Call for Papers: The 19th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XIX)

LAW-XIX will be the 19th annual meeting endorsed by the ACL and ELRA Special Interest Group for Annotation (SIGANN). It will take place in July/Aug 2025 at ACL in Vienna, Austria. 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-XIX 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.

LAW-XIX will be hybrid, allowing both in-person and virtual presentations.

Special Theme

The special theme of LAW-XIX is "Subjectivity and variation in linguistic annotations". In addition to LAW's general topics, we specifically invite submissions on the following topics:

Subjectivity and human label variation in linguistic annotations
Learning from annotation disagreements
Detecting annotation noise in human label variation
Accounting for subjectivity in label aggregation
Ways to aggregate multiple annotators' labels beyond majority vote
Any other topics related to the special theme.

Regarding subjectivity, we are particularly interested in work addressing the annotation of multidimensional constructs from the political and social sciences and encourage submissions on the following topics:

Theory-driven operationalization of complex political or socio-psychological constructs,
Creation of linguistically annotated datasets that capture such constructs
Relation between theories and textual annotations
Challenges for the measurement of multidimensional constructs from text
Challenges for validating (a) theories, (b) annotations
Implications and risks for manual annotation and automatic prediction of socio-psychological constructs from text.

Important Dates

All submission deadlines are 11:59 p.m. UTC-12:00 “anywhere on Earth.”
They cannot be extended.

Workshop papers due (ARR Commitment)	Mar 25, 2025
Workshop papers due (Direct Submission)	April 04, 2025
Notification of acceptance	May 16, 2025
Camera-ready papers due	May 30, 2025
Workshop date	July/Aug, 2025

Submissions

The submission site will be open soon...

We accept both direct submissions and commitments from ACL Rolling Review (ARR).

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 (either in-person or virtually) 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 the 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 (Chen et al., 2024) ..." should be replaced with citations such as "Chen et al. (2024) 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 (law2025workshop@gmail.com). Authors of accepted papers must notify the program chairs within 10 days of acceptance if the paper is withdrawn for any reason.

Following the ACL and ARR policies, there is no anonymity period requirement.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the program co-chairs at law2025workshop@gmail.com.