Call for Papers

Natural Language Processing has seen impressive gains in recent years. This research includes the demonstration by NLP models to have turned into useful technologies with improved capabilities, measured in terms of how well they match human behavior captured in web-scale language data or through annotations. However, human behavior is inherently shaped by the cultural contexts humans are embedded in, the values and beliefs they hold, and the social practices they follow, part of which will be reflected in the data used to train NLP models, and the behavior these NLP models exhibit. Not accounting for this factor could cause incongruencies and misalignments between the cultural contexts that underpin the NLP model development process and the multi-cultural ecosystems they are expected to operate in. These misalignments may result in various harms, including barriers to those from under-represented cultures, violating cultural norms and values, and erasure of cultural knowledge. 


While recent work in the field has started to acknowledge this issue (e.g., Bird (2020), Hovy and Yang (2021), Hershcovich et al. (2022), Prabhakaran et al. (2022)), it is important to build a long-term research agenda for the NLP community around (1) deeper understanding of how global cultures and NLP technologies intersect, in a way that goes beyond multi-lingual and cross-lingual research, (2) how to detect, measure, and attempt to mitigate potential biases and harms in NLP technology in ways that reflect local cultures and values, and (3) how to build more cross-culturally competent NLP systems. This agenda requires looking beyond the NLP community, bringing in multi-disciplinary expertise to shape the inquiries in this important area.


We propose this workshop as a way to bring together the growing number of NLP researchers interested in this topic, along with a community of scholars with multi-disciplinary expertise spanning linguistics, social sciences, and cultural anthropology. Our aim is to build this important inquiry within NLP on a solid basis of cultural theories from social sciences. To this end, the workshop program will focus on the following themes: Inclusivity and Representation of cultures in NLP, Cultural harms of NLP technologies, and Culture Sensitive lens on Social Biases and Harms in NLP. We invite papers on topics including the following (but not limited to):




Archival papers (long and short)


Authors are invited to submit full papers of up to 8 pages of content and short papers of up to 4 pages of content, with unlimited pages for references. These could be new papers that will go through mutually anonymous peer-review, or papers that are already reviewed through the ACL Rolling Review (ARR) process. Accepted papers will be given an additional page of content to address reviewer comments, and will be published in the ACL Anthology. Previously published papers cannot be accepted in the archival track. Dual submissions are allowed; papers that are currently undergoing review at other venues are welcome, but they should declare that during submission. Upon acceptance, you can choose to switch to the non-archival option, if your paper was accepted elsewhere too.


Non-archival submissions


We welcome non-archival submissions through two tracks.

First, you can submit an extended abstract of work not published elsewhere, of length 2-4 pages + 2 pages for references. This can include position papers, or early stage work that would benefit from peer feedback. These submissions will also be peer-reviewed in a mutually anonymous fashion, similar to the archival papers.


Additionally, work previously reviewed, published or accepted to be published elsewhere can also be submitted to the non-archival track, along with details about the venue or journal where it is accepted, and a link to the archived version, if available. These papers need not be anonymous, and will be reviewed only for the fit to the workshop theme, and does not have any page limits.


Accepted papers in the two non-archival tracks will be given an opportunity to present the work at the workshop, but will not be published in the ACL Anthology. 





Submission Information

In order to enable the different modes of submissions, we will have three routes of submitting your work to C3NLP 2024, with respective deadlines, timelines, and submission links. While the submission links and timelines will be released shortly, the details of the three tracks are below.




We request that all papers adhere to our submission policies. The program committee will review submissions in a mutually anonymous fashion. For all submissions that need full peer-review (option 1 above), please ensure that papers are anonymous. Self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...".




Limitations and Ethics Statement


We follow the same guidelines set up by ACL and require all submitted papers to provide a section on limitations. Papers without a limitations section will not be considered and will be desk rejected without review. In addition, a paper could choose to provide a section on broader impact of an ethics statement. Both sections on limitations and ethics statement are not counted towards the page limit and can take up additional space beyond the 8 or 4 pages for archival submissions, and 2-4 pages for the non archival submissions.


Format and Styling


Please follow the formatting documentation and guidelines general to *ACL conferences as available here.




References:


D. Hovy, and D. Yang. "The importance of modeling social factors of language: Theory and practice." The 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2021.


Hershcovich, D., Frank, S., Lent, H., de Lhoneux, M., Abdou, M., Brandl, S., Bugliarello, E., Piqueras, L.C., Chalkidis, I., Cui, R. and Fierro, C, Margatina, K, Rust, P and Søgaard, A. Challenges and Strategies in Cross-Cultural NLP. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 2022.


V. Prabhakaran, R. Qadri, B. Hutchinson. Cultural Incongruencies in Artificial Intelligence. Cultures in AI/AI in Culture. NeurIPS 2022 Workshop.


S. Bird. Decolonising Speech and Language Technology. Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. International Committee on Computational Linguistics. 2020