**Apologies for cross-posting**

Final Call for Papers: Joint Workshop on Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Language Technologies (LEGAL2026) and Computational Approaches to Language Data Pseudonymization, Anonymization, De-identification, and Data Privacy (CALD-pseudo 2026)

Website: https://legal2026.mobileds.de/

Submission: https://softconf.com/lrec2026/LEGAL2026/

We invite submissions to the Joint Workshop on Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Language Technologies (LEGAL2026) and Computational Approaches to Language Data Pseudonymization, Anonymization, De-identification, and Data Privacy (CALD-pseudo 2026), to be held at LREC 2026 on the 12th of May 2026.

Important Dates

~~20th~~ 22nd of February 2026, 23:59 CET: paper submission deadline
30th March 2026: camera ready deadline (strict)
12th May 2026: workshop date

Introduction

Access to text and speech data is essential for research, yet personal and sensitive information often prevents open sharing. Techniques such as pseudonymization and anonymization offer potential solutions, but their effectiveness, limitations, and impact on data utility require deeper investigation. Balancing privacy protection with meaningful scientific use remains a key challenge.
At the same time, legal and ethical requirements increasingly shape how language resources can be created, processed, and distributed. Regulatory frameworks, such as the GDPR, the Data Act, and the Artificial Intelligence Act, affect access, reuse, and documentation duties for both text and speech data, creating a complex environment that demands interdisciplinary insight.

The workshop brings these two perspectives together by addressing both the technical and practical aspects of de-identification as well as the legal and ethical obligations governing data handling. Topics include anonymization and pseudonymization methods, compliance in practical workflows, provenance and rights tracking, and emerging approaches to legal metadata. The goal is to foster responsible, legally sound, and technically robust innovation in human language technologies.

Topics of Interest

We invite contributions from all disciplines involved in the creation, processing, governance, and de-identification of text and speech data. Submissions may address theoretical, empirical, methodological, legal, or technical questions, including cross-disciplinary work. We particularly encourage research on less-represented languages and on data from under-represented communities.

1. Legal Aspects of Language Data (LEGAL2026)

Regulatory frameworks and global governance
Intellectual property, data protection, and LLM governance
Ethics, fairness, trust, and transparency
Compliance in practice
Ethics, fairness, and trust
Operationalizing compliance
Emerging and grey areas
Interdisciplinary and cross-border coordination

2. Pseudonymization, Anonymization, and De-identification: Theoretical, Methodological, and Technical Aspects (CALD-pseudo 2026)

Detection and classification of personal information (PI)
Replacement and transformation of PI
Utility and bias after de-identification
Approaches to evaluation and adversarial testing
Dataset creation for de-identification research
Low-resource scenarios
Speech-specific challenges
Cross-disciplinary applications and challenges

We invite submissions from fields where de-identification of data plays an important role, including but not limited to Computational Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Digital Humanities, Social Sciences, Political Sciences, Medical Science etc., from the perspectives of researchers, public organizations, and industry.

Submission Guidelines

Authors are invited to submit original and unpublished research papers in the following categories:

Long papers (up to 8 pages) for substantial contributions
Short papers (up to 4 pages) for:

Small, focused contributions or ongoing or preliminary work
Extended abstracts for non-technical submissions only, such as conceptual, theoretical, legal, ethical, policy-oriented, or position papers. Extended abstract submissions are expected to be developed into regular papers by the camera-ready submission deadline.

The full papers will be published as workshop proceedings along with the LREC main conference. They should follow the LREC stylesheet, which is available on the conference website on the Author’s kit page. Unlike the main conference, we allow appendices of up to 10 pages already in the review phase. However, the reviewers will not be required to look in the appendices and must be able to review the paper based on everything contained within the main body of the paper (as if there were no appendices).

Submission deadline: 22nd of February 2026, 23:59 CET

Submission link: https://softconf.com/lrec2026/LEGAL2026/

When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research.

Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC authors to share the described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.) to enable their reuse and replicability of experiments (including evaluation ones).

Keynote Talks

We are delighted to announce the workshop will host keynote talks from two speakers: