Good Intentions Beyond ACL: Who Does NLP for Social Good, and Where?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: LeFevre, Grace, Zeng, Qingcheng, Leif, Adam, Jewell, Jason, Peskoff, Denis, Voigt, Rob
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author LeFevre, Grace
Zeng, Qingcheng
Leif, Adam
Jewell, Jason
Peskoff, Denis
Voigt, Rob
author_facet LeFevre, Grace
Zeng, Qingcheng
Leif, Adam
Jewell, Jason
Peskoff, Denis
Voigt, Rob
contents The social impact of Natural Language Processing (NLP) is increasingly important, with a rising community focus on initiatives related to NLP for Social Good (NLP4SG). Indeed, in recent years, almost 20% of all papers in the ACL Anthology address topics related to social good as defined by the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Adauto et al., 2023). In this study, we take an author- and venue-level perspective to map the landscape of NLP4SG, quantifying the proportion of work addressing social good concerns both within and beyond the ACL community, by both core ACL contributors and non-ACL authors. With this approach we discover two surprising facts about the landscape of NLP4SG. First, ACL authors are dramatically more likely to do work addressing social good concerns when publishing in venues outside of ACL. Second, the vast majority of publications using NLP techniques to address concerns of social good are done by non-ACL authors in venues outside of ACL. We discuss the implications of these findings on agenda-setting considerations for the ACL community related to NLP4SG.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_04434
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Good Intentions Beyond ACL: Who Does NLP for Social Good, and Where?
LeFevre, Grace
Zeng, Qingcheng
Leif, Adam
Jewell, Jason
Peskoff, Denis
Voigt, Rob
Computation and Language
Social and Information Networks
The social impact of Natural Language Processing (NLP) is increasingly important, with a rising community focus on initiatives related to NLP for Social Good (NLP4SG). Indeed, in recent years, almost 20% of all papers in the ACL Anthology address topics related to social good as defined by the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Adauto et al., 2023). In this study, we take an author- and venue-level perspective to map the landscape of NLP4SG, quantifying the proportion of work addressing social good concerns both within and beyond the ACL community, by both core ACL contributors and non-ACL authors. With this approach we discover two surprising facts about the landscape of NLP4SG. First, ACL authors are dramatically more likely to do work addressing social good concerns when publishing in venues outside of ACL. Second, the vast majority of publications using NLP techniques to address concerns of social good are done by non-ACL authors in venues outside of ACL. We discuss the implications of these findings on agenda-setting considerations for the ACL community related to NLP4SG.
title Good Intentions Beyond ACL: Who Does NLP for Social Good, and Where?
topic Computation and Language
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04434