About
The complexity, volume, and ever-changing nature of regulatory documents present unique challenges in governance, compliance, and legal frameworks across various sectors. Addressing these challenges demands specialized approaches in natural language processing (NLP) to enable effective management and utilization of regulatory content.
Recent advancements in NLP have opened new avenues for tackling these issues, specifically tailored to the domain of regulatory documents. These advancements include sophisticated techniques for document parsing, entity recognition, and automated compliance checking, which are essential for navigating the intricate landscape of regulatory requirements.
Despite these technological strides, significant open questions and challenges remain. How can NLP models better handle the dynamic and diverse nature of regulatory texts? What methods are most effective for extracting and synthesizing information from vast and complex document repositories? How can we ensure the accuracy and reliability of automated compliance tools? Moreover, what are the best practices for adapting NLP models to the highly specialized language and context of regulatory documents?
The first workshop on Regulatory Natural Language Processing (RegNLP) aims to convene a diverse group of researchers and practitioners from NLP, legal informatics, compliance, and related fields to explore these questions. We seek to share current findings, discuss challenges, and identify promising directions for future research. Most importantly, this workshop aims to foster a collaborative community dedicated to advancing NLP applications in the regulatory domain at this critical juncture.
Topics
We welcome submissions describing original work on regulatory data, as well as data with relevance to compliance and regulation, such as:
Applications of NLP to regulatory tasks including, but not limited to:
- Compliance monitoring and management
- Risk assessment and regulatory reporting
- Interpretation and classification of regulatory changes
- Summarization of regulatory documents for swift decision-making
- Creation of lexical and other data resources for the regulatory domain
- Addressing bias and ensuring privacy in regulatory data processing
Adapting NLP methods for regulatory data including, but not limited to:
- Information retrieval
- Anomaly detection
- Clustering
- Multimodality
- Entity linking
- Entity recognition and disambiguation
- Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing
- Dialogue and discourse analysis
- Text summarization
- Relation and event extraction
- Question answering
- Using large language models to process regulatory data
Tasks and resources:
- New regulatory tasks and datasets for NLP
- Evaluation for tasks related to regulatory data
Demos:
- Descriptions of systems and softwares which use NLP technologies for regulatory text processing
Industrial Research:
- Industrial applications that address specific regulatory compliance needs
- Papers describing research on proprietary data within regulatory contexts
Interdisciplinary position papers:
- Analyses relating to the role NLP can play in the regulatory field
- Critical reflections on the benefits and challenges of Large Language Models (LLMs) from a regulatory perspective
- Critical reflections on the legality and ethics of data collection and processing practices in compliance settings
- Position papers presenting new visions, challenges, and changes to existing research practices
!!! We have prepared a dataset for RegNLP researchers, which can be used for various regulatory NLP research tasks.
!!! The ObliQA dataset is available on GitHub : https://github.com/RegNLP/ObliQADataset.
Submission
We welcome original (unpublished) research papers in the following categories:
- Long Papers: Up to 8 pages, excluding references
- Short Papers: Up to 4 pages, excluding references
Note: Appendices and acknowledgements do not count towards the page limit and should adhere to the formatting guidelines detailed below.
Style & Format Guidelines
All submissions must use the official COLING templates. Templates and detailed submission guidelines are available
here.
Submission Process
To submit your paper, please follow access the
submission link.
Important Dates
- Submission deadline: 5 November 2024
- Notification of Acceptance: 3 December 2024
- Camera Ready Deadline: 10 December 2024
- Workshop: 20 January 2025
