Fifth Workshop on 

NLP and Computational Social Science (NLP+CSS)

At EMNLP 2022

Language is perhaps the most salient outcome of complex social processes. We do not expect teenagers to speak like senior citizens, and we recognize the mutual dependency between language and social factors like gender, age and the level of education. Although this interdependence is at the core of models in both natural language processing (NLP) and (computational) social sciences (CSS), these two fields are continuing to come together, with many opportunities for research insights and potential applications. Humans with different social attributes and cultural backgrounds compared to bots and trolls react to information spread online differently, and express their reactions using different language. Identifying and measuring bias based on language use in different online communities is another emerging area of research. Moreover, it has been shown  that one can construct social variables from language and estimate the relationship between these social variables and other measures in economics, politics, law, religion, anthropology and other fields.  This workshop aims to (1) advance the joint computational analysis of social sciences and language and (2) study how language can be used to measure social variables and their impact across disciplines, both by explicitly involving social scientists with NLP researchers, and other partners from both industry and academia.

This fifth edition of the NLP+CSS workshop builds on five successful years with hundreds of interdisciplinary submissions to make NLP techniques and insights standard practice in CSS research.  Our focus is on NLP for social sciences: to continue the progress of CSS, and to integrate CSS with current trends and techniques in NLP.   

The workshop will have the following tentative format:

• Invited speakers and a panel with a key emphasis on bringing in social scientists from outside NLP and industry participation,

• Short talks for selected papers

• A general poster session for all accepted papers

Submission Details

We invite research on any of the following general topics:

• NLP models and data analytics that incorporate extra-linguistic social information

• Application of NLP tools to computational social science problems

• Methods or studies that test or revisit research from sociolinguistics

• Approaches to identify bias based on language use in different communities

• Predictive modeling of extra-linguistic attributes (age, gender, location, etc.)

• The importance of extra-linguistic attributes from NLP models across languages and cultures

Areas of interest include all levels of linguistic analysis and social sciences, including (but not limited to): phonology, syntax, pragmatics, stylistics, economics, psychology, sociology, sociolinguistics, political science, geography, demography, survey methodology, and public health.

We especially invite graduate students from both disciplines (i.e. social sciences and NLP) and connect them with experts in the respective other field (e.g. NLP student with an expert in social sciences or vice versa). We would like to again provide mentorship for social science students who could not otherwise attend a computer science conference. 

We invite both long and short papers of interest to be submitted through https://softconf.com/emnlp2022/NLPCSS/ (preferred) or through ARR.  Long papers should present new and substantial contributions related to the workshop’s theme. Short papers may be a small and focused contribution or describe a work in progress.  While all submissions will be reviewed equally, authors can choose a non-archival submission, since some social sciences do not accept journal articles published in archived proceedings before. 

Papers will follow the EMNLP 2022 Style guidelines for length and formatting.

More Information

The NLP+CSS websites contains more details on the call for papers, submission instructions, and aims of the workshop: https://sites.google.com/site/nlpandcss/ or follow us on Twitter at @nlpandcss.

Important Dates

• Monday September 19, 2022: submission deadline via Softconf and commitment deadline via ARR

• Notification: Wednesday October 14, 2022

• Camera Ready: Friday October 23, 2022

• Wednesday 7 December 2022: Workshop date

Organizing Committee

David Bamman, UC Berkeley

Dirk Hovy, Bocconi University

David Jurgens, University of Michigan

Katherine Keith, Williams College

Brendan O’Connor, UMass Amherst

Svitlana Volkova, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory