First International Conference on Natural Language Processing

and Artificial Intelligence for Cyber Security

(NLPAICS’2024)

Lancaster University, Lancaster

29-30 July 2024

First announcement

Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Deep Learning and Large Language Models have resulted in improved performance of applications benefiting from these techniques. In particular, in there has been a growing interest of employing AI methods in different Cyber Security applications.

In today's digital world Cyber Security has emerged and its importance has magnified, becoming a priority for both individual users and organisations. With the exponential growth of the volume of information online, traditional security approaches often fall short in identifying and preventing evolving security threats. The inadequacy of conventional security frameworks highlights the need for innovative solutions that can effectively navigate the complex digital landscape for ensuring robust security. NLP and AI in Cyber Security have vast potential to significantly enhance threat detection and mitigation by fostering the development of advanced security systems for autonomous identification, assessment, and response to security threats in real-time. Recognising this challenge and the capabilities of NLP and AI approaches to fortify cyber security systems, the First International Conference on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Cyber Security (NLPAICS’2024) offers to act as a meeting point for researchers working on NLP and AI methods for Cyber Security and welcomes contributions reporting latest solutions based on NLP and AI to mitigate the risks when processing digital information.

Conference topics

The conference invites submissions on a broad range of topics related to the employment of NLP and AI (and in general, language studies and models) for Cyber Security including but not limited to:

Societal and Human Security and Safety

* Content Legitimacy and Quality * Detection and mitigation of hate speech and offensive language * Fake news, deepfakes, misinformation and disinformation * Detection of machine generated language in multimodal context (text, speech

and gesture)

* User Security and Safety * Cyberbullying and identification of internet offenders * Monitoring extremist fora * Suicide prevention * Technical Measures and Solutions * Social engineering identification, phishing detection * NLP for risk assessment * Controlled languages for safe messages * Prevention of malicious use of ai models * Forensic linguistics * Human Factors in Cyber Security

Speech Technology and Multimodal Investigations for Cyber Security

* Voice-based security: Analysis of voice recordings or transcripts for security threats * Detection of machine generated language in multimodal context (text, speech and gesture) * NLP and biometrics in multimodal context

Data and Software Security

* Cryptography * Digital forensics * Malware detection, obfuscation * Models for documentation * NLP for data privacy and leakage prevention (DLP) * Addressing dataset “poisoning” attacks

Human-Centric Security and Support

* Natural language understanding for chatbots: NLP-powered chatbots for user support and security incident reporting * User behaviour analysis: Analysing user-generated text data (e.g., chat logs and emails) to detect insider threats or unusual behaviour * Human supervision of technology for Cyber Security

Anomaly Detection and Threat Intelligence

* Text-Based Anomaly Detection * Identification of unusual or suspicious patterns in logs, incident reports or other textual data * Detecting deviations from normal behaviour in system logs or network traffic * Threat Intelligence Analysis * Processing and analysing threat intelligence reports, news, articles and blogs on latest Cyber Security threats * Extracting key information and indicators of compromise (IoCs) from unstructured text

Systems and Infrastructure Security

* Systems Security * Anti-reverse engineering for protecting privacy and anonymity * Identification and mitigation of side-channel attacks * Authentication and access control * Enterprise-level mitigation * NLP for software vulnerability detection * Malware Detection through Code Analysis * Analysing code and scripts for malware * Detection using NLP to identify patterns indicative of malicious code

Financial Cyber Security

* Financial Fraud Detection * Algorithmic Trading Security * Secure Online Banking * Risk Management in Finance * Financial Text Analytics

Ethics, Bias, and Legislation in Cyber Security

* Ethical and Legal Issues * Digital privacy and identity management * The ethics of NLP and speech technology * Explainability of NLP and speech technology tools * Legislation against malicious use of AI * Regulatory issues * Bias and Security * Bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) * Bias in security related datasets and annotations

Datasets and resources for Cyber Security Applications

Specialised Security Applications and Open Topics

* Intelligence applications * Emerging and innovative applications in Cyber Security

Submissions and Publication

The first call for papers (to be distributed in November 2023) will provide details on the types of submissions and the submission procedure. The first call will also provide information on the conference schedule, including submission and notification deadlines.

Each submission will be reviewed by three members of the Programme Committee.

All accepted papers will be included in the conference e-proceedings which will be available at the conference. The NLPAICS’2024 organisers will work with ACL to secure their inclusion in the ACL Anthology.

Organisation

The First International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence for Cyber Security (NLPAICS’2024) is organised by the Lancaster University UCREL NLP research group.

Further information and contact details

This is a first announcement only. The first Call for Papers is expected in November 2023 and registration will be open as from March 2024. The follow-up calls will list keynote speakers, conference chairs and members of the programme committee once confirmed.

The conference website and the conference email address will be available soon. For any initial queries, please feel free to contact Prof Ruslan Mitkov on r.mitkov@lancaster.ac.uk.