WiNLP 2025 Workshop

Workshop Description

The Widening NLP (WiNLP) workshop aims to foster an inclusive environment that highlights the contributions of researchers from underrepresented groups in NLP. Anyone who self-identifies as being from an underrepresented background—based on gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, disability, or otherwise—is encouraged to submit. In 2025, WiNLP will continue placing emphasis on access, disability, and diversity across scientific backgrounds, disciplines, training, and underrepresented languages.

Our annual Widening Natural Language Processing Workshop (WiNLP) will be held in conjunction with EMNLP 2025 in Suzhou, China. Since EMNLP is anticipating a hybrid format for their conference, we also anticipate our workshop will be hybrid, with both online and in-person attendees. The one-day workshop will occur during EMNLP’s workshop period with an exact date to be announced soon.

The full-day event includes invited talks, oral presentations, and poster sessions. The workshop provides an excellent opportunity for junior members in the community to showcase their work and connect with senior mentors for feedback and career advice.  It also offers recruitment opportunities with leading industrial labs. Most importantly,  the workshop will provide an inclusive and accepting space, and work to lower structural barriers to joining and collaborating with the NLP community at large.

Submission Guidelines

While everyone is encouraged to attend, the opportunity to present a talk or poster is intended for members of underrepresented groups at all career levels: students, post-docs, professors, and other researchers. 

Submissions are invited in two categories:

  1. Thesis Proposals: Designed for graduate students (Master’s or PhD) to present their research plans and receive constructive feedback.
  2. Research Papers: Encompasses both work-in-progress with preliminary results and completed research.

Submissions in both categories can be either:

  • Short Papers: Up to 4 pages of content, plus unlimited references and appendices. An additional content page is permitted upon acceptance (maximum 5 pages).
  • Extended Abstracts: Up to 2 pages of content, plus unlimited references and appendices. An additional content page is permitted upon acceptance (maximum 3 pages).

Authors of short papers may choose whether their submission is archival or non-archival. Archival Papers will be published in the EMNLP 2025 WiNLP Proceedings. Non-Archival Papers can be submitted to other venues in the future, except for another WiNLP workshop. Note, however, paper submissions must be fully self-contained, i.e., supplementary materials, as provided in the appendix, are completely optional, and reviewers are not even asked to review them. Note that it will not be possible to submit additional separate files as supplementary materials.

Submission Requirements

  • Submissions must adhere to the official ACL style templates which are available as an Overleaf template and also a downloadable directly (Latex and Word). Papers must be in a two-column ACL format and submitted as PDF files.
  • Submission link: https://openreview.net/group?id=EMNLP/2025/Workshop/WiNLP
  • Submissions must be anonymized for review to ensure fairness.
  • Topics: Submissions can cover a wide range of topics in computational linguistics and NLP, including but not limited to:
    • Safety and alignment in large language models (LLMs)
    • AI/LLM agents
    • Human-AI interaction and cooperation
    • Retrieval-augmented language models
    • Mathematical, symbolic, and logical reasoning in NLP
    • Computational social science and NLP for social good
    • Code models
    • Interpretability, model editing, transparency, and explainability
    • LLM efficiency
    • Generalizability and transfer learning
    • Dialogue and interactive systems
    • Discourse, pragmatics, and reasoning
    • Low-resource methods for NLP
    • Ethics, bias, and fairness
    • Natural language generation
    • Information extraction and retrieval
    • Linguistic theories, cognitive modeling, and psycholinguistics
    • Machine translation
    • Multilinguality and language diversity
    • Multimodality and language grounding (e.g., vision, robotics)
    • Neurosymbolic approaches to NLP
    • Phonology, morphology, and word segmentation
    • Question answering
    • Resources and evaluation
    • Semantics (lexical, sentence-level, textual inference)
    • Sentiment analysis, stylistic analysis, and argument mining
    • Speech processing and spoken language understanding
    • Summarization
    • Hierarchical structure prediction, syntax, and parsing
    • NLP applications

Multiple Submission Policy

Authors may NOT submit the same work to both the regular and visa-friendly deadlines. While an author may appear on works in both submission deadlines, they must have substantially distinct content. Submissions to the main deadline deemed to duplicate early submissions will be rejected without review.

For archival papers, WiNLP enforces a strict no multiple submission policy. Such papers submitted to WiNLP must not be under review at another journal, conference, or workshop during the WiNLP submission and review period. WiNLP submissions should not overlap significantly in content or results with papers that are already published or will be published elsewhere. 

Important Dates 

All deadlines are 11:59 PM UTC-12:00 “Anywhere on Earth”

  • Pre-submission mentoring deadline: June 20, 2025
  • Pre-submission feedback returned: July 18, 2025
  • Paper submission deadline: August 1, 2025
  • Acceptance notifications: September 15, 2025
  • Camera-ready deadline: October 1, 2025
  • Travel grant applications due: September 26, 2025
  • Travel grant notifications: October 6, 2025

Pre-Submission Mentorship Program

WiNLP offers an optional pre-submission mentorship program to help authors improve the quality of their writing and presentation before final submission. The program focuses on enhancing the clarity and structure of the paper, not critiquing the research content.

  • Submission: Authors must submit a draft of their paper via the designated Google Form by June 12, 2025. The draft should adhere to the same formatting and length guidelines as final submissions.
  • Mentor Assignment: Organizers will check the draft for compliance with formatting requirements before assigning a mentor. The mentor will not be involved in reviewing the final submission.
  • Feedback: Mentors will provide feedback by July 14, 2025, offering suggestions to improve writing and presentation. Authors are encouraged to incorporate this feedback before the final submission deadline.
  • Non-Anonymous: The mentorship process is not anonymized.
  • Final Submission: Authors who participate in the mentorship program should  submit their final paper as a new submission via OpenReview by August 1st, 2025 to be considered for WiNLP workshop. Participation in the mentorship program is not a prerequisite for submitting a paper to WiNLP.

Travel Support

WiNLP offers a limited number of travel grants to support one author per accepted submission. Grants may cover expenses such as registration, travel, lodging, or visa costs. Funded authors may choose to attend virtually if preferred.

  • Travel grant application deadline: September 26, 2025
  • Notification: October 6, 2025
  • Eligibility: One author per accepted submission is eligible. The funded author must be identified in the travel grant application form.

Additional funding for virtual attendance by other authors may be considered if surplus funds are available, but in-person attendance for additional authors is not guaranteed. Travel expenses are handled via reimbursement (primarily through USD check or PayPal). Authors unable to front travel costs should contact the organizers early to discuss alternatives.

Authors are encouraged to explore local funding options (e.g., institutional support) to maximize the reach of WiNLP’s limited funds.We recommend additional student authors keep an eye out for the EMNLP call for student volunteers or call for D&I subsidies as opportunities for further funding.

Contact information

Website: https://www.winlp.org/winlp-2025-workshop/

Twitter: @winlpworkshop

Facebook: Widening NLP

LinkedIn: Widening NLP

E-mail: winlp-chairs@googlegroups.com