We are excited to announce the Industry Track at COLING 2027.

Language technologies and their practical applications, particularly with the recent popularity and adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), have deeply permeated many aspects of our daily lives. Though the origins of these advancements can often be traced back to academic and industrial research facilities, translating these innovations into industrially robust applications presents an entirely distinct set of technical hurdles.

We are soliciting contributions that explore novel ideas and implementations across all domains of speech and natural language processing technologies, particularly LLMs, and systems pertinent to practical scenarios. This track prioritizes submissions that deepen our comprehension and showcase effective strategies for managing the practical difficulties associated with deploying language processing technologies in complex real-world environments. By “complex real-world system,” we refer to applications that are operational outside of controlled environments and incorporate natural language processing and the potential use of LLMs. The emphasis in this track is not on research novelty, but on the practical application of the technologies in real-world settings taking into account computational limitations, ethical considerations, novel applications, model freshness, etc. It is not mandatory that these systems be produced by commercial enterprises; however, their user base should extend beyond the confines of the NLP research community.

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline November 30, 2026
Notification of acceptance March 15, 2027
Camera-ready version of papers due TBD
Main conference, including industry track May 9 – 14, 2027

All deadlines are 11.59 pm UTC -12h (anywhere on earth).

Topics of Interest

The COLING 2027 Industry Track highlights key insights, operational practices, and emerging research challenges arising from the practical deployment of speech and natural language processing (NLP) systems, including Large Language Models (LLMs).

We invite submissions across all areas of speech and natural language processing, grouped into three main core themes:

1. System Design, Infrastructure & Operational Efficiency

  • Efficiency & Latency: Optimization techniques for real-world constraints, including low-latency inference, model compression, quantification, and cost reduction for LLM/LM training and deployment at scale.
  • Continuous Lifecycle & Maintenance: Longitudinal studies of systems in production, tracking performance drift, maintenance burdens, model update strategies, and model freshness over time.
  • Data & Model Governance: Procedures for deployed systems, including versioning, data lineage, compliance, access control, auditing, and corporate regulatory constraints.
  • Enabling Infrastructure: Frameworks, orchestration, and system design choices (e.g., offline vs. online, hybrid symbolic/neural setups, edge computing) for large-scale production deployment.

2. Deployed Methods & System Evaluation

  • Evaluation & Quality Assurance: Methodologies for testing LLM-based components in production, in situ evaluation, automated vs. human-in-the-loop evaluation, and handling non-deterministic system behavior.
  • Robustness & Trustworthiness: Safety, harmlessness, bias mitigation, fairness, interpretability, and handling unexpected or adversarial user behavior in production environments.
  • Human-in-the-Loop & Interactive Systems: Practical designs for human-AI interaction, active learning, human feedback integration (e.g., RLHF/DPO in production), and user satisfaction tracking.
  • Negative Results & Trade-Offs: Lessons learned from failed deployments, architectural trade-offs, and critical retrospective analysis of real-world system designs.

3. Novel Applications, Case Studies & Resources

  • Real-World Case Studies: End-to-end case studies from problem formulation to deployment, highlighting business impact, market opportunity, trade-offs, and actionable insights.
  • Domain-Specific Applications: Novel real-world applications across domains such as healthcare, finance, legal, e-commerce, software engineering, and public services/citizen-facing systems.
  • Application-Relevant Datasets: Design, curation, annotation, and sanitization of specialized or domain-specific real-world datasets.
  • Best Practices & Vision Pieces: Opinion papers, vision pieces, and actionable summaries of best practices in practical language technology adoption.

Evaluation Criteria

Submissions will undergo a double-blind evaluation process where their originality, technical excellence, significance, and readability are considered. Contributions must highlight practical applications of natural language processing technologies, the creation of these tools, or offer insights drawn from real-world datasets showcasing tangible industrial implications. For papers that heavily depend on empirical analysis, it is crucial to present the methodology, results, and ensure they are transparent, effectively conducted, and capable of being replicated (even if the data itself remains confidential).

Submission

Authors are invited to submit original, full-length (6 page) industry track papers that are not previously published, accepted to be published, or under consideration for publication in any other forum. Manuscripts should be submitted electronically, in PDF format and formatted using COLING 2027 formatting requirements. Please do not modify these style files, and do not use templates designed for other conferences. Submissions that do not conform to the required styles, including paper size, margin width, and font size restrictions, will be rejected without review. Industry Track papers cannot exceed 6 pages in length; however, references do not count toward the 6-page limit, nor do the following optional sections: acknowledgements (only in the final version), ethical considerations, and appendices. Appendices may include, for example, pre-processing decisions, model parameters, feature templates, pseudocode, sample system inputs/outputs, information about user studies, additional errors analysis and other details that are necessary for the replication of the work described in the paper. In addition, authors may submit a separate file with supplementary materials such as software or data. Note that the 6-page paper needs to remain fully self-contained: appendices and supplementary material are completely optional, and reviewers are not even asked to review or download them.

Papers are submitted via the COLING 2027 Industry Track system.

Double-blind Review

Starting with COLING 2027, the Industry Track has transitioned from single-blind to double-blind reviewing to align with ACL community standards and ensure an equitable review process. To facilitate this, submissions must neither include the authors’ names nor their affiliations.

When preparing your submission, please adhere to the following anonymization guidelines to avoid desk rejection:

  • Self-references: Self-references that reveal the authors’ identities must be avoided. For example, instead of writing “We previously showed (Smith, 2024)…”, please use third-person phrasing such as “Smith (2024) previously showed…”.
  • Indirect Identifiers: Authors should also be careful not to reveal their affiliation indirectly, for example, through screenshots of proprietary interfaces, specific trade names, or internal project code words.
  • Repositories and Resources: Submissions should avoid links to non-anonymized repositories or websites. Any code, data, or supplementary material must be submitted as a link to an anonymized repository (e.g., Anonymous GitHub or Anonym Share). Please avoid links to personal storage services (like Dropbox or Google Drive) which may track reviewers downloading the resources.
  • Supplementary Materials and Acknowledgements: Ensure any supplementary files are fully anonymized. Do not include an Acknowledgements section in the review submission; this section can be added to the camera-ready version upon acceptance.

Final Version

Accepted papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 7 pages; ethical considerations, acknowledgements and references do not count against this limit) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account. Previous presentations of the work (e.g., preprints on arXiv.org) should be indicated in a footnote that should be excluded from the review submission, but included in the final version of papers appearing in the COLING 2027 proceedings.

The final version should remove anonymization in text, citation, and figures. For example, the final version may include the name of the authors’ institutions, trade names, and screenshots of identifiable products.

In addition to the final version of the paper, authors of all papers accepted to the Industry Track will be given an option to submit a presentation video, slides, and/or a pdf of their poster.

Presentation

Industry track papers will be presented orally or as posters to be determined by the program committee. All accepted papers must be presented at the conference (either via online or onsite presence). All papers accepted to the Industry Track must be presented at the conference to appear in the proceedings, and at least one author must register for COLING 2027. The Industry Track paper sessions will run in parallel with the regular research paper sessions of the conference.

The decisions as to which papers will be presented orally and which as poster presentations will be based on the nature rather than the quality of the work. There will be no distinction in the proceedings between papers presented orally and as posters.

Authorship

The author list for submissions should include all (and only) individuals who made substantial contributions to the work presented. Each author listed on a submission to COLING 2027 Industry Track will be notified of submissions and the final decision. No changes to the order or composition of authorship may be made to submissions to COLING 2027 Industry Track after the paper submission deadline.

Multiple Submission Policy

COLING 2027 will not consider any paper that is under review in a journal or another conference at the time of submission, and submitted papers must not be submitted elsewhere during the COLING 2027 review period. This policy covers all refereed and archival conferences and workshops (e.g., NeurIPS, ACL workshops), as well as ACL Rolling Reviews (ARR). In addition, we will not consider any paper that overlaps significantly in content or results with papers that will be (or have been) published elsewhere. Authors submitting more than one paper to COLING 2027 must ensure that their submissions do not overlap significantly (>25%) with each other in content or results.

Submissions of identical or closely related work to multiple COLING 2027 tracks (e.g., to research track and industry track) will be treated as duplicate submissions. Such submissions violating the multiple submission policy will be rejected without review. The authors should also include the papers that their paper overlaps with or extends in the references section as follows: Anonymous Authors, “Title of the paper”, Under submission at COLING 2027 (TRACK NAME).

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the industry track only for participants from industry?

No, the industry track welcomes participants from the entire COLING community. Researchers working on real-world applications that match the industry track call for papers are invited to submit papers. Everyone is welcome to attend industry track sessions.

What do you mean by real-world applications?

We are looking for applications that are deployed (or expected to be deployed) for real-world use, i.e., outside controlled environments such as laboratories or experimental crowd-sourced setups.

Can students also submit papers to industry track?

Yes! If your work matches the industry track call for papers, consider submitting a paper to the industry track.

Will the papers in the industry track be published in the proceedings?

Yes, industry track papers will be published as a separate volume of the main proceedings.

I work in industry. Can I still submit my paper to the research track?

Absolutely. The industry track offers a forum to submit papers describing aspects of real-world applications that may differ in focus from the research track reviewing criteria.

How do I decide whether to submit to the research track or the industry track?

Papers describing key lessons learned and challenges pertaining to real-world deployment of NLP and speech technologies are best suited for industry track. Authors are advised to review the call for papers for both tracks and submit to the track that best matches your work. The list of topics and reviewing criteria may be helpful. You can also reach out to the track chairs if you need help deciding.

Industry Track Chairs

  • Ekaterina Kochmar, University of Victoria (Canada)
  • Makoto Morishita, Future Corporation (Japan)
  • Alexandros Papangelis, Apple (USA)

Contact: coling2027industry@gmail.com