026 style guidelines and be anonymized for double-blind review.
• Authors may use the ACL conference paper template on Overleaf.
• Archival submissions must not be under review at other venues for the duration of the LT4CPR review period.
• We follow the ACL Code of Ethics. We encourage authors to include an "Ethical Considerations" section before "References", which does not count toward the page limit.

Important Dates

Paper submission deadlines are end-of-day in Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time.

• Direct submission deadlineAugust 24, 2026
• ARR commitment deadlineAugust 31, 2026
• Notification of acceptanceOctober 1, 2026
• Camera-ready version dueOctober 10, 2026
• Workshop dayNovember 9, 2026

Contact

For questions, please contact: LT4Crisis@gmail.com