Call for Papers
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 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:
- Benchmark Design & Task Construction: Benchmarks are no longer passive datasets. They are mechanisms that shape model development. This track focuses on principled, technically grounded benchmark design.
- Alignment & Safety (Multilingual / Global): Most alignment research assumes Western norms. This track focuses on technically grounded alignment methods that generalize across cultures and languages.
- Agentic Systems in Global Environments: As LLMs become agents, we need formal evaluation and control in multilingual, multi-cultural environments.
Submission Guidelines
- Format: We welcome long papers (8 pages) and short papers (4 pages), excluding references.
- Style: Submissions must follow the official IJCAI 2026 style guidelines.
- Where to Submit: Submit your paper via OpenReview.
Important Dates
- Submission deadline:
May 15, 2026May 24, 2026 - Notification of acceptance: June 7, 2026
- Camera-ready paper due: July 1, 2026
- Workshop dates: August 16, 2026
Please note that all the deadlines are 11:59PM in AoE (Anywhere on Earth) timezone.
Contact Us
For inquiries, please contact the workshop organizers: lm4uc.organizers (at) gmail.com
Alternatively, you can reach us via our Discord server.
List of Speakers
List of Organizers
Schedule
| Time | Session |
|---|---|
| 09h00-09h10 | Opening Remarks |
| 09h10-09h50 | Keynote 1: Prof. Preslav Nakov |
| 09h50-10h30 | Keynote 2: Prof. Iryna Gurevych |
| 10h30-11h00 | Coffee Break |
| 11h00-12h30 | Oral Presentations |
| 12h30-14h00 | Lunch Break |
| 14h00-15h15 | Oral Presentations |
| 15h15-15h30 | Closing Remarks |
| 15h30-16h00 | Coffee Break |
| 16h00-17h00 | Poster Session |
Detailed Oral Presentations
11h00-12h30 Session
- Lost in Translation: Cross-Lingual Cultural Value Drift in Large Language Models Across South Asian Languages — Simranjit Singh, Kumar Prateek, MOHIT SAIWAN
- LLM Safety Alignment in Low-Resource Languages: A Systematic Literature Review — LEMOFOUET VALDINI DOUGLACE, Sukairaj Hafiz Imam, Paula Chikaodinaka Anyanwu, Uzor Blessing Ngozi, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad
- IndicAGTD: A Prompt, Model, and Language-Aware Benchmark for Al-Generated Text Detection — Suyash Sethia, Radhika Mamidi
- Can LLMs Translate Palenquero? Evaluating Zero-Shot and Fine-Tuned Approaches for an Underrepresented Colombian Creole — Daniel J. Casas
- ViMedRob: A Robustness Benchmark for Vietnamese Medical Named Entity Recognition under Real-World Input Noise — Minh T. Hua
- When Labels Have Structure: Argument-Role Factorization for Low-Support Multilingual Argument Classification — Toprak Seda Karaosmanoğlu
14h00-15h15 Session
- Bridging the Gap in Low-Resource OCR: The Viyavi Multi-Scale Series for Dhivehi — ubaidhullah abdul hameed, Ahmed Zahir, Chiquan Chen
- Expanding the Lexicon of Ge’ez Based African Languages: A Comparative Study of Amharic and Tigrinya — Hailay Kidu Teklehaymanot, Wolfgang Nejdl
- SAFA-Thera: Modeling Persistent Multi-Turn Risk in Child-Facing Safety Dialogue — Tang chong, Zhiqi Zhang, Hongda Zhang, Wang Dongyu, Pengfei Li, Hao Xu
- Measuring the Tokenization Premium: A Cost Audit for Underserved Language Communities — Avijit Roy, Proma Roy, Hrishitva Patel
- Accessible, but Not Adopted: Increasing LLM Adoption among First-gen, Low-income College Students beyond Expanding Access — Hyungsik Kim