Wordplay @ EMNLP 2025

Overview

Date and time: November 5th-9th, 2025
Location: Suzhou, China
Shared task: Official website
Submission website: OpenReview
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. 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, 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 (not including references or 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.

In addition, we 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.

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. There is no page limit; the authors are required to put CPDC as a keyword in their submission form; the authors are also required to mention their CPDC team id 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.