CALL FOR PAPERS
Tool Competition – The 5th International Workshop on Natural Language-based Software Engineering (NLBSE’26)
Co-located with the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’26)
12-13 April 2026, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
NLP-based approaches and tools have been proposed to improve the efficiency of software engineers, processes, and products, by automatically processing natural language artifacts (issues, emails, commits, etc.).
We believe that the availability of accurate tools is becoming increasingly necessary to improve Software Engineering (SE) processes. Two important processes are (i) code comment classification where developers have to understand, classify, prioritize, assign, etc. incoming issues and code comments reported by end-users and developers and (ii) skill classification where developers build and assess multi‑label classifiers that predict, for each issue, the set of domains and sub‑domains representing the skills required to solve it.
We are pleased to announce the fifth edition of the NLBSE’26 tool competition on code comment classification and skill classification; two important tasks in issue and code comment management and prioritization.
You are invited to participate in one or both tool competitions.
See competition details at https://nlbse2026.github.io/tools/
IMPORTANT DATES
(All deadlines are 23:59h “Anywhere on Earth” (AoE) time)
Paper/tool submission
December 19, 2025
Acceptance notification
January 12, 2026
Camera-ready paper submission
January 26, 2026
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Comments Competition Organizers
– Pooja Rani, University of Zurich, Switzerland
– Moritz Mock, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
Skills Competition Organizers
– Fabio Santos, Colorado State University, USA
– Jacob Penney, Northern Arizona University, USA
– Benjamin Carter, University of California Santa Barbara, USA