Understanding human intelligence by constructing human-like machines has historically been a pivotal goal in artificial intelligence (Shapiro, 2003). In linguistics, cognitive modeling and computational psycholinguistics have pioneered this direction—aligning computational models with human cognition—to scientifically understand how we learn and use language (Crocker, 2010). The CMCL workshop has provided a long-standing venue for such interdisciplinary research on natural language processing (NLP) and the cognitive science of language.

Notably, the recent engineering success of large language models (LLMs) has stimulated scientific questions at this intersection, such as the gap between humans and LLMs in language processing (Huang et al., 2024) and language acquisition (Wilcox et al., 2025), and more generally, the role and position of LLMs in language science (Futrell and Mahowald, 2025, i.a.). Despite this potential, due to the rapid transition of research trends in NLP, submissions of research work on linguistically and cognitively inspired topics have been dwindling in recent NLP conferences.

Following the success of previous editions, we aim to make CMCL a venue that promotes interdisciplinary research at the intersection between NLP, cognitive science, and computational linguistics.

Important Dates

● February 25, 2026: Paper submission deadline

● March 23, 2026: Notification of acceptance

● March 30, 2026: Camera-ready paper due

● May 16, 2026: Workshop date

Deadlines are at 11:59 pm AOE. Submissions will be made through the START platform (link to be announced)