Dear community!

With one step into a new year, we are delighted to invite you for submission to the Fourth Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact co-located at ACL 2025!

Workshop website: https://sites.google.com/view/nlp4positiveimpact
Call for paper: https://sites.google.com/view/nlp4positiveimpact/call-for-papers-2025

Submission methods: ACL Rolling Review (ARR) both commitment and direct submissions.
We also accept non-archival submissions.

Important dates:

ARR-cycle Submission Due: February 15th, 2025
ARR Reviewed Submissions Commitment Due: April 20th, 2025
Direct Submissions Due: March 2nd, 2025 via https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/ACL/2025/Workshop/NLP4PosImpact
Notification of Acceptance (both channels): April 30th, 2025
Camera-Ready Papers Due: May 16th, 2025
Workshop Date: July 31st or August 1st 2025 (co-located with ACL 2025)

All deadlines are 11:59 PM (Anywhere on Earth)

Workshop Summary

The increasing adoption of language-oriented AI systems offers unprecedented opportunities for positive societal impact. NLP technologies have matured to the point where they can meaningfully contribute to addressing global challenges like poverty, hunger, healthcare, education, inequality, COVID-19, and climate change, aligning with the UN sustainability goals.

This workshop aims to advance innovative NLP research that benefits society, emphasizing responsible methods and impactful applications. We welcome submissions in areas including, but not limited to:

Grounding NLP in Real-World Impact: Beyond improving model performance, how can NLP systems be directly tied to social outcomes? This could include case studies of real-world deployments or strategies for better deployment and maintenance practices.

Underexplored Applications: While NLP for healthcare and mental well-being is well-established, we encourage research tackling overlooked areas such as poverty, hunger, energy, and climate change.

Interdisciplinary Collaborations: We highly value work that integrates insights from other fields, such as social science, political science, economics, philanthropy, and HCI, and we encourage submissions of case studies or examples that highlight such collaborations.

Special Theme: NLP for Climate Change

This year, we spotlight NLP’s role in addressing climate change—an area that remains underexplored in the NLP community. We invite research on climate-focused applications, such as fact-checking, question-answering, and initiatives to make NLP models more environmentally sustainable. Attendees will have the chance to share results and ideas with NGO representatives working on climate issues.


Submission Types

We encourage diverse contributions, including:

Identifying social needs and affected demographics.

Proposing new tasks or directions through position papers.

Conducting literature reviews or philosophical discussions on NLP’s societal impact.

Designing user studies, surveys, or ethical frameworks.

Exploring interdisciplinary methods and collaboration strategies.

Submissions must address the ethical and societal implications of the work, with a clear focus on defining and achieving positive impact. We look forward to fostering discussions that inspire actionable, responsible advancements in NLP for the greater good.

Papers Format

Both long and short paper submissions should follow all of the ARR

submission requirements

https://aclrollingreview.org/cfp#paper-submission-information, including: Long Papers (8 pages) and Short Papers (4 pages).


Organizers

Katherine Atwell (Northeastern University)
Prof. Laura Biester (Middlebury College)
Angana Borah (University of Michigan)
Dr. Daryna Dementieva (Technical University of Munich)
Prof Oana Ignat (Santa Clara University)
Dr. Neema Kotonya (Dataminr)
Ziyi Liu (University of Southern California)
Ruyuan Wan (Pennsylvania State University)
Prof Steven Wilson (University of Michigan-Flint)
Prof Jieyu Zhao (University of Southern California)

Steering Committee

Prof Rada Mihalcea (University of Michigan)
Dr. Joel Tetreault (Dataminr)

Contact Email: nlp4pi.workshop@gmail.com