ACL 2027 Workshop Kyoto, Japan August 18 or 19, 2027

ParaCL

Prosodic and Paralinguistic Understanding and Generation

Beyond words, ParaCL connects speech, NLP, and multimodal AI communities to explore understanding and generation of prosodic and paralinguistic signals.

Call for Papers Important Dates

01 About

Language is more than words

Human listeners infer meaning not only from what is said, but how it is said.

From intonation, rhythm, and timing to gaze, laughter, sighs, and other non-verbal vocalizations, paralinguistic signals reveal aspects of speakers and interactions that transcripts rarely capture: emotion, engagement, uncertainty, politeness, sarcasm, social positioning, interpersonal coordination, and communicative intent.

Language technologies increasingly need these capabilities. Speech language models now operate over acoustic signals that expose prosody rather than transcripts. Multimodal language models must reason across speech, text, gaze, gesture, and behavior. Speech synthesis systems must produce appropriate emphasis, affect, style, timing, and conversational behavior.

Yet research on these signals is fragmented across several partially distinct communities. ParaCL brings the paralinguistic communities in speech, audio, vision, and language together to develop a shared computational research agenda around information carried alongside and beyond words: how paralinguistics should be represented, learned, interpreted, generated, and evaluated.

Paralinguistics papers in the ACL main track
2025 72
2026 153

72 of 3,084 accepted papers in 2025; 153 of 4,457 in 2026.

Connecting communities

Prosody & phonetics

Intonation, tone, prominence, phrasing, rhythm, and timing, along with their linguistic and interactional functions.

Computational paralinguistics & affective computing

Emotion, speaker states and traits, social behavior, non-verbal vocalizations, and related acoustic signals.

Dialogue, multimodal interaction & pragmatics

How these signals function in context, across turns, modalities, and conversational partners.

02 Call for Papers

Call for Papers

We invite original research papers and position/synthesis papers addressing both understanding and generation of prosodic and paralinguistic signals. Topics include, but are not limited to:

  1. Prosody and paralinguistics in speech language models, multimodal LLMs, ASR, speech translation, dialogue, and agents
  2. Computational modeling and representation of paralinguistics, including intonation, tone, rhythm, timing, and phrasing
  3. Expressive and controllable speech generation, including prosody, speaking style, affect, and interactional behavior
  4. Emotion, stance, social meaning, and non-verbal behavior
  5. Multimodal and interactional communication, including gesture, gaze, facial expression, turn-taking, and entrainment
  6. Cross-lingual, cross-cultural, and individual variation in paralinguistics
  7. Datasets, metrics, and benchmarks
  8. Robustness, fairness, privacy, ethics, and responsible applications of paralinguistics

Work across boundaries

We especially encourage work that crosses traditional boundaries: for example, papers connecting linguistic prosody with speech foundation models, computational paralinguistics with pragmatics or dialogue, or empirical observations from one community that challenge assumptions prevalent in another.

Beyond read English speech

We particularly welcome multilingual, cross-variety, community-partnered, and conversational work, as well as computational, phonetic, psycholinguistic, interactional, and critical perspectives.

Submission guidelines

Paper types

Long papers
up to 8 pages
Short papers
up to 4 pages

Both lengths accept original research and position/synthesis papers. Page limits exclude references.

Tracks

Archival
Published in the workshop proceedings
Non-archival
Presented at the workshop, not in the proceedings

The non-archival track welcomes works in progress and application-driven perspectives.

How to submit

Direct
Submit via OpenReview
ARR
Commit papers with ACL Rolling Review reviews

Format submissions with the official ACL style files. Accepted papers will be presented as posters, with selected papers featured in a spotlight session.

OpenReview submission site: coming soon

03 Important Dates

Important dates

All deadlines are 11:59 PM AoE.

  1. Direct submission deadlineTBA
  2. ARR commitment deadlineTBA
  3. Notification of acceptanceTBA
  4. Camera-ready deadlineTBA
  5. Workshop at ACL 2027, KyotoAug 18 or 19, 2027

04 Invited Speakers

Invited speakers Tentative

05 Schedule

Schedule Tentative

Times are in Japan Standard Time (UTC+9). ParaCL is hybrid: attend in person in Kyoto or online through the ACL 2027 platform. Talks will be recorded.

Tentative workshop schedule
TimeSession
8:30–8:40Opening Remarks
8:40–10:00Invited Talks
10:00–11:00Coffee Break & Poster Session
11:00–11:40Invited Talk
11:40–12:10Spotlight Session (Poster Highlights)
12:10–14:00Lunch Break
14:00–15:30Invited Talks
15:30–16:30Coffee Break & Poster Session
16:30–17:50Invited Talks
17:50–18:30Panel Discussion

06 Organizers

Organizers

07 Contact

Contact the organizers

davidchan@berkeley.edu