NLP4Ecology2025

NLP4Ecology 2025
the 1st Workshop on Ecology, Environment, and Natural
Language Processing

March 2, 2025, Hestia Hotel Europa, Tallinn, Estonia

Co-located with the Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies. (NoDaLiDa/BalticHLT 2025)

Anthropogenic ecological crisis, impacting people, non-human animals, and ecosystems worldwide, presents urgent challenges that require interdisciplinary action. The Natural Language Processing (NLP) community has a crucial role to play in addressing environmental challenges, as the responsibility to tackle these issues extends beyond scholars directly involved in environmental and climate change studies; it is a shared duty. NLP, with its ability to analyze large-scale textual data, provides essential tools to uncover language patterns and narratives that shape societal perceptions, behaviors, and policies toward the natural world.

This workshop invites scholars, practitioners, NGOs, and industry professionals to explore how NLP can be leveraged to address these ecological challenges. NLP applications include analyzing language across media, political discourse, and social platforms regarding climate change, biodiversity loss, and other environmental concerns, from plastic pollution to the fast fashion industry. It also involves identifying harmful language use, such as anthropocentric or speciesist biases, that contribute to detrimental attitudes and behaviors toward the environment. Conversely, NLP can also be used to detect and analyze positive discourse patterns that promote ecologically responsible behaviors.

We aim to attract a highly interdisciplinary audience and welcome contributions at the intersection of linguistics, ecology, and computer science, particularly from fields such as AI, computational linguistics, digital humanities, ecolinguistics, ethics, philosophy, and environmental humanities. Our goal is to expand research and collaboration, empowering the NLP community to play an active role in mitigating the ecological crisis through innovative and collective action.

Call for Papers

We invite submissions to the 1st Workshop on Ecology, Environment, and Natural Language Processing. This workshop will bring together the NLP community and stakeholders from various disciplines to explore how computational linguistics and NLP tools, methods, and applications can help address pressing climate change and environment-related challenges. We are particularly interested in contributions that push the boundaries of linguistics and NLP research in the context of ecological and environmental crisis and that foster interdisciplinary collaboration.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Sentiment Analysis of Environmental Topics:

Evaluating public opinions on environmental issues across platforms such as social media, news outlets, and other media (e.g., Bosco et al., 2023; Ibrohim et al., 2023).

Automated Linguistic Analysis:

Studying grammatical, syntactical and lexical patterns from an ecolinguistic perspective (e.g., Widanti, 2022), including analyses of corporate environmental reports and other institutional communications (e.g., Gong, 2019).

Detection of Anthropocentric and Speciesist Biases

Identifying harmful biases in language and NLP applications, and developing methods to mitigate them (e.g., Leach et al., 2021; Takeshita et al., 2022).

Topic Modeling & Discourse/Frame Analysis:

Investigating how environmental issues are framed in media and political discourse and how these frames influence public perception and policymaking (e.g., Dehler-Holland et al., 2021).

Geo-tagging and sentiment mapping of environmental discussions:

Mapping environmental discussions and sentiments across geographical locations (e.g., Yao & Wang, 2020).

Ecofeminism, environmental justice, and language:

Exploring the intersections of gender, justice, and ecological narratives, and how NLP can help analyze language in these contexts.

Text Classification in Environmental Contexts:

Categorizing texts into specific environmental subfields such as biodiversity, climate change, and conservation, and using NLP to monitor compliance with environmental regulations (e.g., Schimanski et al., 2023; Grasso & Locci, 2024).

Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction, and Environmental Monitoring

Identifying and tracking mentions of species, habitats, pollutants, and ecological phenomena in text (e.g., Abdelmageed et al., 2022).

Fact-checking & Greenwashing Detection

Analyzing corporate sustainability reports for accuracy and detecting greenwashing practices (e.g., Moodaley & Telukdarie, 2023; Cojoianu et al., 2020).

Further topics include:

  • Ecolinguistic applications of NLP.
  • Large Language Models (LLMs) application in Climate Change and Environmental domain.
  • Analyzing Social Media for Harmful Environmental Narratives.
  • Corpora creation and annotation.
  • Fairness and ethics in environmental data analysis.
  • Environmental communication in low-resource languages.
  • Multimodal analysis for ecological and environmental challenges.
  • Lexical analysis in the context of sustainability and environmental discourse.
  • Linked Data and Knowledge Graphs on ecological topics.
  • Language diversity and inclusion in environmental narratives.
  • Cognitive models and ecological narratives.
  • NLP for understanding indigenous knowledge in environmental contexts.
  • Machine learning techniques for analyzing environmental communication.
  • NLP for tracking environmental legislation and policy discourse.
  • NLP for analyzing environmental education and awareness campaigns.
  • Speech recognition technologies to support ecological field research;
  • Development of educational chatbots or FAQs for raising environmental awareness.

Key Dates

  • Paper Submission Deadline: December 16, 2024
  • Notification of Acceptance: TBA
  • Camera-Ready Deadline: February 3, 2025
  • Workshop Date: March 2, 2025

Submission Instructions:

The workshop will accept archival submissions, non-archival submissions, as well as research communications . Non-archival submissions refer to new work that will not appear in the proceedings, while research communications consist of work already published at other venues (e.g., conferences, journals) that can be presented at the workshop but will not be included in the proceedings.

We also welcomes transdisciplinary contributions that link computational linguistics with disciplines from social sciences and the humanities, which may be presented in a dedicated slot during the event.

Submissions should follow the NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025 formatting templates and guidelines; We invite paper submissions of three types:

  • Regular paper (up to 8 pages)
  • Short papers (up to 4 pages)
  • Demo papers (up to 4 pages)

For all three submission types, these page limits do not include additional pages with bibliographic references. We do not allow any extra pages for appendices.

Submission and reviewing will be conducted through OpenReview via the following link: https://openreview.net/group?id=NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT/2025/Workshop/NLP4Ecology

All submissions will undergo double-blind peer review, adhering to professional standards.

Workshop Format

The workshop is planned as an in-person event, and on-site attendance is thus strongly recommended, as the workshop is intended to provide an opportunity for scholars to connect, share insights, and build a community. However, to ensure inclusivity and broader participation, we will offer hybrid participation for those unable to attend in person due to significant reasons.

Organizing Commettee

(In Alphabetical Order)

  • Valerio Basile, University of Turin (e-mail)
  • Cristina Bosco, University of Turin (e-mail)
  • Francesca Grasso, University of Turin (e-mail)
  • Muhammad Okky Ibrohim, University of Turin (e-mail)
  • Maria Skeppstedt, Uppsala University (e-mail)
  • Manfred Stede, Potsdam University (e-mail)

Program Commettee

(more TBA)

  • Davide Audrito – University of Turin, Italy
  • Luca Brigada Villa – University of Pavia, Italy
  • Tyler A. Chang – University of California San Diego, USA
  • Luigi Di Caro – University of Turin, Italy
  • Steffen Frenzel – University of Potsdam, Germany
  • Sara Gemelli – University of Bergamo, Italy
  • Frederikus Hudi – Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
  • Stefano Locci – University of Turin, Italy
  • Stella Markantonatou – Athena Research Center, Greece
  • Lucia Passaro – University of Pisa, Italy
  • Ana Reyes-Menendez – Rey Juan Carlos University, Spain
  • Maximos Skandalis – University of Montpellier, France
  • Amanda Starling Gould – Duke University, USA
  • Masashi Takeshita – Hokkaido University, Japan
  • Karolina Zaczynska – University of Potsdam, Germany
  • Fabio Massimo Zanzotto – University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Italy