Call for Papers: The 1st Multidisciplinary Workshop on NLP for Democracies (MultiDems)

Co-located with EACL 2027 at Athens, Greece on March 9–14, 2027

(Apologies for cross-posting)

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. We particularly encourage the submission of work that moves beyond predominantly US-centric, monolingual, or two-party settings and studies the linguistic, institutional, and political diversity of democratic systems worldwide.
Topics of Interest

Topics include, but are not limited to:

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.
Submission Types

MultiDems will accept both archival and non-archival submissions.

Archival long papers: up to 8 pages of content, excluding references and appendices.

Archival short papers: up to 4 pages of content, excluding references and appendices.

Archival submissions must describe original work that has not been published elsewhere and, if accepted, will appear in the workshop proceedings. Archival submissions require one author to volunteer as a potential reviewer. Potential reviewers will only be contacted if the existing reviewer pool is not large enough for the number of submissions.

Non-archival extended abstracts: up to 4 pages, excluding references. These submissions provide an opportunity to present and discuss work without publication in the workshop proceedings, including relevant work published or accepted elsewhere where permitted by the original venue.

Both long and short submissions may contain technical, empirical, theoretical, conceptual, or critical contributions.

All submissions must use the official ACL formatting templates. Papers will be submitted through OpenReview and will go through a double-blind review process.

MultiDems will accept:

Direct submissions, reviewed by the workshop Program Committee; and

Papers previously reviewed through ACL Rolling Review (ARR), which may be committed to the workshop through OpenReview.

For direct submissions, we will seek reviewers across disciplinary backgrounds and, where appropriate, aim to combine NLP/computer-science and social-science perspectives in the review process.

Double Submission Policy

Papers submitted to the archival track must not have been previously published and must not be under review at any other venue (conference, workshop, or journal) at the time of submission. Submissions that are found to be under review elsewhere, or that substantially overlap with work published or under review elsewhere, will be desk-rejected.
Shared Task: Summarization of Citizen Consultations

MultiDems will also host an associated shared task on Text Summarization for Online Citizen Consultations. Online consultations enable large-scale democratic participation by collecting citizens' proposals and their votes on public issues (e.g., “We should incorporate the right to clean air into our constitution.”). Turning these contributions into concise, accessible summaries is essential for informing public deliberation and decision-making. Although large language models offer promising opportunities for automating this process, they also raise important questions: Whose proposals are represented? Are minority viewpoints adequately reflected? Does the summary accurately convey both the meaning of proposals and their level of public support?

Task: Participants will develop systems that produce concise, coherent summaries of collections of citizen proposals and associated voting data. Each consultation will contain proposals expressed in natural language, a citizen–proposal voting matrix, and the language of the consultation. Systems must generate natural-language summaries in which statements are accompanied by references to the original proposal IDs supporting them. This source-grounded format enables evaluation of both the selection of proposals and their representation in the resulting text, while remaining agnostic to the summarization method.

Data & Evaluation: The task introduces a multilingual benchmark based on real-world citizen consultation data across multiple European countries. Beyond conventional summary quality, generated summaries will be evaluated using democratically grounded criteria, including proportional representation of citizens’ preferences, preservation of consensus and disagreement, semantic fidelity to the original proposals, balance in the representation of arguments, and coverage of the opinion space.

Systems will be evaluated separately on each dimension, alongside an aggregate score. Importantly, trade-offs between metrics are expected and constitute a central motivation for this shared task: different principles of democratic representation may conflict, and optimizing one criterion may compromise another. The task therefore aims not only to identify effective summarization methods, but also to investigate how alternative approaches navigate these trade-offs.

Participation: The competition will be hosted on CodaBench. Participation is open to researchers and practitioners from NLP/ML/AI, computational social choice, political science, and related fields. Teams may participate in the competition without submitting a paper. Participants are also encouraged to submit archival system-description papers presenting their approaches, experimental results, and analyses of democratic evaluation criteria. Selected teams, including those performing particularly well across different evaluation dimensions, will be invited to present their work at the workshop.
How to participate in the shared task: Register using this form https://forms.gle/FHe4SGvofhYWAtwZA, you’ll be invited to join our google group to stay informed on the Competition launch.
Important Dates

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

Direct paper submission deadline: December 23, 2026

Reviews due: January 13, 2027

ARR commitment deadline: January 18, 2026

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

Invited Speakers

We are delighted to welcome:

Niclas Boehmer, Assistant Professor, Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam
Researching computational social choice and foundations for fair AI/NLP systems.

Judith Möller, Full Professor, Leibniz Institute for Media Research, University of Hamburg
Researching algorithms, recommender systems, political communication, and the effects of AI on democratic dynamics.
Workshop Format

MultiDems is planned as a one-day hybrid workshop, with participation possible both in person at EACL 2027 in Athens and remotely. The program will include invited talks, oral presentations of selected papers, poster presentations, shared-task results, and opportunities for interdisciplinary discussion.
Organizers

François Yvon — Sorbonne Université / CNRS, France
Jean-Philippe Cointet — Sciences Po médialab, France
Benjamin Piwowarski — Sorbonne Université / CNRS, France
Gaël Lejeune — Sorbonne Université, France
Salim Hafid — Sciences Po médialab, France
Paul Lerner — Sorbonne Université, France
Tanise Ceron — Bocconi University, Italy
Eoghan Cunningham — University College Dublin, Ireland
Nazanin Shafiabadi — Sorbonne Université, France
Pierre-Antoine Lequeu — Sorbonne Université, France
Carlo Santagiustina — Inria / Sciences Po médialab, France
Laurène Cave — Sorbonne Université, France

Workshop website: https://sites.google.com/view/multidems/home
Paper Submission website: TBA

CodaBench competition website: TBA
Contact

multidems@googlegroups.com

In case of trouble with the googlegroups email, you can contact the organizers at salim.hafid@sciencespo.fr and lequeu@isir.upmc.fr.