Second International Workshop on Construction Grammars and NLP (CxGs+NLP 2025)
Call for Papers

Please join the workshop’s Google Group for the latest updates and to post any questions you might have: https://groups.google.com/g/cxgsnlp-workshop?pli=1

Overview
Constructionist approaches to language posit that all linguistic knowledge needed for language comprehension and production can be captured as a network of form-meaning mappings, called constructions. Construction Grammars (CxGs) do not distinguish between words and grammar rules, but allow for mappings between forms and meanings of arbitrary complexity and degree of abstraction. CxGs are thereby able to uniformly capture the compositional and non-compositional aspects of language use, making the theory particularly attractive to researchers in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). CxG theories, for example, can serve as a valuable ‘lens’ to assess and investigate the abilities of today’s large language models, which lack explicit, theoretically grounded linguistic insights. At the same time, techniques from the field of NLP are often employed for the further development and scaling of CxG theories and applications.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers across theory and practice from the two complementary perspectives of Construction Grammar and NLP to explore how CxG approaches can both inform and benefit from NLP methods, with an emphasis on LLMs. Therefore, we invite original research papers from a broad spectrum of topics, including but not limited to:
Contributions to Construction Grammar theory
Construction Grammar Formalisms
Computational Construction Grammar Implementations
Natural Language Understanding (NLU)
Opinion pieces on the interplay between Construction Grammar and NLP
Constructions and Language Models (Mechanistic interpretability, probing (e.g., BERTology), and evaluation of LLMs)
Resources: Constructicons and corpora annotated for Construction Grammar
Construction Grammar learning and adaptation
Applications at the intersection of Construction Grammar and NLP

Invited Speakers
Adele Goldberg, Professor of Psychology, Princeton University
Thomas Hoffmann, Professor of English Language and Linguistics, Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
Laura Michaelis, Professor of Linguistics, University of Colorado Boulder

Venue
The 2nd CxGs+NLP workshop will be co-located with the 16th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS), organized by the Heinrich Heine University (HHU) in Düsseldorf, Germany. The workshop will be held on 24 September 2025.
We are expecting the workshop to be in-person only, but are awaiting details on the possibility of a hybrid presentation option.

Important Dates
Jun 06: submission deadline
Aug 01: notification of acceptance, registration opens
Aug 22: camera-ready papers due
Sep 22-23: IWCS main conference
Sep 24: workshop

Submission information
Two types of submission are solicited: long papers and short papers. Long papers should describe original research and must not exceed 8 pages. Short papers (typically system or project descriptions, or ongoing research) must not exceed 4 pages. Acknowledgments, references, a limitations section (optional), an ethics statement (optional), and a technical appendix (optional, not subject to reviewing) do not count towards the page limit.

Accepted papers get an extra page in the camera-ready version and will be published in the conference proceedings in the ACL Anthology. Additionally, non-archival publications will be considered for acceptance into the workshop as in-person poster presentations only.

CxGs+NLP 2 papers should be formatted following the common two-column structure as used by IWCS 2021 (borrowed from ACL 2021). Please use these specific style-files or the Overleaf template.

Double submission policy: We will accept submissions that have been submitted elsewhere, but require that the authors notify us, including information on where else they are submitting and let us know if the work is accepted for publication elsewhere.

Submission site TBA.

Instructions for Double-Blind Review
As reviewing will be double blind, papers must not include authors’ names and affiliations. Furthermore, self-references or links (such as github) that reveal the author’s identity, e.g., “We previously showed (Smith, 1991) …” must be avoided. Instead, use citations such as “Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) …” Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review. Papers should not refer, for further detail, to documents that are not available to the reviewers. For example, do not omit or redact important citation information to preserve anonymity. Instead, use third person or named reference to this work, as described above (“Smith showed” rather than “we showed”). If important citations are not available to reviewers (e.g., awaiting publication), these paper/s should be anonymised and included in the appendix. They can then be referenced from the submission without compromising anonymity. Papers may be accompanied by a resource (software and/or data) described in the paper, but these resources should also be anonymized.

Workshop Chairs
Claire Bonial (U.S. Army Research Lab)
Harish Tayyar Madabushi (The University of Bath)

Workshop Organizing Committee
Melissa Torgbi (The University of Bath)
Leonie Weissweiler (University of Texas at Austin)
Austin Blodgett (U.S. Army Research Lab)
Katrien Beuls (University of Namur,Belgium)
Paul Van Eecke (Vrije Universiteit Brussel,Belgium)