Natural Legal Language Processing workshop @ EMNLP 2021 - Call for Papers
10 November 2021
Punta Cana, DR & Virtual
Collocated with EMNLP 2021
Website: http://nllpw.org - Twitter: @nllpworkshop - Contact: nllp.chairs [at] gmail.com
Goal
Following the success of the first two editions of the NLLP workshop (NAACL 2019, KDD 2020), 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
Submission
We accept papers reporting original (unpublished) research of two types:
- Long papers (max 8 pages + references)
- Short papers (max 4 pages + references)
To submit a paper, please access the submission link: https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2021/nllp/
Conference proceedings will be published on the ACL Anthology (https://aclanthology.org/).
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 2021 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
Starting from this year, our workshop also welcomes submissions from ACL Rolling Review (https://aclrollingreview.org/). Authors of any papers that are submitted to ARR before July 15, 2021 and have their reviews ready may submit their papers and reviews for consideration for the workshop up to one week before our notification date i.e. before 3 September 2021.
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
Submissions to the workshop must be in PDF and formatted according to the new Standard ACL Conference Proceedings Template.
The templates are available on Overleaf as a template (https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/emnlp-2021-template/hqchdxrsnwjs) and can also be downloaded directly (LaTeX - https://2021.emnlp.org/files/emnlp2021-latex.zip, Word - https://2021.emnlp.org/files/emnlp2021.docx).
Please follow the formatting documentation general to *ACL conferences available here (https://acl-org.github.io/ACLPUB/formatting.html). The templates themselves contain only specific notes (e.g., LaTeX notes in the .tex file).
Papers that do not meet the formatting requirements will be rejected without review.
Important dates
Submission deadline ― 20 August 2021
Notification ― 10 September 2021
Camera ready ― 17 September 2021
Workshop ― 10 November 2021
All deadlines are 11.59pm UTC -12h
Presentation
We will follow the EMNLP 2021 recommendations around the workshop's form of organization. Currently, EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.
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 2021 workshop by the registration deadline in order for the submission to be published in the proceedings.
Organization
Nikolaos Aletras ― University of Sheffield
Ion Androutsopoulos ― Athens University of Economics and Business
Leslie Barrett ― Bloomberg Law
Catalina Goanta ― Maastricht University
Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro ― Bloomberg