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Call for papers

Goal

Following the success of the first four editions of the NLLP workshop (NAACL 2019, KDD 2020, EMNLP 2021, EMNLP 2022), we aim to bring researchers and practitioners from NLP, machine learning and other artificial intelligence disciplines together with legal practitioners and researchers. We welcome submissions describing original work on legal data, as well as data with legal relevance, such as:

  • Applications of NLP to legal tasks including, but not limited to:
    • Legal Citation Resolution
    • Case Outcome Analysis and Prediction
    • Models of Legal Reasoning
    • E-Discovery
    • Lexical and other Data Resources for the Legal Domain
    • Bias and Privacy
  • Experimental results using and adapting NLP methods for legal data including:
    • Classification
    • Information Retrieval
    • Anomaly Detection
    • Clustering
    • Knowledge Base Population
    • Multimedia Search
    • Link Analysis
    • Entity Recognition and Disambiguation
    • Training and Using Embeddings
    • Parsing
    • Dialogue and Discourse Analysis
    • Text Summarization and Generation
    • Relation and Event Extraction
    • Anaphora Resolution
    • Question Answering
    • Query Understanding
    • Combining Text with Structured Data
  • Tasks:
    • Description of new legal tasks for NLP
    • Structured overviews of a specific task with the goal of identifying new areas for research
    • Position papers presenting new visions, challenges and changes to existing research practices
  • Resources:
    • Creation of curated and/or annotated data sets that can be publicly released and used by the community to advance the field
  • Demos:
    • Descriptions of systems which use NLP technologies for legal text;
  • Industrial Research:
    • Industrial applications
    • Papers describing research on proprietary data
  • Interdisciplinary position papers:
    • Legal or socio-legal analyses relating to the role NLP can play in the legal field
    • Critical reflections on the legality and ethics of data collection and processing practices
    • Critical reflections about the benefits and challenges of Large Language Models (LLMs) from a legal and regulatory perspective
    • Critical reflections on the legality and ethics of data collection and processing practices

Submission

We accept papers reporting original (unpublished) research of two types:

  • Long papers (max 8 pages + references)
  • Short papers (max 4 pages + references)

Appendices and acknowledgements do not count against the maximum page limit and should be formatted according to the guidelines below.

To submit a paper, please access the submission link.

Conference proceedings will be published on the ACL Anthology.

Ethics section

The NLLP workshop adheres to the same standards regarding ethics as the EMNLP 2023 conference. Authors will be allowed extra space after the 8th page (4th for short papers) for an optional broader impact statement or other discussion of ethics. Note that an ethical considerations section is not required, but papers working with sensitive data or on sensitive tasks that do not discuss these issues will not be accepted.

Non-archival option

The authors have the option of submitting previously unpublished research as non-archival, meaning that only the abstract will be published in the conference proceedings. We expect these submissions to describe the same quality of work as archival submissions. These will be reviewed following the same procedure as archival submissions. This option accommodates publication of the work or a superset at a later date in a conference or journal which does not allow previously archived work and to encourage presentation and feedback on mature, yet unpublished work. Non-archival submissions should adhere to the same formatting and length constraints as archival submissions.

Dual Submission and Pre-print Policy

Papers that have been or will be submitted to workshops, conferences or journals during the review period must indicate so at submission time. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at the NLLP 2023 workshop must notify the organizers by the camera-ready deadline as to whether the paper will be presented or withdrawn.

If the preliminary version of a paper was posted in arXiv, the authors should NOT mention it as their own paper in the submission. Papers that violate the double-blind review requirements will be desk rejected.

Exception: Submissions with the non-archival option are excepted from these requirements.

ACL Rolling Review Submissions

Our workshop also welcomes submissions from ACL Rolling Review (ARR). Authors of any papers that are submitted to ARR and have their meta review ready may submit their papers and reviews for consideration for the workshop until 10 October 2023. This should include submissions to ARR for the 15 August deadline. The decision of publication will be announced by 17 October 2023. The committment should be done via the workshop submission website: https://softconf.com/emnlp2023/nllp2023/ ("ACL Rolling Review Committment" submission type)

EMNLP 2023 Submissions

Authors of any papers that have been reviewed for EMNLP 2023 and were rejected have the opportunity to send their paper and reviews to be considered for publication in the NLLP workshop proceedings. The deadline for submitting papers and reviews is 10 October 2023. The decision of publication will be announced by 17 October 2023. The submission should be done via the workshop submission website: https://softconf.com/emnlp2023/nllp2023 ("EMNLP 2023 Submission with reviews" submission type)

Double-Blind reviewing

The review process is double-blind. Submitted papers must not include author names and affiliations and they must be written in a way so that they do not break the double-blind reviewing process. If the preliminary version of a paper was posted in arXiv, the authors should NOT mention it as their own paper in the submission. Papers that violate the double-blind review requirements will be desk rejected.

Submission Style & Format Guidelines

Paper submissions must use the official ACL style templates, which are available here (Latex and Word). Please follow the paper formatting guidelines general to "*ACL" conferences available here.

Authors may not modify these style files or use templates designed for other conferences. Submissions that do not conform to the required styles, including paper size, margin width, and font size restrictions, will be rejected without review.

All long, short and theme papers must follow the ACL Author Guidelines.

Important deadlines

  • Submission deadline ― 18 25 September 2023
  • Notification ― 6 13 October 2023
  • Submission of EMNLP papers with reviews ― 10 October 2023
  • ARR Committment deadline ― 10 October 2023
  • ARR and EMNLP notification ― 17 October 2023
  • Camera ready due ― 20 October 2023
  • Presentation due ― 1 December 2023
  • Workshop ― 7 December 2023

All deadlines are 11.59pm UTC -12h

Presentation

  • Presentation format for each paper and schedule will be announced between acceptance notification and the camera-ready deadline.
  • At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the NLLP 2023 workshop by the registration deadline in order for the submission to be published in the proceedings.