Call for Papers:

The First Bangla Language Processing Workshop (BLP 2023) Co-located with EMNLP 2023 in Singapore

The first BNLP workshop aims to provide a forum for the NLP, speech and multimodal communities to share and discuss their ongoing work with the international community. We particularly focus on Bangla, which is a low-resource language, and assess its current state-of-the-art and discuss strategies to make further progress in NLP, speech and multimodal research. Through this workshop, we plan to bring researchers together to come up with frameworks and strategies that can later support other low-resource languages. We encourage researchers to submit their papers focusing on novel methodologies and resources that help towards the progress of Bangla and other low resource languages. Novel methodologies include, but are not limited to, zero-shot learning, unsupervised learning, and simple yet effective methods applicable to low-computation scenarios.

We invite original research papers from a wide range of topics, including but not limited to:

Natural Language Processing: Corpus and Resource Development, Language Modeling, Stemmer, POS Tagger, Named Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction, Spell and Grammar Checker, Question Answering, Semantics, Text Summarization, Machine Translation, Sentiment Analysis.

Speech Processing: Speech Synthesis and Spoken Language Generation, Speech Recognition, Phonetics, Phonology, and Prosody, Spoken Dialog and Conversational System, Speaker and Language Detection.

Multimodality: OCR - Handwriting, Printed Document, Sign Language Detection.

Human Computer Interaction: Software for Disabled People, Multimodal HCI for Bangla.

Important dates:

Workshop paper due: 1 September 2023

Notification of acceptance: 6 October 2023

Camera-ready papers due: 18 October 2023

Workshop dates: 6-7 December 2023

All deadlines are 11:59pm anywhere on Earth (AoE).

Submission Details:

Papers must describe original, completed or in-progress, and unpublished work. All papers will be refereed through a double-blind peer review process by multiple reviewers with final acceptance decisions made by the workshop organizers. Accepted papers will be given up to 9 pages (for full papers), 5 pages (for short papers and posters) in the workshop proceedings, and will be presented as oral paper or poster.

We are seeking submissions under the following category

Full papers (8 pages)

Short papers (work in progress, innovative ideas/proposals: 4 pages)

Shared task paper (4 pages)


Both long and short papers must follow the EMNLP 2023 two-column format, using the supplied official templates [1]. The templates can be downloaded in style files and formatting. Please do not modify these style files, nor should you use templates designed for other conferences. Submissions that do not conform to the required styles, including paper size, margin width, and font size restrictions, will be rejected without review. Verification to guarantee conformance to publication standards, we will be using the ACL pubcheck tool [2]. The PDFs of camera-ready papers must be run through this tool prior to their final submission, and we recommend its use also at submission time.

Submissions are open to all, and are to be submitted anonymously. For the anonymity, double-blind submission and reproducibility criteria please follow the EMNLP 2023 instructions [3].

If you have published in the field previously, and are interested in helping out in the program committee to review papers, please fill up this form [4].

Submission portal: TBA

Workshop Organizers:

Firoj Alam, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Qatar

Sudipta Kar, Amazon Alexa AI, USA

Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Qatar

Farig Sadeque, BRAC University, Bangladesh

Ruhul Amin, Fordham University, USA

Asif Shahriyar Sushmit, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA

[1] https://2023.emnlp.org/calls/style-and-formatting/

[2] https://github.com/acl-org/aclpubcheck

[3] https://2023.emnlp.org/calls/main_conference_papers/
[4] https://forms.gle/1WUYQjWT9UuqioX48


The Organizers