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CISMA International Conference 2027, Milan, Italy

Join us for the upcoming CISMA Conference 2027, hosted at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy, jointly hosted by SISU and Cattolica.

Call for Proceedings, CISMA 2026

Submission Open — Share Your Research

Submit your paper for the CISMA 2026 Proceedings. Deadline: October 7, 2026.

Call for Proceedings, CISMA 2026

Dear CISMA 2026 Participants,

We hope this message finds you well and that you had a fruitful experience at CISMA 2026.

As part of our continued efforts to disseminate the excellent research presented at the conference, we are pleased to invite all participants to submit their papers for publication in the CISMA 2026 Proceedings.

Submission Guidelines:

Format: All submissions must strictly follow the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) formatting requirements, including the official ACL style templates, font, margins, and citation format.
Length: Papers should be between 5 to 8 pages, including references.
Selection: 5 to 8 papers will be selected for publication in the CISMA Proceedings based on quality, originality, and relevance.

Important Dates:

Submission Open: September 16, 2026
Submission Deadline: October 7, 2026 (three weeks from the opening date)
Notification of Acceptance: To be announced

How to Submit:

Please submit your paper via email to cisma@shisu.edu.cn with the subject line: “CISMA 2026 Proceedings Submission – [Your Name]”.

We look forward to receiving your contributions. Should you have any questions regarding the submission process or formatting requirements, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Thank you for your continued support of CISMA.

Best regards,

CISMA 2026 Organizing Committee

www.cisma-corpus.com

CISMA Live | Corpus Linguistics Today: A Conversation with Randi Reppen

What makes a corpus study convincing? How can corpus evidence inform teaching? Join Randi Reppen and Muhammad Afzaal for a conversation on the new Cambridge handbook, research methods, and emerging directions in corpus linguistics.

CISMA Live - Conversation with Randi Reppen

Join our team!

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Call for Chapter Proposals

Language, Culture, and Society in Contemporary China

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Editors:

Muhammad Afzaal, Mohammad Hossein Keshavarz, & Guidong Li

Sociocultural Linguistics is an interdisciplinary field that examines language in its social and cultural contexts, i.e., how society and culture shape our linguistic and social behavior. It aims to integrate insights from linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, sociology of language, and other disciplines. It explores how language is used to construct social identity, negotiate power dynamics, and express cultural meaning. This volume provides an outstanding platform for sharing innovative research findings on various sociocultural linguistic issues in diverse contexts and cultures in China.

Conference Commitee

Our Team

Founding Chair

Muhammad Afzaal

Dr. Muhammad Afzaal is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Language Sciences, Shanghai International Studies University (SISU). He earned his PhD from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and has held research fellowships at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. With over seven years of teaching experience at Foundation University Islamabad (Pakistan), he brings strong international expertise in language sciences. His research focuses on corpus linguistics, discourse analysis (including critical discourse analysis), and translation studies, with particular interest in integrating corpus-based approaches with NLP and big data. He is the author of Corpora and Discourses of the Belt and Road Initiative (Springer, 2023) and a recipient of the Yang Yong Research Award from Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Graduate School. His work has been published widely in SSCI/Scopus/ESCI-indexed journals.

Chair

Kaibao Hu

I have had more than 20 years of research experience in corpus-based translation studies, published 100 papers in journals indexed in CSSCI, SSCI, A & HCI, and 9 academic monographs in publishers such as Springer and China's Higher Education Press. I am also investigators of over 13 projects on national level. In 2017 and 2020, I was admitted into the list of the most influential scholars in the research of philosophy and Social Sciences in China and the distinguished professor of the national major talent plan.

Scientific Committee

Distinguished scholars on CISMA panel (name in alphabetically order)

Abbas Brashi

Amanda Clare Murphy

Andrew K.F. Cheung

Changpeng Huan

David Machin

Dina El-Dakhs

Fabio De Leonardis

Geng Qiang

Göran Bertil Eriksson

Jianjun Shi

Lei Lei

Dechao Li

Milanna Abbasova

Muhammad Imran

Randi Reppen

Pierfranca Forchini

Xiaoming Jiang

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Message from Co-Chair

Dear Colleagues, Scholars, and Research Partners,

It is my great honor to welcome you to the CISMA Conference Platform- an academic space founded with a clear purpose: to bring together the brightest minds working at the intersection of corpus linguistics, natural language processing, discourse studies, translation, and interpreting.
In an age where digital technologies, big data, and AI increasingly shape how societies communicate, understand one another, and negotiate meaning, our responsibility as researchers has never been more critical. The CISMA platform was established to respond to this moment. It is built on the conviction that rigorous empirical inquiry, methodological innovation, and interdisciplinary dialogue are essential to understanding the complex linguistic and communicative landscapes of our time.

CISMA is more than a conference; it is a collaborative global network. It brings together early career researchers, senior academics, technologists, and professional practitioners who share a commitment to exploring how digital tools and corpus driven methods can deepen our understanding of language, power, culture, and society. Our mission is to cultivate research that is theoretically robust, methodologically transparent, and socially meaningful.
I encourage you to join us in advancing this intellectual journey. Whether your work focuses on discourse and society, computational linguistics, translation technologies, sentiment analysis, digital humanities, or interdisciplinary approaches to language, CISMA offers a platform where your ideas can grow, be challenged, and make an impact.

Together, we can build a scholarly community that not only responds to today's challenges but also shapes the future of language sciences- a future defined by innovation, collaboration, and shared academic curiosity.
I look forward to welcoming you, learning from your insights, and working with you to strengthen our collective contribution to global scholarship.

Warm regards,
Muhammad Afzaal
Founder & Co Chair, CISMA Conference Platform
Associate Professor, Institute of Language Sciences
Shanghai International Studies University, China

" CISMA was not born in a meeting room or through a formal proposal. It began as an idea, quiet, persistent, and shaped by years of encountering a simple but powerful truth: language research was changing, and the academic world needed a space that could change with it."
-- Muhammad Afzaal