Language is deeply intertwined with nearly all human social processes. We do not expect teenagers to speak like senior citizens, and we recognize the mutual dependency between language and the ways people interact with and even conceptualize the world. Although this interdependence is at the core of models in both natural language processing (NLP) and (computational) social sciences (CSS), these two fields are continuing to come together, with many opportunities for novel methods, research insights, and potential applications. Humans with different social attributes and cultural backgrounds (compared to bots and trolls) react to information spread online differently, and express their reactions using a large variety of language and content choices. Identifying and measuring bias based on language use in different online communities is another emerging area of research. Moreover, it has been shown that one can construct social variables from language and estimate the relationship between these social variables and measures in economics, politics, law, religion, anthropology and other fields.
This workshop aims to (1) advance the joint computational analysis of social sciences and language and (2) study how language can be used to measure social variables and their impact across disciplines, both by explicitly involving social scientists with NLP researchers, and other partners from both industry and academia.
This sixth edition of the NLP+CSS workshop builds on five successful years with hundreds of interdisciplinary submissions to make NLP techniques and insights standard practice in CSS research. Our focus is on NLP for social sciences: to continue the progress of CSS, and to integrate CSS with current trends and techniques in NLP.
The workshop will have the following tentative format:
- Invited speakers with a key emphasis on bringing in social scientists from outside NLP and industry participation,
- Short talks for selected papers
- A general poster session for all accepted papers
Submission Details
We invite research on any of the following general topics:
- NLP models and data analytics that incorporate extra-linguistic social information
- Development and/or application of NLP tools for computational social science problems
- Methods or studies that test or revisit research from sociolinguistics
- Approaches to identify bias based on language use in different communities
- Insights into the importance of extra-linguistic attributes from NLP models across languages and cultures
- Methods or applications that combine NLP with causal inference to better understand social-scientific processes
- Use of large language models (LLMs) for social science measurement
Areas of interest include all levels of linguistic analysis and social sciences, including (but not limited to): phonology, syntax, pragmatics, stylistics, economics, psychology, sociology, sociolinguistics, political science, geography, demography, survey methodology, and public health.
We especially invite graduate students from both disciplines (i.e. social sciences and NLP) and connect them with experts in the respective other field (e.g., an NLP student with an expert in social sciences or vice versa). We would like to again provide mentorship for social science students who could not otherwise attend a computer science conference.
Submission. We invite both long and short papers to be submitted through Open Review:
https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/NAACL/2024/Workshop/NLP-CSS
Long papers should present new and substantial contributions related to the workshop’s theme. Short papers may be a small and focused contribution or describe a work in progress. While all submissions will be reviewed equally, authors can choose a non-archival submission, since some social sciences do not accept journal articles already published in archived proceedings.
Papers will follow the ACL (ARR) style guidelines for length and formatting.
More Information
The NLP+CSS website contains more details on the call for papers, submission instructions, and aims of the workshop: https://sites.google.com/site/nlpandcss/ or follow us on Twitter/X at @nlpandcss.
Contact the organizers by email via nlp-and-css [AT] googlegroups.com.
Important Dates
- Workshop papers due: March 24th, 2024
- Notification of acceptance: April 14th, 2024
- Camera-ready papers due: April 24th 2024
- Workshop dates (at NAACL in Mexico City): June 21 or 22, 2024
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
- Dallas Card (University of Michigan)
- Anjalie Field (Johns Hopkins University)
- Dirk Hovy (Bocconi University)
- Katie Keith (Williams College)