Wordplay @ EMNLP 2025

Overview

Date and time: November 9th, 2025
Location: Suzhou, China
Shared task: Official website
Submission website: OpenReview
Submission deadline: ~~August 29, 2025~~ September 12, 2025, 23:59 (Anywhere On Earth)
This workshop focused on exploring the utility of interactive narratives, think everything from classic text-adventures like Zork to modern Twine games, to fill a role as the learning environments of choice for language-based tasks including but not limited to storytelling. A few previous iterations of this workshop took place very successfully with hundreds of attendees, at NeurIPS 2018, NeurIPS 2020, NAACL 2022, and ACL 2024. Since then, the community of people working in this area has rapidly increased. This workshop aims to be a centralized place where all researchers involved across a breadth of fields can interact and learn from each other. Furthermore, it will act as a showcase to the wider NLP/RL/Game communities on interactive narrative’s place as a learning environment. The program will feature a collection of invited talks in addition to contributed talks and posters from each of these sections of the interactive narrative community and the wider NLP and RL communities.

We like all things:

Interactive narrative: game playing RL agents, game generation, etc.
Interactive language learning
Natural language generation
Improvisational storytelling
And more! Anything you can think of that involves narrative, interactivity, and language!

Check out the full version of our overview!

Call For Papers

Submission website: OpenReview
Submission deadline: ~~August 29, 2025~~ September 12, 2025, 23:59 (Anywhere On Earth)
Author notification: September 26, 2025

We have two tracks:
Main track:
We welcome original research papers ranging between 4-8 pages in length (and unlimited pages for references and supplementary materials), formatted according to the ACL style. Submissions should be in .pdf format. Since the review process is double-blind, all papers should be appropriately anonymised.
Authors have the option of including supplementary manuscript containing further details of their work into the same .pdf file. It is entirely up to the reviewers to decide whether they wish to consult this additional material. Authors are strongly encouraged to make data and code publicly available whenever possible. The accepted papers will be posted on the workshop website and will not appear in the EMNLP proceedings.
Extended Abstracts: We also welcome extended abstracts of up to 2 pages that describe open problems and challenges in this area. The papers will be non-archival; we welcome papers that have been published or submitted to other places. However, authors are required to acknowledge their papers’ original appearance in such cases.
Presentation: All accepted papers and extended abstracts will be presented as posters. The program committee will select a few papers for oral presentation.

CPDC track:
We also welcome participants of the Common-sense Persona-Grounded Dialogue Challenge (CPDC) competition to submit technical reports to describe their submitted systems.
Requirements: - Papers should be ranging between 4-8 pages in length (and unlimited pages for references and supplementary materials), formatted according to the ACL style. Submissions should be in .pdf format. - Put CPDC as a keyword in your submission form. - Mention your CPDC team ID or team name in the technical report submission.
We encourage all CPDC participants to submit and share their work. After light review, the accepted technical reports will be posted on the workshop website and will not appear in the EMNLP proceedings. All accepted technical reports will be presented as posters.
Authors of accepted papers will be invited to present their work in a poster session (in-person or remote), the workshop committee will select a subset of submissions as spotlight talks.

Shared Task

Shared task: Common-sense Persona-Grounded Dialogue Challenge (CPDC) 2025

Total prize value: USD 20,000!!!
Official website *

Our Sponsors

We are grateful to our sponsors for their generous support of Wordplay 2025. Their commitment helps make this workshop possible and supports the advancement of research in language-based interactive environments.

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We gratefully thank Sony for their support in organizing the Wordplay workshop, especially in organizing the CPDC challenge!

Interested in Sponsoring?
If you’re interested in sponsoring the Wordplay Workshop, please contact us at wordplay.workshop.organizers@gmail.com for more information about sponsorship opportunities.