Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLMs) create new opportunities for supporting democratic processes, from large-scale citizen consultation and deliberation to debate summarization, preference aggregation, and access to political information. At the same time, their use raises fundamental questions about fairness, diversity, political representation, transparency, and whose voices and perspectives are amplified or marginalized.

The 1st Multidisciplinary Workshop on NLP for Democracies (MultiDems) aims to provide a dedicated forum for research at the intersection of NLP, political science, social science, computational social choice, and related disciplines. In particuliar, we encourage the submission of work that moves beyond predominantly US-centric, monolingual, or two-party settings and studies NLP systems in the linguistic, institutional, and political diversity of democratic systems worldwide. 

 Democracies are plural, so our research should be too. 

MultiDems welcomes quality contributions on:

• Social choice and computational social choice in NLP

• Agent-in-the-loop and AI-assisted deliberation

• Summarization or moderation of political debates, deliberations and citizen consultations

• Preference inference and aggregation of citizens’ preferences from natural language 

• Fairness and bias in political text classification and NLP systems

• Multilingual NLP for democratic systems, including multilingual and multi-party contexts

• Critical evaluation of AI and NLP systems used in democratic processes

• Representation of diverse, minority, and critical voices in AI systems

• NLP for participatory and deliberative democracy

• Political and parliamentary NLP

• Argument mining and opinion aggregation in democratic settings

• Evaluation methods and benchmarks for democratic applications of NLP

• Human-centered and participatory approaches to AI for democracy

• Ethical, societal, and institutional implications of deploying NLP and LLM systems in democratic contexts

We particularly encourage interdisciplinary work bringing together NLP with political science, sociology, computational social science, computational social choice, HCI, public policy, law, or related fields. 

In addition to conventional research papers, we welcome position and conceptual papers, methodological contributions, negative results, datasets and resources, evaluation studies, critical analyses, and interdisciplinary empirical work.

All deadlines are 11:59 PM Anywhere on Earth (UTC−12).

• First Call for Papers: October 14, 2026

• Direct paper submission deadline: December 23, 2026

• Reviews due: January 13, 2027

• ARR commitment deadline: January 18, 2027

• Notification of acceptance: January 22, 2027

• Camera-ready papers due: February 2 2027

• Pre-recorded video due: February 12, 2027

• EACL 2027: March 9–14, 2027

• MultiDems workshop date: TBA

Dates specific to the shared task are the following:

• Data release and Opening of the Codabench competition: early November 2026

• Codabench competition submission deadline: December 3, 2026

• System-description paper submission deadline: December 23, 2026

• Notification of acceptance: January 22, 2027