Special Issue

Special Issue NL4AI: Natural Language for Artificial Intelligence in the Era of LLMs

IJCoL – Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics, OpenEdition Journal, ISSN 2499-4553, https://www.ai-lc.it/en/journal/ 

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 1st July 2024

Latest Acceptance Deadline for all papers: 1st October 2024

########### Guest Editors: ###########

########### Special issue information: ###########

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in recent years. Transformer-based models such as GPT-3 and BERT have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in modeling and generating human-like text. These models have significantly impacted various applications, including machine translation, sentiment analysis, question answering, and more. The era of LLMs has opened up new opportunities and challenges in harnessing natural language for AI systems.

The motivation behind this special issue is to provide a platform for researchers and practitioners to explore and discuss the latest advancements, methodologies, and applications of Natural Language for Artificial Intelligence in the Era of LLMs. The aim is to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing among the NLP and AI communities, enabling them to leverage LLMs effectively and ethically for solving real-world problems, as well as for tackling open research questions that contribute to a deeper understanding of the similarities and differences between human and machine learning.

This special issue invites original research papers, reviews, and case studies that focus on utilizing LLMs in various natural language processing tasks and applications within the context of Artificial Intelligence. This is a natural extension of the topics covered in the NL4AI 2023 workshop at AIxIA 2023, where the primary focus of discussion among the many papers received was related to the use of LLMs to tackle many typical tasks in natural language understanding and generation. We invite researchers from both academia and industry to submit their cutting-edge research findings, unearthing novel insights and pushing the boundaries of knowledge. We hope to receive submissions not only from people attending NL4AI but also from researchers outside this ring to enrich the discourse with a broader spectrum of perspectives.

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Relevant topics for the proposed special issue include, but are not limited to:

  • Robustness and generalization of LLMs
  • Diversity and inclusion of LLMs
  • The role of linguistics in the era of LLMs
  • Benchmarking and evaluation of LLMs
  • Explainability and interpretability of LLMs through Computational Linguistics and related disciplines
  • Domain-specific applications of LLMs (e.g., healthcare, education, cultural heritage)
  • Knowledge representation and reasoning with LLMs
  • Machine translation and cross-lingual applications with LLMs
  • Applications to the Italian language and under-studied languages 
  • Dialogue systems and conversational agents using LLms
  • Ethical and social implications of LLMs
  • Exploration of multimodality and data augmentation approaches in the era of LLMs

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Contributions will be processed as they are submitted no later than 1st July, 2024. The latest acceptance deadline for all papers is 1st October, 2024.

Submissions must be prepared according to the submission guidelines:

and must be submitted via the dedicated web page:

The special issue will also consider extended versions (at least 30% new content) of papers published at conferences or on preprint platforms (i.e., arXiv.org). The Editors of the Journal will pre-screen all submitted articles. Articles that do not reach the scientific standards of the journal will be desk-rejected. Articles that meet the requirements will be sent to expert reviewers and will then be reviewed for publication. The peer-review procedure will involve two experts (or three, in the rare case of disagreement). IJCoL Editors avoid engaging reviewers who are close to – or have any sort of conflict of interest with – a given author. Referees may request a major or minor revision of the article. The final decision on acceptability is the Editors’ responsibility.

For questions and further information, please contact the Guest Editors: Elisa Bassignana (elba@itu.dk), Dominique Brunato (dominique.brunato@ilc.cnr.it), Marco Polignano (marco.polignano@uniba.it), Alan Ramponi (alramponi@fbk.eu)

More details will be provided at: https://www.ai-lc.it/en/journal/