Call for Papers
CHiPSAL 2026
Second Workshop on Challenges in Processing South Asian Languages @LREC 2026
16 May 2026

We are pleased to announce the Second Workshop on Challenges in Processing South Asian Languages (CHiPSAL 2026), to be held in hybrid mode on 16 May 2026, co-located with LREC 2026.

CHiPSAL 2026 invites substantial, original, and unpublished research on all areas of natural language processing, language resources, and evaluation—covering spoken, signed, and multimodal language—as well as system demonstrations. We welcome long and short papers addressing challenges, resources, tools, and innovations for South Asian languages. Topics include, but are not limited to:

Encoding and Unicode issues
Orthographic complexities
Morphology and generation
Dialectal variation and standardisation
Code-mixing and multilingualism
Building linguistic resources
Speech recognition and synthesis
Technology for linguistic heritage preservation
Benchmarking models
Large language models for South Asian languages

Important Dates (AoE)

Submission Deadline: 20 February 2026
Notification of Acceptance: 20 March 2026
Camera-ready Papers: 30 March 2026
Workshop (Hybrid): 16 May 2026

Submission Guidelines

CHiPSAL 2026 accepts oral, poster, and poster+demo papers.

Short papers: 4 pages
Long papers: 8 pages
(Excluding ethics/limitations, references, acknowledgements, and data/code availability statements)

All submissions must:

Follow the LREC 2026 stylesheet: https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/
Be fully anonymised for double-blind review
Include required ethics/limitations and data/code availability statements
Be self-contained (no appendices or supplementary files at submission)
Be relevant to South Asian language processing

Papers must report original, unpublished work. Concurrent submissions must be declared. Accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings.

Authors are encouraged to submit related resources to the LRE Map: https://lremap.elra.info/
Shared Tasks

CHiPSAL 2026 also hosts two shared tasks:

Multimodal Hate and Sentiment Understanding in Low-Resource Memes
https://sites.google.com/view/chipsal/shared-tasks_1/shared-task-1

Multilingual ASR for South Asian Languages
https://sites.google.com/view/chipsal/shared-tasks_1/shared-task-2

We warmly encourage participation in these shared tasks.
More Information

Workshop website: https://sites.google.com/view/chipsal/
Organising Committee

Kengatharaiyer Sarveswaran, University of Jaffna, Jaffna, Sri Lanka.
Ashwini Vaidya, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India.
Bal Krishna Bal, Kathmandu University, Kathmandu, Nepal.
Surendrabikram Thapa, Virginia Tech, USA.
Tafseer Ahmed, Mohammad Ali Jinnah University, Karachi, Pakistan.

Do not miss the opportunity to submit your work, strengthen the South Asian NLP community, and support the development of language technology in one of the world’s most populous and linguistically diverse regions.

We look forward to your contributions.