We align our paper acceptance with ARR cycles:
Submission Due: February 15th, 2025
Submission Page: ARR submission site
ARR Reviewed Submissions Commitment Due: April 20th, 2025
Submission Due: March 30th, 2025
Submission Page: Direct submission site
Notification of Acceptance: May 20th, 2025
Camera-Ready Papers Due: June 3rd, 2025
Workshop Date: July 31st, 2025
All deadlines are 11:59 PM (Anywhere on Earth)
The widespread and indispensable use of language-oriented AI systems presents new opportunities to have a positive social impact. NLP technologies are starting to mature to the point where they could have an even broader impact, supporting the UN sustainability goals by helping to address big problems such as poverty, hunger, healthcare, education, inequality, COVID-19 and climate change.
Our workshop aims to promote innovative NLP research that will positively impact society, focusing on responsible methods and new applications. We will encourage submissions from areas including (but not limited to):
Work that grounds the impact of NLP: Beyond developing a better-performing NLP model, can we make a step further to connect the model to actual social impact? Example directions include: case studies of real-world deployments; or improving the deployment and maintenance of NLP models in practice.
In addition to commonly recognized NLP for social good areas such as NLP for healthcare, mental well-being, and many others, we also call for work on neglected areas such as NLP for poverty, hunger, energy, climate change, among others.
We also highly value work that builds on interdisciplinary expertise, and encourages submissions of case studies or worked examples that seek to expand the social impact of NLP through collaboration with other fields (e.g., philanthropy, social science, political science, economics, HCI).
Special theme: This year, we would like to encourage submission providing solutions or concepts to address NLP for Climate Change. Despite its importance, this topic remains significantly under-explored in the NLP community. We invite research on climate-focused NLP applications, such as question-answering and fact-checking, as well as initiatives to make NLP models more environmentally sustainable. At the workshop, you will have an opportunity to connect and share your results with NGO representatives from this field!
Submission types:
We would appreciate to see various types of works on this (but not only) topic like:
automatic identification of various social needs, their corresponding sizes and demographics of people affected;
position papers to propose promising new tasks or directions that the field should pursue;
literature review of a subfield;
philosophical discussions of what how positive impact can be achieved with NLP methods;
approaches to interdisciplinary collaboration;
user study designs, user surveys;
ethical considerations, and other related topics.
Our author guidelines follow exactly the ARR requirement, as submitted articles need to first be reviewed by ARR, and then commit to our workshop with a short explanation in the commitment page of why the work fits the theme of NLP for Positive Impact. We welcome both short papers (up to 4 pages) and long papers (up to 8 pages). Note that we want submissions to our workshop to have some distinctive features of social good implications, beyond a general paper on NLP. We will require each submission to discuss the ethical and societal implications of their work, and encourage a discussion of what "positive impact" means in the work.
All accepted papers will be presented at our workshop as posters. We highly encourage in-person poster presentations.
For outstanding papers, we will send out invitations of oral presentations for 10-min oral talk in person. In addition, we will select 2 Best Papers, determined by the program committee.
For the archival process, authors must state clearly on the submission site whether they wish this work to be archival on the ACL anthology or non-archival. Only work that is not submitted to other venues is eligible for archive. If the work has been previously accepted to another venue, please note that you can only opt for a non-archival submission. The acceptance information at other venues will be treated as confidential during the review process.
More details on multiple submissions:
ACL Findings papers can cross-present at our workshop. Please fill out the OpenReview commitment page on top of this webpage. For ACL Main conference papers, you can still submit in the same way, but we will need to check our capacity to see whether we can host your presentation as a poster.
Other ACL workshops: to best save reviewers’ efforts, we do not allow submissions to multiple ACL workshops.
For future venues after our workshop: we have a non-archival track which you can choose when submitting your paper. This way, if you want to submit your work later to another conference/journal, it will be perfectly fine.
Each submission should discuss the ethical and societal implications of the work. We encourage authors to also include a discussion of what "positive impact" means to them or to the field of NLP. We encourage authors to include this discussion throughout the intro/body of their paper, but will also allow an additional "Ethical and societal implications" section that does not count towards the page limit (similar to the ACL "ethics" sections).
We do not have an anonymity deadline, so you are free to post your paper submission online / on preprint servers at any time. We simply ask that you are thoughtful about publicizing/posting your submission so that it minimizes the chances of compromising the double-blind reviewing process. For example, avoid tagging your arXiv paper as a submission to NLP4PositiveImpact, or avoid posting your paper right before or right after the submission deadline (those are just guidelines, not hard rules).
Should you have any questions, please feel free to email us.