NLP4IF 2021 @ NAACL 2021: Workshop + Two Shared Tasks

[Giovanni Da San Martino]

Fourth Workshop on NLP for Internet Freedom  (NLP4IF): Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda

Call for Papers 

 

Workshop website: http://www.netcopia.net/nlp4if/

Co-located with NAACL 2021 https://2021.naacl.org/   currently scheduled to be held in Mexico City, Mexico

Accepted papers will be published in the  NLP4IF Workshop Proceedings

Shared Tasks:

Task 1:  Fighting the COVID-19 Infodemic (in English, Arabic, and Bulgarian)

https://gitlab.com/NLP4IF/nlp4if-2021

Task 2: Censorship Detection (in Chinese)

https://gitlab.com/NLP4IF/nlp4-if-censorship-detection

Important Dates (for regular paper submissions)

 

March 15, 2021: Workshop Papers Due Date

April 15, 2021: Notification of Acceptance

April 26, 2021: Camera-ready papers due (hard deadline)

June 6, 2021:  NLP4IF Workshop

Note: All deadlines are 11:59 pm UTC -12h (anywhere on earth).

For the shared tasks timeline, please, see https://gitlab.com/NLP4IF.

NLP4IF (http://www.netcopia.net/nlp4if/) is dedicated to NLP methods that potentially contribute or hamper  the free flow of information on the Internet, their impact, and to our understanding of the issues that arise in this area. We hope that our workshop will have a transformative impact on society by getting closer to achieving Internet freedom in countries where accessing and sharing of information are controlled by any forms of censorship.

 

We accept submissions of short and long papers.  See the guidelines here: https://2021.naacl.org/calls/style-and-formatting/

 

The topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Censorship

  • Censorship detection: detecting deleted or edited text; detecting blocked keywords/banned terms;

  • Censorship circumvention techniques: linguistically inspired countermeasures for Internet censorship such as keyword substitution, expanding coverage of existing banned terms, text paraphrasing, linguistic steganography, generating information morphs etc.;

  • Detection of self-censorship;

  • Identifying potentially censorable content;

  • Techniques to empirically measure Internet censorship across communication platforms;

  • Investigations on covert linguistic communication and its limits;

• Disinformation

  • Dis-/Misinformation detection: fake/false/impostor news, fake accounts, rumor detection, etc.;

• Propaganda

  • Identification of propaganda at different granularity levels:  text fragment, document, and  full website;

  • (Comparative) analysis of the language of propagandistic and biased texts;

  • Automatic generation of persuasive content;

  • Tools to facilitate the flagging, either automatic or manual, of propaganda and bias in social media;

  • Automatic detection of coordinated propaganda campaigns such as the use of social bots, botnets, and water armies;

  • Analysis of diffusion and consumption of propagandistic, hyperpartisan, and extremely biased content in social media;

  • Automatic debiasing of news content;

• Other relevant topics include ( but not limited to)

  • Identification of hate speech and offensive language;

  • Identity and private information detection;

  • Passive and targeted surveillance techniques;

  • Ethics in NLP;

  • “Walled gardens”, personalization and fragmentation of the online public space.

 

Submission page: https://www.softconf.com/naacl2021/nlp4if2021/