🎵 First Call for Papers: 4th Workshop on NLP for Music and Audio (NLP4MusA 2026)
Co-located with EACL 2026, Rabat, Morocco & Online | March 24–29, 2026
Shared Task: Conversational Music Recommendation Challenge (Music-CRS)Â
About the workshop
Building on a tradition of cross-disciplinary impact, the intersection of NLP with music and audio-based creative media presents a frontier full of unique challenges and exciting opportunities. The Fourth Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Music and Audio (NLP4MusA) aims to explore the multimodal synergies between language, music, and sound. As NLP increasingly enables domains where language and interaction converge, the entertainment industry offers a particularly compelling case: most audio content - such as songs or podcasts - contains an inherent linguistic dimension, while user engagement often occurs through language, from search queries to social media conversations.
Recent advances in language modeling and multimodal representation learning have deepened the connection between NLP and music, giving rise to a new generation of applications. These range from music transcription and captioning to the generation of lyrics, symbolic compositions, and even complex audio signals from text-based prompts. At the same time, techniques from Question Answering and Information Retrieval are transforming how people search for, recommend, and interact with music and audio.
Because language also reflects culture and multilingual diversity, NLP-driven approaches open pathways for cross-cultural discovery and creativity - enriching the way we experience and understand music and sound.
Submission Information
We welcome submissions on topics such as:
NLP for Music and Audio Understanding
 Music Tagging and Auto-tagging, Knowledge Graph Construction, Semantic Ontologies
Information Extraction, Named Entity Recognition, and Entity Linking
Multimodal Representation Learning, Lyrics and Symbolic Representation Analysis
Emotion and Sentiment Analysis, Culture-specific Music Understanding, Corpora Bias
Music Captioning and Description Generation
NLP for Music Retrieval or Recommendation
Conversational Interfaces, Query understanding and Intent Prediction
Multimodal, Cross-modal Music Information Retrieval and Recommender Systems
Natural Language User Modeling
Music Question Answering
Fairness and Transparency
NLP for Music and Audio Generation
Lyrics Generation, Audio/Symbolic Query-driven Music Generation
Synthetic Music Content Detection
Submission Instructions
We invite short papers of up to 4 pages (excluding references and appendices). Final versions will be given one additional page of content so that reviewers' comments can be taken into account. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings (ACL Anthology) and presented orally or as posters.
The review process will be double-blind. Submissions should adhere to the ACL Anthology formatting guidelines. A LaTeX template is available here (no Word templates is provided): https://github.com/mulab-mir/nlp4MusA-style-files
Shared tasks papers should be submitted as a 2-page report describing the solution, using the same  LaTeX template above. The best works will be selected for oral or poster presentations.
Ethics StatementÂ
We encourage all authors to include an explicit ethics statement on the broader impact of the work, or other ethical considerations after the conclusion but before the references. The ethics statement will not count toward the page limit.
Â
Double submission
To maximise the impact of work in the field of NLP for Music and Audio, we are open to the possibility of double submission, or submission of work which has been partially published elsewhere. Any double submission should however be reported to the programme committee at the time of submission and it will not be included in the proceedings.
Â
Authors can submit works that were previously published on preprint websites like arXiv.org.
Key Dates (tentative, AoE)
Direct Submission deadline: December 19, 2025
Notification of acceptance: January 23, 2026
Camera-ready paper due: February 3, 2026
Workshop dates: March 24-29, 2026