Main Call for Papers
The First International Workshop on Linguistic Analysis for Health (HeaLing’26)
We are excited to announce the First Workshop on Linguistic Analysis for Health (HeaLing),
co-located with EACL 2026, to be held in Rabat, Morocco, on March 24–29, 2026.
📌 Important Links
- Workshop Website: https://healing-workshop.github.io
- Contact: healing-workshop@googlegroups.com
- CFP & Submissions (OpenReview): https://openreview.net/group?id=eacl.org/EACL/2026/Workshop/HeaLing
🗓️ Key Dates (AoE)
Tentative Timeline
| Event | Date |
|---|---|
| Direct submission deadline | December 19, 2025 |
| Pre-reviewed (ARR) submission deadline | January 2, 2026 |
| Notification of acceptance | January 23, 2026 |
| Camera-ready paper due | February 3, 2026 |
| Workshop dates | March 24–29, 2026 |
🧠 Workshop Scope
Language-oriented approaches—such as discourse and conversation analysis, narrative medicine, and linguistic ethnography—have long been central to qualitative investigations of how medical knowledge is produced, communicated, and experienced.
Today, advances in natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) offer new possibilities for extending and scaling linguistic approaches across large health-related datasets.
The HeaLing workshop invites contributions that integrate qualitative and computational methods to examine how language informs and transforms medicine as a social and scientific practice. A central focus of the workshop is the practical value of interpretive insights derived from language analysis.
We welcome researchers from medical humanities, social and historical studies of medicine, and computational language sciences.
The workshop will be held as a half-day event at EACL 2026.
🧩 Topics of Interest (include but are not limited to)
- Computational + qualitative discourse analysis of clinical, scientific, policy, and other health-related texts (media, guidelines, patient narratives, clinical notes).
- Metaphor and framing in illness narratives, public health messaging, and clinical communication.
- Narrative medicine, story-centered clinical interventions, and evaluation of their effects.
- Historical and contemporary discourse studies of medical epistemologies (how concepts, categories, and expertise are constructed).
- Language, power, and inequality: how linguistic framing shapes access, stigma, and policy for marginalized populations.
- Methods for responsible use of NLP/LLMs in medical language research (bias, explainability, mixed-methods validation).
- Digital humanities approaches: building and interrogating historical corpora, archives, and born-digital records.
- Translational impact: case studies showing how interpretive linguistic insights led to concrete changes in practice, education, or policy.
📝 Submission Format and Reviewing Procedure
We accept original and unpublished research contributions (including surveys, position, and theory papers) following the ACL format.
The ACL Paper Styles are available here: https://github.com/acl-org/acl-style-files (both LaTeX and Word).
- Long papers: up to 8 pages (+ references)
- Short papers: up to 4 pages (+ references)
Camera-ready versions will be given one additional page to address reviewers’ comments.
Papers must be submitted anonymously. We accept submissions either through our own submission page or via the ACL Rolling Review (ARR).
All submissions will undergo double-blind peer review by at least three reviewers, with final acceptance decisions made by the workshop organizers.
Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings and presented orally or as posters.
👥 Organizing Committee
- Ylva Söderfeldt, Uppsala University, Sweden
- Vera Danilova, Uppsala University, Sweden
- Julia Reed, University of Vienna, Austria
- Murathan Kurfalı, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Sweden
- Gavin Farrell, University of Padua, Italy
📢 We strongly encourage submissions focusing on underrepresented languages and communities.