Call for Papers

The Society for Computation in Linguistics invites submissions to its eighth meeting, SCiL 2025, which will be held July 18-20th, 2025 at the University of Oregon, co-located with the LSA Summer Institute. SCiL 2025 will include both in-person and on-line presentations.

Important Dates

Submission deadline: January 31, 2025

Notifications of acceptance: April 11, 2025

Camera-ready papers and abstracts due May 15, 2025

We seek high-quality research on computational and mathematical approaches in any area of linguistics. Submissions to SCiL should involve a substantial computational and/or mathematical modeling component, make direct contact with linguistics, and be written for an interdisciplinary audience.

There will be two submission tracks: papers and abstracts, and two types of presentation: “talks” and “posters”. Authors must specify at submission time whether they intend to present in-person or on-line. This information will be gathered for planning purposes, and the choice will not affect the selection procedure.

Both papers and abstracts will be published online prior to the conference in the open-access SCiL proceedings. Authors of accepted abstracts will have the option to submit extended abstracts for publication. Papers will also be published in the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Anthology.

There is no limit on the number of submissions per author.

Special Symposium on Computational Pragmatics

A special Symposium on Computational Pragmatics will be held jointly with the 2025 meeting of SCiL. We hope to present an expansive vision of what computational pragmatics can be, encompassing cognitive modeling work on discourse processing, NLP applications that utilize ideas from pragmatics, and computational models that implement pragmatic theory.

Keynote Speakers:

  • Malihe Alikhani, Assistant Professor of AI and social justice at the Khoury School of Computer Science at Northeastern University
  • Daniel Fried, Assistant Professor in the Language Technologies Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
  • Junyi Jessy Li, Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin
  • Hannah Rohde, Professor in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh

If you would like your submission to be considered for the Symposium, please indicate this at submission time. Potential topics include:

  • Social factors in language
  • Pragmatic reasoning
  • Non-literal meaning
  • Perspective-taking and theory-of-mind
  • Discourse coherence
  • Dynamic models of discourse context
  • Entity tracking, and discourse prominence
  • Implicature, presupposition, and other non-at-issue content
  • Questions-Under-Discussion and the Common Ground

We also welcome lightning talks on methodologies for computational pragmatics (see below).

Submissions

Papers (8pp) and abstracts (2pp) are due January 31, 2025 by 11:59pm anywhere in the world. Papers and abstracts must be anonymous and prepared in PDF format according to the following guidelines.

Papers

Paper submissions must describe original, completed, and unpublished work. They are limited to 8 content pages (plus unlimited pages for references) and should follow the two-column ACL format. The latest ACL style templates can be found by following this link.

Supplemental materials can be included in an appendix as part of the paper. There is no limit on appendix length, and it does not count in the 8 page limit. Reviewers are not required to consult the supplemental materials, so the paper should be self-contained.

All submissions must be in PDF format.

Abstracts

Abstract submissions must describe original and completed work. To facilitate exchange of research ideas across disciplines, we will consider not only abstracts presenting new research, but also work that has been previously presented (or published) at venues with distinct scope and audiences from SCiL. Submissions describing previously presented/published work must indicate so at submission time by sending an e-mail to scil2025.uo@gmail.com; these submissions do not need to be anonymous.

Abstract length is limited to a maximum of two single-spaced pages (US Letter), including figures and references. Abstract submissions should not have abstracts. The abstract should follow the two-column ACL format OR the following guidelines: Font should be 12-point Times or Times New Roman throughout, and the document should be single-spaced, left justified, with margins of exactly one inch on all sides. Title and section headings (if used) should be bold.

Accepted abstracts will be presented at SCiL 2025 as talk or poster presentations. Authors of accepted abstracts will have the option to extend abstracts up to 4 pages (extended abstracts). Extended abstracts should follow the two-column ACL format. Abstracts and extended abstracts will be published before the conference in the forthcoming open-access SCiL Proceedings.

Methodology Lightning Talks

As part of the Symposium on Computational Pragmatics, we will hold a special "show-and-tell" session for research methodologies in computational pragmatics. We welcome lightning talks (no more than 5 minutes) demonstrating a methodology, to be presented in person or virtually.

Talks need not present methodological innovations: the target audience is students and researchers who may be interested in adopting new methodologies for their work. For example, potential topics include:

  • Techniques or datasets for probing pragmatic knowledge in neural LMs
  • Modifications of Rational Speech Acts models for more complex phenomena
  • Tools for annotating text with pragmatic information
  • Techniques or datasets for discourse parsing

If you are interested in giving a lightning talk, please submit a short abstract (100 words) describing the scope of the talk.

Submission

Please upload your submission at our OpenReview page.

Organizers

  • Carolyn Jane Anderson, Wellesley College
  • Grusha Prasad, Colgate University
  • Frédéric Mailhot, Dialpad

Contact: scil2025.uo@gmail.com