Call for Papers (2023)

Until recently, the dominant paradigm in natural language processing (and other areas of artificial intelligence) has been to resolve observed label disagreement into a single “ground truth” or “gold standard” via aggregation, adjudication, or statistical means. However, in recent years, the field has increasingly focused on subjective tasks, such as abuse detection or quality estimation, in which multiple points of view may be equally valid, and a unique ‘ground truth’ label may not exist (Plank, 2022). At the same time, as concerns have been raised about bias and fairness in AI, it has become increasingly apparent that an approach which assumes a single “ground truth” can erase minority voices. 

Strong perspectivism in NLP (Cabitza et al., 2023) pursues the spirit of recent initiatives such as Data Statements (Bender and Friedman, 2018), extending their scope to the full NLP pipeline, including the aspects related to modelling, evaluation and explanation.

In line with the first edition, the NLPerspectives (Perspectivist Approaches to Disagreement in NLP)  workshop will explore current and ongoing work on: the collection and labelling of non-aggregated datasets; and approaches to modelling and including these perspectives, as well as evaluation and applications of multi-perspective Machine Learning models. We also welcome opinion pieces and literature reviews, e.g., in the context of fairness and inclusion.

A key outcome of this second edition will be to build on the work begun at https://pdai.info/ to create a repository of perspectivist datasets with non-aggregated labels for use by researchers in perspectivist NLP modelling. 

Authors are, therefore, invited to share their LRs (data, tools, services, etc.) and provide  essential information about resources (i.e., also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work or are a result of their research. In addition, authors will be required to adhere to ethical research policies on AI and may include an ethics statement in their papers.

The NLPerspectives workshop will be hosted in person during the 26th edition of ECAI 2023 in Kraków, Poland, on 30 September or 1 October 2023.

Submissions

The contributions cannot exceed 7 pages (4 for research communications, see below) not including references, and as established by ECAI 2023 conference, the over length submissions will be rejected without review.

The papers should be submitted as a PDF document, conforming to the formatting guidelines provided in the call for papers of ECAI 2023 conference: https://ecai2023.eu/ECAI2023 

We accept three types of submissions:

  • Regular research papers;
  • Non-archival submissions: like research papers, but will not be included in the proceedings;
  • Research communications: 4-page abstracts summarising relevant research published elsewhere.

Topics

We invite original research papers from a wide range of topics, including but not limited to: 

  • Non-aggregated data collection and annotation frameworks
  • Descriptions of corpora collected under the perspectivist paradigm
  • Multi-perspective Modelling and Machine Learning
  • Evaluation of multi-perspective models/ models of disagreement
  • Multi-perspective disagreement as applied to NLP evaluation
  • Fairness and inclusive modelling
  • Perspectivist approaches for social good
  • Applications of multi-perspective modelling
  • Computing with (dis)agreement
  • Perspectivist Natural Language Generation
  • Foundational aspects of perspectivism
  • Opinion pieces and reviews on perspectivist approaches to NLP

Submissions are open to all, and are to be submitted anonymously (and must conform to the instructions for double-blind review). All papers will be refereed through a double-blind peer review process by at least three reviewers, with final acceptance decisions made by the workshop organisers. Scientific papers will be evaluated based on relevance, significance of contribution, impact, technical quality, scholarship, and quality of presentation. 

More information about the submission, publication of proceedings and date of the workshop will be provided soon. We are seeking sponsors in order to provide financial support for conference registration, travel, and accommodation for participants.

Attendance

At least one author of each accepted paper is required to participate in the conference and present the work.

Important Dates

  • Friday June 23 June 30, 2023: Paper submission
  • Friday August 4, 2023: Notification of acceptance
  • Friday September 1, 2023: Camera-ready papers due
  • Saturday September 30, 2023: Workshop 

Workshop organisers: 

Gavin Abercrombie, Heriot-Watt University

Valerio Basile, University of Turin

Davide Bernardi, Amazon Alexa

Shiran Dudy, University of Colorado, Boulder

Simona Frenda,  University of Turin

Lucy Havens, University of Edinburgh

Elisa Leonardelli, Fondazione Bruno Kessler

Sara Tonelli, Fondazione Bruno Kessler