Dear colleagues,
We are very happy to announce the forthcoming special issue on ethics in natural language processing and computational linguistics in the journal Computational Linguistics (https://direct.mit.edu/coli).
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 interests) 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 and information
Submission deadline: 27 November, 2026
Notification: February, 2027
Publication (Expected): October, 2027
Submission site: https://submissions.cljournal.org/index.php/cljournal/submission
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 is the longest-running publication devoted exclusively to the computational and mathematical properties of language and the design and analysis of natural language processing systems. This highly regarded quarterly offers university and industry linguists, computational linguists, artificial intelligence and machine learning investigators, cognitive scientists, speech specialists, and philosophers the latest information about the computational aspects of all the facets of research on language.
Computational Linguistics is a diamond open access journal, which means that “there is no fee to publish and the content is open to anyone to read. All of these titles employ a Creative Commons license for individual articles.” (https://direct.mit.edu/journals/pages/open-access)