We are excited to announce the Industry Track at COLING 2025.

Direct submission: https://softconf.com/coling2025/industryCL25/

Language technologies and their practical applications, particularly with the recent popularity and adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), have deeply permeated many aspects of our daily lives. Though the origins of these advancements can often be traced back to academic and industrial research facilities, translating these innovations into industrially robust applications presents an entirely distinct set of technical hurdles.

We are soliciting contributions that explore novel ideas and implementations across all domains of speech and natural language processing technologies, particularly LLMs, and systems pertinent to practical scenarios. This track prioritizes submissions that deepen our comprehension and showcase effective strategies for managing the practical difficulties associated with deploying language processing technologies in complex real-world environments. By “complex real-world system,” we refer to applications that are operational outside of controlled environments and incorporate natural language processing and the potential use of LLMs. The emphasis in this track is not on research novelty, but on the practical application of the technologies in real-world settings taking into account computational limitations, ethical considerations, novel applications, model freshness, etc. It is not mandatory that these systems be produced by commercial enterprises; however, their user base should extend beyond the confines of the NLP research community.

Important Dates

All deadlines are 11:59PM UTC-12:00 (“anywhere on Earth”).

Paper submission deadline October 6, 2024
Notification of acceptance November 3, 2024
Camera-ready version of papers due TBD
Main conference, including industry track TBD

Topics of Interest

The purpose of this track is to showcase key insights and emerging research challenges emanating from practical applications. It encompasses areas such as:

  • Best practices and practical considerations
  • Model update and improvement
  • Real-world case studies and applications
  • Custom dataset creation and evaluation
  • Ethical considerations and potential biases
  • Human interaction with technology
  • Efficiency, scalability, and cost
  • Negative results
  • Offline vs. online system design choices
  • In situ evaluation of real-world system
  • System combination and hybridization
  • Opinion and vision papers are also welcome.

Submissions must belong to one of the following three categories:

  • Deployed: This category involves presenting a system designed to address an actual real-world issue. The submission should emphasize the problem’s relevance through practical case studies, its importance (such as against market opportunity size, value proposition, and the envisioned end state), the conceptualization or development of strategies for addressing it, key decisions made during solution design, deployment difficulties encountered, and valuable lessons derived from these challenges.

  • Emerging: This category pertains to papers that introduce innovative systems tackling a significant real-world problem. It is not mandatory for these systems to have already been deployed; they should, however, demonstrate a clear intent towards future deployment. Works focusing on foundational infrastructure aimed at facilitating the broad application of natural language processing techniques are also suitable here.

  • Discovery: This category is dedicated to sharing findings from practical applications of NLP technologies that yield actionable insights. The discoveries should indicate promising avenues for further advancements in their respective fields, ultimately contributing to enhanced systems or societal improvements. For instance, an insightful discovery derived from analyzing LLM prompts could uncover the most common use cases that users are interested in, user satisfaction/churn, and scenarios not addressed in the research communities.

Evaluation Criteria

Submissions will undergo a single-blind evaluation process where their originality, technical excellence, significance, and readability are considered. Contributions must highlight practical applications of natural language processing technologies, the creation of these tools, or offer insights drawn from real-world datasets showcasing tangible industrial implications. For papers that heavily depend on empirical analysis, it is crucial to present the methodology, results, and ensure they are transparent, effectively conducted, and capable of being replicated (even if the data itself remains confidential).

Paper submission

Submission

Authors are invited to submit original, full-length (6 page) industry track papers that are not previously published, accepted to be published, or under consideration for publication in any other forum. Manuscripts should be submitted electronically, in PDF format and formatted using COLING 2025 formatting requirements. Please do not modify these style files, nor should you use templates designed for other conferences. Submissions that do not conform to the required styles, including paper size, margin width, and font size restrictions, will be rejected without review. Industry Track papers cannot exceed 6 pages in length; however, references do not count toward the 6-page limit, nor do the following optional sections: acknowledgements (only in the final version), ethical considerations, and appendices. Appendices may include, for example, pre-processing decisions, model parameters, feature templates, pseudocode, sample system inputs/outputs, information about user studies, additional errors analysis and other details that are necessary for the replication of the work described in the paper. In addition, authors may submit a separate file with supplementary materials such as software or data. Note that the 6-page paper needs to remain fully self-contained: appendices and supplementary material are completely optional, and reviewers are not even asked to review or download them.

The papers should be submitted through the COLING 2025 industry track online submission system in SoftConf.

Single-blind Review

Industry Track submissions are single blind. Thus, submissions, supplementary materials, and acknowledgements may reveal the authors’ identities. The submissions may include links to non-anonymized repositories, websites, demos, etc.

Final Version

Accepted papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 7 pages; ethical considerations, acknowledgements and references do not count against this limit) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account. Previous presentations of the work (e.g., preprints on arXiv.org) should be indicated in a footnote that should be excluded from the review submission, but included in the final version of papers appearing in the COLING 2025 proceedings.

The final version should remove anonymization in text, citation, and figures. For example, the final version may include the name of the authors’ institutions, trade names, and screenshots of identifiable products.

In addition to the final version of the paper, authors of all papers accepted to the Industry Track will be given an option to submit a presentation video, slides, and/or a pdf of their poster.

Presentation Requirement for Accepted Papers

Industry track papers will be presented orally or as posters to be determined by the program committee. All accepted papers must be presented at the conference (either via online or onsite presence). All papers accepted to the Industry Track must be presented at the conference to appear in the proceedings, and at least one author must register for COLING 2025. The Industry Track paper sessions will run in parallel with the regular research paper sessions of the conference.

Presentation Mode

Accepted papers will be presented orally or as posters as determined by the program committee. The decisions as to which papers will be presented orally and which as poster presentations will be based on the nature rather than the quality of the work. There will be no distinction in the proceedings between papers presented orally and as posters.

Authorship

The author list for submissions should include all (and only) individuals who made substantial contributions to the work presented. Each author listed on a submission to COLING 2025 Industry Track will be notified of submissions and the final decision. No changes to the order or composition of authorship may be made to submissions to COLING 2025 Industry Track after the paper submission deadline.

Multiple Submission Policy

COLING 2025 will not consider any paper that is under review in a journal or another conference at the time of submission, and submitted papers must not be submitted elsewhere during the COLING 2025 review period. This policy covers all refereed and archival conferences and workshops (e.g., NeurIPS, ACL workshops), as well as ACL Rolling Reviews (ARR). In addition, we will not consider any paper that overlaps significantly in content or results with papers that will be (or have been) published elsewhere. Authors submitting more than one paper to COLING 2025 must ensure that their submissions do not overlap significantly (>25%) with each other in content or results.

Submissions of identical or closely related work to multiple COLING 2025 tracks (e.g., to research track and industry track) will be treated as duplicate submissions. Such submissions violating the multiple submission policy will be rejected without review. The authors should also include the papers that their paper overlaps or extends in the references section as follows: Anonymous Authors, “Title of the paper”, Under submission at COLING 2025 (TRACK NAME).

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the industry track only for participants from industry?

No, the industry track welcomes participants from the entire COLING community. Researchers working on real-world applications that match the industry track call for papers are invited to submit papers. Everyone is welcome to attend industry track sessions.

What do you mean by real-world applications?

We are looking for applications that are deployed (or expected to be deployed) for real-world use, i.e., outside controlled environments such as laboratories or experimental crowd-sourced setups.

Can students also submit papers to industry track?

Yes! If your work matches the industry track call for papers, consider submitting a paper to the industry track.

Will the papers in the industry track be published in the proceedings?

Yes, industry track papers will be published as a separate volume of the main proceedings.

I work in industry. Can I still submit my paper to the research track?

Absolutely. The industry track offers a forum to submit papers describing aspects of real-world applications that may differ in focus from the research track reviewing criteria.

How do I decide whether to submit to the research track or the industry track?

Papers describing key lessons learned and challenges pertaining to real-world deployment of NLP and speech technologies are best suited for industry track. Authors are advised to review the call for papers for both tracks and submit to the track that best matches your work. The list of topics and reviewing criteria may be helpful. You can also reach out to the track chairs if you need help deciding.

Industry Track Chairs

Contact: industryCL25_coling2025@softconf.com

  • Kareem Darwish, aiXplain Inc. (USA)
  • Apoorv Agarwal, Columbia University (USA)