Photo by Frank Mckenna

Welcome!


Welcome to the 4th Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP (C3NLP) Co-located with ACL 2026, San Diego, USA.

CALL FOR PAPERS


Natural Language Processing has seen impressive gains in recent years. This research includes the demonstration by NLP models to have turned into useful technologies with improved capabilities, measured in terms of how well they match human behavior captured in web-scale language data or through annotations. However, human behavior is inherently shaped by the cultural contexts humans are embedded in, the values and beliefs they hold, and the social practices they follow, part of which will be reflected in the data used to train NLP models, and the behavior these NLP models exhibit. Not accounting for this factor could cause incongruencies and misalignments between the cultural contexts that underpin the NLP model development process and the multi-cultural ecosystems they are expected to operate in. These misalignments may result in various harms, including barriers to those from under-represented cultures, violating cultural norms and values, and erasure of cultural knowledge.

While recent work in the field has started to acknowledge this issue, it is important to build a long-term research agenda for the NLP community around (1) deeper understanding of how global cultures and NLP technologies intersect, in a way that goes beyond multi-lingual and cross-lingual research, (2) how to detect, measure, and attempt to mitigate potential biases and harms in NLP technology in ways that reflect local cultures and values, and (3) how to build more cross-culturally competent NLP systems. This agenda requires looking beyond the NLP community, bringing in multi-disciplinary expertise to shape the inquiries in this important area.

We propose this workshop as a way to bring together the growing number of NLP researchers interested in this topic, along with a community of scholars with multi-disciplinary expertise spanning linguistics, social sciences, and cultural anthropology. Our aim is to build this important inquiry within NLP on a solid basis of cultural theories from social sciences. To this end, the workshop program will focus on the following themes: Inclusivity and Representation of cultures in NLP, Cultural harms of NLP technologies, and Culture Sensitive lens on Social Biases and Harms in NLP. We invite papers on topics including the following (but not limited to):

  • How does culture shape NLP data, annotations, models, and applications?
  • How can we use methods from social sciences to study the cultural impacts of NLP?
  • How to incorporate cultural knowledge in NLP data and models in recurrent/dynamic ways?
  • How can we detect and mitigate cultural harms of NLP technology?
  • How does NLP technology reflect and/or reinforce cultural values and stereotypes?
  • How can we develop NLP technology in a way that is representative of global cultures?
  • How can we effectively involve annotators from across cultural contexts in NLP research?
  • How can NLP data collection methods be improved to better capture cultural differences?
  • What are the perceptions of NLP tasks of crowd workers from different cultures?
  • How can NLP technology impact the way we think about language and culture?
  • How to build bridges between NLP researchers, linguists, and language communities?
  • How can multi-modal models accurately capture, represent and enhance cultural expressions?
  • What can we learn from low-resource cultures that could improve NLP technologies?

Requirements for Direct Submission: Both short papers and long papers are welcome, and must follow all of the ACL paper submission requirements.


Submission Link:

IMPORTANT DATES


Event Date
Full peer-review (Archival and Non-archival) Submission deadline: March 20, 2026 Extended to March 27, 2026
Notification of acceptance: April 28, 2026 April 30, 2026
Camera-ready paper due: May 12, 2026
Already peer-reviewed through ARR Last ARR submission deadline: January 5, 2026
Commitment deadline: April 10, 2026
Notification of acceptance: April 28, 2026 April 30, 2026
Camera-ready paper due: May 12, 2026
Already accepted/published (Non-archival) Submission deadline: May 18, 2026
Notification of acceptance: May 25, 2026
Workshop Registration: TBA (Early registration deadline: TBA)
Workshop: July 4, 2026

All deadlines are 23:59 UTC -12h (anywhere on earth) unless stated otherwise.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE


Vinod

Vinodkumar Prabhakaran

Staff Research Scientist
Google Research

Sunipa

Sunipa Dev

Senior Research Scientist
Google Research

Luciana

Luciana Benotti

Associate Professor
Universidad Nacional de Córdoba

Daniel

Daniel Hershcovich

Assistant Professor
University of Copenhagen

Yong

Yong Cao

Postdoc Researcher
University of Tübingen

Li

Li Zhou

Postdoc Researcher
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

Ife

Ife Adebara

PhD Student
University of British Columbia

Bolei

Bolei Ma

PhD Student
LMU Munich

OUR SPONSORS


Gold Sponsor
Apple

Sponsorship Tiers


ACCEPTED PAPERS


Archival

Annotation as Cultural Interpretation: Rethinking Data Labeling in NLP

Wajdi Zaghouani

Somatic in the East, Psychological in the West?: A Clinically-Grounded Evaluation of Cross-Cultural Depression Symptoms in LLMs

Shintaro Sakai, Jisun An, Migyeong Kang, Haewoon Kwak

GCCLA: Graph-Conditioned Cross-Lingual Adaptation of Large Language Models Under Extreme Data Scarcity (A Case Study in Tigrigna)

Hagos Gebremedhin Gebremeskel, Chong Feng, Asefa Mebrahtu Abera

LLM-Adapted Colombian Spanish Lexicography: Proficiency Control, Hallucination, and Cultural Distortion

Johnatan E. Bonilla

Soft Prompts for Adapting LLMs to Cultural Commonsense Knowledge

Gabrielle Le Bellier, Marine Carpuat, Benoît Sagot, Chloé Clavel

The Mirage of Diversity: Unmasking the Cultural Vocabulary Ceiling in LLMs

Soumedhik Bharati, Shibam Mandal, Subhrajit Mukherjee

The American Palimpsest: Quantifying South Asian English Dialect Erasure in LLMs

Soumedhik Bharati, Shibam Mandal, Swarup Kr Ghosh, Sayani Mondal

Toward Culturally Grounded Natural Language Processing

Sina Bagheri Nezhad

TabletCraft: Bridging a 4,000-Year Cultural Gap with Bidirectional Akkadian NMT and Cuneiform Rendering

Zhaohui Wang

Lost in Translation? How Language Shapes Responsibility Attribution in Large Language Models

Pavithra P M Nair, Gilad Gressel, Krishnashree Achuthan

Ontology-oriented lexico-semantic modeling and neural classification of Chinese chéngyǔ: A culture-aware NLP

Lian CHEN

Sorry, Can't Help You: How Large Language Models Judge Failures to Help Across Languages

Pavithra P M Nair, Gilad Gressel, Krishnashree Achuthan

Does Reasoning Kill the Joke? Long-Context Humor Understanding in Hindi

Kaveri Anuranjana, Navya Shrivastava, Atharv Johar, Rishabh Sabharwal, Gautam Ranka, Aryan Lunawat, Punit Rathore, Radhika Mamidi

One Style Fits All? Cultural Values Embedded in Conversational AI via a People-Pleasing Lens

Yi-Jun Chen, I-Tsen Hsieh, Li-Wun Chang

Beyond Monolithic Culture: Evaluating Understandability of Online Text Across Cultural Dimensions

Saurabh Kumar Pandey, Harshit Gupta, Sougata Saha, Monojit Choudhury

Non-Archival

Beyond WEIRD Data: A Sociotechnical Framework for Culturally Responsive AI in Mental Health

Sunny Rai, Elizabeth C. Stade, Graise Zhou, Neil Sehgal, Simone H. Schriger, Sara Gerke, Lyle Ungar, Sharath Chandra Guntuku

Adaptive Data Collection for Latin-American Community-sourced Evaluation of Stereotypes (LACES)

Guido Ivetta, Pietro Palombini, Sofia Martinelli, Marcos J Gomez, M Emilia Echeveste, Sunipa Dev, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Luciana Benotti

Indigenous Inheritances: Integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge into Wildfire Mitigation

Ivory Yang, Hefan Zhang, Wenhua Liang, William Dinauer, Soroush Vosoughi

Modeling Cultural and Subcultural Variation in Code-Switched Discourse with Topic Annotation

Nemika Tyagi, Nelvin Licona-Guevara, Olga Kellert

The Language of Bargaining: Linguistic Effects in LLM Negotiations

Stuti Sinha, Himanshu Kumar, Aryan Raju Mandapati, Rakshit Sakhuja, Dhruv Kumar

Cultural Markers and Narrative Homogeneity in AI-Generated Stories

Shaily Bhatt, Supriti Vijay, Jeremiah Milbauer, Fernando Diaz

Let’s Talk, Not Type: An Oral-First Multi-Agent Architecture for Guaraní

Samantha Adorno, Akshata Kishore Moharir, Ratna Kandala

Culture Affordance Atlas: Reconciling Object Diversity Through Functional Mapping

Joan Nwatu, Longju Bai, Oana Ignat, Rada Mihalcea

Cross-Cultural Value Awareness in Large Vision-Language Models

Phillip Howard, Xin Su, Kathleen C. Fraser

VideoNorms: Benchmarking Cultural Norm Understanding of Video Language Models

Nikhil Reddy Varimalla, Yunfei Xu, Meng Fan Wang, Arkadiy Saakyan, Smaranda Muresan

Steering LLMs for Culturally Localized Generation

Simran Khanuja, Hongbin Liu, Shujian Zhang, John Wheatley Lambert, Mingqing Chen, Rajiv Mathews, Lun Wang

Cultural Mirrors, Distorted Reflections: How Language and Name Scripts Shape Ethnic Hierarchies in Western and Chinese LLMs

Annabella Sakunkoo, Jonathan Sakunkoo

Beyond 'One Language, One Script': Quantifying Orthographic Bias in Multilingual VLMs with PuMVR

Prabhjot Singh, Bhushan Pawar, Madhu Reddiboina

Are Vision Language Models Cross-Cultural Theory of Mind Reasoners?

Zabir Al Nazi, G M Shahariar, MD. ABRAR HOSSAIN, Wei Peng

Already Accepted Track

Reheat Nachos for Dinner? Evaluating AI Support for Cross-Cultural Communication of Neologisms.

Dayeon Ki, Yu Hou, Rachel Rudinger, Hal Daumé III, Marine Carpuat, Fumeng Yang

SAFARI: A Community-Engaged Approach and Dataset of Stereotype Resources in the Sub-Saharan African Context

Aishwarya Verma, Laud Ammah, Olivia Nercy Ndlovu Lucas, Andrew Zaldivar, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Sunipa Dev

Carefully Considering Culture: Analyzing LLM Alignment in Single- and Multi-Cultural Settings using Cultural Consensus Theory

Krishna Pothugunta, John P. Lalor

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