3rd Workshop for Natural Language Processing Open Source Software (NLP-OSS)

6 Dec 2023 @ EMNLP 2023 in Singapore



With great scientific breakthrough comes solid engineering and open communities. The Natural Language Processing (NLP) community has benefited greatly from the open culture in sharing knowledge, data, and software. The primary objective of this workshop is to further the sharing of insights on the engineering and community aspects of creating, developing, and maintaining NLP open source software (OSS), which we seldom talk about in scientific publications. Our secondary goal is to promote synergies between different open source projects and encourage cross-software collaborations and comparisons.

There are many workshops focusing on the creation and curation of open language resources and annotations (e.g. BUCC, GWN, LAW, LOD, WAC). Moreover, we have the flagship LREC conference dedicated to linguistic resources. However, the engineering aspects of NLP-OSS are overlooked and under-discussed within the community. There are open source conferences and venues (such as FOSDEM, OSCON, Open Source Summit) where discussions range from operating system kernels to air traffic control hardware but the representation of NLP related presentations is limited. In the Machine Learning (ML) field, the Journal of Machine Learning Research - Machine Learning Open Source Software (JMLR-MLOSS) is a forum for discussions and dissemination of ML OSS topics. We envision that the Workshop for NLP-OSS becomes a similar avenue for NLP-OSS discussions.

Recently there have been successful Big Science workshop series which examine and promote open science in NLP. While important and complementary, the goals of Big Science are distinct from those of NLP-OSS which focuses more on the community of practice in open-source software in support of NLP and language technologies. We expect many who participated in the BigScience workshop to participate in NLP-OSS as many of the participants are former PC members in past editions of NLP-OSS. Another grassroot community movement, Eleuther AI started with the researchers attempting to replicate commercial language models and has since grown to an active decentralized community of volunteer researchers, engineers, and developers focused on AI alignment, scaling, and open source AI research.

With the rise of open source startups like Huggingface, the democratization of NLP gives researchers and the general public easy access to language models once available only to a handful of industrial research labs. This acceleration of NLP tools availability creates new synergies between cloud integrations, e.g. Huggingface x AWS Sagemaker, that allows engineers and researchers to train and deploy live applications with minimal infrastructure setups. Building on the shoulders of giants, the scikit-learn and Huggingface ecosystems are now interoperable under the skops framework. We want to highlight these emergent communities and synergies in the NLP-OSS workshop and promote future collaborations with like-minded open source NLP researchers in the third NLP-OSS workshop. We hope that the NLP-OSS workshop could also be hosted in an *ACL conference, and be the intellectual forum to collate this type of knowledge, announce new software/features, promote the open source culture and OSS best practices.

Call for Papers

We invite full papers (8 pages) or short papers (4 pages) on topics related to NLP-OSS broadly categorized into (i) software development, (ii) scientific contribution and (iii) NLP-OSS case studies.

Submission information

Authors are invited to submit a

Submissions can be non-archival and be presented in the NLP-OSS workshop, but we would still require at least a 4-page submission so that reviewers have enough information to make the acceptance/rejection decision. This non-archival option is helpful for author(s) who wants to publish or had published the work elsewhere and would like to present/discuss pertinent NLP-OSS related work to the workshop PCs and attendees.

All papers are allowed unlimited but sensible pages for references. Final camera-ready versions will be allowed an additional page of content to address reviewers’ comments.

Due to the nature of open source software, we find it a bit tricky to “anonymize” “open source”. For this reason, we don’t require your publication to be anonymous. However, if you prefer your paper to be anonymized, please mask any identifiable phrase with REDACTED.

Submission should be formatted according to the EMNLP 2023 LaTeX or MS Word templates at https://2023.emnlp.org/calls/style-and-formatting/

Submissions should be uploaded to OpenReview conference management system at https://openreview.net/group?id=EMNLP/2023/Workshop/NLP-OSS

Important dates

The 3rd NLP-OSS workshop will be co-located with the EMNLP 2023 conference.

Invited Speakers



Jordan Meyer, Spawning AI

Jordan Meyer

Bio

Jordan Meyer is the co-founder at Spawaning AI. You may have used their haveibeentrained.com tool to see if you are present in popular training datasets, and opt out or opt in to future training, or you might have seen Holly+, the first project to experiment with consensual interactions around an artist AI model.





Organizers

Programme Committee

Previous Workshops

Second Workshop for Natural Language Processing Open Source Software (NLP-OSS 2020)
[Proceedings]

First Workshop for Natural Language Processing Open Source Software (NLP-OSS 2018)
[Proceedings]