Call For Papers

Important Dates

• Paper submission deadline: July 31, 2025

• Author notification: August 16, 2025

• NORMalize workshop: 22–26 September, 2025 (exact date TBA).

Anywhere on Earth (AoE) timezone, marked at 23:59:59.

Call For Papers

Recommender systems increasingly serve as algorithmic gatekeepers to the content users encounter online, across a wide range of platforms and domains. As such, it is essential that designers, developers, and evaluators of these systems take into account the norms and values relevant to the specific domains in which these systems operate. This is crucial to ensure that recommender systems have a positive societal and individual impact.

The RecSys community has traditionally focused on technical innovation. Questions of law, policy, ethics, philosophy, and social context of recommender systems are often addressed in communities outside of the core RecSys community. To bridge this gap, the third edition of the NORMalize workshop invites contributions that bring these perspectives into the RecSys conversation.

We welcome two types of contributions:

• Early-stage research ideas in the form of extended abstracts (2–4 pages), providing a basis for discussion and feedback at the workshop.

• Previously published manuscripts from journals or conferences outside the core RecSys community (e.g., Law, Social Sciences, Ethics, Philosophy), accompanied by a 1-page cover abstract that articulates the relevance of the work to recommender systems.

All accepted contributions will be featured as presentations and/or posters at the workshop.

Topics of Interest

We are especially interested in contributions related to norms and values in recommender systems, including (but not limited to) the following themes:

Philosophical, Legal, and Conceptual Foundations

• Which norms and values are important in a specific domain, and why?

• How should competing norms and values be balanced?

• What norms and values are required or influenced by legal frameworks?

• How will current and proposed legal frameworks impact the work on recommender systems?  

Qualitative and Stakeholder-Centered Approaches

• How do different stakeholder groups perceive and prioritize norms and values?

• What tensions emerge between stakeholder expectations and system design?

Value-Sensitive and Normative Algorithm Design

• How can we operationalize abstract norms and values into algorithmic objectives?

• How can algorithms be designed to optimize for or balance multiple values?

• What frameworks support multi-objective, multi-stakeholder optimization?

Metrics and Evaluation Methods

• How can we measure norms and values in recommender systems?

• What kinds of data representations are required for such measurements?

• Do value-oriented metrics generalize across domains?

• How can we design robust experiments that surface normative dimensions?

Datasets and Data Practices

• How can public datasets support research on norms and values?

• How does data representation affect value-sensitive evaluation?

Case Studies and Empirical Insights

• What norms and values emerge in real-world deployments?

• What practical challenges arise in implementing value-sensitive systems?

• How do deployed recommender systems behave with respect to these values?

Submission and Review Process

All submissions will be handled via EasyChair.

• Early-stage research ideas must follow the CEURART template. Only submissions using the CEURART template will be considered.

• Previously published manuscripts from journals or conferences can be submitted in their published form. The 1-page cover abstract should be attached as the first page of the submitted manuscript. Only submissions that include the cover will be considered.

Each submission will undergo single-blind peer review and be evaluated by at least two reviewers.