We are excited to announce the 3rd Language Models for Underserved Communities (LM4UC) workshop, co-located with IJCAI 2026. The workshop will take place in person and virtually between August 15-17, 2026, in Bremen. LM4UC invites researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to address challenges and propose innovative solutions for building and deploying language models (LMs) for underserved languages and communities.

Underserved communities often lack adequate access to advanced NLP technologies due to limited linguistic data, insufficient computational resources, or inadequate AI governance frameworks. This gap hinders equitable access to NLP advancements, exacerbating the digital divide. Our workshop aims to address this by fostering a multidisciplinary dialogue around the development of LMs that prioritize cultural sensitivity, resource efficiency, and sustainable AI practices.

Topics of Interest
We invite submissions of full papers, ongoing work, position papers, and survey papers on topics including, but not limited to:

1. Evaluation Design: Evaluations are no longer passive datasets. They are mechanisms that shape model development. We invite research that focuses on principled, technically grounded benchmark design.

2. Cultural Alignment & Safety: Most alignment research assumes Western norms. We invite papers that focus on technically grounded alignment methods that generalize across cultures and languages.

3. Agentic Systems in Global Environments: As LLMs become agents, we need formal evaluation and control in multilingual, multi-cultural environments.

Submission Guidelines
We welcome long papers (8 pages) and short papers (4 pages), excluding references. Submissions must follow the IJCAI 2026 style guidelines.

Important Dates

Submission deadline: May 24, 2026
Notification of acceptance: June 7, 2026
Camera-ready paper due: August 1, 2026
Workshop dates: August 15/16/17, 2026

Submit your paper via OpenReview: https://openreview.net/group?id=ijcai.org/IJCAI/2026/Workshop/LM4UC
Contact Us: For inquiries, please contact the workshop organizer: lm4uc.organizers@gmail.com