CALL FOR PAPERS

The 5th International Workshop on Natural Language-based Software Engineering (NLBSE'26)


Co-located with the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'26)


12-13 April 2026, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil


The NLBSE workshop aims to bring together researchers and industrial practitioners from NLP and the software engineering communities to collaborate, share experiences, provide directions for future research, and encourage the use of NLP techniques and tools for addressing software engineering-specific challenges.


TOPICS OF INTEREST


Papers should address a problem in the software engineering domain or combine elements of NLP research with other concerns in the software engineering lifecycle. Examples of problems in the software engineering domain include (but are not limited to):
- key information identification and extraction from natural language software artifacts;
- elicitation, modeling, and verification of requirements;
- generation of source code documentation;
- software verification and validation support;
- classification, summarization, and prioritization of development tasks;
- changes, developers, and solutions recommendation;
- maintenance effort minimization;
- quality assessment of natural language software artifacts.

Proposed solutions should apply NLP-based approaches and/or models such as (but not limited to) textual analysis, text summarization, topics or aspects modeling and extraction, machine translation, natural language parsing, semantic parsing, natural language generation, sentiment analysis, discourse analysis.


SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS


Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit:

- Full papers (maximum of 8 pages, including references). Original research in NLP for SE, either empirical, theoretical, or showing the practical experience of using NLP techniques and/or NLP tools for addressing software engineering-specific challenges
- Education tools and materials (maximum of 8 pages, including references). Original contributions covering all dimensions of learning and teaching NLP in software engineering. This also includes experience reports providing informal proof by outlining a particular experience connected to education and training, such asa a course, an educational or training method. The submission should translate the experience into practical guidance and insights gained, without the requirement for through evaluation or the application of rigorous research techniques to back its claims.
- Replication Studies and Negative results (maximum of 8 pages, including references). Research papers and reviews focusing on negative results or the reproducibility of previously published work. We believe that publishing negative results, alongside positive ones, provides a more holistic view of the research landscape, fostering transparency, credibility, and the elimination of publication bias.
- Short and demonstration papers (maximum of 4 pages, including references). Work that describes novel techniques, tools, ideas, and positions that have yet to be fully developed; or are a discussion of the importance of a recently published NLP result by another author in setting a direction for the SE community, and/or the potential applicability (or not) of the result in an industrial context.
- [NEW this year] Extended Abstracts (maximum of 2 pages, including references). We invite researchers to present novel ideas that are not fully developed but that might spark discussion or start new trends in the NLBSE community. Extended abstracts are free of APC charges and will be included in the proceedings.
- Position papers (maximum of 2 pages, including references). Contributions that analyze trends in NLBSE and raise issues of importance. Position papers are intended to seed discussion and debate at the workshop, and thus will be reviewed with respect to relevance and their ability to spark discussions.
- Tool Competition entries (maximum of 4 pages, including references). We invite researchers, students, and tool developers to design innovative solutions to tackle the automated classification of code comments and automated skill classification. For submissions of this kind, please refer to the instructions detailed in the tool competition webpage https://nlbse2026.github.io/tools/

All submissions must conform to the ICSE’26 formatting and submission instructions https://conf.researchr.org/track/icse-2026/icse-2026-research-track?#Call-for-papers

All submissions must be anonymized, in PDF format and should be submitted electronically through HotCRP https://icse2026-nlbse26.hotcrp.com/

For tool competition submissions, check the details reported on the tool competition page https://nlbse2026.github.io/tools/


IMPORTANT DATES


(All deadlines are 23:59h "Anywhere on Earth" (AoE) time)

Paper Submission
November 3, 2025

Author Notification
November 24, 2025

Camera Ready Due
January 26, 2026


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE


Chairs
- Giuseppe Colavito, University of Bari, Italy
- Nataliia Stulova, MacPaw, Kyiv, Ukraine
- Fabio Marcos De Abreu Santos, Colorado State University, USA

Comments Competition Organizers
- Pooja Rani, University of Zurich, Switzerland
- Moritz Mock, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

Skills Competition Organizers
- Fabio Santos, Colorado State University, USA
- Jacob Penney, Northern Arizona University, USA
- Benjamin Carter, University of California Santa Barbara, USA

Steering Committee
- Sebastiano Panichella, University of Bern, Switzerland
- Maliheh Izadi, Technical University of Delft, Netherlands
- Andrea Di Sorbo, University of Sannio, Italy

Web Chairs
- Daniela Grassi, University of Bari, Italy
- Atuhaire Ambala, Colorado State University, USA