Important Dates

Submission due: March 7, 2025 23:59 Anywhere on Earth

ARR reviewed submission due: April 10, 2025

Notification of acceptance: April 17, 2025

Camera-ready papers due: May 16, 2025

Workshop: July 31 - August 1, 2025

Overview

Digital technologies have brought significant benefits to society, transforming how people connect, communicate, and interact. However, these same technologies have also enabled the widespread dissemination and amplification of abusive and harmful content, such as hate speech, harassment, and misinformation. Given the sheer volume of content shared online, addressing abuse and harm at scale requires the use of computational tools. Yet, detecting and moderating online abuse remains a complex task, fraught with technical, social, legal, and ethical challenges. The 9th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH) invites paper submissions from a diverse range of fields, including but not limited to natural language processing, machine learning, computational social science, law, political science, psychology, sociology, and cultural studies. We explicitly encourage interdisciplinary research, technical and non-technical contributions, and submissions that focus on under-resourced languages. Non-archival papers and civil society reports are also welcome. Topics covered by WOAH include, but are not limited to:

New models or methods for detecting abusive and harmful online content, including misinformation;
Biases and limitations in existing detection models or datasets for abusive and harmful content, especially those in commercial use;
Development of new datasets and taxonomies for online abuse and harms;
Novel evaluation metrics and procedures for detecting harmful content;
Analyses of the dynamics of online abuse, its propagation, and its impact on different communities;
Social, legal, and ethical considerations in detecting, monitoring, and moderating online abuse.

In addition, we invite submissions related to the theme for this ninth edition of WOAH, which will be Harms Beyond Hate Speech. We aim to expand the conversation beyond conventional definitions of harmful content by exploring the nuanced ways online harms manifest—such as technologically mediated inauthentic behavior, the power of technologies to reshape perceptions and opinions, and their potential to incite discrimination, hostility, violence, or even genocide. Additionally, we emphasize the diverse targets affected by such harms and the unique considerations computational interventions demand. To facilitate this exploration, we invite NLP researchers, social scientists, cultural scholars, and practitioners to engage with key issues, including child sexual abuse material, radicalization, misinformation, platform policies, security, and the politics of computational approaches. By fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, our goal is to deepen understanding of these complex phenomena and advance effective, ethical solutions

Submission

Submission is electronic, using the Softconf START conference management system.

Submission link: TBA

The workshop will accept three types of papers.

Academic Papers (long and short): Long papers of up to 8 pages, excluding references, and short papers of up to 4 pages, excluding references. Unlimited pages for references and appendices. Accepted papers will be given an additional page of content to address reviewer comments. Previously published papers cannot be accepted.
Non-Archival Submissions: Up to 2 pages, excluding references, to summarise and showcase in-progress work and work published elsewhere.
Civil Society Reports: Non-archival submissions, with a minimum of 2 pages and no upper limit. Can include work published elsewhere.

Format and styling

All submissions must use the official ACL two-column format, using the supplied official style files. The templates can be downloaded in Style Files and Formatting. Submissions that do not conform to the required styles, including paper size, margin width, and font size restrictions, will be rejected without review. All submissions should adhere to the workshop policies.

All submissions, except for civil society reports, must be fully anonymised. Self-references that reveal the author’s identity, e.g., “We previously showed (Smith, 1991) …”, should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as “Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) …”.

Following the ACL 2023 guidelines, we believe that it is also important to discuss the limitations of your work, in addition to its strengths. The “Limitations” section will appear at the end of the paper, after the discussion/conclusions section and before the references, and will not count towards the page limit.

Authorship

The author list for submissions must include all (and only) individuals who made substantial contributions to the work presented. No changes to the order or composition of authorship may be made after the paper submission deadline. Submissions will be reviewed by the Programme Committee. We have included a conflict of interest section in the submission form. When submitting, you should mark all potential reviewers who have been authors on the paper, are from the same research group or institution, or who have seen versions of this paper or discussed it with you.

Anonymity Period

We are not enforcing any anonymity period.

Multiple Submissions Policy

The workshop allows for multiple submissions. Work that has been presented, or will be presented, at other venues may also be submitted as non-archival. This includes work that will be presented at the NAACL 2024 main conference, or is accepted in Findings of NAACL.

Contact Info

Please send any questions about the workshop to organizers@workshopononlineabuse.com