Call for Papers: Identity-Aware AI 2026

Ethical and Technical Challenges for Identity-Aware AI

Workshop at LREC 2026, Palma de Mallorca, Spain, May 11-16, 2026

Workshop theme: What makes each of us unique, and which ethical and technical challenges does this imply?

Overview

What makes us unique? Language (and thus the automatic processing of it) is about people and what they mean. However, current practice relies on the assumptions that the involved humans are all the same, and that if enough data (and compute power) is present, the resulting generalizations will be robust enough and represent the majority.

This approach often harms marginalized communities and ignores the notion of identity in models and systems. Our interdisciplinary workshop aims to raise the question of “what makes each of us unique?” to the AI community. We seek to gather researchers from diverse fields to understand how the identities of all stakeholders, e.g., the individuals projecting their views in texts, the individuals perceiving the texts, the individuals mentioned and those not mentioned in the texts, should be considered in future research in AI and NLP.

Workshop Goals

• The development of a shared and interdisciplinary understanding of identities and how identity is treated in AI
• The development of new methods that push the effective, fair, and inclusive treatment of individuals in AI to the next level

Topics of Interest

We invite submissions on the following topics:

• Approaches to model subjective phenomena: Personalization and perspectivist methods that leverage disaggregated labeled data, encoding annotator metadata on their beliefs, moral values, sociodemographic features, or personal narratives. ML methods to address the challenges of “learning from disagreements” both from the development of new models and the collection of data to train such models.

• Methods for detecting and controlling bias in models and data: Techniques to audit fairness, enforce fairness constraints, and learn fair representation from data, in order to enhance the fairness of models while maintaining their predictive reliability. Ethical challenges for LLMs in identity-aware dialog and tasks: diversity, stereotypes, harms.

• The role of sociodemographics in LLMs: Such as which characteristics (and disagreements) they embody and how to measure their capacity for representing and reasoning about diverse types of identities.

• Challenges for applying AI methods to model socio-political phenomena: Including polarization, impact of media consumption on public opinion formation, agenda setting, deliberation support, and how integrating identity into AI methods can influence the accuracy for these tasks.

• NLP work at the intersection with social psychology: The methodological foundation for quantitative investigation of identity-related topics. The reflection on best practices to reliably measure complex constructs such as morals and values. Detection and analysis of personal narratives across cultures.

• Accountability of AI in the eye of the general public: The role of LLMs, and the responsibilities of AI and NLP developers for ethical use of identities.

• Identity-aware and community informed evaluation and auditing: Community informed bias evaluation and auditing. Human evaluation of LLMs and other AI systems in an identity-aware manner.

Submission Types

We welcome the following types of submissions:

• Archival workshop papers: 4 to 8 pages in length, excluding acknowledgements, references, and (optional) Ethics Statement and Limitations sections
• Non-archival submissions, student project presentations, mixed-media submissions

For non-archival submissions, we welcome creative formats including:

• Art, poetry, music
• Blog posts
• Jupyter notebooks
• Teaching materials
• Videos
• Findings papers
• Late-breaking papers
• Extended abstracts

For creative format submissions, please submit a PDF containing:

• A summary or abstract of your work
• A link to your work (if hosted externally)
• Any additional context or documentation

Submission Guidelines

• Formatting: submissions must follow the LREC stylesheet (see the LREC 2026 Author’s Kit): https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/
• Length: submissions must be 4 to 8 pages, excluding acknowledgements, references, and (optional) Ethics Statement and Limitations sections
• Ethics Statement and Limitations: we strongly encourage including both. They will not be counted toward the page limit. If included, place them after the conclusion.
• Appendices / supplementary material:
  • Initial submission: not permitted (papers must be self-contained and reviewable on their own)
  • Camera-ready version: permitted; each camera-ready paper may include an appendix of up to 10 pages
• Double-blind review: all submissions will be double-blind reviewed and must be fully anonymized (remove author names/affiliations and avoid links to non-anonymized repositories; if needed, use an anonymized repository)
• Originality and simultaneous submissions: submissions must be original, previously unpublished work. If a paper is submitted to or under consideration at another venue at the same time, this must be declared at submission time. If accepted here, it must be withdrawn from other venues; if accepted elsewhere while under review here, please notify us promptly.
• Preprints: there is no anonymity period at LREC 2026, so authors may post preprints at any time; however, the version submitted for review must still be anonymized
• Language resources (optional): at submission time, authors may share related language resources with the community; repository entries are linked to the LRE Map and provide metadata for the resource
• Submission site: https://softconf.com/lrec2026/IdentityAwareAI
• Proceedings and presentation: accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings. All accepted papers will be presented as posters. For remote participants, we will also organize a lightning round of short virtual presentations to accompany the posters.

Workshop Format

The workshop will be a half-day event featuring:

• Keynote speeches from leading experts in the field
• Poster session for accepted papers, plus a lightning round for virtual talks
• Participatory design activity to develop a shared interdisciplinary vocabulary, identify current gaps in datasets for studying identity, and design a vision for collecting new datasets

We are committed to ensuring that our workshop is accessible to all. The workshop will be held in a hybrid format, allowing both in-person and virtual participation.

Important Dates

All deadlines are 11:59 PM AoE (Anywhere on Earth)

• Submission Deadline: February 20, 2026
• Notification of Acceptance: March 20, 2026
• Camera-Ready Deadline: March 30, 2026
• Workshop Date: During LREC 2026 (May 11-16, 2026); exact half-day slot TBA

Diversity & Inclusion

We actively encourage submissions from underrepresented communities and countries. The workshop organizers will provide mentorship and thorough feedback, especially to first-time authors and reviewers.

Contact

For queries, please contact: identity-aware-ai@googlegroups.com

Join us at Identity-Aware AI 2026 to contribute to this important conversation!