Good Intentions Beyond ACL: Who Does NLP for Social Good, and Where?
Authors: name: Grace LeFevre; name: Qingcheng Zeng; name: Adam Leif; name: Jason Jewell; name: Denis Peskoff; name: Rob Voigt
Published: 2025-10-06 02:04:42

Abstract: 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.