Special Issue on the Ethics of NLP and CL in Computational Linguistics

2026-06-20

Submission deadline: 27 November 2026 · Notification: February 2027 · Expected publication: October 2027
When submitting, select the section "Special Issue: Ethics in NLP and CL" and state the paper type (e.g., long, short, survey or position paper) in your cover letter. See the Submission Guidelines for formatting and page limits.
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Language processing technologies from Siri to Google Translate and ChatGPT have become ubiquitous in our societies. Consequently, there has been a decade of attention to algorithmically mediated harms, including harms arising from social biases and discriminatory technologies. In this special issue, we broadly invite contributions that reflect on the ethics of language technologies. We invite theoretical and technical submissions around – but not limited to:

  • Reflection on bias and fairness research and its outcomes;
  • Interdisciplinary perspectives on bias, fairness, and algorithmically mediated harms;
  • Critiques of existing approaches;
  • Development of new theories for bias, fairness, and algorithmically mediated harms;
  • Analyses of power relationships (including conflicts of interest) and their impacts;
  • Multilingual considerations;
  • Decolonisation in relation to bias and fairness;
  • Reflections on ongoing debates on bias, fairness, and ethics;
  • Language technologies in context (e.g., in political/social/cultural tensions);
  • Slow science and its relationship to bias and fairness;
  • Luddite and decomputing perspectives on language technologies, bias, and fairness;
  • Environmental impacts of language technologies;
  • The impacts and social considerations of data labour;
  • Social and societal harms of language technologies; and
  • External perspectives on language technologies.

We particularly encourage inter-, cross- and transdisciplinary submissions which center questions around the fairness, bias, justice, and ethics of natural language processing technologies and computational linguistics.

Important Dates
Submission deadline
27 November 2026
Notification
February 2027
Expected publication
October 2027
Guest Editors
  • Karën Fort, Université de Lorraine / LORIA, France
  • Margot Mieskes, University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt, Germany
  • Zeerak Talat, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at cl_si_ethics@inria.fr.

About the Journal

Computational Linguistics, established in 1974, is the official flagship journal of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and a leading venue for research in computational linguistics and natural language processing. It is a diamond open access journal published by MIT Press: there is no fee to publish, and all content is free to read. More about the journal →