The Natural Language Processing and Law (NLLP) community aims to bridge the gap between NLP researchers and legal domain experts. Their focus is on developing and applying NLP methods specifically tailored for legal texts and documents with legal significance. This specialization is necessary because legal language is often considered a 'sublanguage' with unique characteristics such as specialized vocabulary, formal syntax, and domain-specific semantics. These features make it challenging for generic NLP tools to accurately process legal text.
This community's work encompasses a wide range of legal corpora, including litigation documents, patents, financial filings, legal codes, privacy policies, and legislative records.
The motivation behind the NLLP community's efforts lies in the enormous potential for NLP applications in the legal domain. As electronic information becomes increasingly available worldwide, automated tools for processing this information have grown in importance. While NLP applications have found success in areas like finance and healthcare, the legal domain remains underrepresented in NLP literature despite its significant commercial potential.
There's a growing need to analyze text with legal significance on the internet, such as advertising language and deveptive patterns. Public authorities and regulators are increasingly interested in developing market monitoring tools, creating new opportunities for multidisciplinary research in this area.
Following the success of the first five editions of the NLLP workshop (NAACL 2019, KDD 2020, EMNLP 2021, EMNLP 2022, EMNLP 2023), we aim to bring researchers and practitioners from NLP, machine learning and other artificial intelligence disciplines together with legal practitioners and researchers. We welcome submissions describing original work on legal data, as well as data with legal relevance.
Next edition: The NLLP Workshop 2024 will take place on 16 November 2024 and will be co-located with the EMNLP 2024 conference in Miami, Florida. Read more about the NLLP Workshop at https://nllpw.org/workshop/.
Call for papers: The full call for papers can be found at https://nllpw.org/workshop/call/.
Submission: To submit a paper, please access the submission link at https://softconf.com/emnlp2024/nllp.
Read more about the past editions at NLLP 2023, NLLP 2022, NLLP 2021, NLLP 2020, NLLP 2019.
The NLLP Talks series brings together researchers from academia and industry working at the intersection of law and NLP. The talks explore in depth recent research in this multidisciplinary space. By featuring presenters and discussants from complementary disciplines, the NLLP Talks series aims to further bridge law and computational linguistics.
Read more, see past talks, or reach out at https://nllpw.org/talks/.
The NLLP Resources directory is a list of publications, datasets, models, and related events/workshops in the field of natural language processing and legal applications.
Access them at https://nllpw.org/resources/.
