Call for Papers: The 18th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVIII)

LAW-XVIII will be the 18th annual meeting endorsed by the ACL and ELRA Special Interest Group for Annotation (SIGANN). It will take place in March 2024 at EACL in St. Julians, Malta. 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-XVIII 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.

In line with the EACL main conference, LAW will be hybrid, allowing both in-person and virtual presentations.

Special Theme

The special theme of LAW-XVIII is “Annotation in the Age of Large Language Models (LLMs).” In addition to LAW’s general topics, we specifically invite submissions on the following topics:

Important Dates

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

Anonymity period starts November 18, 2023
Workshop papers due (Direct Submission) December 18, 2023
Workshop papers due (ARR Commitment) January 17, 2024
Notification of acceptance January 20, 2024
Camera-ready papers due January 30, 2024
Workshop date March 22, 2024

Submissions

The submission site is now open at https://softconf.com/eacl2024/LAW-XVIII/.

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:

Submissions should report original and unpublished research on topics of interest to the workshop.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 (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-xviii-2024@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.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the program co-chairs at law-xviii-2024@googlegroups.com.