Call for Papers

Two international key players in the area of computational linguistics, the ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA) and the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL), are joining forces to organize the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024) to be held in Torino, Italy on 20-25 May, 2024.

IMPORTANT DATES
(All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 (“anywhere on Earth”)

22 September 2023: Paper anonymity period starts
20 October 2023 (Extended deadline): Final submissions due (long, short and position papers)
20 October 2023: Workshop/Tutorial proposal submissions due
22–29 January 2024: Author rebuttal period
5 February 2024: Final reviewing
19 February 2024: Notification of acceptance
25 March 2024: Camera-ready due
20-21-25 May 2024: LREC-COLING 2024 workshop/tutorials
22-23-24 May 2024: LREC-COLING 2024 conference


SUBMISSION TOPICS
LREC-COLING 2024 invites the submission of long and short papers featuring substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of natural language and computation, language resources (LRs) and evaluation, including spoken and sign language and multimodal interaction. Submissions are invited in five broad categories: (i) theories, algorithms, and models, (ii) NLP applications, (iii) language resources, (iv) NLP evaluation and (v) topics of general interest. Submissions that span multiple categories are particularly welcome.

(I) Theories, algorithms, and models
Discourse and Pragmatics
Explainability and Interpretability of Large Language Models
Language Modeling
CL/NLP and Linguistic Theories
CL/NLP for Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
Machine Learning for CL/NLP
Morphology and Word Segmentation
Semantics
Tagging, Chunking, Syntax and Parsing
Textual Inference

(II) NLP applications
Applications (including BioNLP and eHealth, NLP for legal purposes, NLP for Social Media and Journalism, etc.)
Dialogue and Interactive Systems
Document Classification, Topic Modeling, Information Retrieval and Cross-Lingual Retrieval
Information Extraction, Text Mining, and Knowledge Graph Derivation from Texts
Machine Translation for Spoken/Written/Sign Languages, and Translation Aids
Sentiment Analysis, Opinion and Argument Mining
Speech Recognition/Synthesis and Spoken Language Understanding
Natural Language Generation, Summarization and Simplification
Question Answering
Offensive Speech Detection and Analysis
Vision, Robotics, Multimodal and Grounded Language Acquisition

(III) Language resource design, creation, and use: text, speech, sign, gesture, image, in single or multimodal/multimedia data
Guidelines, standards, best practices and models for LRs, interoperability
Methodologies and tools for LRs construction, annotation, and acquisition
Ontologies, terminology and knowledge representation
LRs and Semantic Web (including Linked Data, Knowledge Graphs, etc.)
LRs and Crowdsourcing
Metadata for LRs and semantic/content mark-up
LRs in systems and applications such as information extraction, information retrieval, audio-visual and multimedia search, speech dictation, meeting transcription, Computer-Aided Language Learning, training and education, mobile communication, machine translation, speech translation, summarisation, semantic search, text mining, inferencing, reasoning, sentiment analysis/opinion mining, (speech-based) dialogue systems, natural language and multimodal/multisensory interactions, chatbots, voice-activated services, etc.
Use of (multilingual) LRs in various fields of application like e-government, e-participation, e-culture, e-health, mobile applications, digital humanities, social sciences, etc.
LRs in the age of deep neural networks
Open, linked and shared data and tools, open and collaborative architectures
Bias in language resources
User needs, LT for accessibility

(IV) NLP evaluation methodologies
NLP evaluation methodologies, protocols and measures
Benchmarking of systems and products
Evaluation metrics in Machine Learning
Usability evaluation of HLT-based user interfaces and dialogue systems
User satisfaction evaluation

(V) Topics of general interest
Multilingual issues, language coverage and diversity, less-resourced languages
Replicability and reproducibility issues
Organisational, economical, ethical and legal issues
Priorities, perspectives, strategies in national and international policies
International and national activities, projects and initiatives

PAPER THEME TRACKS
Those topics are organized into 26 main tracks:

LC01 Applications Involving LRs and Evaluation (including Applications in Specific Domains)
LC02 CL and Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
LC03 Corpora and Annotation (including Tools, Systems, Treebanks)
LC04 Dialogue, Conversational Systems, Chatbots, Human-Robot Interaction
LC05 Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
LC06 Discourse and Pragmatics
LC07 Document Classification, Information Retrieval and Cross-lingual Retrieval
LC08 Evaluation and Validation Methodologies
LC09 Inference, Reasoning, Question Answering
LC10 Information Extraction, Knowledge Extraction, and Text Mining
LC11 Integrated Systems and Applications
LC12 Knowledge Discovery/Representation (including Knowledge Graphs, Linked Data, Terminology, Ontologies)
LC13 Language Modeling
LC14 Less-Resourced/Endangered/Less-studied Languages
LC15 Lexicon and Semantics
LC16 Machine Learning Models and Techniques for CL/NLP
LC17 Multilinguality, Machine Translation, and Translation Aids (including Speech-to-Speech Translation)
LC18 Multimodality, Cross-modality (including Sign Languages, Vision and Other Modalities), Multimodal Applications, Grounded Language Acquisition, and HRI
LC19 Natural Language Generation, Summarization and Simplification
LC20 Offensive and Harmful Language Detection and Analysis
LC21 Opinion & Argument Mining, Sentiment Analysis, Emotion Recognition/Generation
LC22 Parsing, Tagging, Chunking, Grammar, Syntax, Morphosyntax, Morphology
LC23 Policy issues, Ethics, Legal Issues, Bias Analysis (including Language Resource Infrastructures, Standards for LRs, Metadata)
LC24 Social Media Processing
LC25 Speech Resources and Processing (including Phonetic Databases, Phonology, Prosody, Speech Recognition, Synthesis and Spoken Language Understanding)
LC26 Trustworthiness, Interpretability, and Explainability of Neural Models

PAPER TYPES AND FORMATS
LREC-COLING 2024 invites high-quality submissions written in English. Submissions of three forms of papers will be considered:

Regular long papers – up to eight (8) pages maximum*, presenting substantial, original, completed, and unpublished work.
Short papers – up to four (4) pages*, describing a small focused contribution, negative results, system demonstrations, etc.
Position papers – up to eight (8) pages*, discussing key hot topics, challenges and open issues, as well as cross-fertilization between computational linguistics and other disciplines.
* Excluding any number of additional pages for references, ethical consideration, conflict-of-interest, as well as data, and code availability statements.


Upon acceptance, final versions of long papers will be given one additional page – up to nine (9) pages of content plus unlimited pages for acknowledgments and references – so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account. Final versions of short papers may have up to five (5) pages, plus unlimited pages for acknowledgments and references. For both long and short papers, all figures and tables that are part of the main text must fit within these page limits.


Furthermore, appendices or supplementary material will also be allowed ONLY in the final, camera-ready version, but not during submission, as papers should be reviewed without the need to refer to any supplementary materials.

Linguistic examples, if any, should be presented in the original language but also glossed into English to allow accessibility for a broader audience.

Note that paper types are decisions made orthogonal to the eventual, final form of presentation (i.e., oral versus poster).

PAPER SUBMISSIONS AND TEMPLATES
Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system via the link:

https://softconf.com/lrec-coling2024/papers/

Both long and short papers must follow the LREC-COLING 2024 two-column format, using the supplied official style files. The templates can be downloaded from the Style Files and Formatting page provided on the website. Please do not modify these style files, nor should you 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.

Author's Kit: https://lrec-coling-2024.org/authors-kit/

AUTHOR RESPONSIBILITIES
Papers must be of original, previously-unpublished work. Papers must be anonymized to support double-blind reviewing. Submissions thus must not include authors’ names and affiliations. The submissions should also avoid links to non-anonymized repositories: the code should be either submitted as supplementary material in the final version of the paper, or as a link to an anonymized repository (e.g., Anonymous GitHub or Anonym Share). Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.

If the paper is available as a preprint, this must be indicated on the submission form but not in the paper itself. In addition, LREC-COLING 2024 will follow the same policy as ACL conferences establishing an anonymity period during which non-anonymous posting of preprints is not allowed.

More specifically, direct submissions to LREC-COLING 2024 may not be made available online (e.g. via a preprint server) in a non-anonymized form after September 22, 11:59PM UTC-12:00 (for arXiv, note that this refers to submission time).

Also included in that policy are instructions to reviewers to not rate papers down for not citing recent preprints. Authors are asked to cite published versions of papers instead of preprint versions when possible.

Papers that have been or will be under consideration for other venues at the same time must be declared at submission time. If a paper is accepted for publication at LREC-COLING 2024, it must be immediately withdrawn from other venues. If a paper under review at LREC-COLING 2024 is accepted elsewhere and authors intend to proceed there, the LREC-COLING 2024 committee must be notified immediately

ETHICS STATEMENT
We encourage all authors submitting to LREC-COLING 2024 to include an explicit ethics statement on the broader impact of their work, or other ethical considerations after the conclusion but before the references. The ethics statement will not count toward the page limit (8 pages for long, 4 pages for short papers).

PRESENTATION REQUIREMENT
All papers accepted to the main conference track must be presented at the conference to appear in the proceedings, and at least one author must register for LREC-COLING2024. Papers will be presented either orally or as posters. The specific presentation modality of a paper will be decided based on its content, with no difference in quality implied. Papers that include a demonstration component will be presented as posters.

All papers accepted to the main conference will be required to submit a presentation video. The conference will be hybrid, with an emphasis on encouraging interaction between the online and in-person modalities, and thus presentations can be either on-site or virtual.