Call for Papers
Call for Papers: by May 7, 2021
Upload your submissions to: https://www.softconf.com/acl2021/w12_nlp4pi21/
Topics
This workshop aims to promote innovative NLP research that will positively impact society, specifically focusing on proactive and responsible methods and new applications. We will encourage submissions from areas including (but not limited to):
Positive conversation generation & online prosocial behavior: conversational AI for promoting constructive interactions or alternate perspectives; analyses of conversations with successful positive outcomes; models for positive rephrasing of online content; analyses of implied or stated altruism, empathy, or other prosocial behavior online.
Participatory design & algorithmic cultural competency: co-creation of NLP systems with end users; value sensitive design of NLP systems; adaptation of widely used NLP models to specific user populations (e.g., dialect-aware pretrained LMs).
Online well-being & positive information sharing: NLP for improving the well-being of users (e.g., COVID-related support, therapeutic AI-in-the-loop journaling); NLG for alternate perspectives to articles; context generation/infilling for (ambiguous) statements; mitigation of filter bubbles through generative methods (e.g., sharing positive stories, disseminating positive information), etc.
Social good, justice, equity: perspectives and opinions on the role of NLP/AI towards re-imagining justice and empowering disenfranchised users; analyses and design of systems that further challenge existing power structures.
Interdisciplinary perspectives: perspectives and analyses from other fields (e.g., social sciences, philosophy) on the potential positive impacts of NLP techniques.
Case studies of NLP applications for social good: e.g., NLP for disaster relief, NLG for climate change awareness, models for users with cognitive disabilities, etc.
Challenges of NLP for positive impact: ethical and privacy implications, design of positive technology that is less-susceptible to misuse.
Call for Reviewers: We need more reviewers. Please feel free to apply through this Google Form if you'd like to be our reviewer. The workload is 1~2 papers during May 7-28, 2021 (tentative).
Important dates
Paper Submissions Due: May 7, 2021 (extended from April 26)
Notification of Acceptance: May 28, 2021
Camera-Ready Papers Due: June 7, 2021
Workshop: August 5, 2021
All deadlines are 11:59PM Anywhere on Earth time
Please check this page later for more updates.
Author Guidelines
Submissions should be 4-8 pages of content and unlimited references, and must use the ACL 2021 style template. There is no length limit for supplementary materials or appendices. Upon acceptance, authors will be allowed up to 9 pages.
You can submit original research work or a summary of research activities done in the direction of NLP for Positive Impact. You can present original completed work, a case study, a negative result, an opinion piece, or an interesting application nugget.
The review process will be double-blinded. Submissions must not identify authors or their affiliations, or otherwise they will be desk-rejected.
Accepted papers will be presented during the workshop by either oral presentations or posters determined by the program committee.
Archival, non-archival, and multiple submissions policy
For archival process, authors must state clearly in 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 can be eligible for archive. If the work has been previously accepted to another venue, please provide the name of that venue, and note that you can only opt for non-archival. The acceptance information at other venues will be treated as confidential during the review process.
Some more details on multiple submissions:
Other ACL workshops: to best save reviewers’ efforts, we don’t allow submissions to multiple ACL workshops.
For future venues after our workshop: we have an non-archival track which you can choose when submitting your paper. In this way, if you want to submit your stuff later to conferences/journals, it will be perfectly fine.
For EMNLP: Note that you cannot dual submit to NLP4PositiveImpact and EMNLP, because if your paper gets into our workshop, presenting it will violate anonymity for EMNLP.
Special requirement if your paper is to appear at ACL 2021 main conference (or Findings):
Note that our CFP is after the notification date of ACL 2021 main conference. If you know your paper will appear at the ACL main conference, then you can only choose the non-archival track. After acceptance to our workshop, our website will display your paper title, and provide a link to your formal ACL anthology webpage in the ACL 2021 proceedings.
If your paper is not to appear at ACL 2021 proceedings, then you are eligible for both the archival and non-archival tracks of our workshop
Ethical and societal implications
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 into 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).
Anonymity period / double-blind reviewing
Note, 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).
Contact
Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact Maarten Sap at msap@cs.washington.edu or Zhijing Jin at zjin@tue.mpg.de.