CfP 7th Workshop on Natural Legal Language Processing (NLLP 2025)

[Jerry Spanakis]

7th Workshop on Natural Legal Language Processing (NLLP 2025)

8 November 2025, Suzhou, China (collocated with EMNLP 2025)

Website: http://nllpw.org/workshop

Twitter: @nllpworkshop

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/nllpworkshop.bsky.social

Contact: nllp....@gmail.com

= Important Dates =

Submission deadline ― 26 August 2025
Submission of EMNLP papers with reviews and ARR commitment ― 2 September 2025
Notification for direct submissions, ARR and EMNLP papers ― 30 September 2025
Camera ready due ― 7 October 2025
Workshop ― 8 November 2025
All deadlines are 11.59pm UTC -12h

Submission website: https://openreview.net/group?id=EMNLP/2025/Workshop/NLLP

For the full text: https://nllpw.org/workshop/call/

= Goal =

Following the success of the first six editions of the NLLP workshop (EMNLP 2021 - 2024, KDD 2020, NAACL 2019), the workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners working on NLP, LLMs and other AI fields with legal practitioners and researchers.We welcome submissions describing original work on legal data, as well as data with legal relevance.= Topics =Applications of NLP methods to tasks in the legal domain including, but not limited to:

• Case outcome analysis and prediction

• Summarization and analysis of long-form and complex legal documents

• Information extraction

• Contract drafting

• Chatbots and assistants for legal or negotiation support

• Legal analysis and commentary

• Legal argumentation analysis

• Legal reasoning

• Information retrieval and question-answering (incl. retrieval-augmented generation)

• Detection and mitigation of legal misinformation

• Copyright and intellectual property law applications, incl. infringement detection, licensing compliance, generative content auditing

• Agentic applications for conducting tasks in the legal domain

Methods for applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to the legal domain including, but not limited to:

• Adaptation of LLMs to the legal domain

• Prompt engineering and prompt chaining

• Composite methods using symbolic or rule-based reasoning

• Groundedness and attributability of generations

• Privacy and bias risks in legal LLM applications

• Copyright compliance, dataset provenance and transparency and fair use analysis in LLM training and usage

Methodological innovations for legal tasks including, but not limited to:

• Classification

• Summarization and generation

• Information extraction incl. entity recognition, disambiguation, event extraction, query understanding, anonymization, data extraction, knowledge base population

• Question answering incl. retrieval-augmented generation

• Information retrieval incl. sparse, dense or hybrid approaches

• Multi-modal document parsing incl. using structured, semi-structured and metadata (e.g. tables, charts, images)

• Clustering, clause similarity and topic modeling

• Link and citation prediction

• Causal inference and counterfactual reasoning for legal decision-making

• Conversational agents incl. conversational question answering, contract analysis and review, negotiation support agents or multi-agent coordination

• Planning and reasoning

Tasks, Resources and Evaluation for NLP in the Legal domain:

• Description of new tasks for NLP in the legal domain e.g. legal argument reasoning, legal QA attribution

• Task overviews and survey papers that identify current research gaps

• Dataset development for LLM benchmarking for legal applications

• Publicly available datasets curated and annotated by legal experts

• Methods for automatic evaluation of LLM performance on legal domains

NLP for Online Platforms, Social Media and Regulations:

• Detection and moderation of illegal content (e.g. harassment, defamation)

• NLP for platform compliance under regulatory regimes (e.g. Data Services Act, AI Act, etc.)

• Legal transparency tooling for platform decisions (e.g. Statement of Reasons analysis)

• Misinformation and disinformation detection with legal implications

• Online dispute resolution, appeals and access to justice via social platforms

• Legal evidence mining from user-generated content and public discourse

• Legal implications of chatbots and agents operating in or for social media platforms

• NLP aided analysis of Terms of Services and platform policies

Systems, Demos and Industry Applications

• System descriptions of real-world legal NLP systems

• Industry applications in legal tech or compliance

• NLP systems for legal professionals such as E-Discovery, contract review, risk assessment.

• Open or proprietary NLP tools for citizens, lawyers, courts, or regulators

Interdisciplinary position papers on topics including, but not limited to:

• Legal or socio-legal analyses relating to the role NLP in the legal domain

• Ethical, legal and regulatory aspects of data collection and LLM use in the legal domain

• Critical reflections about the benefits and challenges with using NLP technologies in the legal domain

• The role of NLP in Access to Justice and Digital Legal Empowerment

• The role of NLP in platform governance and content moderation including legal, regulatory and ethical aspects of automated moderation, accountability under emerging platform regulations (e.g., DSA, DMA, AI Act) and impacts on freedom of expression and access to justice

• Legal and ethical challenges of NLP in the context of copyright and IP

= Submissions =We accept papers reporting original (unpublished) research of two types:

• Long papers (max 8 pages of content)

• Short papers (max 4 pages of content)

Appendices, references, optional limitations section, optional ethics section and acknowledgements do not count against the maximum page limit and should be formatted according to the guidelines below. 

To submit a paper, please access the submission link: https://openreview.net/group?id=EMNLP/2025/Workshop/NLLP

Conference proceedings will be published on the ACL Anthology.

= Ethics Section =

The NLLP workshop adheres to the same standards regarding ethics as the EMNLP 2025 conference (link). Authors will be allowed extra space after the 8th page (4th for short papers) for an optional broader impact statement or other discussion of ethics. Note that an ethical considerations section is not required, but papers working with sensitive data or on sensitive tasks that do not discuss these issues will not be accepted.= Non-archival Option =The authors have the option of submitting previously unpublished research as non-archival, meaning that only the abstract will be published in the conference proceedings. We expect these submissions to describe the same quality of work as archival submissions. These will be reviewed following the same procedure as archival submissions. This option accommodates publication of the work or a superset at a later date in a conference or journal which does not allow previously archived work and to encourage presentation and feedback on mature, yet unpublished work. Non-archival submissions should adhere to the same formatting and length constraints as archival submissions.

= Dual Submission and Preprint Policy =

Papers that are under consideration at other workshops, conferences or journals during the review period must explicitly indicate so at submission time. Authors of papers accepted for presentation at the NLLP 2025 workshop must notify the organizers by the camera-ready deadline as to whether the paper will be published or withdrawn.
There is no anonymity period or limitation on posting or discussing non-anonymous preprints while the work is under peer review. However, if the preliminary version of a paper was posted on arXiv, the paper should *not* have a self-reference to it in the submission.

= ACL Rolling Review Submissions =

Our workshop also welcomes submissions from ACL Rolling Review (ARR). Authors of any papers that are submitted to ARR and have their meta review ready may submit their papers and reviews for consideration for the workshop until 2 September 2025. This should include submissions to ARR for the May deadline. The decision of publication will be announced by 7 October 2025. The commitment should be done via the workshop submission website: https://openreview.net/group?id=EMNLP/2025/Workshop/NLLP_ARR_Commitment

= EMNLP 2025 Submissions =

Authors of any papers that have been reviewed for EMNLP 2025 and were rejected have the opportunity to send their paper and reviews to be considered for publication in the NLLP workshop proceedings as long as the topics are relevant to those described in this call for papers.
The deadline for submitting papers and reviews is 2 September 2025. The decision of publication will be announced by 7 October 2025. The submission should be done via the workshop submission website: https://openreview.net/group?id=EMNLP/2025/Workshop/NLLP_ARR_Commitment

= Double-Blind Reviewing =

The review process is double-blind and should follow the ARR guidelines on ensuring two-way anonymized review available here. Papers that violate these requirements will be desk rejected.

= Submission Style & Format Guidelines =

Paper submissions must use the official ACL style templates, which are available here (Latex and Word). Please follow the paper formatting guidelines general to “*ACL” conferences available here. Authors may not modify these style files or use templates designed for other conferences.Submissions that do not conform to the required styles, including paper size, margin width, and font size restrictions, will be rejected without review.

= Presentation=

Presentation format for each paper and schedule will be announced between acceptance notification and the camera-ready deadline.At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the NLLP 2025 workshop by the registration deadline in order for the submission to be published in the proceedings.

=Organizing Commitee=

Nikolaos Aletras - University of Sheffield

Leslie Barrett ― Bloomberg

Ilias Chalkidis - University of Copenhagen

Catalina Goanta - Utrecht University

Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro - Bloomberg

Gerasimos (Jerry) Spanakis - Maastricht University