We are excited to announce the Language Models for Underserved Communities (LM4UC) (https://lm4uc.github.io) workshop, co-located with NAACL 2025. The workshop will take place in person and virtually on May 3-4, 2025, in New Mexico, US. LM4UC invites researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to address challenges and propose innovative solutions for building and deploying language models (LMs) for underserved languages and communities.
Underserved communities often lack adequate access to advanced NLP technologies due to limited linguistic data, insufficient computational resources, or inadequate AI governance frameworks. This gap hinders equitable access to NLP advancements, exacerbating the digital divide. Our workshop aims to address this by fostering a multidisciplinary dialogue around the development of LMs that prioritize cultural sensitivity, resource efficiency, and sustainable AI practices.
Topics of Interest
We invite submissions of full papers, ongoing work, position papers, and survey papers on topics including, but not limited to:
- Democratization of AI: Open access data and community-driven language models, Developing frameworks for inclusive AI, Equitable NLP governance for underserved communities
- Data Sovereignty and Ethical AI: Ethical frameworks for data ownership and informed consent, Strategies for ensuring privacy and intellectual property protection
- Preservation of Cultural Norms and Diversity: Methods for encoding and evaluating cultural norms in LMs, Human-centric data collection for endangered and minority languages, Language models tailored for multilingual and multicultural contexts
- Efficient and Sustainable Language Models: Scalable and energy-efficient NLP methods, Transfer learning, model compression, and knowledge distillation for underserved languages, Adaptation of LMs for low-resource or resource-constrained environments
Submission Guidelines
We welcome long papers (8 pages) and short papers (4 pages), excluding references. Submissions must follow the NAACL 2025 style guidelines.
Accepted papers will be published in the NAACL workshop proceedings and archived on the workshop website.
Important Dates
Submission deadline: January 30, 2025
Pre-reviewed (ARR) submission deadline: February 20, 2025
Notification of acceptance: March 1, 2025
Camera-ready paper due: March 10, 2025
Workshop dates: May 3-4, 2025
Submit your paper via OpenReview: https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/NAACL/2025/Workshop/LM4UC
Contact Us
For inquiries, please contact the workshop organizers: Sang Truong (Stanford), Rifki Afina Putri (KAIST), Angelina Wang (Stanford), Duc Nguyen (VNU-HCM UT), Dan Ho (Stanford), Alice Oh (KAIST), Sanmi Koyejo (Stanford).
We look forward to your contributions and engaging discussions at LM4UC!