First Call for Papers

The 17th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVII)

LAW-XVII will be the 17th annual meeting endorsed by the ACL Special Interest Group for Annotation (SIGANN). It will take place in July 2023 at ACL in Toronto, Canada.

Linguistic annotation of natural language corpora is the backbone of supervised methods in both statistical and neural natural language processing. Annotated corpora are also a major supporting source of information for unsupervised methods, multitask learning, and evaluation of both NLP tools and theories about language within and outside of linguistics. The LAW-XVII will provide a forum for presentation and discussion of innovative research on all aspects of linguistic annotation, including creation/evaluation of annotation schemes, methods for automatic and manual annotation, use and evaluation of annotation software and frameworks, representation of linguistic data and annotations, semi-supervised “human in the loop” methods of annotation, crowd-sourcing approaches, and more.

The LAW will also provide a forum for annotation researchers to work towards standardization, best practices, and interoperability of annotation information and software.

Special Theme

The special theme of LAW-XVII is “Ethics and Annotation.” In addition to LAW’s general topics, we specifically invite submissions on the following topics:

• Aspects of ethics related to annotation work: How do we treat annotators? How do we ensure that they feel good about the work that they are doing? Are there dangers related to psychological health?
• Aspects of ethics related to bias.
• Ethics in crowd-sourcing annotation scenarios.
• Annotation of information regarding ethics in text.
• Any other topics related to the special theme.

Submissions

We welcome submissions of long and short papers, posters, and demonstrations relating to the special theme or any aspect of linguistic annotation, including:

• Annotation procedures
• Innovative automated and manual strategies for annotation
• Machine learning and knowledge-based methods for automation of corpus annotation
• Creation, maintenance, and interactive exploration of annotation structures and annotated data
• Annotation evaluation
• Inter-annotator agreement and other evaluation metrics and strategies
• Qualitative evaluation of linguistic representations
• Innovative means to evaluate annotation quality
• Annotation access and use
• Representation formats/structures for annotations of different phenomena, especially annotations at multiple levels, and means to explore/manipulate them
• Linguistic considerations for merging annotations of distinct phenomena
• Annotation schemes, guidelines and standards
• New and innovative annotation schemes, comparison of annotation schemes
• Methodologies and resources for annotation scheme development
• Best practices for annotation procedures and/or development and documentation of annotation schemes
• Interoperability of annotation formats and/or frameworks among different systems as well as different tasks, frameworks, modalities, and languages
• Results from the application and evaluation of standards for linguistic annotation
• Annotation software and frameworks
• Development, evaluation and/or innovative use of annotation software frameworks

Submissions should report original and unpublished research on topics of interest to the workshop. We also invite substantiated position papers, in particular with regard to our special theme. Accepted papers are expected to be presented at the workshop and will be published in the workshop proceedings. They should emphasize obtained results rather than intended work, and should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results.

A paper accepted for presentation at the workshop must not be or have been presented at any other meeting with publicly available proceedings.

Long/short paper submissions must use the official ACL style templates. Long papers must not exceed eight (8) pages of content. Short papers and demonstration papers must not exceed four (4) pages of content. References do not count against these limits.

Note: The supplementary material does not count towards page limit and should not be included in paper, but should be submitted separately using the appropriate field on the submission website. All submissions must be in PDF format.

Reviewing of papers will be double-blind. Therefore, the paper must not include the authors' names and affiliations or self-references that reveal the authors’ identity--e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ..." should be replaced with citations such as "Smith (1991) previously showed ...". Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.

Authors of papers that have been or will be submitted to other meetings or publications must provide this information to the workshop co-chairs (law-2023-chairs@googlegroups.com). Authors of accepted papers must notify the program chairs within 10 days of acceptance if the paper is withdrawn for any reason.

We follow previous and current ACL policy to establish an anonymity period (from submission to author notification) during which non-anonymous posting of preprints is not allowed. 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.

The submission site will be announced shortly.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the program co-chairs at law-2023-chairs@googlegroups.com or check the workshop website (https://sigann.github.io/LAW-XVII-2023/) for updates.

Dates (All submission deadlines are 11:59 p.m. UTC-12:00 “anywhere on Earth”)

Anonymity period starts: 7th March 2023

Preliminary submission of long and short papers: 7th April 2023

Submission, notification, and camera-ready dates to be announced in January 2023

Workshop: 13th or 14th July, 2023 (TBD)

Workshop Organizers

Annemarie Friedrich (Program Co-Chair)

Jakob Prange (Program Co-Chair)

Amir Zeldes (ACL SIGANN President)

Ines Rehbein (ACL SIGANN Secretary)

Program Committee

Omri Abend (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Melanie Andresen (University of Stuttgart)

Aditya Bhargava (University of Toronto)

Claire Bonial (Army Research Laboratory)

Marie Candito (Université Paris Cité)

Emmanuele Chersoni (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University )

Christian Chiarcos (University of Cologne)

Kathryn Conger (University of Colorado Boulder )

Stefanie Dipper (Ruhr University Bochum)

Lucia Donatelli (Saarland University)

Jonathan Dunn (University of Canterbury)

Federico Fancellu (3M Health Information Services)

Pablo Faria (University of Campinas)

Nizar Habash (New York University Abu Dhabi)

Udo Hahn (Friedrich Schiller University Jena)

Andrea Horbach (University of Hagen)

Chu-Ren Huang (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)

Nancy Ide (Brandeis University)

Sandra Kuebler (Indiana University)

Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski (University of Hildesheim)

Els Lefever (LT3, Ghent University)

Lori Levin (Carnegie Mellon University)

Katja Markert (Heidelberg University)

Marie-Catherine de Marneffe (FNRS - UCLouvain - The Ohio State University)

Adam Meyers (New York University)

Philippe Muller (IRIT, University of Toulouse)

Anna Nedoluzhko (Charles University)

Simon Ostermann (German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI))

Alexis Palmer (University of Colorado Boulder)

Antonio Pareja-Lora (SIC, UCM/OEG, UPM)

Miriam R. L. Petruck (International Computer Science Institute)

Barbara Plank (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)

Massimo Poesio (Queen Mary University of London)

Sameer Pradhan (LDC, Cemantix)

James Pustejovsky (Brandeis University)

Ines Rehbein (Mannheim University)

Michael Roth (University of Stuttgart)

Josef Ruppenhofer (Leibniz Institute for the German Language)

Nathan Schneider (Georgetown University)

Djamé Seddah (Inria Paris)

Manfred Stede (University of Potsdam)

Joel Tetreault (Dataminr, Inc.)

Katrin Tomanek (Open Table)

Bonnie Webber (University of Edinburgh)

Michael Wiegand (University of Klagenfurt)

Andreas Witt  (Leibniz Institute for the German Language)

Fei Xia (University of Washington)

Nianwen Xue (Brandeis University)

Amir Zeldes (Georgetown University)

Deniz Zeyrek (Middle East Technical University)

Heike Zinsmeister (University of Hamburg)