Call for Papers: First Workshop on Computational Developmental Linguistics @ACL 2026, San Diego
Friday, 3 July 2026 to Tuesday, 7 July 2026


Website:
https://comp-dev-ling.github.io/
Submission Deadline:
Friday, 20 March 2026

We are pleased to invite submissions to the First Workshop on Computational Developmental Linguistics (CDL, https://comp-dev-ling.github.io/), co-located with ACL 2026 in San Diego, CA, USA. The workshop will take place between July 3rd and July 7th (exact date to be confirmed).

The workshop aims to bridge the conversation between modern machine learning and developmental linguistics. We hope to draw inspiration from both fields, identifying similarities and differences in the (im)plausibilities of comparing LMs and human language learning, to motivate better LM engineering and more rigorous computational modeling of human language acquisition.

The scope and topics include, but are not limited to:

Computational models for developmental linguistics.
Learning dynamics in pretraining and post-training of LMs.
Comparisons of developmental linguistics in humans and machines.
Knowledge tracing and developmental diagnostics.
Applications of developmental insights in language education and clinical NLP.

Important Dates

Submission Due: March 20th, 2026
Review Due: April 22nd, 2026
Notification of Acceptance: May 1st, 2026
Camera-Ready Due (tentative): May 15th, 2026

Submission types include long papers (up to 8 pages, both archival and non-archival), short papers (up to 4 pages, both archival and non-archival), and ARR commitments (both archival and non-archival). Archival papers will receive an additional page in the camera-ready version to address reviewers' feedback and will be published in the ACL Anthology.

Submission Portal: https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/ACL/2026/Workshop/CDL

If you are interested in reviewing for CDL, please fill in the form here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdyPBKh2GZ6ETuUrQktqNYv6fLIsg7r...

Warm regards,

CDL 2026 Organizers: Martin Ziqiao Ma, Emmy Liu, Jing Liu, Tyler A. Chang, Abdellah Fourtassi, Alex Warstadt, Michael Hahn, Weiwei Sun, and Freda Shi
Contact Email:
cdl.workshop.committee@gmail.com