NLBSE 2026

The 5th International Workshop on
Natural Language-based Software Engineering
12 April 2026, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Natural Language-based Software Engineering: Advances from NLBSE’26

Scope

This special issue of Science of Computer Programming (SCICO) invites contributions on Natural Language-based Software Engineering (NLBSE), building on the 5th International Workshop on Natural Language-based Software Engineering (NLBSE’26), co-located with ICSE 2026. The special issue is open to all submissions within scope, including extended versions of papers presented at NLBSE’26.

Topics of interest

The special issue accepts submissions in two tracks.

Research Track topics include, but are not limited to:

  • NLP methodologies, algorithms, and models for SE tasks.
  • Large Language Models and foundation models for software engineering.
  • Semantic, syntactic, and discourse analysis of software-related natural language.
  • Information extraction, knowledge representation, and traceability for SE artifacts.
  • Multilingual and low-resource NLP for software requirements, documentation, issue reports, and other SE artifacts.
  • Explainability, fairness, trustworthiness, and ethical aspects of NLP-based SE tools.
  • Evaluation frameworks, datasets, and benchmarks for NLP systems in software engineering.
  • Empirical studies of NLP-based methods in SE contexts.

Software Track submissions include, but are not limited to:

  • Text analytics and document-processing platforms for software artifacts.
  • Automated summarization systems for requirements, issue reports, commits, pull requests, documentation, or user feedback.
  • NLP-based tools for requirements elicitation, analysis, modeling, and validation.
  • Conversational agents, chatbots, or question-answering systems for developers, testers, maintainers, or requirements engineers.
  • Intelligent search and recommendation systems for software projects and repositories.
  • Content-generation and writing-assistance tools for software documentation, requirements, tests, or code comments.
  • NLP-enabled decision-support and workflow-automation systems for software development, maintenance, and project management.

Author Instructions

Research Track. Submissions should present novel or substantially extended research related to NLP-based software engineering. They must follow the journal’s standard requirements for research articles and will be reviewed according to the journal’s criteria for research contributions. Authors are encouraged to make research artifacts available where applicable.

Software Track. Submissions should present novel software tools, platforms, systems, or applications related to NLP-based software engineering. They submissions must conform to the specifications of the SCICO Software Track listed on the journal website, including page limits, software artifacts, software versions, metadata, and related requirements. Submissions will be evaluated using the criteria specified on the same website: originality and novelty, impact on software engineering, availability and ease of installation or use, quality of documentation, and reproducibility of empirical results. The software, including any evaluation code, must be released as open-source software under a license approved by Elsevier.

Submissions based on previously published workshop papers, including demonstration, tool, and tool-competition papers, must be significantly updated and extended, with at least 30% new content relative to the original workshop version. Authors should include a cover letter that identifies the original publication and summarises the new content.

Manuscripts must be submitted through the SCICO submission system at https://submit.elsevier.com/SCICO/ When submitting, authors must select the article type corresponding to their track, VSI: NLBSE26-Research or VSI: NLBSE26-Softwareb, from the Article Type menu. Selecting the correct article type is required for the manuscript to be assigned to the special issue rather than the regular submission stream.

Important Dates

  • Submission deadline: December 1, 2026
  • First-round notification: March 1, 2027
  • Revised submission deadline: April 1, 2027
  • Final notification: May 1, 2027

For questions about this special issue, please contact the guest editors at workshop.nlbse@gmail.com.