CALL FOR
ARTICLES
Natural Language Processing and Ethics

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has always posed ethical or legal problems. These
problems are particularly sensitive in this age of Big Data and of data duplication,
areas in which NLP is involved. In addition to legal and economic matters (search for
patents and rights associated with data/software), there are military issues (monitoring
of conversations) and social issues (the ?right to be forgotten? imposed on Google).

The crucial problem today is access to data (including sensitive) and personal privacy
protection for citizens. Indeed, our domain produces applications considered to be
effective for both areas (data access and protection), but without their known
limitations being clear to the general public and governments.

Diversifying work on corpora has also led the community to be able to process more and
more sensitive sources, be it personal data, medical data or even that of a criminal
nature.

For privacy protection, anonymizing data, whether oral or written, is as much an
industrial as an academic stake, with sometimes strong coverage constraints depending on
the application or research needs, issues regarding the nature of the resources and the
information to be anonymized, or legal limits.

Some NLP tools also join the ethical concerns, such as tools for plagiarism detection,
facts checking and speaker identification. In addition, the advent of Web 2.0 and with it
the development of crowdsourcing raises new questions as to the way in which to consider
participants in the creation of linguistic resources.

This special issue of the TAL journal aims to highlight the NLP contributions to ethics
and data protection and to uncover the limitations of the field both in terms of real
possibilities (evaluation) and societal dangers.

We encourage submissions on all aspects related to ethics for and by Natural Language
Processing, and in particular on the following problems or tasks:


sensitive corpus processing, including medical, police or personal data
language resource production, in particular using crowdsourcing, and ethics
ethical questions linked to the use of tools or the result of NLP processing
ethical questions related to NLP practices
quality and ways of evaluating applications and/or language resources
anonymization, de-identification and re-identification of NLP corpora
plagiarism detection by NLP
facts checking
paralinguistic and ethics, in particular speaker identification or detection of
pathologies
historical perspective of ethics in NLP
definition of ethics as applied to NLP

We also welcome position papers on the subject.

LANGUAGE

Manuscripts may be submitted in English or French. French-speaking authors are requested
to submit in French. Submissions in English are accepted only in case of one of the
authors not being a French speaker.



IMPORTANT DATES


** extension ** end of March 2016 Deadline for submission
end of May 2016 Notification to authors after first review
beg. of July 2016 Deadline for submission of revised version
mid-July 2016 Notification to authors after second review
end of Sept. 2016 Deadline for submission of final version
December 2016 Publication

PAPER SUBMISSION

Authors who intend to submit a paper are encouraged to upload their contribution (no more
than 25 pages, PDF format) via the menu 'Paper submission' of the issue page of the
journal. To do so, you will need to have an account on the Sciencesconf platform. To
create an account, go to the Sciencesconf site and click on 'create account' next to the
'Connect' button at the top of the page. To submit, come back to this page, connect to
you account and upload your submission.

TAL perfoms double blind reviewing. Your paper should be anonymised.

Style sheets are available for download on the Web site of the journal
(http://www.atala.org/IMG/zip/tal-style.zip).

Invited editors: Karën Fort (U. Paris-Sorbonne/STIH), Gilles Adda (LIMSI-CNRS/IMMI), K.
Bretonnel Cohen (U. of Colorado, School of Medicine)

REVIEWING COMMITTEE

Maxime Amblard (U. de Lorraine/LORIA)
Jean-Yves Antoine (U. de Tours/LI)
Philippe Blache (CNRS / LPL)
Jean-François Bonastre (LIA/U. D'Avignon)
Alain Couillault (U. de La Rochelle/L3i)
Gaël de Chalendar (CEA LIST)
Patrick Drouin (U. de Montréal/OLST)
Cécile Fabre (U. de Toulouse/CLLE-ERSS)
Cyril Grouin (LIMSI-CNRS)
Lynette Hirschman (MITRE Corporation)
Larry Hunter (U. of Colorado, School of Medicine)
Nancy Ide (Vassar College/Dpt of Computer Science)
Juliette Kahn (LNE)
Mark Liberman (UPenn/LDC)
Joseph Mariani (LIMSI-CNRS/IMMI)
Yann Mathet (U. de Caen/GREYC)
Claude Montacié (U. Paris-Sorbonne/STIH)
Jean-Philippe Prost (U. de Montpellier/LIRMM)
Rafal Rzepka (Hokkaido University/Language Media Laboratory)
Björn Schuller (University of Passau)
Michel Simard (National Reseach Council Canada)
Mariarosaria Taddeo (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford)

THE JOURNAL

TAL (Traitement Automatique des Langues) is an international journal that has been
published by ATALA (Association pour le Traitement Automatique des Langues) for the past
40 years with the support of the CNRS. Over the past few years, it has become an online
journal, with possibility of ordering the paper versions. This does not, in any way,
affect the selection and review process.