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

Grace LeFevre, Qingcheng Zeng, Adam Leif, Jason Jewell, Denis Peskoff +1 more
10/6/2025
cs.CLcs.SI

No confident code implementation found for this paper. 1 possible match can be shown below.

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.

View on arXivView PDF

Code Implementations

No confident code match yet

We couldn't find an author-owned or strongly-evidenced community implementation for this paper. 1 weaker match is hidden by default — verify before relying on them.

No code implementations found yet.

Know of an implementation? Let us know in the comments below!

Similar Papers

NLP for Social Good: A Survey and Outlook of Challenges, Opportunities, and Responsible Deployment

91% match2025

Internal and External Impacts of Natural Language Processing Papers

81% match2025

Transforming Scholarly Landscapes: Influence of Large Language Models on Academic Fields beyond Computer Science

78% match1 repo2024

The Nature of NLP: Analyzing Contributions in NLP Papers

77% match1 repo32024

Assessing the Applicability of Natural Language Processing to Traditional Social Science Methodology: A Case Study in Identifying Strategic Signaling Patterns in Presidential Directives

76% match2025

Shoulders of Giants: A Look at the Degree and Utility of Openness in NLP Research

76% match2024

Cite this paper

@article{lefevre2025good,
  title  = {Good Intentions Beyond ACL: Who Does NLP for Social Good, and Where?},
  author = {Grace LeFevre and Qingcheng Zeng and Adam Leif and Jason Jewell and Denis Peskoff and Rob Voigt},
  year   = {2025},
  eprint = {2510.04434},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04434v1}
}

Add a badge to your README

Shows whether official code is linked for this paper.

Code of Paper badge
[![Code of Paper](https://codeofpaper.com/badge/2510.04434.svg)](https://codeofpaper.com/paper/2510.04434)

Discussion