Welcome to the first HeaLing workshop to be held at EACL 2026 in Rabat, Morocco.

Tagline: Exploring Linguistic Analysis in Medicine and Healthcare: Bridging Hypotheses, Methods, and Insights

Important Dates

(Tentative timeline)

First call for workshop papers: October 15, 2025
Second call for workshop papers: November 12, 2025
Third call for papers: December 5, 2025
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

All deadlines are 11:59pm UTC-12 (“anywhere on earth”).

Workshop Topic and Context

Language in medicine is never neutral: the ways clinicians, patients, researchers, and institutions talk and write about health reflect and shape medical knowledge, practice, and policy. In the humanities and social sciences disciplines that study medicine, healthcare and the medical professions, qualitative discourse analysis is often used as the principal method to study how diagnostic categories emerge, how metaphors and narratives frame illness, how medical records evolve, and how misunderstandings in everyday interactions have concrete clinical consequences.

With the explosion of AI, quantitative methods are increasingly shaping how the humanities and social sciences study medicine. AI-based methods are powerful, yet their value depends on careful alignment between hypotheses, chosen methods, and the interpretation of the outputs. Without this alignment and rigorous evaluation, computational analyses risk obscuring the very concepts they aim to clarify. The contribution of the outcomes of raw language data analyses to the future of medicine and healthcare, such as understanding how healthcare coordination is affected by societal perceptions of disease, the naming and framing of illnesses, stigmatization, and mismatched discourses, – critically depends on this careful alignment.

This workshop will provide a forum for researchers studying medical and healthcare language in the humanities and social sciences to discuss and compare their use of both quantitative and qualitative methods in their research. It will contribute to:

Assessing methods and evaluation: benchmark tools, document corpus design (timeframe, domain, de-identification, multilinguality), and improve reproducibility.
Connecting methods to hypotheses: ensure that computational analyses truly capture linguistic phenomena of interest (e.g., framing, metaphor, classification).
Improving interpretability and reliability: develop explainable models and transparent reporting so conclusions are usable across medicine, history, and policy.
Highlighting real-world impact: present case studies of how language analysis shapes clinical practice, public health communication, or historical understanding.
Fostering interdisciplinary exchange: bring together ACL researchers with scholars from medicine, social sciences, history, and the humanities.

Invited Speakers

Ericka Johnson, Linköping University, Sweden

Ericka Johnson is Professor of Gender and Society at Linköping University, Sweden, whose research explores how medical knowledge, technologies, and bodies are shaped by language and practice. In recent years, she has examined the role of synthetic data in medicine, connecting it to broader questions from feminist science and technology studies about evidence, trust, and the social life of data. By situating synthetic datasets within the history of medical record-keeping and the politics of representation, her work highlights both their promise for innovation and their risks of reinforcing bias or obscuring patient experience.

Submission Guidelines

Authors are invited to submit original and unpublished research contributions (including surveys, position and theory papers) in the following categories:

Full Papers — up to 8 pages, presenting substantial, completed research.
Short Papers — up to 4 pages, describing ongoing, focused, or preliminary work.

All submissions must be in PDF format and submitted electronically via OpenReview. Papers should adhere to the ACL formatting guidelines, following the ACL Rolling Review (ARR) Call for Papers ARR CfP. Please use the official ACL style templates, available here (both Word and LaTeX).

Authors of accepted papers must submit their camera-ready versions by the camera-ready deadline. One (1) additional page is allowed for addressing reviewer comments.

Papers must be submitted anonymously. We accept submissions either through our own submission page, or via the general ACL Rolling Review. 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.

The full EACL 2026 Call for Papers is available here.

Program Committee

Sofía Aguilar, Saarland University, Germany
Meriem Beloucif, Uppsala University, Sweden
Vera Danilova, Uppsala University, Sweden
Luise Dürlich, RISE Research Institute, Sweden
Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Saarland University, Germany
Vinu Ekayanake, University of Kentucky, USA
Christina Humphreys, Uppsala University, Sweden
Murathan Kurfalı, Stockholm University and RISE Research Institute, Sweden
Lia Shahnazaryan, Paderborn University, Germany
Amir Payberah, KTH, Sweden
Lidia Pivovarova, University of Helsinki, Finland
Roland Roller, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, DFKI, Germany
Ahmed Ruby, Uppsala University, Sweden
Eugenia Rykova, Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany
Patrick Ruch, University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland
Diego Saez Trumper, Pompeu Fabra University, Spain
Arno Simons, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
Maria Skeppstedt, Stockholm University, Sweden
Sara Stymne, Uppsala University, Sweden

Organizers


Ylva Söderfeldt, Uppsala University, Sweden	Vera Danilova, Uppsala University, Sweden	Julia Reed, University of Vienna, Austria	Gavin Farrell, University of Padua, Italy	Murathan Kurfalı, Stockholm University, Sweden